The Sequester and the Tea Party Plot & The Sequestration Fight Is Based on Lies and Stupidity 1MAR13

The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly in the air like birds and swim in the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers and sisters.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

ROBERT REICH outlines the strategies and goals of the tea-baggers for the nation. BOB CESCA exposes those responsible for the sequestration fight reaching the point it has because of gop / tea-bagger lies, the stupidity of mainstream media and the voluntary ignorance of the American public. Duped by the rich, the rank rank and file of the movement are still too ignorant to see the very policies they are supporting through their propaganda campaign will harm them as much as the rest of us. The politicians controlled by plutocrats of corporate America are taking actions that verge on treason, because they seek not only to reduce the nation to Third World status but they also threaten the very foundations of our Republic in their attempts to manipulate election laws through misinformation and deception to strengthen their economic and political  power. This is not what the majority of the American people voted for with the reelection of Pres Obama, and he does not serve the best interest of the American people by kow-towing to the unpatriotic demands of the tea-baggers and their gop allies. From HuffPost....

Imagine a plot to undermine the government of the United States, to destroy much of its capacity to do the public's business, and to sow distrust among the population.

Imagine further that the plotters infiltrate Congress and state governments, reshape their districts to give them disproportionate influence in Washington, and use the media to spread big lies about the government.

Finally, imagine they not only paralyze the government but are on the verge of dismantling pieces of it.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But take a look at what's been happening in Washington and many state capitals since Tea Party fanatics gained effective control of the Republican Party, and you'd be forgiven if you see parallels.

Tea Party Republicans are crowing about the "sequestration" cuts beginning today (Friday). "This will be the first significant tea party victory in that we got what we set out to do in changing Washington," says Rep. Tim Huelskamp (Kan.), a Tea Partier who was first elected in 2010.

Sequestration is only the start. What they set out to do was not simply change Washington but eviscerate the U.S. government -- "drown it in the bathtub," in the words of their guru Grover Norquist -- slashing Social Security and Medicare, ending worker protections we've had since the 1930s, eroding civil rights and voting rights, terminating programs that have helped the poor for generations, and making it impossible for the government to invest in our future.

Sequestration grew out of a strategy hatched soon after they took over the House in 2011, to achieve their goals by holding hostage the full faith and credit of the United States -- notwithstanding the Constitution's instruction that the public debt of the United States "not be questioned."

To avoid default on the public debt, the White House and House Republicans agreed to harsh and arbitrary "sequestered" spending cuts if they couldn't come up with a more reasonable deal in the interim. But the Tea Partiers had no intention of agreeing to anything more reasonable. They knew the only way to dismember the federal government was through large spending cuts without tax increases.

Nor do they seem to mind the higher unemployment their strategy will almost certainly bring about. Sequestration combined with January's fiscal cliff deal is expected to slow economic growth by 1.5 percentage points this year - dangerous for an economy now crawling at about 2 percent. It will be even worse if the Tea Partiers refuse to extend the government's spending authority, which expires March 27.

A conspiracy theorist might think they welcome more joblessness because they want Americans to be even more fearful and angry. Tea Partiers use fear and anger in their war against the government -- blaming the anemic recovery on government deficits and the government's size, and selling a poisonous snake-oil of austerity economics and trickle-down economics as the remedy.

They likewise use the disruption and paralysis they've sown in Washington to persuade Americans government is necessarily dysfunctional, and politics inherently bad. Their continuing showdowns and standoffs are, in this sense, part of the plot.

What is the President's response? He still wants a so-called "grand bargain" of "balanced" spending cuts (including cuts in the projected growth of Social Security and Medicare) combined with tax increases on the wealthy. So far, though, he has agreed to a gross imbalance -- $1.5 trillion in cuts to Republicans' $600 billion in tax increases on the rich.

The President apparently believes Republicans are serious about deficit reduction, when in fact the Tea Partiers now running the GOP are serious only about dismembering the government.

And he seems to accept that the budget deficit is the largest economic problem facing the nation, when in reality the largest problem is continuing high unemployment (some 20 million Americans unemployed or under-employed), declining real wages, and widening inequality. Deficit reduction now or in the near-term will only make these worse.

Besides, the deficit is now down to about 5 percent of GDP -- where it was when Bill Clinton took office. It is projected to mushroom in later years mainly because healthcare costs are expected to rise faster than the economy is expected to grow, and the American population is aging. These trends have little or nothing to do with government programs. In fact, Medicare is far more efficient than private health insurance.

I suggest the President forget about a "grand bargain." In fact, he should stop talking about the budget deficit and start talking about jobs and wages, and widening inequality - as he did in the campaign. And he should give up all hope of making a deal with the Tea Partiers who now run the Republican Party.

Instead, the President should let the public see the Tea Partiers for who they are -- a small, radical minority intent on dismantling the government of the United States. As long as they are allowed to dictate the terms of public debate they will continue to hold the rest of us hostage to their extremism.

ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage," now available in paperback. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause

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The Sequestration Fight Is Based on Lies and Stupidity

As a political writer, being outraged by certain issues and policies is like rocket fuel. I'm not an angry guy by nature, but there's a universe of things in politics that anger me and, combined with an almost involuntary drive to seek and disseminate the truth, I'm never really at a loss for topics to cover.

But the sequestration issue has been one of those rare items that frustrate me to the point of being incapable of spending time on it. When I read about sequestration, my brain seizes. The stupidity of it all simply confounds me to the point of being speechless. For me, this is a shocking and rare predicament.

It's not even the chronic brinksmanship -- the reoccurring doomsday countdowns and the Republican-manifested economic sabotage that's behind it all. It's not the Keynesian in me who opposes the very notion of deficit reduction during a sluggish recovery. Granted, these are both points of irritation, but the characteristic of the sequester that ought to force us all into complete apoplexy and subsequent outrage-induced catatonia is the epidemic of ignorance regarding the status of the federal budget deficit.

There are two sides to this deficit idiocy.

Firstly, the completely inexcusable conflation of the deficit and the debt, and, secondly, the total failure to acknowledge actual deficit reduction. The press, and especially the Republicans, refuse to acknowledge that not only has the deficit been reduced by more than half-a-trillion dollars since 2009, but also that the deficit will continue to drop with or without the automatic cuts that appear to be inevitable by the end of the week. As a result, deficit hysteria is based on nearly unprecedented stupidity and deliberate deception. And very few players are innocent in this endeavor.

Turn on cable news and you'll hear the words "deficit" and "debt" used interchangeably as if they're the same thing. Not too long ago, Sean Hannity ran a segment in which he aired a clip of the president discussing in his State of the Union address how his proposals won't "add a single dime" to the deficit. Then, with a satisfied gotcha! tone, Hannity illustrated how the debt -- the debt, not the deficit -- has increased by $5.86 trillion since Obama took office. Therefore the president must be lying about the deficit. The president, Hannity said, actually spent a crapload of dimes: 58 trillion of them.

The dishonesty and cynicism is astonishing, even for Fox News. This was a deliberate attempt to deceive its audience into believing the, I don't know, deficitdebt is not only the same thing but that the president lied to the tune of $5.86 trillion dollars.

On top of the ridiculous lies and inability of too many people to use the correct word to match the numbers, when was the last time you heard anyone on cable news or the Sunday shows, much less the White House press room, note with emphasis that the deficit has been reduced by $555 billion since 2009? Let's go through this again: the final Bush administration budget bill authorized spending for 2009, creating a deficit of $1.2 trillion by the time President Obama was sworn in. An additional $200 billion was added by Obama by the end of that year, creating a total of a $1.4 trillion deficit. From that high water mark, the deficit has steadily decreased to a projected $845 billion by the end of this year. The CBO projects that by the end of 2016, the deficit will have dropped to $433 billion, for a total of nearly a trillion dollars in deficit reduction in six years.

Here's a fantastically disgusting example of an obvious lie about deficit reduction. Last week, the president said, "Over the last few years both parties have worked together to reduce our deficits by more than $2.5 trillion." He's clearly referring to cumulative long-term deficit reduction and not the year-to-year reduction. But CNS News, a right-wing outfit, claimed, like Fox News, that the president was lying because the debt has gone up. Furthermore, the author, Terence P. Jeffrey wrote:

In fiscal 2008, the federal deficit was $454.8 billion. In fiscal 2012, it was $1.2967 trillion. By this measure, President Obama did not reduce federal deficits by $2.5 trillion. He increased the annual deficit by $841.9 billion.

Needless to say, that's a complete distortion. The 2012 deficit was $1.1 trillion. Not $1.3 trillion. And, as I wrote earlier, the first deficit for which Obama ought to be fully responsible is 2010 -- not 2008, and only a very small chunk of the 2009 deficit.

Ultimately, all of the misinformation and agitprop about the deficitdebt has resulted in an American electorate that's utterly clueless on the deficit. Via JM Ashby and Steve Benen, here's a graph illustrating the results of a new Bloomberg poll:

A 62% majority believe the deficit is getting bigger, 28% believe the deficit is staying roughly the same, and only 6% believe the deficit is shrinking.

In other words, in the midst of a major national debate over America's finances, 90% of Americans are wrong about the one basic detail that probably matters most in the conversation, while only 6% -- 6%! -- are correct.

I think you get the idea... even though everyone else most definitely does not.

The entire sequestration debate is based on the premise that the government needs to reduce the deficit or else we're all screwed -- and debt and insolvency and Greece. Run for your lives! Thus we either have to come up with a deal or slash an additional $85 billion. Add into the mix the fact that we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place if the Republicans hadn't played games with the debt ceiling because of similar misrepresentations of the facts and total lies about the deficit.

Yet David Brooks and others believe that both sides are to blame for it, in spite of the fact that it was the Republican effort to sabotage the economy and, therefore, the Obama presidency, and the party's reckless decision to use the debt ceiling as a political cudgel for the first time in history. Yeah, the both sides meme is part of the sequestration insanity. All told, the sequester is a huge shit sandwich with all the trimmings -- everything that's infuriating and stupid about the current political and fiscal debate, stacked high and tasting appropriately, you know, shitty.

Cross-posted at The Daily Banter.
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