Crossposted at The Progressive Electorate.com



As Chris Hayes says . . .

This all seems eerily familiar. The conversation—if it can be called that—about deficits recalls the national conversation about war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. From one day to the next, what was once accepted by the establishment as tolerable—Saddam Hussein—became intolerable, a crisis of such pressing urgency that "serious people" were required to present their ideas about how to deal with it. Once the burden of proof shifted from those who favored war to those who opposed it, the argument was lost. thenation.com Bold text added by the diarist

It doesn't matter if the proof provided by the advocates of the Shock Doctrine disaster capitalism sucks and is skewed away from reality (Al Qaeda is linked to Saddam because something something), what matters is that the people in power have already decided what to do, and any facts that can prove that they are wrong will be ignored, because as Ronny Reagan once said "facts are stupid things".

The LIES (WMD's, Deficits are the problem, Death Panels, Maverick), once accepted as gospel by the villagers and their uber-wealthy patrons shall no longer require second thought. Anyone with proof of the fallacy of the gospel of the villagers will be ignored. The burden of providing proof is never on the side of the people who push corporatist policies that harm everyone so the richest may profit. And once the corporatist policies utterly fail everyone who wasn't super rich already ( just like they are supposed to ) the same people who were dead wrong the first time will be right back telling you why they never saw it coming and their NEW idea is just what the doctor ordered.

More from Chris Hayes . . .

We are poised on the same tipping point with regard to the debt. Amid official unemployment of 9.5 percent and a global contraction, we shouldn't even be talking about deficits in the short run. Yet these days, entrance into the club of the "serious" requires not a plan for reducing unemployment but a plan to do battle with the invisible and as yet unmaterialized international bond traders preparing an attack on the dollar. Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about austerity—about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis. Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." So there you have it. (read on) thenation.com Bold text added by the diarist

The deficits we have now were caused by the Bush/Cheney Administrations zeal for war profiteering, tax cuts for the richest among us and the rampant deregulation of Wall St that took place in the 90's (thanks a ton, President Clinton). Any solution to fixing the deficit that does NOT include ending the wars, taxing the rich and new regulations to keep the banksters from crashing the economy again is BULLSHIT.

As Grover Norquist once said "I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The way he will do that is by cutting taxes, creating deficits, cutting spending, wash, rinse, repeat. Tax cuts CREATE deficits. Deficits create the need to either raise taxes or cut spending, and we all know which one of those is taboo.

So the fix seems like it is in. The #2 Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer has declared that "We could and should consider a higher retirement age, or one pegged to life span." Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner has declared "We're all living a lot longer than anyone ever expected,". Boehner continued by saying "And I think that raising the retirement age — going out 20 years, so you're not affecting anyone close to retirement — and eventually getting the retirement age to 70 is a step that needs to be taken." The #2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbinhas said "Bleeding Heart Liberals" Should Be Open to Medicare and Social Security Cuts. House Speaker Pelosi stuck a rule in the war supplemental bill that passed earlier this month that would bind the House to accept Obama's Deficit Commission if the Senate passes it, and Obama's 18 member Deficit Commission is stacked with proponents of raising the retirement age and investing 20% of the Social Security trust fund in the stock market.

So the fix looks like it is in. The rich will keep their tax cuts, the wars will go on, and the serfs will just have to work another 5 years and retire at 70 in the name of "austerity" to pay off the deficits created by policies that only benefitted the richest among us.

Deficits ARE the new Weapons of Mass Destruction, free trade is the new Hoovernomics, and, apparently, main street is the new Baghdad.

Same Shock Doctrine, same old song and dance.

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