On Friday, the President signed $85 billion spending cut that will phase in different stages, starting in a few weeks. The fledgling economy which barely grew out of recession is now looking at it once again, but the most serious impact of the sequestration is going to be on the unemployment numbers, which is bound to rise.
Only yesterday I wrote , “At one side is the T-party led Republicans who are totally bent upon preserving the interest of the superrich, on the other side is Wall Street led Democrats who pretend to be the savior of the little guys.”
Some of you who read my article were unhappy that I had branded the Democrats in the same breath as the Republicans. Because the mindset, “Democrats as the savior of the little guys” is too deep rooted in many of you and those of you are unable to get out of the groove.
In contrast one reader responding to Robert Reich’s The Sequester and the Tea Party Plot saw through the charade, and commented, “Don't be fooled. The President is in on the plot. Democrats and Republicans, most of them in on it too, are playing good cop - bad cop so as to keep us people against each other, and for us not to realize the U.S.A. is not a democracy, but all Washington answers to a couple hundred psycho billionaires who rule over us, and these psycho billionaires have decided us common folk here in America have been having too good for too long and it’s time to put us in our place along with the rest of the common folk living on five bucks a day in third world countries. Yes we are utterly screwed.”
The problem is, this reader is still in minority, and the vast majority of sheeple is unable to see through the sham game the politicians play to keep their control. You want proof?
For several weeks Obama traveled the country declaring that all hells are going to break loose if the sequester comes into play. His base, the progressives were in the seventh heaven—they got their revolutionary leader back! They never even realized that all Obama was doing was pandering to his base, throwing a few bones to chew.
On Friday, the very first day of the evil sequester, the President said , “Jedi mind meld could prod the GOP into compromise, and the dumb automatic across-the-board cuts taking effect Friday are the fault of Republican resistance to a reasonable deal to avert the sequestration's budget reductions(throwing another bone to his dimwit base).
Now mark this, his (Obama) profound observation, “We will get through this. This is not going to be an apocalypse, I think, as some people have said. It’s just dumb. And it's going to hurt.” This is the codeword—get used to it people—this is going to be your future.
Reich compared the impact of sequester with “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.”
Reich further maintains, “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.”
The sequester will slow the economic growth by 1.5 percentage points this year, at a time when it was barely growing at the rate of 2 percent. The Republicans paint a dooms day scenario if the deficit is not brought under control whereas the deficit is now down to about 5 percent of GDP, the same rate where it was when Bill Clinton became president.
So why is this sudden hue and cry?
Talk show host Thom Hartmann calls this “Double Santa Claus theory;” when in power Republicans give it to the rich in the form of tax cuts to the superrich and when out of power they force the Democrats to cut spending, again to benefit the rich.
