Richard Eskow: Washington's Stupid, Destructive Game!

It's Monday morning in America. That means we're about to endure another week of pointless debate over the precise methods by which Federal government will impose more needless misery on the hapless population, instead of addressing its eminently fixable economic problems. Readers of our nation's newspapers might be forgiven for believing that the citizens of our nation have been condemned to some sort of quotidian hell, as punishment for our collective crimes, where we must suffer the pangs of deprivation, while listening to endless debates about how best to compound our misery. Which reminds me: Is it time for Meet the Press yet? The sequester debate is the latest stage of an ongoing hostage crisis, that's forcing austerity economics on an unwilling population, cloakin it in a false debate about how to do it, not why we shouldn't do it at all. "The president says he has to have tax increases to head off the sequester," says Republican Rep. Martha Roby. "Well, he already got his tax increase." Rep Roby is referring to the last crisis negotiation over the national budget, which occurred way back in, let's see when was that? Oh, yeah, seven weeks ago. Time flies, except when it doesn't. The tax increases that the President already got, were less than the ones which would have taken effect automatically, if there had been no deal at all. Well played, Sir!  Meanwhile austerity continues to devastate the economies of Europe, sapping the wealth and well being of the majorities, and increasing rather than lowering, those deified deficits. Austerity's beginning to weave its dark magic here, too. So surely we're finally having the debate we should have been having all along, right? Wrong. The President is once again boasting of past spending cuts, even as their harmful effects ripple throughout our economy. He's giving immediate deficit reduction a higher priority than much needed investment, and he's proposing two dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in revenue, which is a pretty right wing way of going about it. A White House web page lays out the President's "pre-conservatized" negotiating position, thereby ensuring the final result will be even worse, and the web page's heading speaks of a "Last Offer to Speaker Boehner," a phrasing which linguistically places the nation's Chief Executive in the position of supplicant, to the leader of the lower chamber of the legislature. Well played, Sir!