Location, Location, Location

Is anyone else noticing the irony of where the deficit hawks are pouncing on FDR's New Deal in anticipation of disemboweling it?

The apparatchiks of the plutocracy had their first Grand Guignol Bargain meet-up this morning in that historic bastion of populism known as the Roosevelt Room.  The West Wing work-space actually gets its name from both Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin.

This was akin to holding a Black Mass in St. Peter's Basilica. I live right across the river from the second Roosevelt's burying place in Hyde Park. So if I hear a rumbling from the east, I know it will be the sound of Franklin turning in his grave.

Leaders of both sides of the Right Wing Money Party emerged from the confab full of hugs and smiles and bonhomie. They expressed confidence in reaching a deal that will please their Wall Street paymasters. The big sell-out reportedly entails a few extra bucks from billionaires in exchange for the slow starvation of the rest of us. We are being told that our own destruction is why we voted them back into office. What they don't tell us is that the weighted votes of the plutocrats count a lot more than the numerical votes of the lower orders. 

Oh, and they promise we will get the details of our demise just in time for Christmas. Deck the halls and ho ho ho.

A Way With Words

As Glenn Greenwald and others have cogently pointed out, the American media have been displaying a definite neo-con/neo-liberal bias when it comes to coverage of the recent Israel/Gaza violence. Israeli casualties are always mentioned in the first graf of New York Times stories, for example, while that much worse and so unfortunate "collateral damage" inflicted on the Palestinian side gets buried deep within the sixth or seventh paragraph.

And the coverage also reflects the dawning of the new age of War by Tweet. A series of graphic AP photos showing a grief-stricken Palestinian father holding his dead child have gone viral. The Times, while posting the image, obviously felt compelled to be fair and balanced by publishing a similar photo allegedly portraying an injured Israeli baby. It just so happens to have come directly from the Twitter account of the Israeli prime minister. Bibi seemingly has all the time in the world to tweet and post YouTube videos while waging his war. 

 

 Even as the Israelis bombed the head of the Hamas military into oblivion, it was conducting a parallel pre-emptive propaganda strike in social media. We saw it almost in real time. We Were There.

Meanwhile, the Times headlines today are again reeking of bias. We are told that Israel is "girding itself" for a ground assault. The connotion of "gird" is a positive and honorable one. Old Testament heroes girded their loins. Knights girded themselves in shining armor to do battle against dragons. Crusaders girded themselves to vanquish the infidel. And so it goes.

Hamas, meanwhile, in a much tinier subhead is "emboldened." This word has a negative slant. It connotes an articially fueled chutzpah or bravado, rather than bravery. The Oxford online dictionary give us this sentence as an example:  "Emboldened by the claret, he pressed his knee against hers."

Such not-no-subtle language is in perfect keeping with the Gray Lady's role as quasi-official White House propaganda flack. As Greenwald points out, it behooves the United States to take Israel's side in the conflict:

US policy always lies at the heart of these episodes, because Israeli aggression is possible only due to the unstinting financial, military and diplomatic support of the US. Needless to say, the Obama administration wasted no time expressing its "full-throttled support" for the Israeli attacks. And one can't help but notice the timing of this attack: launched just days after Obama's re-election victory, demanding an answer to the question of whether Obama was told in advance of these attacks and gave his approval.

(snip)

 Extra-judicial assassination - accompanied by the wanton killing of whatever civilians happen to be near the target, often including children - is a staple of the Obama presidency. That lawless tactic is one of the US president's favorite instruments for projecting force and killing whomever he decides should have their lives ended: all in total secrecy and with no due process or oversight. There is now a virtually complete convergence between US and Israeli aggression, making US criticism of Israel impossible not only for all the usual domestic political reasons, but also out of pure self-interest: for Obama to condemn Israel's rogue behavior would be to condemn himself.
 

And that, of course, will never come to pass. Full-throttle, after all, means unrestrained, no holds barred, full speed ahead, Marlon Brando on a motorcycle, earsplitting loudness and machismo. It's the American way.  

Moo, Slurp, Snooze, Repeat

The usual faux-liberal suspects have all been herded into the White House Veal Pen for their periodic branding. The sounds of suckling are echoing through the blogosphere.

I wrote before the election that so-called progressive and labor groups working hard for the president's re-election were going to give him a brief honeymoon before launching a concerted effort to hold his feet to the fire on taxing the rich and protecting Social Security and other traditional New Deal stuff.

Oh, dear. I expected them to be cowed -- but to turn a negotiating session into a pep rally for Dear Leader? Say it isn't so!

Obama and the participants largely focused on areas on which they agree: in particular, the need to extend low tax rates for the middle class while letting them expire for wealthier households, according to people who attended the 45-minute meeting.

There was much less talk about possible areas of disagreement between Obama and his progressive partners, such as on cuts to entitlement spending.

(snip)

“It was a great meeting. The president was really standing firm on taxes. Everyone talked about how much they have the president’s back in this fight,” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, said afterward.

The Center for American Progress, truth be told, is only a quasi-independent group. It has direct ties to the Democratic Party. Liberal, it is not. Tanden herself came to her think tank job directly from the Obama Administration. Founded by Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta, CAP is the primary conduit for controlled White House leaks and major source of the hot air used to float White House trial balloons. Podesta now runs a big lobby shop in Washington. No surprises there. What is shocking, though, is the blatant transparency with which the veal pen occupants are jumping onto the austerity bandwagon.  They are directly skipping the part where they pretend to hold Barry's feet to the fire, then sigh in defeat down the road, when they whine that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of good. Better to starve slowly under Obama than to have your guts ripped out by Romney.

And today is the day the president will be closing the deal with the billionaires -- all of whom, of course, want to cut Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid in order to boost the confidence of the markets. (translation: inject a giant bolus of publicly-funded financial testosterone directly into their own over-clogged arteries.)

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, fresh from being not prosecuted for fraud by the Department of Justice, now has the freedom to dictate his own terms. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he announced that he needs more assurance that he can keep hoarding his billions. He is willing to pay a bit more in revenue, but only if he is first allowed to steal money from the poor, the old and the sick. "We are all ready to roll up our sleeves and work with the Obama administration and Congress to help fulfill America's enduring promise," he wrote.

I hope he chokes on his diamond-encrusted cufflinks as he rips them off with his teeth in preparation for rolling up his sleeves.

So, now what do we do? Occupy is back in the limelight with its humanitarian successes in the wake of Sandy. It even garnered front-page headlines in the New York Times for its novel Occupy the Debt campaign. What Barry and the Banksters refused to do -- wipe out household debt the same way they rescued Wall Street -- the new group aims to do by buying it up at a discount and then forgiving it.

Barry, safe for a final four years as temporary emperor, is a lost cause. Now is the perfect time to start harassing your down-ticket reps. Either they promise to protect the New Deal now, or they are out in two, four or six years. Now is also the perfect time for the rising of third, fourth and fifth parties.

It's a perfect storm. As long as the physical climate is changing, we might as well change the political climate, too. So much pollution on so many levels.
 

Bonfire of the Peaches

Before femme fatale Paula Broadwell sends me one of her anonymous Glenn Close-y emails, let me hastily confess that my relationship with David Petraeus is purely of the six degrees of separation type.

David grew up in the same little New York backwater where I spent most of my adult life. My kids went to the same schools he did, even had some of the same long-lived teachers, went to nursery school at the same Presbyterian church where he had once worshipped. My parents owned a house right around the corner from his parents'. (Scarily, the name of our street was Homeland Avenue!)

David's high school sweetheart was the daughter of the realtor who sold me and my husband our house. The same year David graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, I'd gotten got my first newspaper job, with West Point being part of my shared beat. Just missed him, before he went on to his storied career of doing 1000 pushups an hour after being shot. I exaggerate, but not by much. The legend was already beginning.

(I hated doing stories at West Point. I couldn't stand, as a 20-something, being called "Ma'am" by 20-something cadets. Besides, I was still a hippie just coming off a college career of Vietnam protests. Don't get me started on having to cover William Westmoreland giving a speech. I cringe whenever I think of it.)  

I never flirted with Peaches, as he was called in high school. If I ever crossed paths with him, I don't remember him. I didn't go to school there, since my family didn't set down new roots in a smaller house till my sister and I were already in college.(But I ended up staying, long after my family had departed.) In a town of only 3,000 people, it seems likely that I must have passed him on the street.

High School Peaches

 I did end up flirting quite a bit with his father, though. The late Sixtus Petraeus used to make weekly visits to the local newspaper where I worked, to buy the paper and shoot the breeze. He was a nice man who never talked about his kid, at least not to me. Of course, I never asked! My son later worked for the same utility company that Petraeus Sr. had before his retirement. 

One of Peaches' elementary school teachers, Miss Janet Dempsey, became a regular volunteer at the local library used book store when she retired. She took a shine to my son, and used to set aside all the old National Geographics for him. Miss Janet Dempsey was quite impressed with my son's passion for National Geographics! But when the New York Times tracked her down as part of their Hometown Boy Makes Good hagiography, she was blithely unaware of the burgeoning Petraeus Cult of Personality. She went off script, telling them she hadn't been all that impressed with young David. His sister, she said, had been much smarter in class.

So, that made me feel good. She was more impressed with my kid than she was with King David. 

David first became a hometown hero when Bush appointed him the chief general of the Iraq war, and his national reputation soared. He had not always been thus regarded by the locals. As a matter of fact, when Cornwall Central High School decided to start recognizing its famous alumni back in the 90s, Petraeus was overlooked in the first round of honorees. Back then, the most famous grad was actor Armand Assante, who at the time was starring in a whole slew of  made-for-TV movies. Among his many character roles were Odysseus and Jack the Ripper. But poor Armand soon faded from the limelight, going through a bankruptcy and foreclosure even as the Petraeus star rose higher and higher in the skies above Cornwall.

Ellen Kelly, his high school girlfriend, took over her daddy's real estate biz and sold a ton of overpriced houses just by bragging that she used to date David Petraeus. It was really getting weird in my little town. It seemed that Cornwall was morphing into Petraeusville.

Anyway, he certainly made a whole series of Hail the Conquering Hero visits back home in the past couple of years. When I read that he included a publicity stunt of himself visiting Miss Dempsey in the library, presenting her with four custom-upholstered Petraeus memorial chairs, I cackled inwardly. By this time, my kids had grown up and I'd moved further north. I resisted the temptation to join the thundering hordes of P-worshippers for these staged events. The townsfolk basked the glow of national attention, soaking up the second-hand Petraeusosity with each succeeding visit. This was definitely a man on a mission to establish some good old fashioned civilian political cred.

They even renamed a street after him last year. No, it was not the obvious choice -- Homeland Avenue! It was much, much worse. The town fathers took a stretch of Quaker Avenue, named after the town's historic early 18th century meeting house, and christened it David Petraeus Drive! What rich and nauseating irony. There is no word yet on whether they'll un-rename it, so as to finally stop the anti-war Society of Friends from turning in their graves, right next door. One of my old Cornwall neighbors, a Quaker activist who'd  been arrested a few times for protesting the Stealth fighter and other military adventurous hardware at Stewart Airbase, was quite upset about the renaming. In tastelessness, it ranks right up there with awarding Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize.

Before the David Downfall, Paetriotic fervor had gone so far that some residents had even been calling for the removal of the plaque honoring Olympic speed skater Bonnie Blair from the town park, and replacing it with a Petraeus shrine. After all, Bonnie was only born in Cornwall and had left when she was two. When she came back to speak after winning her five gold medals, she admitted she didn't even remember the place. Still, I think her plaque may be safe now.

The Cornwallians are still apparently in a state of stunned disbelief over the scandal. There have been only terse announcements of his resignation in the local newspaper and online news sites. If they feel they have been the victims of a massive scam perpetrated upon them by David Petraeus, they're not saying.

Michael Hastings, one of the great journalists of our generation, has always had Petraeus pegged. He writes in Buzzfeed: 

More so than any other leading military figure, Petraeus’ entire philosophy has been based on hiding the truth, on deception, on building a false image. “Perception” is key, he wrote in his 1987 Princeton dissertation: "What policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters — more than what actually occurred."

Yes, it’s not what actually happens that matters — it’s what you can convince the public it thinks happened.

Until this weekend, Petraeus had been incredibly successful in making the public think he was a man of great integrity and honor, among other things. Most of the stories written about him fall under what we hacks in the media like to call “a blow job." Vanity Fair. The New Yorker. The New York Times. The Washington Post. Time. Newsweek. In total, all the profiles, stage-managed and controlled by the Pentagon’s multimillion dollar public relations apparatus, built up an unrealistic and superhuman myth around the general that, in the end, did not do Petraeus or the public any favors. Ironically, despite all the media fellating, our esteemed and sex-obsessed press somehow missed the actual blow job.
 

President Svengali

If you believe the piece in today's White House propaganda bullhorn (a/k/a the New York Times), President Obama thinks the reason he lost the Grand Bargain last time around was because he didn't do a good enough job selling "folks" on the idea.

His place in history in danger, Barry will first have a meet-up with a group of corporate fat cats to ask them what they want. He will later hit the road and do what he does best: hold rallies, and campaign, campaign, campaign. He will persuade crowds of adoring fans to pressure Congress to just get along and shovel the bipartishit. I am not kidding. Here is exactly what the Gray Lady is spewing this morning:

And with the election campaign over, the campaign for the Obama legacy begins: Mr. Obama will keep his grass-roots organization in place to “have the president’s back,” as its members like to say, on the budget negotiations and other issues in the second term.

(snip)  

Some of the business leaders the president will meet with on Wednesday are members of the new Fix the Debt coalition, which has raised about $40 million to urge lawmakers and their constituents to support a plan that combines spending cuts with new revenue. That session will follow Mr. Obama’s meeting with labor leaders on Tuesday.

His first trip outside Washington to engage the public will come after Thanksgiving, since Mr. Obama is scheduled to leave next weekend on a diplomatic trip to Asia. Travel plans are still sketchy, partly because his December calendar is full of the traditional holiday parties.
 

This is so sickening, on so many levels. First, his campaign operatives persist in falsely portraying him as a hapless warrior prince. We, his loyal subjects, must give him cover as he battles the dark knights of the Republican Party. But as temporary Emperor, he must first travel to the Far East to extend the American realm, chest-thump at the Chinese, and negotiate trade deals for the creation of more wage slaves. Then, he will sacrifice his precious time in order to mass-hypnotize regular people between rounds of holiday parties to which only the elites are invited. What a busy, busy man. So much to creatively destroy, so little time.

Not that it will do any good, but I did write a response to the White House press release. Here it is:

Let me get this straight. President Obama is going to "rally the public" by first making nice with the deficit scold/corporate crowd.Then he will essentially fall back into endless campaign mode, somehow convincing us that cutting Medicare and Social Security will be good for us.

What's he going to say? "Call Congress and tell them you can make do with a smaller retirement check if Warren Buffett pays a few dollars more in taxes! Tell them it's not fair to ask you to cut back on your medical care without first asking Jamie Dimon to give up the tax loophole on his corporate jet". That will go over very well at public rallies, I'm sure. 

Oh, he'll use more subtle phraseology. Words like "shared sacrifice" and "economic patriotism" and "the wealthy should be asked politely to pay a little more" will flow like honey from his lips.

The president should get a clue, pronto. A lot of people voted for him only because Romney would have been worse. If Barack Obama thinks he's Svengali, and we are a nation of Trilbys who will sing for our own destruction, he'd better think again.
 

Lo-o-o-o-k Into My Eyes, Sh-a-a-a-re the Sacrifice

 
Paul Krugman wrote a follow-up to his last column, warning the president not to listen to deficit hypocrites Erskine Bowles (rumored to replace Tim Geithner) and Alan Simpson. Uh-oh. Too late. Krugman's paper just informed us that Obama will indeed be listening to them, real hard, this coming week. But the good professor in certainly right about the nefarious methods to their madness:

It’s not just the fact that the deficit scolds have been wrong about everything so far. Recent events have also demonstrated clearly what was already apparent to careful observers: the deficit-scold movement was never really about the deficit. Instead, it was about using deficit fears to shred the social safety net. And letting that happen wouldn’t just be bad policy; it would be a betrayal of the Americans who just re-elected a health-reformer president and voted in some of the most progressive senators ever.

But, same as last time, he stopped just short of mentioning that it was President Obama himself who dreamed up the Bowles-Simpson Catfood Commission. He does not mention that the president himself is taking a leading role in the slashing of the safety net. My response: 

The only thing scarier than appointing Erskine Bowles to replace Timothy Geithner is appointing Geithner to replace himself. BFF to the banksters that he is, he agreed to stay on at least through January to steer us through the fiscal bluff -- oops, "fiscal cliff" negotiations.

Cutting Social Security and Medicare is so unpopular that every politician who ran on a platform of deficit reduction based on the Bowles-Simpson plan was defeated last week. Every single one, that is, except President Obama. He made his wish for a B-S grand bargain a highlight of his acceptance speech. He mentioned it frequently during his campaign. Far from being pressured, he himself is pressuring "the party of regular folks" to join him in the dismantling of the New Deal.

Editorial boards and centrist think tanks and greedy CEOs are in bandwagon echo chamber mode. They're clamoring for safety net cuts right in the middle of this humanitarian crisis of unemployment and plummeting wages. The other looming catastrophe of climate change coupled with crumbling infrastructure is ignored, while B-S trial balloons are soaring through the stratosphere.

Former OMB director Peter Orszag (now a Citigroup vice chairman), just wrote a piece suggesting that Social Security needs to be cut, despite admitting that it has zilch to do with the deficit!

Something is rotten inside the Beltway. Mitt may have lost, but this whole thing is beginning to smell like the Bain method of creative destruction.
 

The other reader comments, for the most part, fall along the lines of "gee, I hope the president gets a backbone and fights back this time." The kool-aid opiate has a long half-life. I reckon. It's going to take some time for them to emerge from the post-election euphoria in order for the full impact of the Barack Smack to register. 

The readers who responded to my comment were right on the mark, though. To view those, scroll down to mine, the seventh comment under "Oldest". Robert Sadin of Brooklyn thinks we need to Occupy Obama. The trick, of course, will be getting past that new law that protects elected officials from having to actually hear the voices of citizen demonstrators. 

President Obama, you remember, signed H.R. 347 last spring to make sure that protesters at the NATO summit in Chicago were neither seen nor heard by his invited guests and global dignitaries.

He doesn't really need the law, though. The few hecklers at his campaign speeches all tend to get drowned out without the help of the Secret Service. As if on mass hypnotic cue, the crowd roars.

"Four more YEARS. Four more YEARS. Four more YEARS."
 

By Populist Request....

Several of you have been asking how the alternative presidential candidates fared in our quadrennial exercise of citizen participation. Here, courtesy of Global Research, are the preliminary unofficial results: (the Florida count wasn't made official until after the release of this chart, so although I corrected the electoral vote count, the popular vote is still off. And anyway, we won't see the final tally until all the absentee and provisional ballots are counted.)

I was surprised to see Roseanne Barr of the Peace and Freedom Party coming out ahead of Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. Barr, incidentally, shared the ticket with Bush bete noire and anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan.

Candidate (Party)	Electoral votes	States carried	Popular vote	Percent
Obama (Democratic)	332	25+DC	61,304,426	50.51%
Romney (Republican)	206	25	58,230,919	47.98%
Johnson (Libertarian)	0	0	1,178,442	0.97%
Stein (Green)	0	0	414,545	0.34%
Goode (Constitution)	0	0	113,947	0.09%
Barr (Peace and Freedom)	0	0	49,380	0.04%
Anderson (Justice)	0	0	35,490	0.03%
Others	0	0	39,822	0.03%
Total	538	51	121,366,971	100.00%

The Slippery Slope of the Fiscal Cliff

Feel like reading the handwriting on the wall about what your overlords have in store for you this week? Even better, are you up for getting really bold and reading between the lines? Look no further than the homepage of The New York Times on any given day for the latest trial balloons, controlled leaks, fear-mongering and all-purpose propaganda.

Connecting the dots is the way this game is played. There are two stories and one op-ed up today that at first glance may not seem to be related. But they definitely are.

The first headline screams something about lawmakers in Washington scrambling like mad to cut a budget deal in the lame-duck session to avert a national catastrophe quaintly known as the "Fiscal Cliff." This totally manufactured piece of disaster theater was set up after the Debt Ceiling Kabuki a year ago by an unelected senatorial "Supercommittee" which stipulated that unless Congress cuts a budget deal this year, there will be horrible terrible cuts to Pentagon spending and the Bush tax cuts will expire. Sounds pretty good, huh?

Not so fast, citizens. Another headline shrills that one of our unarmed American spy drones was shot at by the Iranians a few miles off their own coast, in a terrifying act of misplaced aggression! So if you thought that going off the fiscal cliff and cutting money off from our eternal war machine is still a good idea, be afraid be very afraid. Feel the terror, and submit before you hurl.... off the cliff.

Even though reasonable people reasonably state that the fiscal cliff is more like a gradual slope and that there is no urgency in letting us slide gently down it for awhile next year until a new,
somewhat more liberal Congress can deal with it at its customary leisure, The Times is having none of this calm rationale. It sees a "rising urgency" in getting a deal cut. That is because Catfood Commissioners Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson (the B.S. Duo) are leading an astroturf rampage of Wall Street CEOs in a Bain-like campaign to gut the social safety net in order to enrich themselves. The Times article reads like an unedited press release from a centrist think tank (Third Way comes to mind):

 Senior lawmakers said Thursday that they were moving quickly to take advantage of the postelection political atmosphere to try to strike an agreement that would avert a fiscal crisis early next year when trillions of dollars in tax increases and automatic spending cuts begin to go into force. (hurry to take advantage of a cowed populace still basking in the O-gasmic afterglow and too busy trashing Karl Rove to notice the incipient betrayal.)   

Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, said he had begun circulating a draft plan to overhaul the tax code and entitlements, had met with 25 senators from both parties and “been on the phone nonstop since the election.” (Before his own self-congratulatory tears had even dried on his face,President Obama was also on the phone, reaching out to Boehner and McConnell, while his starstruck fans slept, blissfully unaware of the incipient betrayal.)

Senator Olympia J. Snowe, the Maine Republican who will retire at the end of the year, made it clear that she intended to press for a deal to avert the so-called fiscal cliff and get serious on the deficit, lame duck or not.

“The message and signals we send in the coming days could bear serious consequences for this country,” she said. “It could trigger another downgrade. It could trigger a global financial crisis. This is a very consequential moment.” (What a bunch of bullshit. It's not critical, it's not consequential, the deficit is not important to anyone but CEOs, and no way are these clowns even remotely serious. Seriously cynical, maybe. Did Olympia mention she is under consideration for an Obama Administration appointment in between revolving door spins to lobby shops?)

 

Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Senate Democrat, extended an olive branch to Republicans, suggesting Thursday that he could accept a tax plan that leaves the top tax rate at 35 percent, provided that loophole closings would hit the rich, not the middle class. He previously had said that he would accept nothing short of a return to the top tax rate of Bill Clinton’s presidency, 39.6 percent. (Democratic mandate? What Democratic mandate? Oh, never mind. Chuck's constituency is the Wall Street plutocracy. But since he's not up for re-election to his permanent seat for several years yet, it's safe to play Bad Cop.) 

Meanwhile, the Iranian attack on a piece of flying metal that resembles an upside-down-spoon was announced for the blatant purpose of scaring us. Call your Congress Critters pronto, and demand that open-ended funding for the eternal war machine to avoid the precipice! If we go down the fiscal cliff in a few months, that will not be good for American Empire and definitely not good for the defense contractors' bottom lines. Drone production will come to a screeching halt unless we act, and act right now, to avert fiscal catastrophe.

Oh, and although the alleged attack took place a week before the election, it was not revealed until the Fiscal Cliff crescendo had reached a fever pitch, within hours of the Obama victory. What a coincidence.

And now for the op-ed. The president has safely won re-election, so Paul Krugman is finally getting around to playing Good Cop, urging him not to "cave" to Republican demands for a deficit reduction deal in the lame duck session. The only thing he seems to miss is that it's President Obama himself and the Blue Dog cohort who are leading the charge for a B.S. type of deal. Too many people are still under the impression that Barry is the hapless victim of Republican intransigence, and that it is up to us to urge him to stand strong for the People. Inveterate letter-writer Bernie Sanders says he should go on another 50-state tour (as if the last two years of campaigning were not enough) to repudiate the Grand Bargain the president himself wants. Oh yeah. We are really going to hold Obama's feet to the fire now. Here's my response to Krugman: 

We can't say we weren't warned. The president did promise throughout the campaign that he would collaborate with the GOP on a deficit reduction program. Social Security and Medicare will be put on the table in exchange for a bit of token revenue from the plutocrats. The free market, which is laughably portrayed by the media as an actual living being with feelings, must be placated at all costs. Wall Street actually went all droopy the day after the election. Fetch the smelling salts, quick.

But no worries. The confetti was still floating through the Chicago air when the president picked up the phone to reach out to Boehner and McConnell.Never mind the liberal mandate that was handed to him by an increasingly progressive nation. Never mind that only 10% of respondents in exit polls said their main concern is the deficit.

The "fiscal cliff" is a contrived bit of disaster capitalism dreamed up by the corporate class that runs things in this country. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles are leading an astroturf movement of 80 CEOs, yammering hysterically for social spending cuts in the name of increased profits and lower taxes for themselves. Meanwhile, the complicit news media spews endless propaganda to keep the populace cowed. Economic collapse, we are told, can be averted only by tightening our own belts, funding the endless wars, and enriching the oligarchs.

Grand Bargain? More like a Bargain for the Grandees, and a grand betrayal of everyone else.
 

Even though Mitt Romney lost, the powers-that-be are still operating under the theory that the deficit hawks and the vulture capitalists hold all the cards.  No matter that, excepting for Barack "Teflon Don" Obama himself, every single candidate who voiced support of Bowles Simpson, lost their races this week.

So, you voted and thought you were giving the victors a mandate? Think again.

As Sheldon Wolin wrote in "Democracy, Inc.",

Today elections have replaced participation. Elections enact a kind of primal myth in which “the people” designate who is to rule them, that is, who is to authorized to wield government power. Authority or authorization means not only that some official is enabled to perform a particular action (e.g. has the means  to enforce the law) but also that he or she is entitled to assume that citizens will accept the decision and comply. Thus an election, at one and the same time, empowers a Few and causes the Many to submit, to consent to be obedient. Submission entails more than obeying the law. Citizens, regardless of whether or not they voted for the elected candidate, are expected to defer to those who were elected, to give them the benefit of whatever doubts there are about the wisdom of a particular action or law, to the identification of democracy largely with voting, there is the risk that legitimation can become automatic, tantamount to a slippery slope ending in Tocqueville’s submissive citizenry.