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Political Washington Fiddles While Rome Burns - by Stephen Lendman
With an approaching August 2 deadline, Paul Craig Roberts assessed the state of things accurately like he always does, saying in his new article headlined, "Disastrous Outcomes From An Orchestrated Crisis:"
"Americans need desperately to ask themselves why they put into political office such utterly irresponsible and incompetent people capable of creating such a totally unnecessary crisis loaded with such disastrous potential outcomes."
Michael Hudson's new article also covered important ground headlined, "The Debt Ceiling Set For Progressive Repealing," saying:
Obama's "blatantly empty threat (claims) there won't be money to pay Social Security checks next month (if Congress doesn't) 'tackle the tough challenges of entitlement and tax reform.' "
As always, Obama did what he does best. He lied. His threat "is not remotely true. But it has become the scare theme for over a week," and will be repeated until political Washington agrees on a deal destroying America's social contract, claiming it was done to save it.
In the end, of course, the debt ceiling will be raised as done routinely numerous previous times, including 10 times in the past decade and 74 times since 1962. Moreover, raised or not, no default will occur. Threatening otherwise is a lie. Failure to act, however, will lose America's AAA rating.
But that's virtually guaranteed anyway, given decades of reckless spending, largely on out-of-control militarism and handouts to Wall Street and other corporate favorites.
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