Stephen Lendman

It's all over but the mourning. After weeks of tooing-and-frooing theater, Obama signed the deal from hell. Understand clearly what happened. A bipartisan conspiracy took step one to ending America's social contract. Subsequent ones will follow.

On the chopping block are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and publicly funded pensions, heading perhaps first for privatization while slash and burn cuts continue. In addition, all other New Deal/Great Society programs are earmarked for elimination. But don't expect political Washington or America's media to explain.

Raising the debt ceiling was subterfuge, a scam. For decades it's always been done routinely without debate. America's media went along with the charade, manipulating public fear to accept what's now law.

On August 2, in a 1:06PM Rose Garden statement, Obama hailed the budget deal, saying:

"Congress has now approved a compromise to reduce the deficit and avert a default that would have devastated our economy. (The agreement is) an important first step to ensuring that as a nation we live within our means."

"This is, however, just the first step. This compromise requires that both parties work together on a larger plan to cut the deficit...."

Except for announcing future cuts, his entire statement wreaked of duplicity, suppressing what's really at stake. It's so destructively ugly, in fact, no politician or major media journalist would dare explain. More on The New York Times coverup below.

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William Blum

When you read about economic issues in the news, like the crisis in Greece or the Wall Street/banking mortgage shambles are you sometimes left befuddled by the seeming complexity, which no one appears able to untangle or explain to your satisfaction in simple English? Well, I certainly can't explain it all myself, but I do know that the problem is not necessarily that you and I are economic illiterates. The problem is often that the "experts" discuss these issues as if we're dealing with hard and fast rules or laws, not to be violated, scientifically based, mathematically sound and rational; when, in fact, a great deal of what takes place in the real world of economics and in the arena of "expert" analysis of that world, is based significantly on partisan party politics, ideology, news headlines, speculation, manipulation, psychology (see the utter meaninglessness and absurdity of the daily rise or fall of stock prices), backroom deals of the powerful, and the excessive power given to and reliance upon thoroughly corrupt credit-rating agencies and insurers of various kinds. The agencies like Moody's and Standard and Poor's are protection rackets — pay our exorbitant fees or we give you a bad rating, which investors and governments then bow down to as if it's the result of completely objective and impressive analytical study.

Then there's the exceptions made for powerful countries to get away with things that lesser countries, like Greece, are not allowed to get away with, but all still explained in terms of the unforgiving laws of economics.

And when all other explanations fail to sound plausible, the experts fall back on "the law of supply and demand". But that law was repealed years ago; just try and explain the cost of gasoline based on it, as but one example.

So there's a lot to cover up, many reasons why the financial-world players can't be as open as they should be, as forthright as the public and investors may assume they are.

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Paul Craig Roberts

The United States Government and its presstitute media have wasted time and energy creating hysteria over a non-existent "debt ceiling crisis."

After reading the "news" in the Ministry of Propaganda and witnessing the stupidity of the US government, the rest of the world is struck dumbfounded by the immaturity of the "world’s only superpower."

What kind of superpower is it, the world wonders, that is willing to go to the eleventh hour to convince the world, which holds its banking reserves in US Treasury debt, that the US government will default on the debt?

Every country in the world now worries about the judgment and sanity of the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

This is the achievement of the Republicans, who took an ordinary commonplace increase in the debt ceiling limit, an event that has occurred routinely many times over the course of my life, and turned it into a crisis threatening the world financial system.

To be clear, there was never any risk whatsoever of US default as President Obama has power established by President George W. Bush’s Presidential Directive 51 to declare default a National Emergency and to set aside the debt ceiling limit and Congress’ power of the purse, and to continue to issue the debt necessary to fund the US government and its wars.

That the American press ever took this highly-hyped "crisis" seriously merely demonstrates their prostitute status.

The US public debt is rising too rapidly against US GDP, although it is still below the percentages during World War II. The problem that is ignored by the idiots in Washington and the presstitutes is that the debt is rising relative to the economy because the economy is not rising, but war expenditures are.

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