What They (Really, Really, Really) Intended All Along

Trey Smith

Step into my time machine. We are going back to those frenetic days of...late February 2013. Having supposedly made a deal with the devil during the negotiations over raising the debt ceiling in 2011, it was time for Congress and the White House to face the music. Looming before them was this thing called the sequester, an almost across-the-board significant reduction in federal spending. Supposedly the sequester was like a doomsday machine -- one that neither political party would want to see deployed.

As this article from CBS news reported back then, "Everybody bought in, but nobody wants to claim ownership." Both political parties worked fervently to try to pin the blame for the sequester on the other. While the blame game took center stage, neither party made much of any effort to avoid the deadline and so the sequester went through as scheduled.

Since that time, no one has tried to reverse it. In fact, it is no longer an important issue in the beltway anymore. It is accepted by both parties as a given. This lack of interest should tell us something. It should tell us that the sequester is not something they genuinely wanted to avoid; it is what they really, really, really intended all along.

You see, they simply couldn't come out to say this. While politics predominantly is controlled by and for the elites, average American voters do play a key role. If the electorate becomes sufficiently upset, then the chance theoretically exists that they might throw their support to renegade candidates. That might mean that some members of the ruling junta could be voted out of office and replaced with enough individuals to muck up the system that patently favors the elites.

So, they had to create a spectacle. They had to create the illusion that neither party wanted the sequester and was forced into it by the recalcitrance of the other. The leaders of the [ostensible] two sides clamored up on their soapboxes to wage a war of rhetoric. They threw around their words like darts. They huffed and they puffed and eventually did nothing. And so, austerity came to America like a wolf in sheep's clothing. The American people got leveled by it before they even knew what hit them.

This gambit was a bit of a gamble, but the elites had already succeeded with a dry run experiment and so they were really confident that they could pull this off.

The experiment? Back during the mid-term elections after Obama's "stunning" victory, the GOP came up with a strategy to retake the House of Representatives. On the campaign trail, the number one issue of their candidates was jobs, jobs, jobs. Elect us, they said, and getting this nation back to work will be our number one priority. This tack worked. The GOP easily took back the House. Once back in the majority, the GOP advanced numerous issues, but the one issue they never got around to addressing was.......jobs. To this day, they have introduced NO legislation that directly addresses the employment crisis.

Of course, they blamed the Democrats for this "failure" and the Democrats blamed them. Both sides engaged in a war of words, but just as they would later do with the sequester, both sides accepted a lack of meaningful jobs legislation as a given. In no time at all, the issue disappeared from the radar screen.

I hope you are able to discern a pattern here. The sequester is not some train wreck that either the Democrats or Republicans truly tried to avoid. It was an elaborate masquerade that has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Now that they know that this strategy works, there will be more train wrecks on the horizon that they somehow won't be able to "avoid" either and they will keep engaging in this charade UNTIL the public awakens from its collective stupor!