Another Win For Exploitation and Idiocy

Here is a summary of the deal made to raise the debt ceiling (hint: it involves cutting up to 2.2 trillion dollars in spending with NO new revenue coming in), here's Paul Krugman on how fucked up this really is (he sees it as the worst "compromise" Obama has made yet, by far), and here's why I put the word compromise in scare quotes.

From Krugman today:

"Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.

"It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.

"In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t."