Portside

The "Budget Deal." abandons the unemployed, while increasing the military budget, and ignores massive job creation. Reducing projected sequester cuts will save jobs, but half the mindless across-the-board sequester cuts continue in fiscal year 2014 and three-fourths in 2015. The deal provides relief from some destructive sequester cuts. But it sustains Washington's focus on deficit reduction and its commitment to austerity. Thanks to the Campaign for America's Future.

Here's how the capitalist scam works: let government borrow for crisis bailouts, then insist cuts pay for them. Guess who loses.

The attempt to take the nation’s politics hostage is still underway. Only the wording of the ransom note has changed.

Incredibly, when King called for full employment in 1967, the national unemployment rate was under 4 percent. Flash forward to today: 56 consecutive months of unemployment above 7 percent, among African Americans above 13 percent, above 9 percent among Latinos. At our current rate of job creation, it would take another seven years to get the national unemployment rate down to 5 percent, where it was at the end of 2007.

The sequester means that most federal budgets must be reduced by as much as five percent. Housing is taking a huge hit. I’ve been stewing about it for days now. I want to ask the important people in Washington – starting with the one in the White House – how could they let something like this happen? How, in the richest, most powerful country on the planet, could they visit such cruelty on people?

Conservative Republicans in our nation’s capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They’ve basically shut Congress down. Meanwhile, the nation's political work has shifted to the states, and the political division among them is widening.

That $9.2 billion tax bill that Apple dodged in cooking up a scheme this week to finance a $55 billion stock buyback for its shareholders would have been enough to make unnecessary all of the major budget cuts in the sequester. That's not counting the tax dodges of Bank of America, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, FedEx, General Electric, Honeywell, Merck, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Verizon.