TBGO~~Baah, di-baah-di-baah: Good News!; Invented Crises;

"Real Politik":Woody'z sad and sorry to have to break it to ya, but THIS is how it's done.
George Kennan, a "clear-eyed realist," and acknowledged architect of Murka's post-WW II "foreign (aka "imperial") policy, nailed it 65 years ago!
It's called "real politik"; politics without illusions.
It's how EVERYBODY plays the game, then and now, no matter what ANYBODY says--or pretends--to the contrary. Quote:

"With 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6% of its population, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, raising of living standards and democratization. We are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans the better."

In our exceptionalist way, of course, we Murkins DID figger out a way to mouth the necessary platitudes about democracy, freedom, and other bullshit, all the while bombng the shit out of people all over the globe, dispossessing them of their resources and meddling in their politics.
Oliver Stone will explain it all for you...


Good News for Whom? Prez LowBar has kept Govt spending down?
And this is good, exactly, WHY"
What the fucking fuck?
Reducing the number of jobs in the Federal Govt during a time of severe economic contraction, high unemployment, and stagnant wages sounds to me like something a motherfucking OILIGARCH would celebrate, brag about, and run on, not someone touted as a progressive/librul/commie/soshulist.
Notice anything anomalous here?
Yeah, that's it: Prez LowBarry went ENTIRELY and PRECISELY the WRONG fucking DIRECTION, fired workers, cut programs, and otherwise behaved like a fucking Romney in order to appease the motherfuckers who own and operate him like a fucking Sambo's restaurant.

Invented Helplessness:  How many MORE invented crises will there be?
LOTS!
As many as it takes to create enough panic among the media-managed, bleating, baahing proles that they'll just roll over and accept their "violation" by the Oilgarchs, Bosses, and the Elites as their natural state.
There will ALWAYS be another. Remember Naomi Klein? "Crisis capitalism" is the order of the day.
The phenomenon which directs and instructs the proles to apathy is (wrongly, I believe) labeled "learned helplessness."
How it works:

In the learned helplessness experiment an animal is repeatedly hurt by an adverse stimulus which it cannot escape.
Eventually the animal will stop trying to avoid the pain and behave as if it is utterly helpless to change the situation.
Finally, when opportunities to escape are presented, this learned helplessness prevents any action. The only coping mechanism the animal uses is to be stoical and put up with the discomfort, not expending energy getting worked up about the adverse stimulus....

There are several aspects of human helplessness that have no counterpart among animals. One of the most intriguing aspects is "vicarious learning (or modelling)": that people can learn to be helpless through observing another person encountering uncontrollable events.^[14]
Apart from the shared depression symptoms between human and other animals such as passivity, introjected hostility, weight loss, appetite loss, social and sexual deficits, some of the diagnostic symptoms of learned helplessness—including depressed mood, feelings of worthlessness, and suicidal ideation—can be found and observed in human beings but not necessarily in other animals.^[12] In non-human animal models, control over stress conveys resilience to future uncontrolled stressors and induces changes in the function of specific neurons within the prefrontal cortex.^[15]

And it ALWAYS works. ALWAYS. Never fails. 100% effective.
It's a technique used by psychological torturers and interrogators to make their subjects believe they are powerless and will always be powerless to confront and change circumstances imposed on them by forces beyond their comprehension. It actually TEACHES helplessness. 
Martin Seligman, a fucking fascist asswipe who was once president of the APA is the psychologist who perfected the technique; he is the head of US military psy-ops division.