Congress knew the cliff was coming. In fact, Congress made the cliff.

[woo me with science]

3. Corporate Republicans and corporate Democrats, including President Obama,

were complicit in setting up this scam.

They did it by fabricating this "crisis" in the first place; validating it and the right-wing framing of how we got here, e.g. through the President's despicable speech to the nation on "pea eating"; and colluding to ensure the outcome they both sought: austerity for the 99 percent.

This entire process was deliberately rigged from the outset as a Shock Doctrine scam to ensure that the ONLY possible outcomes were austerity or slightly less draconian austerity through the debt ceiling "trigger."

No, it was not ONLY Republicans perpetrating this scam. For decades, Democrats were the only ones standing between predatory corporate policies and the American people. Now too many of them have sold out and abandoned that role, and this is what we get as a result.