It all feels eerily similar to the atmosphere leading up to the 2008 bailout with warnings of looming government collapse and Wall Street and its cronies threatening doom.

Instead of a no-questions asked payoff of bankers, this time it’s the looting of Social Security and Medicaid, and cuts to other programs that benefit the aged, sick, vulnerable, in other words, society’s least politically potent, that’s at stake.

There’s another familiar aspect of the scenario: under the terms of the emergency, because the cuts are opposed by a majority of the people in the country, democracy has to be stifled, open argument limited. It’s more debacle than debate.

Anybody in Washington who isn’t for these cuts isn’t considered serious.

While the media portrays the debt ceiling standoff as a partisan nightmare, the quest for budget cuts is more of cooperative bipartisan effort with each faction playing its part.

The Tea Party raises holy hell about funding the government at all, so President Obama and the Democrat’s proposed draconian cuts to social programs and infrastructure look like the least bad alternative.

But make no mistake: the Democrats’ drastic cutbacks don’t represent compromise. They represent the goals of a financial and corporate elite that has been fighting for these goals relentlessly and methodically for years.

And they’re using this trumped up debt ceiling crisis as their latest gambit to achieve them.

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-California’s description of the first hastily put together bailout plan, could easily apply to our current predicament.

It wasn’t legislation, Sherman said at the time, it was a ransom note.