It's Official: The Government is Broken

The reboot cast of The Three Stooges, with Ted Cruz a very convincing Moe

Today, the federal government does the unthinkably self-destructive act and refuses to raise the debt ceiling. Don't for a moment fool yourself that this is a repeat of 1996. The House of Representatives this time is far more hardline than it was in the previous shutdown. The Representatives are far less responsive to their constituents. Many of them are millionaires themselves in the pockets of  billionaires. Many have jobs lined up with companies for which they've done favors. This time there's going to be no retraction.

The economic dimension of this crisis is also worse. In the '90s it was just Congress refusing to fund the government, and only did it short term. Now Congress is refusing to pay debts for money that's already spent, for programs it already approved. The government is going deadbeat. Economically, I'm afraid this will be an unmitigated disaster. If it goes on for months, it might make the troubles 2008-2009 look like average years.

There's been hope and even assurances among the Left and I've often shared it myself, that this will hurt and discredit the Republicans and Conservatism the most. Some Republicans are encouraging this prediction. It might cost us the economy, but the Left will then be allowed to govern and pick up the pieces. Now that crunch time is here, I can see little material reason for optimism. It reminds of the winning attitude that seized the citizens of Europe as World War I broke out.

The flaw in this thinking is too many people are ignorant and therefore prone to propaganda. The polls I've heard break down as follows: 46 percent would say Republicans are responsible, 36 percent would say Obama was responsible. 13 percent would blame both. 68 percent said Congressional Republicans were acting like spoiled children, 58 percent said Congressional Democrats are.

Yes, the balance is against Republicans, but who's responsible for the coming default has never been mysterious. You don't need an investigative reporter or a conspiracy theory to see that the refusal to raise the debt ceiling is a Conservative Republican maneuver.

So many people are still ignorant or deceived about it, I believe a strategic, well-financed, marketing campaign as times get rough might easily swing opinion against President Obama and the Democrats. (For those of us too far left to be Democrats, we'll be presented as the power behind the thrown, but that's business as usual.)

I suspect right-wing organizations are prepared to make just such a media blitz. Unless the progressives and liberals are prepared to counter it, I'm afraid they'll get drowned in the muddy deluge. I don't think the Left, especially the few of us in the Democratic Party, are prepared for this. They better scramble to catch up. Those outside the Party don't have a source of funds. Inside the Party, they should be ready for war.

My perception is the Left, especially in the Democratic Party, think the Tea Partiers in Congress are a renegade minority of rubes who have forced the Republican Party into radicalism. That's an optimistic interpretation. Optimism can be just as deluding and intoxicating as any drug-induced high. Optimism is the high of the masses who shoot the opium of religion, snort the cocaine of media, smoke the meth of pop culture. Us political people tend to sniff the glue of self-deception to get optimistic. Anyone alive in the US is addicted to at least one of those now.

It's easy to be disarmed by the fact that Tea Party politicians, such as Ted Cruz, Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert are stupid. That makes this shutdown look like a severe, amateur, misstep on their part. However, in light of how the Republican Party has behaved, I have a less sanguine theory, supported by some evidence that GOPers planned this shut down since 2010.

First thing to observe is the Tea Party radicals, indeed, have been the driving force in Congress. Either from the few who are present in Congress, or from the general threat against incumbent Republicans of losing their seat to a Tea Party upstart in the primary. The latter has widespread influence with Republicans and has been demonstrated as real. The Left see the Tea Partiers as being too dumb to succeed in this irrational plan default on our debts. Unfortunately, that wasn't significant for Ronald Reagan, and that's not significant for his political offspring.

However, I believe the idiot Tea Partiers we see in Congress are not the brains behind this scheme. Their most important quality is their ideological and moral submission to the wealthy. Like Ronald Reagan, and other scions of conservatism, ignorance and stupidity serve their ideologically bolstered greed. They also view wealth as proof of wisdom.

Truth is, pawns don't have to be bright. They only have to know enough to stay faithful to the hand that moves them. The Tea Party has always been an astroturf movement. Tea Party candidates, despite their lunacy, have been well-financed. When the money has been traced, the trail leads to billionaires like Charles and David Koch. 

Not at all coincidentally, Tea Partiers are known for their ideological commitment, their flat refusal to compromise, and their disregard for whether they're ever reelected. Likely, this isn't a sign of integrity. The same billionaire networks that paid for their election campaigns also have cushy and lucrative jobs lined up when the TPer is turned from office. TPer politicians are likely looking at a standard of living after they're out of Congress the far exceeds the ones they have as “civil servants.” As long as they don't have morals, they can be idiots because their choices are almost idiot proof. Even the plantbrained characters in Idiocracy knew they liked money.

There are plenty of reasons to think this default is not just a dead end stunt by stupid, renegade right wing extremists. To me, this is likely a step in a plan by billionaires lurking in the shadows, people who are capable of deception and who are competent at making big plans. Because the Tea Party candidates continue to be well-financed in elections, it's reasonable to say a cadre of wealthy people exist who want this default, who want to sabotage our government. They want it to shut down Obamacare and shred the safety net, which is exactly what their party, the GOP, has been openly demanding in just in the last 48 hours. The front of the Tea Partiers give the impression that this is being run by fools, but I find it likely that the people behind this scheme are prepared to make results break their way.

The Left should presume the money is already in the war chest for the media blitz to blame the Democrats, especially President Obama, for the Great Default and the coming Great Depression. I hope the Left, in and out of the Democratic Party, is wise enough to have a their own war chest to counter the blitz that's likely to come.

If this is a masterminded plan, why would wealthy conservatives do something this radical and reckless?

Because anything that lowers taxes and causes a suppression of wages favors the wealthy. If they can keep a huge majority of people impoverished, this means that the rich can pay slave wages to the “fortunate” few, work them to death, and then just draw more from the endless numbers of poor.

I think the One Percent, or at least a portion of them, are now playing hardball, and are ready to take  our government and our economy down to win this laissez fair social system. I believe they likely think they have the well-armed police and privatized prison infrastructure now to suppress any left wing rebellion. If they don't, they have well-armed contingent of right wing militia-vigilantes to manipulate, our own domestic Contras come home to roost. The wealthy apparently learned a lot from the CIA's activities overseas, so let's not forget the surveillance apparatus that's in place revealed by Edward Snowden via Glen Greenwald.

With all this in place, and with their political wing's (the GOP) support dwindling among the masses as demographics change, they will never have a better opportunity to make this move. If I'm right, they'd be doing this because the Republican Party and middle-class conservatism is only going to decline from here. Right now, only gerrymandering has handed the GOP a majority in the House of Representatives. Apparently, they think it's now or never, which is also the reason why Republicans have been pushing their agenda so hard in the states. 

If I'm correct, it's hard to understate how hardline this strategy is and how ruthless it might be carried out. This is open, all out class warfare where the wealthy are endangering the worldwide economy. Even after the short-term shut down in 2012, the US dollar remained the keystone currency of the world. It kept that status even after Standard & Poors downgraded US bonds. That was a mere warning shot across the bow, as US bonds remained the best investment in the market.  Now, flat out refusal to honor our debts will cause chaos in the bond markets, and economic catastrophe worldwide. Something for which the rest of the world will blame us. The world, meanwhile, is likely to abandon the dollar.

Even without this, US influence is already in decline. After the George W. Bush administration; the  Financial scandal in 2008; the refusal of the President Obama to prosecute banksters, torturers and war criminals; Wikileaks revelations, and the NSA scandal the world is just about through with us.
Foreign investment will fly away from US shores, causing widespread domestic poverty, and poor people who have already taken a beating will get stomped. The domestic and worldwide economic damage from this could be incalculable. This is not just any Washington scandal, snafu or foible. It's not economic bankruptcy that will cause this damage, it's moral and political bankruptcy. If this isn't called this between our borders, the rest of the world will call it that.

As it fails to raise the debt ceiling, the US government stops performing a basic, vital and routine function all governments must carry out. Congress is brazenly declaring that it won't do its job and daring its citizens and the world to do something about it. It wouldn't mean as much if the country were broke, but this willful refusal to pay the country's debts due for political reasons is more serious.
It will mean we no longer have a functioning federal government. Political divisions, wealthy opportunists, and delusional ideologues have made the country ungovernable. That's what this default admits.

Terrible things can happen as the nation tries to adjust to that reality and what we're left with at the end of this might not be recognizable. In the coming months, the seriousness of this crisis is going to sink in. It could easily cause a Constitutional crisis, as the system laid out in the founding document no longer works. Polarization makes a Constitutional Convention impossible, so this problem invites ad hoc solutions, which invite reactionary rebellions, or even civil war.

Nor will any suffering make Republicans in the House relent even as people complain. Republicans don't even try to hide their contempt for the poor now (nor their racism). The more poor people there are, the more carefree Republicans are going to get. Our government has already shown that it no longer cares what its people, at least 99 percent of them, think.

We didn't just find ourselves here with a bunch of Republican idiocrats destroying our government. Those idiocrats have been made and groomed a long time, starting even before the days that Rush Limbaugh went on the air. They started in the days before Reagan. I'm still left to wonder how books as terrible as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged seemed to find their ways into the hands of every high schooler as I was growing up. (I'll admit this isn't proof of anything, but it is worthy of looking into.) The first cuts to education were in the 1970s, not coincidentally, in response to Vietnam. The one percent now have a large pool of idiocrats to draw on. Unlike the Left, this pool of volunteers is armed.

What are some of the results of this government sabotage? As Congress resigns its responsibilities, it leaves a power vacuum the executive branch could try to fill. If the executive branch tries to take over Congressional powers even on a temporary basis, it looks to me like a trap. The right wing has been laying the groundwork for a coup with its continual agitation against President Obama, and his taking charge of abdicated Congressional power will be all they will need to go ahead with it. The military being already right wing, (a side effect of there being no draft) this won't be difficult to accomplish. Obviously, once that's done, they won't rescind the powers over the budget the President has seized, the right will just put their man in charge.

That's only one thing that can go wrong here. The other thing is, the states could step in and try to fill the vacuum. This will have much the same success as the Articles of Confederation, and might lead to civil war.

This situation doesn't give me nightmares so much as it makes me want to have nightmares for relief. I uses to have faith that things would only get better. When the millennium turned, however, I never knew how much it would suck and continue to suck of for fourteen years. How the '90s are looking like the good ol' days. The Cold War was over, so no one was worried about the nuclear apocalypse that had been hanging over our heads for a lifetime. Then, a government scandal meant the President getting a blow job. The seeds of this disaster had already been sown, but how whimsical it all seems now.