Update: A turning point?

I've felt a little better about prospects the Republicans would stop their de-fund/default-the-government policy since the Kochs came out and renounced the tactic. It seems on the surface the brothers don't have a war chest ready to see that Democrats get blamed. 

This means this entire thing was just one huge, one-shot fuck up by Conservatives and a more costly one than choosing Romney as the winner in 2012. Considering how long they had planned to do this, and how prominent the people behind it were (Ed Meese, for one), the incompetence of this stunt is stunning. The GOP is truly the party of the stupid, where Fundamentalists, Creationists and Global Warming deniers don't feel intellectually threatened.

Continued beneath the divide.

Experts terrified of US default

The seriousness of the Republican refusal to raise the debt ceiling is beginning to sink in, and the experts are starting to get uncomfortable. Bloomberg this morning calmly calls it "an economic calamity like none the world has ever seen." No, no signs of fear there.

Lehman almost sent the world into a depression. Only the Federal Reserve prevented that from happening. As it is, we just had "the Great Recession." The US debt is twenty-three times the size of Lehman's. 

Update: Outside groups hold sway to keep government defunded.

I blogged on Monday that Conservative political advocacy groups, all fronts for billionaires and corporations, were behind the shutdown and coming default. They are going to be the driving force on keeping it going. A New York Times article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mike McIntire confirms that:

Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.

Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.

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.