Guest editorial by Evan Kutner of distributorcap NY
It took 30 years and 204 days, but on Tuesday August 2, 2011 the fruits of the Reagan Tree of Life will finally have reached its peak when the over-ripened, low-hanging, worm-filled Reagapples will begin to pound the ground, not with sweetened blossoms, but with a dead thud. 30 years and 204 days of belittling and ignoring the American education system, calling ketchup a vegetable, telling us trees cause pollution, cutting taxes to create trickled-down imaginary jobs (OK there are a few more maids and gardeners) and teaching Americans that they could have everything they want and it will cost nothing – the Teadras educated Republican party is willing to take the ultimate bet and tell the piper (or croupier) this time to shove it.
The US Congress has spent the better part of the past month arguing over whether the credit limit on the Visa card should be raised in order to pay their bills — bills they have committed and signed to pay. If this game of cold-war brinkmanship wasn’t so dangerous on so many levels — it would actually be comical to watch. Watching the children of the right storm out of meetings (Eric Cantor — who probably has the distinction of having had the most spit balls thrown at him during 7th grade lunch) and then say no, no, no as the opposition capitulates to nearly every one of their demands is nothing short of having MacBeth playing in a Kabuki Theater.
The 80 or so teabaggers, who sandbagged their way into Congress last November promising to stop those eternal welfare queens from driving Cadillacs and finally ridding the country of the leeches who live off their hard-earned (over) taxed dollars, are about to allow the real grand experiment to go forward — let the US default on its payments for the first time in history — and default by choice. You know the world’s strongest economy is going to look like it is managed even worse than Greece…
I used to think the only item on the Republican platform (aka Our American Mein Kampf) was the personal destruction of Barack Obama (or any Democratic president), but now I realize there is actually a second principle enshrined in the GOP’s manifesto. Not only do the Teabaggers and their enablers want to see Obama fail, but they also want to prove that the ripened fruit of the Reagan revolution (“something for nothing”) is actually a sweet treat — that the US defaulting on its bills will have absolutely no consequences. After all American exceptionalism is American exceptionalism. Chicken Little — is really just Donkey Little — a completely made up scenario just to allow those pesky liberals to abscond with more money from hedge fund billionaires and private jet owners to pay for BMWs for those food-stamp queens and unemployed kings. Unlike Bill Clinton, Barack Obama has not given the goose-stepping lunatics in the GOP any stained dresses to use as evidence of a grand socialist conspiracy. Short of the 21st century version of Fanne Foxe showing up next few days – the teabaggers will have to resort their only other weapon — actually pushing the nuclear trigger. In other words, in order to save the country they have to vaporize the country. 300,000,000 Americans will just have to hope the dice on 8/2/11 are boxcars or snake eyes and not a craps. Good luck with that when one die is all three’s and the other is all four’s.
Obama has made this so easy for the Republicans. He has caved so many times to the right on so many issues — even the more “reasonable Republicans” (an oxymoron if there ever was one) realize they can play the blinking game knowing their odds of winning are about as good as Secretariat’s was at the 1973 Belmont. His obvious weakness as a leader and his hesitancy to confront a group of people bent on his destruction has made the Republican work of making a mountain out of a molehill as easy as selling worthless credit default swaps to a bunch of insurance companies. Compromise requires compromise, not rolling over time after time. Obama has rolled over so many times — John Boehner finally figured out that those 80 or so teabaggers in Congress must really be on to something.
What the teabaggers and their enablers (actually, they are all a bunch of teabaggers) fail to realize is that if the sky does fall on August 2nd (and it will) – it will be more than repossessed Cadillacs. While those teabagging Congressmen will barely suffer the loss of a nickel in salary, benefits or pensions (and plenty of them have more than enough money to cushion the potential blow) — I would think they have relatives that will suffer, and suffer badly from a default. And what about the millions who actually voted for the teabaggers thinking these really smart guys would save them from the leeches on society — only to see now that a government that cannot pay its bills means no social security checks mailed, no medicare payments, soaring interest rates on their variable mortgages, a collapsed housing market, more bridges and roads crumbling, weakened airport security, soldiers in Afghanistan watching their checks bounce and finally a lot of very angry Europeans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Brazilians, Australians, Saudis and Swiss- people who help fund the elite of Wall Street.
And what about those private companies the teabaggers just love so much? You know, the ones that actually employ thousands of teabagging voters – the ones that receive a big chunk of their revenue from government contracts? Do you think Boeing and Lockheed Martin are going to keep pay a lot of private employees sitting around the lunchroom while they wait for Tim Geithner to sign the checks? What about the diners, dry cleaners, auto mechanics, waiters, coffee trucks, baby sitters and hundreds of thousands of other private businesses that exist because of companies employing thousands of workers based on government contracts? And those free parks the teabaggers love to take their kids to on vacation — gonna get awfully expensive at $50 a head to get into Yellowstone. This is the real trickle down economy — people who really do earn a living because other people are getting a paycheck — no matter where that paycheck originates — not from so-called job creators who just take their tax breaks and buy more Prada or stash it in the Cayman Islands.
So old people, government contractors, ancillary businesses, soldiers, medical professionals that help the elderly – it is time for you to sacrifice in the name of proving the Teabag Gambit. The road to teabag nirvana is filled with collateral damage. We may suffer, we may default, we may see rising interest rates, we may start opening Hoovervilles — but those fine Republicans in the House — the ones that were sent to ensure an orderly country – well they will just be right.
Maybe we can form a new union — of people to pick up those little green Reagapples.
Your analogy of the debt limit to the credit limit on your credit card is proof that even you have bought the tea party argument that raising the debt limit will increase our new spending. The debt limit is NOT in any way whatsoever the same as a credit card limit. The debt limit is a limit on the amount of money we can borrow to pay our bills. The credit card limit is a limit on new debt. The most accurate analogy would be to some imaginary limit a credit card issuer might put on the size of payment you could make to pay off your credit card debt.
The results of Gippernomics, Voodoonomics, and Decidernomics are in.
The republican T-baggers don’t like what their party has sown and reaped.
Now, either they do not know their ilk did it, or they can’t follow the bouncing ball because their brain has been on propaganda too long.
The Very Rich Moneyed People don’t mind a default. in fact they are encouraging it. Hedge Fund Parasite Stan Druckenmiller (Net worth 2.5 Billion), “I think technical default would be horrible, but I don’t think it’s going to be the end of the world. It’s not going to be catastrophic. What’s going to be catastrophic is if we don’t solve the real problem.”
The Real Problem being Welfare Phantoms. The Plutocrats see this as a decisive action. They may lose money but if they can force a default and continue to receive Teabagger support, then they may destroy every program they despise, Social Security, Medicaid, the EPA, the Clean Water act, anything which constrains they desire to steal more of the wealth of this nation.
Didn’t ONLY 75 teabaggers show up for last week’s rally in D.C. I’ve given dinner parties with fewer attendees, and I have more tea cups that that. WTH?
Didn’t ONLY 75 teabaggers show up for last week’s rally in D.C. I’ve given dinner parties with more attendees, and I have more tea cups that that. WTH?
first one got away with a wrong word
You know it’s time to move away from Reaganomics when Reagan’s own budget adviser is saying we need to sober up.
And as far as the Tea Party, their antics are quite dangerous. This nation was built through comprise, not through adopting the attitudes of three-year-olds. It’s frightening to see a group of people (regardless of whether they lean to the left or the right) that is so determined to get exactly what they want that there is zero room for compromise. That’s not the reality of US politics, and it isn’t a political environment that will foster an progress.
Houston Criminal Defense Lawyer,
When you take a case to defend a client, do you start from a position of “lets compromise?”
Or is “compromise” a path only within the political realm?
I do not mean to be pejorative, just curious.
Davey
What the hell does a question to a criminal defense lawyer about whether he comes to a case looking to compromise have to do with intransigent fools in congress?
I’m not just curious. I mean to be pejorative.
The Tea Partiers are connected to reality only by the thinnest of threads. They are mostly missing the boat, the dock, the pier, the ocean, etc. So is Obama, Boehner, Reid, and McConnell.
Here’s Bernie Sanders making sense and speaking for the majority of us.
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/07/29
Davey, you obviously know little about criminal law. Most cases involve negotiations on plea agreements to ensure that the charge matches the facts of the case. Only when one side is totally unreasonable (or the client is innocent and willing to risk trial) does a plea agreement not occur. This is why well over 90% of criminal cases (civil cases, too) result in agreements and not trials.
So what’s your point, exactly?
Income tax revenue in the US are at least a 30 year historical low.
Social Security is in trouble primarily because for 40 years our elected “leaders” have borrowed from it to fund oil wars, which dictated that they put the trust fund dollars into easily accessible T Bills rather than real investments with real return potential.
We are spending 8 times the real annual GDP of Afghanistan in that country each year.
All the terrorists that we are dealing with out of the Middle East have one over-riding concern and have been very vocal about that concern. Hint: it isn’t our standard of living or our religious approach within our own country.
We have allowed the corporations that garnered their success here to export the intellectual property and manufacturing expertise developed here to another part of the world, along with the all jobs that are also involved.
We have a resident population of illegal immigrants here that closely mirrors the percentage of unemployed American citizens.
The result is depressed wages, fewer real jobs and extreme pressure on the revenue/ expense equation.
Does anyone in our government have the stones to frame the question accurately and do something about it?
Remember when teachers, public employees, planned parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half our 401Ks, took trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?
Yeah, me neither. Pass it on.
Dear Ranting,
Yeah, Bernie Sanders does in that video clip I put at #8. Hard to imagnie that he’s gonna have much company though. Except for most Americans. It’s well past pitchfork time.
LMK,
You are correct. I am not an expert on criminal law. I do know this, however, unless the blood were still dripping from my hands, I would not ask my attorney to go find a compromise. I would start with “get me outa this!”
I am fully aware that many (do not know the statistic) cases are plea bargained. I suspect that the vast majority of all cases are settled out of court (criminal and civil).
One could argue, on a philosophical basis I suppose, that most transactions are the result of compromise.
I have no aversion to compromise either and would not have “jumped in” were it not a criminal defense atty commenting on “compromise.”
Looks like some compromising is going on right now in DC to address the debt ceiling. Compromise is great!
Davey Crocket–
That’s compromise like Breitbart is a journalist. You somehow believe in both. Not the planet I live on.
Even the notion that it’s reasonable to be talking about “compromise” when the subject is the debt ceiling is indicative of how sense and reason have themselves been compromised by an insane and capricious minority party and a pathetically inept Democratic “leadership”.
I say again–here’s Bernie Sanders making sense-
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/07/29
Ranting Citizen @8,
You asked:
Yes, here is a link to a ballsy essay about it.
ooops, I meant “Ranting Citizen @10”
sorry David 😉
Davey Crocket said @ 12
Um, I have no “aversion to compromise” either. Compromise, however, generally means both sides in a dispute give up something to reach compromise.
It’s clear what the Ds have given up in this debt “deal”. Pray tell, what have the Rs given up? Please let me know.
D. R. HAA HAA
HHHHAAAAAAAAAA HHHHAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!
Reagapples have NOT been IGNORING the education system.
I had to explain this to a “progressive” Democratic state representative in a west coast “progressive” state. He said: “The Republicans don’t care about education.”
The Republicans know that an educated citizen will VERY likely not vote for them.
THEREFORE: Republicans DO care, they care to subvert, if not totally destroy, public education AND it is impossible to subvert/destroy something by ignoring it.