Default, round two

From the Washington Post:

"Across the U.S. economy, anxiety is rising about the potential for widespread disruptions after the November election, when a lame-duck Congress will have barely two months to resolve a grinding standoff over taxes and spending.
The halls of the U.S. Capitol are already teeming with people warning of disaster if lawmakers fail to defuse a New Year’s budget bomb scheduled to raise taxes for every American taxpayer and slash spending at the Pentagon and most other federal agencies."

Didn't we just do this? Anyone remember the Y2K scare? Some geek forgot to add a 19 that could roll over into a 20 in the date counter of a computer that somehow managed to get into every computer across the land. Started off the new century with a bang right? But of course, nothing really happened. It was just the first instance of media-inspired panic over an event none of us could control and barely understood. While I suppose it was sort of manmade, it wasn't directly political. Debt and deficit debate in DC, however, is completely manmade, and totally, completely political. It exists only because of carefully calculated partisanship and time bombs loaded into the Federal government. These were planted by the republican party, period. They are again trying to implement their rotten and unpopular agenda of "starving the beast" as they call it.

Now, in reality, doing nothing is exactly what would be best. If President Obama and members of his party in Congress can resist the temptation to fall into the trap and give into the gop's nefarious plans. The "raise taxes for every American" part of the story above is actually just the end of tax cuts, and the alarming phrase of "slash spending at the Pentagon" is highly disingenuous. We are talking about cutting the procurement of obsolete weapon systems that DoD doesn't actually want and cutting contracts for all the outsourced functions that government used to do. Before dick cheney sabotaged the Pentagon, many functions such as cooking, sanitation, and laundry were performed by soldiers. Then private, for-profit, contractor parasites were unleashed to suck tax money out of the war machine. This is what Speaker Boehner and his republican colleagues are protecting, and proposing huge spending slashes in domestic programs that prevent the "uncertainty" of starving or becoming homeless.

Obviously, that kind of uncertainty is nothing next to the “over 1 million American jobs” that will be lost if we dare cut war spending. Lockheed Martin and all the usual merchants of death love to threaten mass layoffs if government even consider trimming the pork. So on the one hand we have republican insistance that "government can't create jobs" and "cutting spending is the only way to bring back growth in the economy;" versus the hostage-taking by government contractors who will chuck over a million Americans out of work if this horrible "uncertainty" isn't resolved. They sure love to have it both ways, don't they?

So, Boehner and the republicans are planning to take the economy hostage, again. The profits of contractors are sacrosanct, and the gop is willing to shut down the entire government, again, to prevent uncertainty for incredibly wealthy people. Despite the chaos it would bring for every American. Will the business community ever start to doubt their champions, the ones who so casually play with the lives of so many Americans? Will President Obama ever have the balls to say "sit down and shut up?"

The crash of 2008 that presented such a great opportunity for the right wing to finally destroy the hated government, you know the one they spend so much money and spin so many lies to gain office in, had a pretty simple cause. A handful of pampered bankers in a handful of wall street firms had so much money to speculate on sub prime mortgages that addiction to bonus-sucking greed overwhelmed any fear of what chaos would come if the scheme fell apart. They also had confidence in the nanny state to make them all better should their bets with other peoples' money go bad, as the very nature of the gambling all but insured it would. Again, having it both ways. The swaggering, bullying nature of these self-appointed masters of the universe in business, finance, and government is the true "entitlement problem" in America.

The question rapidly approaching is, will Americans finally realize how crooked the republicans really are in forcing default and injecting completely unneccessary uncertainty and chaos into our lives? Will republicans ever feel a tinge of shame or conscience at the harm they are doing to the country the profess to love so much? Or go along with the inexplicable assertion that it is the president's fault?