In Booman’s recent piece It’s About Our Country, Not John Boehner, he wrote:
The White House long ago conceded that the House of Representatives has the power to compel them to give up on stimulating the economy and focus on cutting down on the debt. In that sense, the budget hawks won. But they don’t want that kind of victory. The idea that they might throw away everything that Boehner has extracted and chew him up and spit him out is astonishing.
This is not so astonishing if what is really in the air on the Koch brothers/budget hawk level of the right wing is a desire to push to default in order to totally destroy the current political and financial system as it now stands. That’s the way it’s beginning to look to me. Wisconsin was just a test run. From the recent shocked looks on both Boehner’s and Obama’s faces I am beginning to believe that they are seeing a similar picture.
Is this what is happening? If so, it explains the Tea Party types’ intransigence in the face of what the establishment…mainstream DemRats and RatPubs both…sees as a financial and social tragedy in the making.
Take the system down by force…by force of what we laughingly refer to as “law”, anyway…and rebuild it as some sort of isolationist, corporatist utopia where there exist only a working class, a managing class (including massive security forces) and an ownership/governing elite. Ayn Rand’s comic book-level dream come to reality. Will the peons suffer? The useless middle class, the retirees, the unemployed? No matter…they’re all just another set of drags on the economic engine. Let them eat crow. Let them all work for the equivalent of Chinese wages. Fuck ’em. We have to compete on a world level and we can’t afford to be squeamish at the necessities that such competition imposes. China certainly hasn’t been, and look at how well they’re doing.
Can they get away with it? The first part, the default? We shall soon see. The rest? I doubt it. If they are initially successful what they will eventually get is a breakup of the United States on the order of what happened in the U.S.S.R. Years of economic gridlock and human misery followed by secessionist movements and several different countries.
I have written about this potential for breakup before. The U.S. is now held together only by the hypnomedia. We are “Americans” only because we are continually told that’s what we are in thousands of different ways by the media. If things get too tough in terms of quality of life…for any reason, be it an economic tsunami of the sort that will most likely follow a default or a gradual sinking into economic third world status due to the piling on of more and more debt…we will likely see a diminishing set of returns from the media’s “We are Americans” blitz as the true face of poverty…hunger, fuel shortages, a crumbling infrastructure, an almost useless educational system…begins to intrude on the Happy Meal bullshit that passes for media in this country.
When that happens?
When that happens then the various true societally related areas…New England, the East Coast megalopolis, the midwest, the deep south, the western states, the Pacific Coast states, the southwestern states…will begin to drift away from the center out of sheer survivalist necessities. There won’t be enough money for them to be able to afford to support the federal kleptocracy as it now stands, and there goes the “United” part of the United States.
Watch.
We are at a crux point.
Damned if we do (continue to live past our means of production as a nation) and damned if we don’t.
Watch.
Is there a solution to this set of problems??
Yes, possibly. But I do not believe that Obama is temperamentally capable of imposing it. He would have to declare himself the center of the U.S. system and rally its people around him, Winston Churchill style. That’s just not his way. He’s a compromiser. He’ll go the distance using that approach and he will eventually only succeed in compromising himself…and the rest of us as well…right out of business.
So it goes.
That’s how I’m seeing it, anyway.
Your results may differ.
Unless the Dem presidential candidate in 2012 has coattails large enough and strong enough to maintain a Dem majority in the Senate and reestablish one in the House as well…a highly unlikely scenario, it seems to me…then what we will get is four more years of this Tea Party vs. the so-called “liberals” horseshit.
And four more years of that will throw this entire country under a bus.
Precisely where the corporatist far right wants it.
Which is where I came in.
A financial coup d’etat in the making.
Watch.
Later…
AG
Could be a good move. Read Thomas Naylor yet?
Y’oughta.
Later…
AG
great post.
my only criticism is “whaddya mean ‘what if'”?
it’s pretty clear to me that’s EXACTLY what’s going on.
Well…yes. But by “What if” I actually meant “If this is what is happening, what can we do about it?”
An unwieldy title at best.
Got any ideas?
Besides of course simply hunkering down and awaiting whatever fate decrees?
I for one am getting mighty tired of being subject to the Law of Accident.
AG
I’m beginning to agree with you.
What’s happening in Washington right now is straight out of The Shock Doctrine.
Indeed it is.
AG
Exactly. We are now in for a dose of “Shock Therapy” in the US. And it won’t be the last. The transfer of wealth from the workers and middle class to the CEO class will be hugely facilitated by the kabuki we are witnessing in DC right now with this manufactured ‘crisis’. The outcome will be ugly for the vast majority of us.
And Al-Jazeera has produced a great video which explains how the transfer is done…
This is not a 30-second sound-bite video. It is more in-depth at 25 minutes. Check it out!
The Republicans have been working on the same coup for as long as I can remember. I really doubt they can get away with it now.
Not many of us want another civil war, and hopefully we’ll do our best to avoid it. If the EU can hang together, why can’t we?
I’m reading Strauss & Howe’s “The Fourth Turning” about the generational cycles of history. According to them, we are in a Crisis time now – experiencing a fiscal scenario that they predicted as a possibility.
published in 1997:
Their description of the 90’s & 00’s as an Unraveling era was just as spooky.
This book gave me hope when I read it years ago. You might like it too, as it promises a new sense of community.
Optimists.
I love ’em.
However, the only people that I presently see who might be capable of such courage and fortitude are those who for one reason or another are not subject to the same level of hypnomedia-induced trance as are about 90+% of the rest of America.
The intelligent young who have escaped the enforced stupidity of our so-called educational system w/out crashing into drugs and despair. In my own son’s graduating high school class (’94) that would be about 2%.
2% of the roughly 40 million young adults between the ages of 18-30? 800,000. A good start if they all went to the streets. But they don’t. A lot of them have no use for anything remotely resembling a movement of any kind because they have already…quite correctly, on the evidence of their own eyes, ears and years…seen too many popular “movements” co-opted by the fake left and fake right.
Those immigrants for whom English has not yet become a first language…overwhelmingly South/Central/Caribbean American…who have thus somewhat escaped the all-powerful eye of media hypnosis.
How many?
Nobody knows. Not really. Many of them are very shy of anything smacking of government…once again, on the evidence of their own lives both here and in the countries from which they fled…and fear reprisal on both the physical and social level if they get too involved in movements of any sort.
The black population has been so systematically co-opted, jailed, gentrified out of their neighborhoods and generally dissed since the black power riots that in truth I don’t think that…past the gang-oriented segment…there is a statistically large enough number of that population who are ready to resist to be relevant to this discussion. And gang-bangers? Be they of any race or social class, they are not extremely useful to a “rousting courage and fortitude from the people” type of movement.
And the great white middle and working classes?
Ask yourselves this. How many people over 30 do you know…of all the hundreds with whom you regularly come into some kind of contact…who would willingly put their mortal asses on the street for a chance at “rousting courage and fortitude from the people.”
I live in a fairly…radical…subset of American society, and I only know maybe two or three.
Say 1% of the rest of the population under about 65.
Say 1 million more.
1,800,000.
Make it 2 million.
There are about 300 million people that allow themselves to be counted in the US.
Do you really believe that 2/3rds of 1% of the American people…about the population of Phoenx AZ and environs… are capable of rousing the rest of America to evince enough real “courage and fortitude” to stop this mess in its tracks?
Spread all over the country?
Totally unorganized as of now?
Sure to be ignored by the media?
I don’t believe it.
But ya gotta love the optimists.
Without them…Santa Claus would never arrive.
Sorry Alice…I have traveled the length and breadth of this country, and aside from the disenfranchised, be they Appalachian Scots-Irish, urban poor or purposeful dropouts…none of which groups are very big w/Wetwork (Errr…Network.) News except for being a convenient source of “human interest” stories…I see no sizable group with enough gumption to resist McDonalds, McRepblicans and McDemocrats, let alone rouse a new “courage and fortitude from the people.”
Sorry, but…there it is.
Take away “the people’s ” toys, their TVs and cheap food and relatively plentiful shelter? Then maybe.
Until then?
Ain’t happening.
But I do so love a good fairy tale!
Later…
AG
Isn’t that just what history is? And maybe our own puny lives as well.
I know there’s a lot of meaningless living going on, but there is still a lot of inspiration and beauty.
I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but it seems that the cycles of nature are quite reliable. (So far…)
Like the man said – don’t criticize, organize. Lots of people are working on it, we can contact them.
I have seen community evolve in some totally unlikely situations, and it didn’t take an army to bring change.
Peace and love, my friend.
Gotcha.
But on a much smaller level than “America.”
You are right. The “cycles of nature” are quite reliable, and it does not require masses of people to bring change. One natural cycle that I have clearly identified on every level of existence is the one that takes down overgrown systems. That’s where we are now. Too big to fail? No. Too big to continue to succeed.
You quoted:
The “Spirit of America.”
Capitalized.
Like when we were great?
The Greatest Generation(s)?
When The U.S. busted out of the gate and in less than a century became the most powerful, richest country in the world?
That “Spirit?”
That ‘spirit” was one of violent racism both within the nation and in the application of force to non-white cultures across the globe in the “spirit” of economic imperialism.
It worked, too.
And now it is no longer working.
So what remains?
An overgrown, overweight country that can no longer adequately feed its nasty, gluttonous habits of overconsumption through rampant international theft and the mistreatment of its own working classes. After the victims of that national and international crime began to become powerful enough to resist…say somewhere around the same time as the black power movements in the US and the successful Vietnamese resistance to America’s military might…the country borrowed its way into massive debt trying to keep its addictions pacified, and now the loans are beginning to dry up because we are in way over our heads.
If there is a true “Spirit of America” to be regained, it is the spirit of smallness and simplicity. The way we lived before our so-called “greatness.”
Once again…go read Thomas Naylor. Here and here on Counterpunch, just for starters.
I got yer “Spirit of America”, right there!
Read my sig.
Thoreau knew, right around the time of the Civil War.
The spirit of pre-“America.”
Bet on it.
S.
.S. Has anyone noted the fairly recent new pronuciation of the word “America” among the post-Tweet generations?
No more longish “e” sound in the second syllable. Now…among the stupid classes, almost all of whom are white and middle class…it’s a whining, longer “e.”
“Ameeiirica.”
Yes. A small-town ideal for a city folk.
Despite my obsession with the idea, nobody (except maybe pols on TV) ever says ‘America’ to me. It sounds terrible there, guess I don’t have your musical ear for speech. I’m having trouble imagining the “post-tweet” generation, being ante-tweet myself.
We’ll make it somehow, I insist on my optimism over despair. Choice – that’s the spirit.
Post-what I like to call “The Tweeting of America”, Alice.
You could also call it “The United States of American Idol” or “The Post-
Non-Reality show America.”Dysfunctional, shallow America, where no-talent is considered talent and any statement longer than about 16 words is treated as incomprehensible.
Dangerously close to a working majority of voting Americans is now all crowded up in the shallow end of the pool, sipping chemical-laced Mai Tais with leaky umbrellas in the glasses and watching faux-news on great big LED screens. The leftinesses consider themselves above all of this because they stay a little closer to deep water, sip chemical-laced imported Mai-Tais and watch other faux news on slightly harder to see screens.
So it goes.
Down.
AG
You are probably right, AG.
I wish I had something to argue against the points you make here, but it’s difficult. It’s just so depressing when it’s broken down this way.
Time to emigrate? I don’t know. Mexico? Holland? Denmark? Spain? Name your favorite country. All seem superior to what we face here.
But what I can safely say is that we’re better off with Obama than anything the Republicans are offering to replace him. I personally like the guy but he’s fucked us with this “centrism” he’s being advised to preach in order to “Win The Future.” WTF is right.
I really hope they know what they’re doing and that this fits into their Master Plan of rope-a-dope to scrub the House and Senate of the Tea Party and their sympathizers. If we can’t get big majorities in both houses next time, we really are screwed because we need to completely turn things around, re-write the tax code to something like we had in the 60’s, invest heavily in public works projects, stop warring everywhere in the world and pay down some debt.
So I sit and type about it… Maybe I should be doing more, but what? (BTW, I do already volunteer for Dems and give money when needed.)