In Naomi Kleins recent book Shock Doctrine she chronicles how economic fundamentalists take advantage of natural and economic disasters to privatize and cannibalize economies around the world. The result being windfall profits for connected multinational corporations while local control is eroded or even destroyed. Here in the US this fake Debt Ceiling crisis is starting shape up to be just such a disaster, this one instigated by these same economic fundamentalists. Their objective: to take over.
The GOP using the so called “Tea Party” as a combination anti-Obama ‘shock troops’ one moment and ‘economic terrorists’ the next, seem to be driving the entire already wobbly US economy off a cliff. First a disastrous stock market 512 point dive last week that followed the very disappointing eleventh hour agreement to avoid the artificially contrived possible US default on money it owes. Then low behold over the weekend a key conspirator in the original financial crisis, the rating agency Standards and Poors (what an appropriate name), dealt the US economy another body blow. By lowering the rating on US Gov bonds a notch, SP drove the stock market into another steep dive while feeding new energy into the politically instigated paranoia about the national debt.
Anyone who has taken even one intro course in college economics should be incensed, demoralized and depressed by this horrendous Kubuki theater by the ruling class we have just witnessed. From any point of view Obama, representing the moderate centrist wing of the ruling class, has been again taken to the cleaners by the far right, which now controls Republican Party. Obama, instead of a frontal assault on the GOP using their contrived Debt Ceiling crisis as a teaching moment for the American public (with lots of colorful graphs and charts), he accepted most if not all of his opponents politically motivated assertions – like Social Security being ‘in trouble.’ One basic fact that Obama could made known to the American public, as mind bending as a number like 14 trillion is, our national debt is being financed at a historically low interest rate. What better time to borrow to rejuvenate a flagging recovery? Yet we are going in the dead opposite direction!
And there was a very real threat of default. But it was not because the US was unable to afford to borrow. We are not like the PIGS in Europe (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) that due to market-determined high interest rates on their government issued bonds, who are in real trouble. No, it was because the Republicans decided to hold the country (maybe the whole world) ransom unless the Demos agreed to begin wholesale extirpation of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. This political theater exposed to the world the dysfunctional nature of American politics in which hostage taking is now fair game. It made us look like another near failed state. Confidence in the U.S. as a functional democracy must be falling all over the world.
Any objective person recognizes that our ongoing national debt must be addressed in an organized, thoughtful and rational manner. It should be approached as a practical input-output problem not a political football. Instead the solutions are being driven in the worst way by hard line ideologues and cynical power junkies who benefit whether their economic reasoning is correct or incorrect. In fact it is better if they are ‘wrong’ – and they know it.
