When you’re mugged in a dark alley at gunpoint, a win could be losing your wallet but keeping your life. America is being mugged in plain view at economic gunpoint, and too many of the 300 million American bystanders think the ones holding the gun are the good guys and the nation being mugged will be better off for being deprived of its wallet. Under such conditions, a win might be getting out of the situation with our national life still intact.
The political reality is that enough of the American people, extremely foolishly, helped put into place enough inflexible fanatics with an irrational agenda that arriving at a reasonable policy solution to the current combined debt ceiling/national debt reduction “crisis” (a crisis created by the gun now pointed at our head by those who claim to be dedicated to averting the crisis) may simply be impossible. Those elected fanatics and their fanatical followers wield enough pivotal political power in Congress that their insane will cannot simply be shunted aside. And they have dug in on the notion of not compromising.
The left complains that Obama did not stand firm enough, but does anyone really believe that having stood any firmer would have led to any other conclusion? Without Congressional approval, the nation (those of us that are rational and sane, that is) is left with a few extreme possible maneuvers, such as the president unilaterally invoking the 14th amendment provision (section 4) stating that ” [t]he validity of the public debt of the United States…shall not be questioned.” That, or another similar legal maneuver, might well be the right choice, but it might not be. A careful cost-benefit analysis is required to make that determination, and such maneuvers are by no means costless.
My point is not that what The Economist magazine has called an “economically illiterate and disgracefully cynical” refusal to include revenues as part of any debt-reduction plan is in any way defensible policy -it isn’t (it will cost jobs, reduce services, shrink the economy, and, in the long run, both exacerbate our national debt problem while simultaneously decimating our quality of life)- but rather that the question now may be one of how little self-inflicted harm we escape from having to suffer.
I use the word “might” in the title of this post very purposefully: All hope is not yet lost, and we might indeed be able to escape this situation with a better deal than the one we seem now to be careening toward. But it is not at all clear that that is possible, and it is quite clear that it may not be, so we (that is, again, the rational and sane among us) need to brace ourselves for the possibility that we are indeed going to be victims of an act of political sabotage of our national and world economy, and that the goal for us (again, the rational and sane among us) might indeed be minimizing the damage caused by that act of political sabotage.
I suspect that this will be one of my least popular posts among those who appreciate my perspective, and I hope that their greater optimism and faith in our ability to ensure that reason prevails, at least to some degree greater than the almost non-existent degree that I am conceding may be the greatest degree currently possible, is warranted and that I am proven wrong in my present pessimistic caution about what can be expected, and about what can be immediately accomplished by the rational and sane among our elected officials. But my purpose in writing this unhappy post is to advise my friends that we can suffer great acts of violence from within or without, whether physical or social institutional in nature, and survive to recover and grow stronger and wiser and healthier even so. And that completely or largely averting such acts of violence and their consequences, as we so often see throughout human history, is not something that the rational and sane among us always have within our power to do.
When dealing with irrational people who have acquired some form of power, whether it is a gun with which to mug a stranger in the street, or elected office with which to mug a nation in plain view, it is not always possible to arrive at rational or fair or productive outcomes. Sometimes, you just have to deal with the fact that irrational people have power, and act rationally within the context of that reality. Brace yourselves for that possibility, and spare those who were forced by their own sense of responsibility to give in from the brunt of your just rage over the crime which forced them to do so.
Yes, shame on those fanatics, both those elected to office and those who voted for them. But there is indeed a gun to our heads, and while we don’t want the muggers to get away with the crime they are committing against us, we even more definitively don’t want them to pull the trigger.
2 Comments »
What’s in a name? An Attitude. The Denver Post reported that the newly minted Republican State House Majority has not only renamed several committees to announce their disdain for workers, the poor, and the disabled, but threw in a little historical revisionism for good measure (http://blogs.denverpost.com/thespot/2010/11/12/house-committee-names-included-labor-and-welfare-under-prior-republican-rule/18581/). Yes, delightfully reminescent of other previous incarnations of a similar mentality, the House Republicans changed the name of “the House Business Affairs and Labor Committee” to simply “the House Business Affairs Committee,” and “the House Health and Human Services Committee” to “the House Health and Environment Committee” (signalling the presence of an obviously absent interest in environmental issues, while assuring us of a continuing disinterest in humanity?). They then claimed that they were changing the names back to what they had been prior to the 2004 Democratic takeover of the House, though in neither case were the pre-2004 names what the Republicans now adopted, and in the former case, the pre-2004 name was the same as the one that the Republicans inherited and then dumped. Remember the original Charlton Heston version of “Planet of the Apes”? Republicans = Gorillas, and Democrats = Chimpanzees and Orangutans. Nowhere more true than it is in Colorado, where we’ve been blessed with folks like Dave Schultheis and Scott Renfroe, the former having argued against a prenatal HIV test which prevents the transfer of HIV from the mother to the fetus on the basis that the mothers should have to suffer for their immorality, and the latter for having compared homosexuality to murder (http://blogs.rockymountainnews.com/rockytalklive/archives/2009/02/schulteis_says_if_baby.html).
As expected, the 2010 elections left us with a Congress comprised mostly of the Far-Right and Far-Left, and the few remaining moderates from either party badly outnumbered. The Economist reported on the increased power of the Tea Party nut-jobs who have now taken power while remaining utterly clueless, and on the decreased power of moderate Democrats who now comprise a smaller minority of the Congressional Democratic Caucus (http://www.economist.com/node/17465283). Immoderate voters give us an immoderate and polarized government, and a lot of spinning wheels kicking up lots of mud but getting no traction, and getting us nowhere, not even on issues such as deficit and debt reduction.
No Comments »
The Denver Post reported today that Democratic Senator Mark Udall of Colorado has teamed up with conservative American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein to make the filibuster more difficult to implement (as it once was, not so very long ago), and only available one time (rather than at multiple stages of a bill’s journey through Congress) (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16208174).
Despite the backing of a conservative luminary, and despite Udall’s crafting of the bill as a compromise to the minority party, he has thus far been unable to find a Republican co-sponsor, again underscoring President Obama’s observations in his recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, and what everyone but the thoroughly self-deceived have known for some time (and what I wrote early today when commenting on Obama’s interview, http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=575): The Republicans in Congress have no intention of serving the interests of the American people. Their raison d’etre is to hamstring the government, blame the consequences on the Democratic majority, regain control of Congress by doing so, and continue to serve the short-term interests of the few, by cultivating and exploiting the compatible blind dogma of a large information-deprived faction, at the expense of us all in the long run.
