Whee! Ain't This Fun!

Guvmint shut down, so we won't have to pay no taxes no more. Guvmint shut down so we don't have to have no guvmint health care. So, poor folks can still die when they're no longer useful. And enterprising people--like us--can still buy the finest healthcare in the world.

You'll see. Everybody will be better off without guvmint--except for keeping gangs in the keeps and off the streets, if you know what I mean, while smart folk in the suites can make off with the green.

The Tea Party represents two elements: racists, who want to prove that a black man should never be President, and 'those people' should stay in their place; and predators, who want all government out of the way, so they can make off with ALL the wealth everyone else produces. The second element funds the first, of course, and primes it on what to say.

So, every day that the government is shut down, and we notice the things that can go wrong when it's not doing its job, the more the Tea Party/Republicans will lose credibility--except with the racist and vengeful 20%. The predators don't lose: they make out like the bandits they are.

The extremism of people like Ted Cruz is not unlike the Taliban and al Qaeda in its nihilism. It's hard to know what a zealot like Cruz or Mullah Mohammed really believe. Cruz gets others to believe, for example, that the Affordable Care Act is going to unleash the apocalypse, although it's an almost Republican attempt at providing universal health care (even Mexico precedes us), so that people won't be in perpetual fear of the illness that loses them their job, their insurance and drives them into bankruptcy. Cruz and the Republican crazies in the House are absolutely determined to stop this potentially extremely popular program from ever happening. They fear its effects: already, in one day, the website insurance exchanges have had far more traffic and demand than either opponents or proponents predicted, with the predictable screw ups giving opponents something to exploit.

Tea Party funders want people desperate, not secure. Consciously or not, they have encouraged the progressive impoverishment of the middle class, because anxious employees will work harder. They won't dare challenge elite rip-offs.

Capital buys technology and dis-employs, but also enables world-wide use of the cheapest labor--and even creates it, since global competition drives down wages--and weakens all those other things self-respecting business leaders despise, like unions.

Affordable Care could actually begin to change that dynamic: it would give employees greater independence: they wouldn't have to fear losing their insurance, possibly their lives, if they changed jobs.

This has to be stopped--says Cruz--and especially, the people behind him. In Rome, these same people, the predatory Senatorial class, drove the Empire bankrupt--and most soon lost everything themselves. And so did almost everyone else: Rome was reduced to a village.

Standing Up On Their Hindlegs

And finding, yes, I think, a little spine in there. I'm referring to both Obama and the Democrats in Congress.

Obama insists on tax increases for the wealthy, including his Buffett Rule, that millionaires should pay taxes at the same rate as the middle class. He came out with a surprisingly muscular jobs bill, although it is still far from enough. And then he issued a veto threat (his first?): against any super-committee budget agreement that doesn't include tax increases as well as cuts to programs. His proposal actually is estimated to come 40% from tax increases on corporations and the wealthy, 60 % from expenditure cuts.

Republicans for months have been insisting that: "you can't raise taxes in a recession." Nor on "job creators," their euphemism for the stinking rich, so Obama's position is no longer compromise; it's confrontation. It's as if somebody finally got to him and said: "They'll compromise with you only if it'll guarantee their chances of defeating you in 2012. They're not sincere; give up trying.

Maybe he's given up trying. The Republicans, especially the House backbenchers are every bit as crazy as the radical Republicans after Lincoln's assassination. It's definitely better to show Americans what they really are.

Which brings us to the US House Democrats: they voted against the short-term budget, and so did enough sane Republicans that the government could shut down beginning next Tuesday.

Sane to shut down the government? Democrats?

What the Democrats were voting against was the insistence by the Republican majority that, counter to all past practice, disaster relief should be "paid for" by cuts to other programs. A program Republicans were going to cut was for developing more highly efficient vehicles: it was already creating jobs and was highly popular.

Now, Speaker Boehner is going to have to find a majority, not among the radical cutters, but among the sane. Insisting that disaster relief has to be "paid for," is like saying: "If I help him, I'll have to take the money from you." That's not going to be very popular.

With accelerating greenhouse gas emissions, and Republican crazies denying that humans have anything to do with climate change (it's just sunspots), disaster relief may become our new growth industry. But if you're going to accelerate disasters, at least you should help out the victims. The polluting companies and their shareholders should fund disaster relief from their excessive profits, even if the Kochs, et al deny any responsibility.

The debt-deficit mania, the austerity abroad, military stalemate, the increasingly polarized (and irrational) politics both in the US and in Europe spell rapid decline, not just of the American Empire but of any kind of western pre-eminence.

We do still have a chance to turn things around: Democrats standing up on their hindlegs is a start.