The Chris Moeller Archives

Why we almost defaulted

The tale of the Ted Cruz/Koch Industries government shutdown just may be the least-complicated major American political story since George Wallace stepped in front of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in 1963.

If you’ve read Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine,” then you know exactly what this plot is all about. It’s the shock and burn tactics of Milton Friedman finally coming home after being endeavored first throughout South America, in Iraq, Sri Lanka, China, Russia, Poland, South Africa, and points beyond. It’s about unchecked capitalism and the purposeful liquidation of the government so that the consent of the governed might be steamrolled, and social programs ultimately gutted.

The Republican power structure, generally-speaking, wants to disown this band of neo-confederate insurrectionists, yet it’s imperative that they face the fact that they share a party with them and a major culpability. The natural human tendency is to try to make peace with those that wish to make trouble, but with this shutdown, we were distinctly past the “party crasher” stage. Cruz and Co. were up on the proverbial kitchen table and squatting over the punch bowl.

The wrong presumption to make is that all parties involved in the shutdown want what’s best for America. They don’t. The disaster capitalists desire the full destruction of the government and for its corpse to be re-animated only with piecemeal programs they support, which are decidedly few. They are “hoarders.” If they were packing away burned-out light bulbs or back issues of Popular Mechanics, we would have no problem identifying them as such, but what these guys hoard is money. They want as much as they can get, philosophically and in practice, and they don’t care if anybody else on the planet or in the country has any. They would rather burn the country down than share it with anyone else.

They believe that Obamacare is unconstitutional not because it’s a massive taxpayer giveaway to Big Pharma, which it is, but because they believe it to be a constitutional crisis any time an elderly, infant, or infirm human is provided life-saving medical attention without first paying for it. The worse things get, and the deeper we slip into Banana Republic standing, the easier they feel their mission becomes. The “shock” events of 9-11, the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, and now the risk of a national default push us only closer to their authoritarian pillaging. If we’re talking about Greece or Spain, then we see the big banks raid the national pension programs, pin the blame of economic depression on the citizens that earn a living wage, and then the International Monetary Fund swoops in and orders the tearing of whatever strands of the social safety net still exist, but in the United States… well, actually the plan is pretty much the same here.

But the elevated difference is that the United States serves as the last and ultimate destination for the neoliberals’ assault. We’re the white whale. The culmination. Friedman’s deepest and sweatiest wet dream arriving in human form at his doorstep in the person of the first Hispanic Senator in Texas history.

Their elected representatives are very unpopular nationally. It’s irrelevant. They are errand boys. Gerrymandered errand boys. Their strategies have become so radical and dangerous that even the capitulator-in-chief is forced to stand tall. The president could never have struck a compromise with John Boehner because Boehner wasn’t authorized to accept a compromise.

The Affordable Care Act is a shitty piece of legislation, far afield from socialism in that it actually forces Americans to buy the product of a private corporation, a product they have despised for years, incidentally. But despite that reality, and the reality of a corporate media state, Obamacare has come to symbolize the potentially-positive relationship between the government and its citizens. If Americans collectively decide once again that the government is not their enemy in respect to providing vital social services like health care, than the whole of Reaganism unravels. Look what happened with Social Security originally. Despised early on, it became such a runaway success, even Republicans voters now won’t give it up.

The candle of effective government must be extinguished before people are able to focus in on the smaller print. It's a return of the military strategy in Vietnam also-- destroying the village in order to save it.

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A smidgen of noted sexism that needs to be added to the official record before it slips back too far into history: It's clear that Paul Ryan deserved to have been thrown into the same national category as Sarah Palin, the one for pretty-faced but dimwitted vice presidential candidates. This week Ryan cast a vote to default the United States federal government and destroy the global economy.

posted by CM @ 12:26 PM