Sunday, July 31, 2011

Debt-ceiling hubbub

It looks like a deal is taking shape in which the extreme Republicans get pretty much everything they want, which means precious little cuts in military spending and bloody-awful cuts in social programs. Obama and the codependent-doormat Democratic-Party Kool-Aid drinkers deserve one another in a huge and major way. This was probably the plan all along in this whole ridiculous scripted drama.

And if the global economy would have been taken over the edge of the cliff by the Tea Party? I would have seen it as this country's karma playing itself out. There were plenty of signs and warnings that the new crop of Republicans would prove to be mondo-serious Jacobins unlike any previous generation of Republicans, but the electorate chose to let itself be beguiled by all the free publicity the media gave the Tea Party.

And the Long March to the Right which has made all that has transpired possible is something for which we can thank not just the Republicans, but also the now-withering middle class, the corporate media, and the Democratic Party establishment itself. All the Kool-Aid in the world won't change what the historical facts of the matter are. On the spiritual level, what has been driving this ongoing fiasco is what an utterly narcissistic society we have been for a very long time, and it's why our future as a society is very grim.

And let's face facts. The reason for this squabbling over our runaway national debt arises from the fact that energy and resources are necessarily becoming more scarce and therefore expensive, and some kind of conservation needs to start taking place, only we don't have the conceptual framework to realize that because our economic mode is based on generating profit through energy-waste. And reducing social spending won't restore growth as the far-right politicos and economists would have us think, because taking spending power away from ordinary people reduces the amount of money circulating in the economy, which reduces tax revenues, which increases deficits further. When waste-based economies no longer have fuel and resources to readily squander, contraction is the only option there is. And in corrupt, plutocratic societies, that means the people who are least able to defend their interests will be the ones who get fucked over.

And the fading-away and increasingly-irrelevant Liberal Class of whom Chris Hedges speaks will continue to pretend that voting for and supporting Democrats will somehow mitigate this ongoing disaster, in the face of all contrary evidence such as this last-mintue debt-ceiling deal. In the immortal words of Mr. Natural, "'Twas ever thus."

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