Debt ceiling political crisis

A lot of bandwidth has been used up by various liberal analyses of the debt ceiling hub-bub, but what it boils down to is that it's really an entirely premeditated crisis. And the reason for it is because the white-supremacist coalition that has been running this country for the past three decades, as well as the value system associated with it, is on the verge of becoming a minority political tendency in this country. (And it is this coaltion, by the way, whom we can thank for having to settle for the sort of "halfway healthcare reform" represented by Obamacare, because they killed true universal healthcare before I or Barack Obama were even born.) The most fanatical acolytes of this political tendency would rather destroy the country they claim to love so fetishistically, than allow that to happen. They may have thought that they were on the rise with the Republican victories in 2010, but the fact that more votes for Congress were cast for Democrats than Republicans (Republicans retaining their majority in the house with brazen and desperate gerrymandering) in 2012, shows us that 2010 was merely a swan song. After all, the same state that handed Scott Walker a victory in the recall election, also went for Obama and sent Tammy Baldwin to the Senate a mere few months later. So I guess I'm back on board with the Democrats for a while, as long as the alternative is a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth Klansmen who want to drive the country over the edge of a cliff.

But of course, there is a much bigger story at work behind the scenes, which is well summarized by Reverse Engineer over at Doomstead Diner. This really explains as well as anyone could why the problems this country is facing in the near future aren't like those in the past, and claiming otherwise is just the rankest sort of denial. So given that, yes, I believe that collapse is inevitable and unpreventable because the whole system is in a rather more fragile state than most people seem to want to realize. Austrian-school economists such as Peter Schiff think we shouldn't raise the debt ceiling no matter what and face the pain of a serious depression, and then the Magick Market will eventually fix everything and we can all live in a devil-take-the-hindmost libertarian paradise with a gold-backed currency. It's a pretty little fantasy, to be sure, but it only goes to show how both Keynsians and Austrians blind themselves to the deeper reality by clinging to the insane notion that you can have infinite growth on a finite planet. I guess I just want to delay the disaster until some of my current health problems improve somewhat. Though a doomer case can certainly be made for embracing an economic depression.

And speaking of the Archdruid, his own perspective on the shutdown and the fiscal cliff also provides much-needed context and food for thought.

And as long as I'm piling on links, here's another way of explaining the same situation.