Burning Man 2009 by JahFae, on Flickr
There is an apocryphal quote from the Vietnam War “We had to destroy the village to save it”. I call it apocryphal because its attribution is murky and it has been distorted from the original quote over time. However it is still a powerful idea that leaders can get so close to their immediate goals that they lose sight of the bigger picture of what they are trying to achieve.
The quote comes from the story of Ben Tre , a provincial capital in the Mekong Delta. The United States Army made the decision to shell and bomb the town, even though there were large numbers of civilians in it, in order to break the Viet Cong hold on the town. They destroyed the town to deny it to the enemy. Not exactly a productive thing to do when you are fighting a counter insurgency.
It sees that this kind of thinking has infected the Congressional Republicans. Yesterday Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Dr. Evil –VA) said that he and his caucus, who control the House of Representatives, will not take up the issue of raising the debt ceiling until after it actually is hit. Right now the Treasury department estimates this will happen no later than May 15th.
Why is the House Majority Leader going to wait? Because he sees political advantage in playing with the nations credit rating. You see even when we a prevented by law from borrowing any more money there are ways that the Treasury department can shift dollars around for a few weeks to keep paying for things. They think they can get us through June and into July before those emergency measures run out.
What our demented jackass of a Majority Leader does not seem to understand is that it is not just the objective credit worthiness of the United States that keeps barrowing costs so low. It is also the confidence that the world has in the basic sanity of our government. By using something as important as the full faith and credit of the United States as a political bargaining chip Cantor and the Republicans are signaling to the world that at least 1/3 of our government is wicky-in-the-whacky-woo.
There has never, not once in the history of our nation, been a time when the Congress played politics with the debt ceiling. There have been protest votes, the President participated in one in 2006, but they have always been made when passage of an increase in the debt ceiling was assured. There has never been a time when one party would actually hold up the future of the nation over their political agenda.
We should not kid ourselves, these people are dangerous. Eric Cantor has shown time and again that he has no fucking idea how government works. He has decided that his future is with the malignant morons who think that we can always lower taxes and it will make the economy grow.
What is really frustrating about all of this is that this is a man who has spent the last two years bleating about “uncertainty in the markets”. This move to make the debt ceiling a bargaining chip is the single biggest thing that could make the markets uncertain. If the government gets to the emergency measures things will get bad quite quickly.
Everyone in the world will start to wonder if they really can trust US Treasuries and all of the other things that are tied to them. In fact if we get past the debt ceiling and there is no agreement, the damage will be done. The very fact of this fight and the seeming willingness of the Republicans to run the nation off a cliff to enact policies that most of the nation abhors is going to make our bonds less attractive for a long while to come.
You see this is not the last time there will be a debt ceiling raise. As long as we are not taxing our corporations and ultra-wealthy as we should while at the same time spending 160 billion a year on wars, we will not have enough revenue to run our nation. There is just no way it is going to happen. So even with the draconian and regressive cuts to social programs we are going to have to borrow money.
If there is any doubt that we will make good on our debt then it is going to be more expensive for us to borrow in the future. The Republicans and Conservatives have been floating the meme that we are broke, that we will see hyperinflation like Greece and Ireland and this is the reason that we must cut spending.
This was always a false equivalence because of our position in the world, the size of our economy and yes the faith that other nations and our own investors put in the credit of the United States. If we go down this road of making that faith seem foolish then the Republicans might trigger the very fairytale they had been telling.
When a nation won’t tax and it can’t borrow it defaults on its debt. When that happens its currency collapses and it goes into very hard economic times. If the economy that represents 40% of the planetary economy does that, then the world goes into a massive depression.
The last time we saw a world wide economic depression fascism rose, and World War II happened. Let me be clear that there were other causes of that conflict, but the collapse of the world economy allowed governments to come to power that probably would not have if there had been more stable economics.
Cantors office says that they will just wait until we are in the window between reaching the debt ceiling and when the emergency measures run out. They insist that they won’t let the United States default on its debt, but they fail to see the dangers to the economy and our economic future by playing this game of brinksmanship.
It is as if we have given people I would not trust with a potato gun the keys the nuclear weapons locker. They are standing over a thermonuclear warhead, and putting their finger over the detonation button and saying “I’m not touching it! I could, but I am not”. The problem with this game as everyone knows is that when morons play at something like that, the button almost always gets pushed.
I actually think that Majority Leader Cantor believes what he says when saying that Republicans won’t let us default. I also believe that morons who say they won’t touch the trigger think that is true too. Unfortunately I have no faith in either of them to actually follow through on that belief. When you play with things you don’t understand or down play the dangers of a idiotic action, bad things tend to happen.
The Republicans and the Teahadists have become so emeshed in their ideology, so sure they are “taking the country back” and saving it, that they may very well be willing to destroy it to achieve that goal.
Now I know that this probably won’t make a bit of difference since Rep. Cantor only hears what is inside his head and maybe what the Teahadist’s say, but here is his office phone number. Call him and tell him not to play with our national future. Tell him that if we default the American people will blame him and his place in history will be that of the man that played with fire and burnt down the nation.
Rep. Eric Cantor 202-225-2815
The floor is yours.