Debtors Prison

It's hard to express how infuriating the whole "debt ceiling" nonsense is.

Partially because it's even a thing, like there's an option to just decide to not pay your bills (which is what this is - it's not about spending, it's about paying off what's been allocated and spent) for you or me or Sears Roebuck. The whole idea is idiotic and should have been taken out behind the shed and shot decades ago.

But mostly because it's just another (stop me if you've heard this before...) way for fucking wingnuts to fuck around without finding out.

The stuff they're demanding or they'll shoot the hostage - things like cutting poor people off welfare and cutting vet's benefits - are massively unpopular. If they tried that shit in Congress the usual way they'd get crucified - even in the popular press where idiotic trashfires like the NYT and CNN will usually just vomit up Republican talking points - before they got out the committee room door.

So they're pulling this shit.

As I keep saying; they're cultist loons. They don't care. If they can't have it their way, they'll burn it down.

You'll note what's NOT on the table, right?

Reversing decades of plutocrat-fluffing "tax cuts"?

Yeah.

Because damn near everybody in US politics - outside the Bernie and AOC "looney left" - loves handing cash to billionaires the way Empty-G loves some CrossFit stud groping for trout in her peculiar river.

(Look that one up..!)

But the same idiotic press is pimping this as "negotiations" and bothsidsing the hell out of it. The Biden Administration looks like they're too scared to tell the wingnut terrorists to fuck off and die in a hole. They'll cave, the idiot public will blame them and elect MORE wingnuts...so we're going to end up right where the wingnuts want us. Poorer. Smaller. Weaker. Stupider. Closer to the plutocratic Christopathy they crave.

All because We the People have been sitting on our hands while these people beaver away rolling back everything our parents and grandparents fought for since the First Gilded Age.

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF. 

Update 6/1/23: So the Wolves of Wall Street got nervous that their Congressional sock-puppets were going to do something stupid and called them off. As Charlie Pierce noted,

"As soon as Wall Street and the financial elite started getting publicly nervous about the possibility of a default, both Kevin McCarthy and, to a lesser extent, Joe Biden, were painted into a corner. All bluffs were not just called, but they were effectively dispatched into an alternate reality, a kind of political phantom zone. The money power was the only thing in this particular reality that was, well, real."

So we're not going to have to find out how to catch and eat starlings before midsummer, so I suppose that's fine.

That said, there's little respite in knowing that the lives and fortunes and sacred honor of countless millions of citizens of this country mean nothing to the vandals.

But their plutocratic masters whims?

To finish with Pierce again:

"In other words, politics as usual, a basic Washington transaction conducted in the most basic of Washington ways, a Swamp Thing from start to finish. And all in service to the money power, to the corporate elite, woke and otherwise."

Cold comfort if comfort it is.

 

 

Ceiling

Sigh.

As Driftglass reminds us at the link above, these assholes have been doing this little "locked out of the toilet but I'm busting to piss - on YOU!" debt ceiling dance for thirty years or more.

It's always the same; starve the grannies or we shoot the hostage.

The "reporting" is always the same, too; "conscienceless terrorist holds global economy hostage, but claims to be noble patriot; opinions differ!".

It's always pointless to remind everyone that the GQP is full of shit - if they want to "balance the budget" it's perfectly legit - MORE than legit - to do it on the wallets of billionaires and defense contractors than on granny's grocery budget.

But even if that fact was clearly presented the whole nonsensical farrago is never even remotely close to the truth...because these assholes could give a shit about the budget. 

Proof? The only Trump "accomplishment" - the ridiculously named "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" - blew a massive, WW2-size hole in the federal budget. And, since it gave tax cuts to fatcats, the Republicans were juuuuust fine with that.

The bottom line with these nimrods is that they want to go back to the pre-New Deal nation of their wet dreams, where the poor were really poor and desperate and the fear of starvation kept the smelly proles silent and afraid.

And I remind you that it WAS a dream - for them - and a nightmare for everyone else. It was never a real thing. It's the usual Republican lie about the "good old days".

The "good old days" were pretty shitty for probably about 60% of the people in this country.

Financial "panics" impoverishing working people. Predatory cartels and trusts. Lethal jobs paying shit. Hopeless poverty once you were too old or too broken to work even those awful jobs.

The pre-Deal U.S. was as often as not a contentious snakepit of class and racial hatred, the only time in U.S. history that an actual socialist party got more than a derisively tiny handful of votes...because so many Americans were furiously angry at (imagine!) the fear of starvation and destitution. The examples of Soviet communism and European fascism were looming threats to the American Experiment.

That wily old plutocrat FDR didn't come up with Social Security because he was a hairy-handed Man of the People.

It was because he was a wily plutocrat and knew that if you imiserated the proles hard enough pretty soon they would decide that it was worth their while to try and put you in the barber chair for a close trim from the national razor.

The modern GQP is a lot of things. But "wily" is not even remotely among them.

So we're going to go through this idiotic piss-dance again.

Driftglass has another bit of wisdom about that:

You can be a good American.

(in the sense of believing in the genuine promise of the United States - equal justice under law)

Or a good Republican.

But not both.