The Republican Party Means to Destroy the World Economy to Create a US Oligarchic Dystopia

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been watching the slow moving debt ceiling debacle with all the fascination that a bloody multi-car pile up on an interstate gets. Like most other people watching the Republicans shoot the world’s economy in the gonads, hide the smoking gun behind their back, and point at Biden, I’m struck by how casual they are about literally destroying our position of world economic leadership and dominance. Let me organize my thoughts into some kind of order and let me know in the comments what you think:

IRREPARABLE Harm to our economy

OUR ECONOMY is worth saving. If we take it as gospel that the US economy is worth saving and that defaulting on our debt would do irreparable harm to it, then there is no universe in which threatening a default makes sense. It’s like pointing a gun at someone just to scare them. How many people have died in that situation? I’m forced to conclude that the hostage takers actually want to do the irreparable harm.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Useful Idiot) said that he has a rule that he can use as a member of the Rules Committee that would stop the debt ceiling bill from reaching the floor of the House for a vote. He claims that as part of the agreement that old Kevin Fifteen made to become Speaker, the Rules Committee needs to vote unanimously to move a bill forward.

Not everyone is convinced that this rule exists or was even talked about. So, what gives. Why is Roy setting up such a straw man smack down? Is just preening for the MAGA mooks? Is he just delusional? Either way, anyone negotiating in good faith doesn’t make such easily refuted statements.

If you’re not negotiating in good faith, you aren’t serious about averting a default on the debt, are you?

Conclusion: Chip Roy and Freedumb Caucus disciples of idiocy mean to default. They mean to destroy our economy.

Why would they do that?

DEFAULTING ON THE DEBT is not in anyone’s interest, especially anyone who is in the profit-making business. There must be big dollar donors to the GOP shitting bricks about now, right? Shouldn’t those folks be melting the telephone exchanges into slag and crashing email servers with all of their nervous nellie messages about not defaulting?

The Republicans really have insulated themselves from accountability by their voters. Look at Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi to name just a few states where gerrymandering, racism, and sportification have successfully nullified the vote.

The default game buggars the question, though, have they insulated themselves from their donors. There are billionaire backers of many candidates. Is it possible that these billionaire backers, the Harlan Crows and Rupert Murdochs of the world also decided that they’ve had enough of liberal democratic mixed economies?

Conclusion: They must be sure that the resulting deflation of the economy would benefit them somehow.

Default end game

CORPORATE OWNERSHIP of the economy has been growing. Trump’s tariff wars were about wiping out middle sized farms and companies, so they could be bought cheaply by corporations. The wild inflation of housing prices was driven by investment firms buying up housing stock to turn it into rental properties. The Republicans have been salivating over privatizing — corporate ownership — of Medicaid and Veterans benefits for decades.

They mean to create an oligarchy, just like they have in Russia.

The Republicans have been playing a long game for the past sixty years or so. Part of that long game is to normalize the notion of defaulting on the national debt. By frequently shutting down the government and playing brinkmanship with the debt ceiling, they’ve been able to take the hyperventilating threat out of the possibility.

They’ve turned it into something that is survivable like personal bankruptcy or even helpful. The for-profit media has played right along because profits are people, too, my friend.

HITLER WAS BROUGHT to power during the chaos of the Great Depression had reduced the German economy to ash where the baskets that carried the bushels of Deutsch Marks needed to buy staples were worth more than the marks they carried. That’s what they’re hoping for here.

LIBERALS LOVE to comfort themselves by saying, polls show that the American people support issue x, y, or z by elebenty billion percent! But, they never seem to ever vote like it, right? The electorate never seems to getting around to punishing the Republicans for their unpopular social issue positions and seems to like the taste of urine that the Republicans leaving tricking down in the economy because every eight years, we put a Republican president in office who blows up the economy by giving trillions to billionaires and everybody else just gets poorer.

Giving trillions to billionaires don’t work no more. There ain’t no more to give. We’ve done rung that rag dry.

Conclusion: They want an oligarchy.

Solutions?

SOLUTIONS to the mad drive to single-party pseudo-democratic authoritarian oligarchy are few and far between. They’ve advanced their cause pretty darn far and are close to achieving it.

There are only two courses of action open to us.

FIRST, we must call our members of Congress and tell them to support raising the debt ceiling. Tell them that default is not an option. We must muster as much pressure as we can.

Unfortunately, there is a lack of groundswell and passion for doing so. Not like there was just a few short years ago. It is time for each of us to dig deep and call who ever represents us in Washington and tell them that we expect them to raise the debt ceiling. If it doesn’t get raised, the GOP Dystopia is born.

AND SECOND, we have to deliver a crushing electoral defeat to the Republican Party in 2024. We can’t settle for blue puddles. We can’t run around crying about blue tsunamis. We have to actually work to turn out the vote across the board in all fifty states and vote these mo’fo’s out in overwhelming numbers.

We have to return Biden and Harris to the White House and give them veto-proof majorities in both Houses of Congress. We have to sweep them out of state legislatures, governorships, and statewide offices. They have to loose mayors and city councils and school boards. It has to be up and down the ticket.

The Republican Party has to go the way of the Whigs.

Can we do it? Only if we recognize the threat in time.

Image Attribution

“The Final Clock Tower Burns Down” by CaDeltaFoto is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.