Government Shutdown or Showdown? - Will things go as I predicted?

Hello, did I call this or what?  "Is the GOP dropping Obamacare in shutdown debate?" That's the notion Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Committee chairman, and the party's vice presidential nominee last year, argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Here's How We can End the worst part of this Stalemate - the threat of a default on American debt for the first time since the Republic was founded. Ryan's suggestion: that Democrats and Republicans should pass a raising of the borrowing limit in exchange for the Democrats' agreement to immediate negotiations that focus on "modest reforms to entitlement programs and the tax code."  

Above all, Ryan's column never mentioned Obamacare, focusing instead on  spending cuts to domestic and military programs, as well as Medicare reforms, and implicitly accepting the deal that has been on the table for most of a year -- to include some of the "revenue-side elimination of fat-cat tax breaks that the democratic side has sought. In other words, precisely the deal I predicted almost a week ago.

Of course this elicited rage from the dogmatic wing. Amanda Carpenter, a communications adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tweeted: "There is one big word missing from this op-ed. It's start(s) with an O and ends with BAMACARE ..." Those who want to keep up the game of chicken, despite all reason or sense, will threaten any House GOP member who drifts toward Ryan's position with a challenge in his or her district's Republican primary, next spring.  This is no small cudgel, because of the radicalism engendered by gerrymandering. A national disaster that has a surprisingly simple solution that I'll post about soon.  


But first, back to the frantic search by Republican leaders for a way out. With the Ryan proposal savaged by Tea Partiers, Speaker Boehner stepped up on Thursday, reiterating Ryan's position, suddenly dropping all mention of Obamacare... while making all the requisite aggressive noises as if this retreat were instead a manly ultimatum.

As I predicted, saner elements of the GOP are now desperately seeking a face-saving way out. Especially now that the Koch brothers and others in the Republican money establishment see a gaping gulf gulf between the neo-confederate radicalism they themselves engendered with billions in political meddling vs the looming devastation to their own self-interest that will happen if this Frankenstein mania takes our economy over a cliff.

So let me repeat my forecast, spelling it out explicitly. Under orders from above (the Kochs, Murdoch, Fox etc), just enough House GOP members will threaten to break with the House Republican Caucus, forcing the Tea Party militants to free up Boehner. He, in turn, will accept the offer the Senate has made twenty times since March, to hold the constitutionally mandated House-Senate Budget Conference Committee, where these things have been worked out for 230 years, to discuss the deal that was already mostly worked out last year. A deal for moderate efficiency reforms in entitlements plus elimination of some fat cat tax write-offs.  Boehner and his co-leaders will accept the invitation at last…

…but declare it as a great victory!  That Obama and Sen. Reid had "caved" under pressure from Speaker Boehner's tactics, playing extortion-chicken with the shut-down and default cliffs.  "This is all we wanted, all along!"

And the President will let them crow.  His only real concession, after the dust settles, will be letting them have a week of face-saving "we won!" chanting.  Then the Budget Reconciliation Conference Committee will strike a deal that the dems have offered for a year.  And Boehner will need democrats in the House, in order to pass it. At which point the real Tea Party insurrection may begin.

The problem with such a budget deal, from the GOP perspective, is that - like Obamacare - it might actually work.  With the right mix of reforms in entitlements and taxes, the budget deficit -- already vastly improving -- might swing back toward Clintonian balance. If Obamacare also works, then where will the GOP stand in the 2014 elections?

I could not care less.  As we'll see below, the asymptote for all of their orbital momenta leads to insanity.

== But the Shut-down goes on -- its real aim ==

Mind you, all of this only has to do with raising the debt borrowing limit and avoiding default. The Republicans have vowed to maintain the other half of their game-of-chicken... the Government Shut-down.

They see a winning hand, here. So far, every time an important constituency - or one that is symbolically powerful, like military death benefits - has howled loudly enough, the House has scurried to pass a special bill and demand quickie Senate action to grant continued funding to that special interest group. "Why didn't we think of this sooner!" cried one Tea Party radical, envisioning this as a way to -- without the onerous task of legislation -- simply eliminate most of the Federal Government, which today's incantations of the right depict as evil at a fundamentally inherent level, while eliminating any political blowback by funding islands of vocal constituency.

Never mind that during the Bush years, these same fellows were just fine with skyrocketing federal power, spending and calamity. Or that they thus declare that Abraham Lincoln's "Government of the people, by the people" shall perish from the Earth. Or that it's simply crazy.  Just look at some of the things they have succeeded in shuting down, and see the consistent logic, at least.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory has gone out of business for the duration.  Already hampered by the sequester, it is now closed by the government shut down. So have all research activities for the entire season in Antarctica.  NASA says 97% of its personnel are furloughed. Certainly my colleagues at NASA NIAC have been. Perhaps that's why no one answered George Clooney's calls in GRAVITY?

Having sabotaged atmospheric and climate science for twenty years, the GOP can now shut it all down completely, while continuing to cry: "we need more data!" before doing anything about climate change.

In fact, the shut down has also hammered most research contracted by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, The National Academy, research divisions of the Centers for Disease Control, the Energy Department, the EPA and the Weather Service. Moreover these interruptions do far more harm than at first appears, as some experiments and observations are completely ruined. Just one example: the government shutdown is likely to mean an early death for thousands of mice used in research on diseases such as diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer's.

If the shut downs continue, they'll divert graduate students and research fellows who must eat to survive -- which will undercut science even more. .

Now the kicker… this is not something that the currently dominant brand of conservatism (as opposed to the older, and deeply-missed, intellectual brand of Goldwater and Buckley) deems regrettable at all.  It is not a "flaw" in the GOP tactics. To the madmen now running the asylum -- who for two decades actively have waged the War on Science --  this latest hampering is a silver lining. This is not a flaw but a Feature.

Think that's a one-off? Take this additional example from a decade ago, still doing outrageous harm:   "In 1996, Congress passed a law requiring the U.S. government to sell off our entire helium stockpile by 2015. This has forced the price of the gas way, way lower than it should be, considering how little of the stuff is actually left in the world. (Some estimate that a balloon's worth would cost $100 if the market were allowed to set the price.)"  The US currently owns 80% of the world's supply and given the ever-widening range of uses for Helium -- (ask any physicist, chemist or biologist or electronics maker) - it might offer leverage against - say - the Chinese near monopoly on rare earth minerals. At minimum, every scientist alive cringes at what the GOP has done on just this one (of countless many ) area of deliberate destruction.

Indeed, if anyone out there can think of a non-criminal reason why the GOP commanded this fire sale and non-economic selloff such a high priority strategic asset, I'd love to hear your theory.

== And finally… ==

This harsh rumination by Josh Eidelson on SALON ponders why the Republican elites of Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce, who have so much to lose if a U.S. default trashes the American credit and economy, have not laid down the law upon the unruly House GOP, the way they have in every past crisis.  After all, they were the ones - not average Red Americans - who gained the benefits from every past Republican legislative and/or executive action, from the Bush tax breaks to middle east wars.  But this time, it appears that the Tea Party -- a genuine populist movement -- has metastacized completely out of control of the party's traditional masters.

This is evidenced by the behavior of the shills at Fox News, who are riding a brahma bull. They keep hinting that the Obamacare fixation may be over-wrought and may have to be set aside… (as we describe Congressman Ryan saying, above)... this is the message commanded from up-top.  But Roger Ailes and his Fox "News" team must also look to the bottom line! The average Fox viewer is by now so riled up -- ironically by Fox itself -- that any calm-down message might alienate them and hurt the advertisers who pay the network's bills.

Above all, do not let the counter-meme spread... that Obamacare was actually almost completely  cloned from the Republicans own 1994 health care plan that they put forward as an alternative to Hillary's plan. Copied almost verbatim. Republicans ignore this fact because it collapses their tirades.  (Oppose it? Fine. Say "we changed our minds?" Fine! Express volcanic fury? Hypocrisy!)

Although the deep-right coined the term "culture war" I have been the one suggesting that things have come to a dramatic pass. That we are now in Phase Three of the American Civil War.  

Now have a look at an incisive appraisal by a writer who is (admittedly) from the left-end. And you all know that I am caustic toward the fartghest-maddest-left, which, though currently far-smaller than the far-mad-right, was once -- and may someday again be -- a locus of dogmatic danger in the world.

Nevertheless, and despite that bias, an educated person knows that Marxists at least have thought a lot more about this whole "class" thing that most of us blithely ignored, during the anomalously flat era from 1945 to 2000.  So, while retaining a wary awareness that Marxists truly are crazy at another level (e.g. they believe in social teleology), I nevertheless think there is plenty here worth pondering.  Take this from Josh Eidelson's article, Tea Party's Shutdown Lunacy: Avenging the Surrender of the South:

"A couple things. I do think that we have this broad kind of rot at the top end of our society: It’s devolved from a real ruling class, with some distance from day-to-day moneymaking, into something more just like a pure plutocracy, interested in maximizing its cash in as short a time as possible, and really not capable of thinking about policy in a serious sense. The Financial Times has been writing about how groups like the Chamber of Commerce, who normally would put pressure on the difficult Republicans, don’t seem to be willing or able to do that — and one of the reasons is that they’re so enamored of the tax-cutting side of the Republican Party that they don’t really want to stop things like the government shutdown, or they don’t have the capacity to stop things. It does seem like there’s a breakdown at the elite level of society."

Josh Eidelson continues: "But also, Michael Lind had an interesting piece about how the roots of Tea Party are in a Confederate, almost kind of a neo-Confederate structure of people who want to preserve their class privileges ...and they are a very sizable portion of the Republican Party. And what they see — and this is also confirmed by the focus groups that David Greenberg et al. did — the core of this is a group of people that feel like the country is being taken away from them by a new minority-majority country. And all of their familiar touchstones are being smashed. They feel like they’re fighting a heroic kind of lost cause, and they’re willing to do a  lot of damage to try to get their way."

"To some degree the Big Business interests are paying a price for having relied on these characters in the first place. The last thing that Big Business wants to see is something that threatens the status of Treasury bonds. They don’t want to threaten the status of the dollar as reserve currency. They don’t want to rock the image of the United States as the most stable capitalist power in the world. Even though the financial crisis essentially originated here, money still flowed to the United States then because it seemed safer than everywhere else. The big boys don’t want to endanger that status."

Okay that was at least thought provoking. Still. At risk of agreeing with a quasi Marxist… I will one-up that appraisal, taking it even farther.

After the almost perfect record of calamitous rule by the Bushites -- with every large decision directly resulting in extreme harm or decline in the American Republic, its small businesses and entrepreneurial verve, its science, its economic and its Pax power -- one has to wonder about the author's core assumption, that all of the right wing's oligarchs want the United States to thrive.  

Don't forget that the Republican Party's top bankrollers now include quite a number of foreign princes, aristocrats, moguls and sovereign wealth funds, many of them rooted in cultures that express open contempt for North American civilization in principle and who have openly wished for an end to the American Pax. I include one of the top foreign co-owners of Fox News in that clade.  

As Goldfinger said: "Once, Mr. Bond, may be happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three … or many many times… that's enemy action."