Posted October 1, 2013
The United States has entered multiple twilight zones with
the shutdown of the federal government, basically refusal by the House to pass a routine continuing service agreement. That, to
name only a few of the consequences, closes national parks, shuts most of NASA and
disease control services, halts several Head Start and day care programs and forces
payless vacations on 800,000 workers while asking many more to work without
regular paychecks, not to mention the impact on small businesses relying on
these customers.
No big deal, say those living in a vacuum – largely
radically conservative districts so controlled by gerrymandering that their
residents won’t speak up against the extremists they send to Congress. They believe this doesn’t hurt more than a
paper cut. Shutdowns are rare, but when
they happened in the past, they say, the
affected workers were made whole and the re-start costs were sucked up by
taxpayers. But federal workers I talk to
aren’t so sure -- this time they are dealing with ideologues who may say they
shouldn’t be paid for work they didn’t do.
And meanwhile, how do they feed their kids?
In fact, most extremists want this shutdown to be a mere
prelude to a bigger economic disaster later in October -- refusing to raise the debt ceiling. There is a lot of public misunderstanding
about what “raising the debt ceiling” means, since it doesn’t add a penny to the debt. It’s a
usually routine mechanism to allow the government to pay the bills Congress has
already rung up. Without it the nation
could quickly plunge back into a recession or into lower credit ratings since
it becomes an international deadbeat.
The media isn’t helping here. In the need to draw eyeballs
and sell newspapers, it is treating this situation as gridlock between the
political parties, as if the blame is fairly equal. But deeper pundits on both the left and right actually
know it is all being caused by a small controlling segment of the GOP known (perhaps
too much in shorthand) as the Tea Party wing – and daily more detested by
centrist Republicans.
But these were the
elected members from the far right who blamed President Obama in 2010 for the economic meltdown caused years before
he entered office but hitting them right as he took office. So this has become
a well funded but totally phony argument that the way to stop bad government is
to shut all government down. That’s something
like holding your breath in the hope that someone will take you to the hospital
once you turn blue. Or refusing to pay your monthly credit card bills – boy,
that will bring Wall Street to its knees!
This time the excuse for the shutdown, which simply hurts
ordinary Americans, was it would defund Obamacare, which it can’t. In fact the
launch of the state by state Exchanges started the same day as the shutdown Oct.
1, protected by separate funding. The
feared glitches stemmed from how many people tried to sign up the first day of
a six-month enrollment period, a signal of how hungry the uninsured 15% of the
nation are to find a plan.
So it was all bogus. In fact, the flabbergaster in chief,
Ted Cruz, knew it. His 21 hour Senate talkathon was never a filibuster because
it had no legal or practical chance of stopping anything. It was also totally a joke on his supporters
and they fell for it when he compared Obamacare to addiction to sugar, in this
case the sugar being better health coverage – huh?
He warped the meaning of the world’s most famous children’s
author, Dr. Suess (actually Theodor Geisel, a famous liberal thinker), by reading “Green Eggs and Ham,” which is
actually about the value of trying unfamiliar food and finding it tasty. Isn’t
that the real danger of Obamacare? He’s afraid it will work!
The Cruz control approach raised money for his future
national campaigns but deeply offended the conservative business community. Remember, Obama even back in 2008 was
attacked by the left for not going far enough into government control of health
care, insisting that private health insurers should gain the 30 million
uninsured Americans. Obama rejected single payer or the government paying
physicians and hospitals directly, as has worked in other nations, because he wanted to
protect the existing US private system.
In other words, despite the attacks from Hillary Clinton and others, he
preferred being more of a capitalist than a socialist.
Now the supposedly fiscally concerned Tea Party wants to rob the business community
of these new customers. At least Obama
understood how insurance works, especially social insurance. The larger the pool the cheaper the
cost. And if you can include the more
healthy as well as the less healthy that’s how you bring costs down. Delaying the individual mandate as the Tea
Party wanted simply assured that costs would rise for health providers and for
the governments involved since the less healthy would flock in and the
healthier young who already consider themselves invincible would have an excuse to stay out.
Comes another twilight
zone. When its first attacks on the
Affordable Health Care failed in Congress, the House GOP switched strategies
and now wants the public to think it was
only about desiring conference negotiations on the entire US budget (so much
for Cruz and multiple caucus votes).
But the GOP had refused that conference idea 18 times in 6
months! Last spring the House passed a budget and the Senate did, too, and it
was the GOP that refused to hold conferences to reconcile the differences, even
though the Democrats, biting their lips, accepted the lower budget amount
represented by the still hated sequester.
And now they are painting Obama as the one unwilling to negotiate and compromise!
We have now entered so many twilight zones that a string
theory physicist couldn’t work it out.
Because isn’t this the president talking openly if cautiously
to Iran (after three decades when we didn’t), and to Russia and to Syria, all
to thwart the international threat of weapons of mass destruction? It’s too early to know what will work and what
won’t, but already Obama’s threat of military action has brought agreement from
Syria to turn over all its chemical weapons
to the United Nations.
What the Tea Party House is actually revealing is that they
are more stubborn about talking to Obama than three totalitarian regimes! That raises a horrifying reality. This sliver of elected representatives of our democracy, sent
to D.C. to make government work better, are less open to talk and more eager to extort Obama than nations
notorious for human rights violations.
It’s a comment on these representatives but mainly on the voters
who put them in office.
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