America’s tyranny of yokels
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1024595--olive-america-s-tyranny-of-yokels
On Tuesday, the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress narrowly failed to ban a phase-out of incandescent light bulbs — a provision of a 2007 bill signed by then-president George W. Bush — with energy-efficient replacements that would save the average American household $85 a year on power bills and eliminate the need for 30 large power plants.
An extremist libertarian GOP that has taken charge of the U.S. House of Representatives sees that measure as a threat to individual liberty, though the purchase of the new bulbs is voluntary. As I’ve written more than once in this space, a world of finite energy sources and the slow development of alternatives makes conservation the one sure way of maintaining energy security.
A thousand credentialed experts would agree. But our American friends are in the clutches of a tyranny of yokels. Emboldened by gutting environmental protection laws and post-Great Recession reforms to Wall Street, they now are pushing their 235-year-old republic as close to anarchy as they can manage by threatening to vote against raising America’s debt ceiling.
Until now, the debt ceiling adjustment has been a routine, non-partisan event. The extremists — controlling just one-half of one of the three branches of the U.S. government — have seized upon it to humble America with deadbeat status if its ideological agenda isn’t adopted.
An agreement on raising the U.S. debt ceiling must be reached next week to provide enough time to pass the necessary legislation. As I write this, the chances of that happening are bleak. U.S. President Obama has accommodated the extremists with massive spending cuts. But the insurgents demand that he also accede to maintaining the fiscally ruinous Bush tax cuts skewed to the rich of the early 2000s.
That is an idiotic “ask.” Any shopkeeper or household pushed to the wall strives to cut costs and increase income, not one or the other. The loony fringe in Congress insists that the U.S. government — which has 80 million bills to pay each month and is the world’s largest buyer of goods and services — starve itself at a time when taxes are a smaller portion of the economy than at any time in 40 years.
Watching the Tea Party-influenced cohort that took control of the House last November — and now holds the entire GOP hostage — hurtling the U.S. toward the brink has induced apoplexy among even the GOP’s allies.
The libertarian extremists who’ve gained control of the GOP, says conservative pundit David Brooks, “have no sense of moral decency.” In the days to come, we’ll learn if the GOP is “a normal conservative party or an odd protest movement that has separated itself from normal governance.”
What this lunatic fringe is threatening 311 million Americans with is the inability of the U.S., come the Aug. 2 deadline for raising the debt ceiling, to pay roughly half its bills. In one of several scenarios, all grisly, the U.S. stops funding the military, education, air-traffic control, NASA, the federal workforce, the food-stamp program, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Economists agree America would be plunged back into recession, with 44 per cent of the feds’ $3.4-trillion budget cut. What they don’t agree on, since nothing like this has ever happened, is the impact on businesses with government contracts.
They likely would clog the courts with breach-of-contract lawsuits while hoarding cash, laying off employees and stiffing their own suppliers.
“It’ll be 1931 all over again,” bemoans stalwart conservative David Frum. In Canada, a U.S. that can’t pay its bills will play havoc with federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s schedule to restore Canada to budgetary surplus.
The collateral damage will be worse in Europe, where Germany — an export-driven economy like Canada — would likely find it impossible to continue its leading role in bailing out the crippled economies of southern Europe.
To be clear, this isn’t about economics.
It’s about denying the legitimacy of a U.S. president who won election with an overwhelming mandate in 2008, just as the GOP never accepted Bill Clinton’s presidency. “As long as this president is in the Oval Office, a real solution is unattainable,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, said Tuesday.
Ronald Reagan could impose one of the biggest tax increases in U.S. history. But even a dime of “revenue enhancement” by the Obama administration will trigger more misery for the U.S. middle class and the poor with a default that wrecks an already weak economy. All in order to drive Obama out of office next year.
That’s what Brooks means by moral decency. If nothing else, this fiasco is at least revealing the current GOP for what it is — a thuggish gang of nation-wreckers, and a menace to America’s trading partners.
_______________________________________________________________
Yes Obama is not one of us and must be driven from office at any cost inluding tanking the country while social conservatives give the public petty moral drivel with marriage pledges and other hypocracies.
Yokels indeed.
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1024595--olive-america-s-tyranny-of-yokels
On Tuesday, the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress narrowly failed to ban a phase-out of incandescent light bulbs — a provision of a 2007 bill signed by then-president George W. Bush — with energy-efficient replacements that would save the average American household $85 a year on power bills and eliminate the need for 30 large power plants.
An extremist libertarian GOP that has taken charge of the U.S. House of Representatives sees that measure as a threat to individual liberty, though the purchase of the new bulbs is voluntary. As I’ve written more than once in this space, a world of finite energy sources and the slow development of alternatives makes conservation the one sure way of maintaining energy security.
A thousand credentialed experts would agree. But our American friends are in the clutches of a tyranny of yokels. Emboldened by gutting environmental protection laws and post-Great Recession reforms to Wall Street, they now are pushing their 235-year-old republic as close to anarchy as they can manage by threatening to vote against raising America’s debt ceiling.
Until now, the debt ceiling adjustment has been a routine, non-partisan event. The extremists — controlling just one-half of one of the three branches of the U.S. government — have seized upon it to humble America with deadbeat status if its ideological agenda isn’t adopted.
An agreement on raising the U.S. debt ceiling must be reached next week to provide enough time to pass the necessary legislation. As I write this, the chances of that happening are bleak. U.S. President Obama has accommodated the extremists with massive spending cuts. But the insurgents demand that he also accede to maintaining the fiscally ruinous Bush tax cuts skewed to the rich of the early 2000s.
That is an idiotic “ask.” Any shopkeeper or household pushed to the wall strives to cut costs and increase income, not one or the other. The loony fringe in Congress insists that the U.S. government — which has 80 million bills to pay each month and is the world’s largest buyer of goods and services — starve itself at a time when taxes are a smaller portion of the economy than at any time in 40 years.
Watching the Tea Party-influenced cohort that took control of the House last November — and now holds the entire GOP hostage — hurtling the U.S. toward the brink has induced apoplexy among even the GOP’s allies.
The libertarian extremists who’ve gained control of the GOP, says conservative pundit David Brooks, “have no sense of moral decency.” In the days to come, we’ll learn if the GOP is “a normal conservative party or an odd protest movement that has separated itself from normal governance.”
What this lunatic fringe is threatening 311 million Americans with is the inability of the U.S., come the Aug. 2 deadline for raising the debt ceiling, to pay roughly half its bills. In one of several scenarios, all grisly, the U.S. stops funding the military, education, air-traffic control, NASA, the federal workforce, the food-stamp program, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Economists agree America would be plunged back into recession, with 44 per cent of the feds’ $3.4-trillion budget cut. What they don’t agree on, since nothing like this has ever happened, is the impact on businesses with government contracts.
They likely would clog the courts with breach-of-contract lawsuits while hoarding cash, laying off employees and stiffing their own suppliers.
“It’ll be 1931 all over again,” bemoans stalwart conservative David Frum. In Canada, a U.S. that can’t pay its bills will play havoc with federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s schedule to restore Canada to budgetary surplus.
The collateral damage will be worse in Europe, where Germany — an export-driven economy like Canada — would likely find it impossible to continue its leading role in bailing out the crippled economies of southern Europe.
To be clear, this isn’t about economics.
It’s about denying the legitimacy of a U.S. president who won election with an overwhelming mandate in 2008, just as the GOP never accepted Bill Clinton’s presidency. “As long as this president is in the Oval Office, a real solution is unattainable,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, said Tuesday.
Ronald Reagan could impose one of the biggest tax increases in U.S. history. But even a dime of “revenue enhancement” by the Obama administration will trigger more misery for the U.S. middle class and the poor with a default that wrecks an already weak economy. All in order to drive Obama out of office next year.
That’s what Brooks means by moral decency. If nothing else, this fiasco is at least revealing the current GOP for what it is — a thuggish gang of nation-wreckers, and a menace to America’s trading partners.
_______________________________________________________________
Yes Obama is not one of us and must be driven from office at any cost inluding tanking the country while social conservatives give the public petty moral drivel with marriage pledges and other hypocracies.
Yokels indeed.
social conservatives use their fake petty personal morality and religion as a cover for their general moral despicableness 