B*llsh*t Debt Statistics

In a pub a couple of weeks ago I tried to explain a crazy fact about the UK's level of national debt to a friend. According to infamous leftie historian Niall Ferguson Britain's most worrying time of national debt wasn't now, or in the 70s, or even after either of the two world wars. The worst level of UK debt as a % of GDP was 200 years ago.


First Graph - what we normally see when the subject of debt is discussed in the media - note the scary graph starts at 2008 

Second Graph - those same figures - debt as a % of GDP shown historically before 2008

Third Graph, for US readers showing what your level of terrifying debt (default! default!)  looks like compared to the record of the UK. Note that AFTER that high peak of debt the UK became the sole world superpower. So much for national decline based on debt eh?

Unspoken Tea Party Deficit Solution : Repeal the Bush Tax Cuts

I think I now understand the Tea Party mindset. Or at least the mindset they claim to have.

I must have read hundreds of comments from Tea Party supporters this week all blaming Obama for the deficit and claiming he will only add to it (despite the fact he is paying it off)

"I don't care about the poltics or the government in power. Republicans and Democrats, they are all the same. Government needs to be shut down because it is out of control. Sensible spending is all that matters at this point"
You know, I can see some of that. The deficit is a national security issue and there are parts of the US government that seem to think buying even more tanks the US Army does not need
is somehow sensible when the money to do that is being borrowed from the Chinese.

So I get spending is out of control and needs to be reigned in. Apparently dealing with the budget right now is so vital it is worth risking another credit downgrade*, and senior US politicians on both sides, Democrat and Republican are to blame and must be ignored to push through (more) tough cuts to the Federal government.

So, Tea Party people, if you are so in favour of fiscal responsibility, and so above petty distractions like conventional politics, where we you on the Bush tax cuts?

If you are so in favour of cutting the US budget, were you for the gigantic tax cuts for the super rich that took the Clinton era budget surplus and flushed it down the toilet? They alone are at least 20% of the US deficit!

It is an important question, because if you were in favour of the Republican's disastrous attempts at trickle down economics you are not as above conventional politics as you would have us all believe
- and your grasp of budgeting isn't entirely reliable.

*For those not in the know - the last credit limit crisis only ended when the elected US President (who had run on repealing the tax cuts) gave in and let the Tea Party have them.

Tea Party is now in effect Leader of the Free World

With the Tea Party Republicans now seeking to overturn the result of two democratic elections in the United States - by bringing the entire government to a halt - I for one welcome our new Tea Party overlords

Pic from

The Most Ridiculous Tea Party Protest Signs

See also 
Poll shows Americans prefer zombies and hemorrhoids to Congress

Republican Government Shut Down is a Tea Party Coup

American Republicanism thinks it's going out in a blaze of glory, actually it's American Democracy that's dying of cancer in a frozen car

If the American people vote against a set of policies clearly - twice - and they are implemented anyway because one part of government, backed by big business, threatens to bring the country and the world to its knees over not agreeing a budget, that is a effectively coup isn't it?

This is what is happening now in the United States government, where completely without precedent a minority are shutting down the government unless policies which have been voted down twice are put into effect.

Like Karl Marx was in the 20th Century, Ayn Rand is turning into the political suicide creed of the 21st.
As I voiced in an earlier post these shutdowns are not lack of agreement. They are actual policy, based on Randian fantasies of 'elites' shutting down the government. US Government shutdown is Atlas Shrugged made real, the world of the Producers shutting down the world of the Moochers coming to pass. The Producers in this case is not the musical, and Rand, in case you didn't know, died after living off government welfare under an assumed name.

If this seems a little sinister and unlikely consider a right wing talking point you increasingly see across the net
"America is Not a Democracy — It's Something Even Better"
and
We are not a Democracy; We are a "Republic"

Apparently, for those who haven't had the benefit of an education system that often features highlights like Creationism, a 'Jeffersonian' system of government, includes "putting checks on the power of the majority", and the power of the individual at the expense of actual "Democracy"

"And the values of republicanism, such as individual rights, civic virtue, and putting checks on the power of the majority, are ones that we desperately need to rediscover."
http://www.policymic.com/articles/52373/july-4-2013-america-is-not-a-democracy-it-s-something-even-better
just one of many examples out there

Here we have the semantic problem with the heart of modern right wing politics.Supporting a system which increasingly benefits only the top 1%, 'Democracy' is obviously not going to work. Instead we have a new improved concept which trumps Democracy - "Republicanism"

Republicanism now is really about "putting checks on the power of the majority"? Anyone who has studied European history from the 20th Century will recognise that kind of language immediately.
Need some elites to point the ignorant peasants in the right direction?
We used to call it Fascism, Communism and Nazism.

The shut down is a minor issue, at least for the rest of the world. It's happened before. What is new the possibility of a default on the extension of US budget ceiling on the 17th October. That is the World Reserve Currency suddenly deciding that it can't pay its bills. An really that is is deciding, not it actually happening. The current US government has haved the deficit already.

Just to indicate where the American media sits on this issue - this deficit, the centre of the debate, was left by the last Republican president. The last Republican President to balance the US budget was Eisenhower in the 1950s.

And yet the US media lets the Republicans of today call into the question the faith and credit of the US economy under Democractic leadership (there were no similar budget deficit issues when Bush Jnr was entering two wars and cutting taxes at the same time). Republicans have already engineered a loss of credit rating in the US Economy, during Obama's government, based on a deficit they supported and voted for themselves when in power.

If the US media seems quite complicit in this, how are are the other side? We have reached this insane negotiating point because the Democrats have already caved in on negotiations against similar tactics, most recently on the Sequester.

Yeah. The Sequester was a Democratic negotiating tactic intended to keep government going last time, which ironically had the effect of gutting US government funding in exactly the way the Republicans ultimately intended. Strange how Democratic negotiation tactics nearly always result in huge cuts to US government whatever the result.

We could ask where would we be if the Republicans had blocked funding for FDR's New Deal during the great Depression but going partisan undermines the seriousness of this issue. We have gone beyond into an actual challenge to a running government which has been democratically elected twice.

On the surface this an attempt to stop Obama taking credit for Republican heal care program. (Needless to say the Democrats couldn't implement the Single Payer health care reform their supporters wanted so they went with a Republican program first introduced by Mitt Romney in New Hampshire)

But in reality, quite aside from political considerations of right and left, the functioning of the world largest democracy is in real danger of buckling under pressure from a corporate interest group. We might actually be looking at the corporate take-over in action.

The world won't end by the time this budget crisis is over - but it will be a different one. There are three outcomes:

• The Republicans cave in - all out war breaks out on the US right, Tea Party is formed as an actual political party (some networks have been treating it as such for some time). Frustrated by the inability to keep "the majority in check" in their "Republican" not "Democratic" system, a lot of very powerful entities (the Koch brothers among others) start looking for other remedies. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.".. is another Jeffersonian favourite. 

• If Obama caves in - again - the power of the US President is fatally undermined going forward, and this tactic of using deadline budget negotiations is used from now on to make the United States  ungovernable. Successful Military coup within the decade? (see below*) 

• Neither gives in, the US defaults on its debt we have (at least) a different world reserve currency and (at the very least) some high interest rates. 

​​​Consider Walter White sitting in the frozen car contemplating his end in the finale of Breaking Bad. The end may be coming - perhaps it is here - and the US electorate and media need to stop dreaming and be aware of what is really happening.

*Rick Joyner, Televangelist And Pastor, Wants A Military Takeover Of The U.S. Government

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/02/televangelist-military-takeover-rick-joyner_n_4030522.html

STARVE THE BEAST; Ayn Rand for Europeans

The US credit downgrade was no accident. To understand why the American Right brought the world to the brink of financial collapse by threatening to veto the US budget extension you need to know what their real intentions are, ("the most pernicious fiscal doctrine in history”) and why they they think corporate anarchy should replace elected government.


“This is a manufactured crisis”
Too true. Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann was quite right. The trigger for the U.S. debt rating downgrade, and the disaster we stared at from the largest economy on Earth defaulting, was an entirely self-inflicted wound. But Mrs Bachman’s statement was not just stating the obvious. She was trying to convince the American voter that a budget default could only be good for the U.S. Why would a serving U.S congresswomen and Presidential candidate suggest that?

To understand this you should be aware of political strategy of the far right called Starve The Beast
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast>

To quote the Wikipedia link above, 

"*Starving the beast*" is a fiscal-political strategy of some American conservatives to cut taxes, depriving the government of revenue that enables spending on social programs …in an effort to create a fiscal budget crisis that would then force the federal government to reduce spending.”

Economist Paul Krugman: "Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts,
Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate
intention of worsening the government’s fiscal position. Spending cuts could
then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate
an unsustainable budget deficit."

Sarah Palin is hardly even coy about this  “[Congress], starve the beast,
don't perpetuate the problem, don't fund the largesse, we need to cut
taxes."

If you are anything like me (a naive idealistic European), you will be astounded at the cynicism of this. We might be aware of the naked political cynicism of Soviet Communism or Nazism but the perpetrators in those cases were brutalised gangsters or embittered World War 1 veterans. Not Christians. And many of the American far right claim to be exactly that. What defines the conscience of a devout Christian who is prepared to inflict widespread economic misery across his own nation for political gain?

George Monbiot thinks they are hypnotised by Fox news. It is much deeper than that. To accept what comes from Fox, and to perpetrate what is political cynicism of the highest order, you need to have already accepted a whole new morality based on 'freedom' as 'the law of the jungle'.

Adherents to this new freedom are people living in a moral mirror universe, role-playing that beard heavy episode of Star Trek without any hint of irony. They can bring the world to its knees over a budget crisis but will not pay any tax themselves. They can cry foul at the excesses of Greeks and then perpetuate endemic tax evasion through their own political system (40% of the U.S. budget deficit is Bush tax cuts for the top 1% of Americans. It is growing all the time and fiscal suicide.)

Once labelled a grass roots organisation, in reality, the Tea Party is as much a grass roots movement as the tobacco industry and the Oil Lobby. It has now been revealed a Republican front organisation, each political alter ego of the other. Sharp dressed responsible businessman by day, white hooded pyromaniac by night. If ‘psychopath’ sounds harsh consider the definition “ characterized by a tendency to commit antisocial and sometimes violent acts and a failure to feel guilt for such acts”. And then apply it to recent political acts by the U.S. Republican party.

Those doubters who are unaware of the depths of Republican thinking might
need to read the around The Southern Strategy<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy>, for 40 years dismissed as left wing conspiracy theory, now accepted as truth.

‘The Tea Party’ is a dumbed down political off shoot of Republican Supply Side economics (and ultimately Starve the Beast) in the same way that Nazism was an off shoot of Eugenics. Supply Side (or Trickle down) economics, has all the real world practical advantage for the overall economy and the average person as the English National Opera. Even No.1 Ayn Rand fan Alan Greenspan should be thankful that devotees like Reagan, Thatcher and their heirs were too corrupt or incompetent to completely usher in the ‘share owning democracy’, as the stock market cataclysms since 2008 would have left the world population actually destitute instead of theoretically destitute.

And the less said about their business/service industry vs. manufacturing policy the better. How many times have you watched that Knight of the Chipping Norton Set, Jeremy Clarkson opine about the lack of British industry without bothering with the slightest mention of where it went to? In retrospect destroying our own manufacturing base looks uncomfortably similar to the self destruct button being pushed on our economies.

The ideas behind all this, and their moral base, have become all the more pervasive since the 1980s. The political and economic ideas which were once just ruthless self-interested greed among the haves have become a mean meme running the through the meanest of the have-nots as well.

Starve The Beast, has been a virus handed out in blankets in the corporate breaks between the commercial breaks on Fox News. But economics alone does not climb into peoples hearts and make them this mean.

For that, you need ideas powerful enough to subvert the basic human behaviour (call it Christian morality if you like) given at all, to allow normal people to coexist happily in society without resorting to shooting sprees. To make the morality of the Tea Party Republicanism and policies such as Starve the Beast and the Southern Strategy make any kind of sense you need to understand their cult hero, Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand is to these people what Wagner was to the Nazis. She would be its heart and soul if they actually still possessed anything in that cavity except for blackened lemons full of spite and negativity. (How do such creatures pro-create? They stare into each other’s eyes and marvel at their mutual self-interest?). Readers in the U.K. may well be unaware of Ayn Rand, a Russian Kulak émigré from Stalin to Hollywood whose two cult novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, defined her philosphy of extreme selfishness, Objectivism.

Atlas Shrugged is the most nakedly political of the two, a science fiction parable in which the talented elite (say, the Chipping Norton Set) "down tools" to re-take the world from the shiftless parasites (you and me).

The real meat though, a brilliant piece of moral subversion, is The Fountainhead. On the surface a Dallas-like saga of feuding architects determined to bring modernism (Art Deco) to the skyline of New York, it is thrillingly bad in four dimensions, like reading a novel written by a J.G. Ballard character, or putting on a great suit once own by Oswald Mosley. It is a novel so intoxicated with its own personal integrity it seems unaware it is flirting with extreme politics like Eva Braun after a bottle of Black Tower.

The Fountainhead is full of fetishistic moral inversion and dark obsessions that have been running through U.S. society for decades. The hero, an almost farcically principled artist, martyrs himself by blowing up a building he doesn't like. He counts among his friends a tabloid press baron, a young protégé convicted of attempted assassination, a love interest that seems to invite consensual rape shortly after they meet, and most chilling of all, the villain, Toohey, a cartoon Liberal manipulator, who uses morals and charity as a tool only to place others in his debt and advance himself.

Toohey is a Bond villain whose tool for world domination, his orbital space laser, is a social conscience.

If I described a flashback from The Fountainhead in which Toohey thwarts and exposes the school bully just to advance himself, and the sympathy of the writer is most definitely with the bully, you would struggle to believe me, but it is there. As seen by Rand the school bully is a free spirit, oblivious to the constraints around him. (Chapter VIII)


Rand is not only a cult hero to the Tea Party Republicans she is the idol of the economists that have shaped our world since the 1980s, and is now regularly featured in U.S. schools forced to ‘balance’ the liberal leanings of their other literature. The fact that Rand ended her days living off the state under an assumed name has been quietly forgotten. Vice Presidential nominee and new face of the Republican Party, Paul Ryan, is in record as being a disciple of Rand. “There is no better place to find the moral case for capitalism and individualism," Ryan told The Atlas Society in 2005, "than through Ayn Rand’s writings and works."

Rand has ushered in a mirror moral universe, where the' freedom' of press Barons in the Chipping Norton set to run tabloid surveillance amounts to a corporate totalitarian state for the rest of us. Here is a headline from the tabloid newspaper in The Fountainhead. Compare with the level of press morality seen by some of Fox News’s paper stablemates at News International.

 *“Hell is said to be paved with good intentions” said The Banner “Could it be we’ve never learnt to distinguish what constitutes the good? Is it not time to learn? Never have there been so many good intentions proclaimed in the world. And look at it”* (from XIII)

Ayn Rand herself was fiercely anti-religious, a fact conveniently forgotten by most of her followers, who seem unaware that her message of extreme self is not unlike that of a near contemporary.

"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law".

That the political and economic message of the Tea Party seems closer to the ideas of Aleister Crowley than anything in the Bible has to be an irony that will keep amused whatever replaces us on the surface of this planet. Perhaps the human race is lucky to have got this far. With Tea Party levels of social co-operative behaviour 50,000 years ago the human race would never have made it out of the caves, in fact we would probably have sold each other out
to the Neanderthals.

With the Tea Party, the Republicans and the Party Whose Job It Is To Fail (the Democrats) pushing the U.S. face first into an extreme experiment with gangster economics and plutocracy, it all seems very dark. There is only one horrible blood red light on the horizon. What was that quote about capitalism and rope?

"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."

Are we sure Lenin never worked as a Republican strategist?