A Failure To Communicate

”What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

There’s still no deal on the debt ceiling, so at least at this minute Grandma doesn’t have to write monthly checks to the Koch Brothers, and cat food futures are holding steady. That’s good. That’s stability. The breaking news shortly will be that Tweedle Dum has struck a big f*cking debt ceiling deal with Tweedle Dee. Rejoice! Or maybe it will be that Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen have struck a big f*cking debt ceiling deal. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to determine which one is the dummy. Or is the real dummy watching? Nevermind. Let there be scripted rejoicing and sighs of relief. Let business return to the usual.

If I had written my opinion about economics and the debt ceiling in particular on the back of a $15,000 check, no doubt my Congressperson would have asked me my views. But I didn’t. And he didn’t. I wrote it on a blog and in an email. He replied with an auto response. And so I suspect that about 216 people in the House of Representatives, none of whom passed Economics 101 or has the slightest clue about macroeconomics, are about the make a deal without input from me. They are poorer for that, though they don't recognize it.

The upcoming deal will be the culmination of Republican strategies modeled after old James Cagney movies, “If you don’t turn over the money, the kid (or kitten or puppy or baby) gets it.” Only now it’s “If you don’t pass the cuts for the debt ceiling (or you try to restore taxes on the richest people), we kill Grandma and the economy gets it, too. Got that Shorty?” Very nice people. Shortly, the economy will turn up DOA at a breadline near you. When asked what killed it, the Trad Media will tell us with a straight face that the US never came to grips with excessive spending. They will play lugubrious music. I will laugh at this till I cry. Others will just cry out loud.

Satyagraha won’t work. I could stand on my head and hold my breath until I turned blue, but it wouldn’t stop the Congress from doing something idiotic with the debt ceiling. I could go on a hunger strike to try to stop the impending deal, but I suspect that the Republicans are going to put lots and lots of us on a fast with this deal, so they won’t care. They won’t mind if I get a head start. I could write another blog entry detailing my outrage. Do I have to?

You will forgive me if I change the channel and don’t watch the inevitable ending of this on TV. You will forgive me, also, if I don’t turn on NPR for a while. I’m thinking I’m about to be run over by an oncoming bus. The bus schedule is a little indefinite so far, but it will definitely arrive before Tuesday evening. After I am under the bus, I will attempt (yet again) to regroup. But I have to say, I’m really tired of looking up only to see the bottom on the bus as it passes overme I've been doing this since January, 2009. Repeatedly. This time, I fear, is also going to be déjà vu all over again.