Tuesday, July 12, 2011

The GOP collapses

McConnell Proposes Giving Obama Authority To Raise Debt Limit Alone. This will be retracted and denied and stuffed down the memory hole.

Doesn't matter though, the GOP has collapsed.

On the bright side, we will probably avoid the greatest failure of American governance since the Civil War. We may avoid turning the Lesser Depression into a Greater Depression.

On the dimmer side, the GOP will survive this. If they had forced the nation into default they might have done themselves in. We desperately need a somewhat sane party to oppose the worst tendencies of my team, we need a replacement for the GOP. Their retreat puts that day off.

Dimmer still, it appears I was right. Seven months ago I assumed that the GOP, in the end, would not risk the wrath of their corporate masters. They know the pre-demented boomers of the Tea Party will forget this affair within months, but corporate paymasters will not forgive economic ruin.

Like Jared Bernstein, I felt we were just now crossing over into panic time. I began to think emergent orporate entities were not as powerful as I'd imagined.

It seems they are.

2 comments:

Regina Chris said...

This GOP stumble or collapse is overall a good thing. However, I think that the real remaining challenge (in my opinion I believe that I am echoing many of your earlier comments) is to harness (in the short term) and perhaps ultimstely transform the ability of large corporations to generate positive social and ecological change. Remember that the current structure of corporations (whether in the US or abroad) does not represent a "free market". Corporations have real power!

Chris Pepin

JGF said...

I doubt we'll be able to "harness" the large corporations. We'll be lucky merely to keep them "in their place" and beat back some of their legislative control.

Large corporations, however, are an improvement over the Tea Party. One can do worse than have GM or even Exxon in power -- as terrible as that reality is.