Tea Party Destroying "Capitalism in One Country"

It's hard to see how the United States avoids default. Boehner's gambit to deflate Senate negotiations by offering up a House deal was successful for a day before the effort collapsed; once again, he couldn't line up the ultras in his caucus. The deal Boehner was trying to piece together would have taken the main components of the deal being hatched in the Senate -- paying for the operation of government through January 15; lifting the debt ceiling through February 7 -- and added Tea Party sweeteners in the form of forcing Congressional staff members to purchase Obamacare without subsidy and putting limits on what the Treasury Department can to to manage payments once the debt ceiling has been reached.

That Boehner could not garner Tea Party support for his debt-ceiling/government-shutdown deal makes it close to certain that anything that emerges from Senate negotiations today will not have Tea Party support in the House. So -- not to belabor a point made on this blog repeatedly the last two weeks -- it will be up to Boehner -- as he has done in the past with the fiscal cliff and storm relief -- to allow an up-or-down vote and to pass a bill with majority support from the Democrats.

Even if a way out of a financial meltdown is found at the eleventh hour, lasting damage has been done. Damien Cave has an interesting story today, "Viewing U.S. in Fear and Dismay," which is a collection of quotes, some by people on their way to work, from around the world:

“The U.S.’s exorbitant privilege” — of issuing the world’s most widely accepted currency — “allows it not to have a budget, to bump against debt limit with scant market reaction,” said Luis de la Calle, a Mexican economist. 

If Mexico and many other countries shut down their governments, stopped paying salaries and threatened to default, he added, the titans of global finance, as they have in the past, would make sure the consequences were swift and severe. “We have little choice but to be responsible,” Mr. de la Calle said.

What we're going through is the concentration of capitalism in one country -- this is a point that the Monthly Review has made in the past, sort of an upside down postmodern version of Stalin's "Socialism in One Country" -- combined with the reactionary, revanchist capture of one of the parties making up the duopoly.

The Tea Party was organized and financed by plutocrats fearing the progressive majority that elected Obama, twice; at the time that it was whipped into being by the captains of capital, back in the summer of 2009, I thought it revealed how desperate and out of touch conservative power brokers were. Now, as "Capitalism in One Country" starts to dissolve, the strategy of empowering the Tea Party has backfired. Clearly.