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.

Wahhabis on the March

Reuters is reporting this morning a massacre of Shiites in the rebel-held Syrian town of Hatla:

A video posted online by rebels on Tuesday, entitled "The storming and cleansing of Hatla" showed dozens of gunmen carrying black Islamist flags celebrating and firing guns in the streets of a small town as smoke curled above several buildings.

Rick Gladstone has a story this morning, "U.S. Blacklists Fund-Raisers for Hezbollah," about the Treasury Department sanctioning four Hezbollah fundraisers who operate out of Africa:

The Treasury said that the four, identified as Ali Ibrahim al-Watfa, Abbas Loutfe Fawaz, Ali Ahmad Chehade and Hicham Nmer Khanafer, had “organized fund-raising efforts, recruited members, and in some cases styled themselves as ambassadors of Hezbollah’s Foreign Relations Department.” 

David S. Cohen, the Treasury under secretary in charge of administering sanctions, rejected Hezbollah’s depiction of itself as a resistance organization, noting that three of Europe’s biggest countries — Britain, Germany and France — now support an effort within the European Union to classify Hezbollah as a terrorist group. Such a change could hurt Hezbollah’s fund-raising in Europe.

The Gulf Cooperation Council, that league of Arab monarchies, also announced yesterday its intention to sanction Hezbollah.

Gladstone provides an economical summary of yesterday's civil war news:

On Tuesday, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported that rocket fire from Syria struck the Shiite border village of Hermel, in what appeared to be a rebel reprisal. In Syria’s capital, Damascus, two suicide bombers killed at least 14 people, which Syria’s state news agency, Sana, called a cowardly retaliation that illustrated “the bankruptcy of the armed terrorist groups and those who stand behind them.”

As Taliban suicide bombers rock Afghanistan, it's worth mentioning yet again that the West is working in concert to destabilize the Middle East with the same regressive Wahhabism that we have been purportedly locked in existential war since 9/11. Assad's characterization of the opposition as foreign-backed terrorists, scoffed at initially, is now impossible to deny.

And this is what Obama is going to wade into with heavy weapons? Madness.