Sputnik Should Be Here — but Where Is the Enemy?

Obama has to restructure the USA without the help of symbols.

Today it’s happening again. Using its budget as a measuring stick, the USA. is bankrupt. The self-imposed debt limit of 14.3 trillion dollars is reached. Despite the situation, the United States didn’t dare pass a budget that didn’t allow government loans to be issued or interest to be paid. It only avoided more debt.

That certainly won’t happen because the White House will just force Congress to raise the limit again. Until the situation reaches that point, Treasury Secretary Geithner will have to, as he calls it, “juggle” a bit. The moral damage and the scarred image remain though, not to mention the insecurity, too. If people aren’t afraid of the multitrillion-dollar sum, then the president’s latest rhetoric should be alarming. Obama went on TV — as publicly as possible — and went through a default scenario for the USA. In the process, he uttered the R-word. According to what he said, a further recession would be worse than the one that the citizens have just gotten over. [A plan for] a nightmare scenario is being drafted because even though the USA has found its way back to a path of growth, 10 percent of Americans are out of work, and that is in a market in which many people have two jobs, sometimes more, in order to have a little extra money after the bills. The wave of bankruptcies in the financial services industry has also continued, as well as the poor state of the American national finances.

On a related note, Obama has already talked once about a Sputnik moment. While he was talking about it, he asked the entire American public to come together as they did when the USSR seemed to be winning the space race. Obama’s problem: this time there’s a Sputnik, but no USSR. The long lines of unemployed people are indeed a sad sight, but only subtly threatening. The middle class, where the collaboration would have to start, is looking away just like the middle class in every other country is doing, hoping that this plan doesn’t wipe them out and thrust the blame for unemployment onto the unemployed. The middle class only wants two things: to have nothing taken away from them and not to be left with such an uncertain future. Ergo, there will be no Sputnik moment. So Obama will come out of his battle against American bankruptcy without symbols, and he’ll have to stand against the winds of opposition that will meet him.