Economic Crisis, the Tea Party and Obama

The change that Barack Obama’s weakness and the tea party’s obstinacy have brought about in the Capitol and in United States politics is so large that it has brought the country — and the rest of the global economy with it — to a level of unprecedented uncertainty. The debate has generated a sharp loss of global credibility in economic subjects, resulting in a categorical downgrade by risk calculators of the American debt from AAA to AA+. Additionally, a Chinese agency further devalued Uncle Sam’s credit and marked its debt as AA.

The analysts at Standard & Poor’s lowered the United States from the top rating; this is in addition to the problem of the debt’s being so much higher now due to rising interest. What a gift presented to their country and the world by 2012 presidential candidates Michelle Bachmann, Jim DeMint, the rest of the tea party and Barack Obama’s failings!

Friday’s announcement was not unexpected. Since April, the agency had been saying that there was a 50 percent possibility that the American debt rating would be lowered, a number that was exacerbated by the conflict during negotiations to reach agreement on the debt ceiling in Congress.

And though this downgrade is the first in the country’s history, S&P has further warned that there is a 33 percent chance of another lowering of the American debt rating. This, combined with the ongoing crisis in Italy and Spain, has sent world stock markets into disarray.

While many argue that the United States’ debt was over-evaluated and that the economic crisis in Spain and Italy is also contributing to the current global economic swing, the truth is that last week’s struggles in the White House and in the U.S. Congress between Democrats and Republicans went more than far enough in demonstrating that right-wing Republican members of the tea party have hijacked Congress — and the rest of the nation — with a gun to the head.

The big problem with the tea party is that they reject every proposal from Washington, no matter how sensible it may be. Even as Barack Obama warned that what was happening with the negotiations could result in a downgrade of the country’s debt rating, tea party members sent letters and emails screaming that nothing would pass, that Washington and Wall Street were still in bed together and that Obama would scare the entire world just as he did in 2008, when he presented Wall Street with 700 billion dollars at taxpayers’ expense.

Negotiations over the past two weeks to prevent Washington’s closure and a default on the debt demonstrate what we already knew: The filibusterers of the tea party have won. Even though in this country racism and wars have always generated internal divisions, in Congress and the White House matters have never been this complicated because politicians always reached an agreement for the good of the nation.

“In those days, there were real divisions in the country… The Anti-War Movement had taken a turn toward the irrational. Weathermen were blowing up college buildings on college campuses, but the political system worked. There were filibusters against the civil rights legislation, but they were defeated. The Democrats did not use the debt ceiling — and we had one at that point — to stop funding for the Vietnam War,” said Joe Klein, on NBC, commenting on what had happened with the tea party.

But this time it was not so. The tea party managed to force Obama and the Democrats to sign the debt ceiling bill without raising taxes for the rich, which, according to S&P, was the catalyst for their decision to downgrade the U.S. debt rating.

Perhaps the biggest and most important message that the United States debt downgrade from AAA to AA+ sends the planet is that risk calculators and economic organisms consider the White House and Congress incapable of resolving the problems of their domestic economy. This threatens not only Uncle Sam’s global leadership, but also the sheer survival of the middle class, faced with the possibility of a large decline due to both unemployment and tremendous service cuts in the near future.