Will the Sky Fall With the Debt Ceiling?

Are these the final moments of our financial lives before the US plunges into default? The media certainly has whipped up a frenzy of emotion around the debt ceiling crisis. I am not an economist. When the economy fell over a cliff in 2008, I didn't believe it would affect me at all. I wasn't a Wall Street investor. I'd owned my home for nearly 20 years. But I was wrong on that one. It turned out that because I have a public sector job with a pension, I was not safe. Nobody is.

The irony is that most middle and working class folks have already lost so much that, emotionally, it's getting hard to rise to the bait of these trumped-up crises. It begs the question: How much worse can it get? Unfortunately, as someone who has traveled quite a bit in the third world, I know that answer and it isn't pretty. The upside is that people do set priorities differently when their lives aren't centered on money and things. When relationships assume greater importance than material objects, it's like seeing the whole forest instead of just your personal tree.

On the other hand, I don't want to romanticize poverty. Having shelter, food, clothing and access to decent medical care are concrete conditions whose importance can't be overstated. With or without the debt ceiling fiasco the powers that be are already reaching into our pockets and helping themselves. On a personal level, my medical co-pays have doubled in the past year. Transportation costs are skyrocketing. You can literally take a bus from one end of Costa Rica to the other for what it costs to get across the bay on BART.

To add insult to injury, Obama's alternative to stave off US default in the face of Republican intransigence involved raising the age that people can get medicare from 65 to 67. Those extra two years of health care denial would make the 3,000 plus people who died on September 11, 2001 seem like just a drop in the bucket. Homeless, throw-away people litter the streets of San Francisco. Will the sky fall if the debt ceiling is not raised?

The truth is it is already lying in pieces all around us.

Solidarity and New Attacks

Oakland Rally--April 4th 2011

Of course their was not much mainstream press coverage but some workers took to the streets yesterday, the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, to show solidarity with Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, states where workers rights are being butchered mercilessly. King who had arrived in Memphis in 1968 to support a strike of that city's sanitation workers. We must remember that a vast swath of states across the American South call themselves "right to work" states, Brave New World doublespeak that means the same as 'freedom is slavery," they are states where it is against the law to unionize.

Yes, we are up that proverbial creek full of fecal matter but we are beginning to fight back. And speaking of fecal matter, Dairyland Dictator Scott Walker is continuing to refuse to comply with judges orders and has said he will deduct a percentage of state worker's wages, in line with his illegal bill, on their April 21st paychecks. Holding fast to a his warped yet gilded memory of Ronald Reagan and the air traffic controllers, he is steadfastly refusing to acknowledge, even the not-so-just, justice system.

Paul Ryan

Meanwhile another meadow muffin, Republican, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (Scott Walker's evil twin), is going hog wild with his proposal to transform Medicaid and Medicare into a for profit, private voucher system with the unspoken goal of ending healthcare for a large chunk of middle and working class and poor folks. His sights are also set on doing away with Social Security and other last remnants of safety nets the non-wealthy rely on.

In other news, will the government shut down on Friday? Only time will tell...