US Capitol ©Bobt54

A new political paradigm is at hand like a rough beast slouching toward Washington

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LAS CRUCES, NM – The current political extremism in Washington, D.C., reminded me of Yeats’ poem The Second Coming, especially the lines “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”

Our founders could not have foreseen a time when a small group of right-wing diehards in the U.S. House of Representatives could shut down the government and threaten to damage the American economy because they lost the fight to wreck the hard-fought Affordable Care Act. They started this skirmish under the Capitol dome to kill the health-care law after more that 40 previous failed attempts to damage the law, which was enacted by Congress, signed by the president and upheld by the Supreme Court.  They even ran against it in the last presidential election and lost. An eleventh hour vote accepting a short-term agreement ending the government shutdown and raising the debt ceiling finally passed both houses of Congress after a 16-day impasse, but the measure is only temporary. You might as well get used to this political trench warfare, because like zombies, the extremists never stay underground for long. They will continue lunging at Obamacare forever in the same way the right wing has never stopped attacking Social Security.

(David Smith-Soto/Borderzine.com)

Markets beware, the debt ceiling isn’t falling and neither are we

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(Another in a series of dearstudents columns by Borderzine executive editor David Smith-Soto)

Granted, the grocery store where I buy my nonfat Bulgarian yogurt is not your neighborhood Albertson’s, but I was surprised when I found my access to the two-ounce jar of sliced pimentos blocked by a little old lady who had cornered the store manager with her concerns over the downgrading of the credit rating of the United States of America. The diced pimentos were reachable, but I was ordered to buy sliced pimentos and my own rating would be severely downgraded if I came home with those tantalizingly reachable diced ones. “It’s those Tea Party people,” she informed the manager, “They’re responsible for the divided government that landed us in this mess.” Well, she could have been quoting Standard and Poor’s, the bond-rating agency that had just kicked Uncle Sam down one notch from AAA to AA+, for the first time in recorded history. “Our nest egg…”