The Debt Ceiling and Nostradamus

 

“Don’t call my bluff!” warned the President of the United States recently, staring down Congressman Eric Cantor, the House Republican leadership’s Faustian choice, the new chief negotiator pitted in an ideological game of chicken with the future of the US and global economy.

Obama is in a standoff with Cantor and at the time of this writing, they have only 18 days left. By 2 August, time runs on out lifting the US debt ceiling. As most of you may well know by now, if that ceiling is not lifted the US will not be able to pay its swelling debts. US credit standing would crumble. You could feel this immediately from military outposts in Afghanistan to retired elderly members of your family not receiving their combat pay or social security checks. You will feel it whether living in or outside the US in a return of the Great Recession. This time doing its worst with unemployment rising well past 10.5 percent in the US, BS official government tally, even though the current 9.2 percent unemployment is euphemism in math. The real number is many more millions. They are not counted on the monthly dole report because their unemployment checks already ran out. Employment options that do not exist have many staying home not seeking it. Therefore, the real unemployment number is currently 16 percent. Bungle the debt ceiling heavy lift and watch that number after August climb near 20 percent.

The Speaker of the House, John Boehner, has all but surrendered his position as negotiator-in-chief to the second in command Cantor. The latter is singing the fire breathing right wing revolution as head of the Tea Party Caucus, which now speaks for the entire GOP in this debt ceiling debate face to face with Obama and Democrat leaders at the White House.

Revolutions, be they extreme left or right wing, breed economic ideologues. These men and women put their faith in ideas that do not have grounding in reality. These insouciant social engineers, in their minds, line up nagging details against the firing squad wall of their dogmas — unyielding barriers insulating them from the desperate call of fact over their socialist of fascist fictions.

Shoot the details in detail. Move ahead and over all who might prevent Bolshevik collectivization of industry and farming, the Nazis employing the German economic miracle based on armaments for fighting a catastrophic world war, Reaganomics trickling down profits like piss on the poor and middle classes whilst building capitalistic growth based on increasing the national debt. Deficit wealth creation is a concept that every president since has bested in their Clintonian bubbles or Bush busted economic experiments until the national debt has reached its 14 trillion and counting economic bomb caliber. The fuse is burning, running out of time for a payoff put out.

Great leaps forward like those of Chinese Commie Papa ooh-mao Mao and Deng Zhou Ping are leaps of faith, no less irrational and prone to potential disasters happily denied than what made The Fool in the tarot card, eyes bright set skyward with dewy idealism, take a step off the cliff, money bag tied to stick and all.

So here we have President Obama a few days ago in the White House meeting room, glowering with black, fiery eyes at Mad Hatter number one of the Congressional Tea Party caucus. This cantering Fool for revolutionary ideology ever eager to step off a cliff to embrace his anti-spending anti-taxing econ-idiotic New Age. Cantor demanded of Obama one too many times uncompromising words that to the effect said, “My way or the highway!” as his definition of “negotiation” and “compromise.”

You cannot reason with a zealous Revolutionary. You are expected to thrust out your arm, commie right angled or Nazi straight armed to reap their revolution’s whirlwind without the defeatism of reason.

Mao Zedong and Erick Cantor are of like mind, thought polar opposites as economic revolutionaries. Mao in the early 1960s could blithely believe he could match US steel output by taking his farmers off the fields and into their backyards manufacturing mud and brick smelters baking ingots of iron. Cantor and his ilk believe balancing the budget can be accomplished by drastic cuts alone mostly to social and medical programs without the need to generate new tax revenue sources.

The crops left untended by Chinese farmers cooking slag in crumbling ovens lead to a famine that carried off 20 million Chinese citizens.

Holding the debt ceiling where it is while making drastic cuts to government spending, with all the pain directed to the hollowing out US middle class, and no revenue increases, is just another ingot of Mao madness in mathematics.

You can’t eat steel.

You can’t balance a budget without raising taxes.

There, I have said it and before you rush with praying mantis claws to pounce upon keyboard to poke out a missive in the comments box below, reflect on this. I am a former Republican and ever a fiscal conservative who has not yet drank the Barbara Bachman Kool-Aid that faith over fact makes right. I still rely on rational mathematics when balancing “my” budget.

Heck, even Ronald Reagan raised taxes to the economy’s gain. Even Reagan knew what every leader in history up to G.W. Bush knew: you cannot go to war without raising taxes. The same is true about getting out of deficits. Spending must be cut “and” you have to raise revenues, i.e., taxes. All the tea in your party cannot change that, as the future will reveal sooner — or catastrophically — later.

But hey, in this political era or the irrational, of course you can start wars while cutting revenue, all you need to do is ignore the consequences all around you and keep believing your college BS BA made you a true capitalist. After Reagan came President Bonzo who monkeyed around with fundamental economic realities, cut taxes while going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, passed medication price reforms without paying for them either and drove the economy into the deep Republican red debt of trillions of dollars.

Now it is political bedtime for Bonzo since 2008, yet my formerly Grand Old Party, the party that used to think and count, has sustained as their current Alzheimer mendacity a mindset from the last decade spouting in the name of Reagan things that would make Ronnie turn over in his shining tomb on the hill in sunny California.

Is Cantor promoting Reaganite? More like Bush-political kryptonite that has sapped the US Superman economy with its moonbeam rays of green-greedy and insane ideology.

No pain, no gain, you say?

I simply do not have to believe it. I will spend the first decade of the 21st century buying houses mindless of any mathematical fact that I cannot afford one. But hey, I am a believer who will not Eric re-Cantor our motto:

Blind to the coming pain! Cut taxes and spending. All will be gain.

Republican Party leadership, here comes Cantor and his Night on a Bald Mountain of economic incubi on which to succubae.

Possessed, you purchased this Walpurgis Night of impish ideas, daemon dancing, unmindful of the devil in the details of your Tea Party pact.

My oracle saw this coming long before the midterm elections as my blogs in 2010 record. Shortly after the election I published the following summary of things to come in a chapter entitled “Big GOPocalyptic Faustian Deal” for Predictions for 2011:

I predict that after 2011 the Republican leadership will privately consider themselves just as taken for a ride like Faustus: damned because they did and damned if they hadn’t surfed the Tea Party wave back into power in the House of Representatives. The Tea Party is not Republican. It’s a 3rd party in coalition. The GOP has less power than 16 years ago when Republicans by themselves took back both houses of Congress in 1994. The GOP leadership will keep their new House and Senate seats if they do the Tea Party’s bidding not the other way around…

Bipolar bipartisanship goes both ways. Right wing elements and fire breathers in the House will push on the “my way or the highwaymen” of the Left tenuously holding the Senate. The talking head butting will expose a rebooted Congress even less effective than the last in getting anything done.

Public exasperation will grow as time and energy is squandered in political “gotcha” theatrics…

So what happened? Boehner these days is speechless as the Tea Party leader does all the talking in Obama’s face. This Congress so far has been the most ineffectual in passing legislation than any in a half century. And the people are left with an all-time low opinion in the polls about them, in the low teens.

We are entering the second half of 2011 of which my oracle commented and published the following on 21 December 2010. This and much more it cautioned, cajoled and warned is ahead as deadlocked Democrats pitted against a GOP leadership on a Tea Party leash count down the days to the Debt Ceiling deadline on 2 August:

In the second half of 2011, at least one of the three parties in Congress — Democrats, Republicans or the Tea Party — must break the cycle of ideological coercion. Someone in this oncoming three-way deadlock of the people’s business must cease attacking the motivation of their opposites but debate the substance. The Fox and MSNBC cable news networks disrespect the essence of motivation when they editorialize the news from self-righteous ideological right or left-leaning points of view. In such a “gotcha” climate, people are dehumanized, turned into labels like “liberal” or “conservative” rather than having their motivations constructively criticized…

The Tea Party won half of Congress with a mandate of anger. People can’t contain anger for a sustained period. Anger may win your candidates a seat at the table but no Tea Party of mad hatter behavior can go on for two years…

What’s really brewing out there among the American people is an impatience for real leadership. Whether it’s Obama or someone else in 2012 is more up to Obama finding his Abraham Lincoln groove; otherwise, his future is all Jimmy Carter darkness.

Predictions for 2011
Chapter 3, Big GOPocalyptic Faustian Deal

My oracle understood from the beginning that the Tea Party is a Third Party that would use the establishment Republicans as a jumping board into power, then, behind closed doors, turn on the leadership, usurping their power.

Why else has the Speaker of the House become a deflated Boehner ala Demo-donkey dick-head, Anthony Wiener — politically speaking, that is. Boehner is reported to be sitting silently in meetings with Obama where the Tea Party’s chief Cantor does all the talking and singing the praises of spending cut of gain without tax revenue pain for those who can’t afford it.

It finally was too much. Even for a passive aggressive President Obama. He let lose a rare moment of “in-your-face” and as Cantor later related “extreme agitation.” Obama threatened Cantor and his Tea Partiers not to call his bluff and let the debt-ceiling deadline come and go on 2 August. Then the passive aggressive mask returned punctuated by Obama’s next move. He pushed back his leather chair and walked out on the meeting.

Did Jimmy Carter just leave the building?

On the other hand, are we about to see a turning point for the president who would be a karmic return of Abraham Lincoln in his third year in office?

Details of this can be read in a chapter entitled, The Second Coming of Change We Can Believe In, written for this year’s almanac of prophecies. In the meantime, let us again be reminded of where we all are going days, weeks or a few years after 2 August 2011 becomes the “21 December 2012″ for two sides playing Chicken Little doomsday that came and went.

I believe we will kick this can of debt worms down a road in time, bouncing and clanging through and beyond the year 2012 into 2013. But Nostradamus has something to say about what will happen to your can of bean-counted economy if prompt and painful action — including tax hikes for everybody folks — is not forthcoming. Soon.

There is nothing nebulous this time in Nostradamus’ words, if this is about the fate of the global economy:

Les simulachres d’or & argent enflez,
Qu’apres le rapt au lac furent gettez
Au descouuert estaincts tous & troublez.
Au marbre escripz prescript intergetez.

The imitations of gold and silver will become inflated,
Which after the rape are thrown into the fire,
After discovering all is exhausted and dissipated by the debt,
All scripts and bonds are wiped out.

Nostradamus, (c. 1558)
Century 8 Quatrain 28
Les Propheites

And if that wasn’t clear enough…

It’s a topsy-turvy world, and maybe the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans. But this is our hill. And these are our beans!

Frank Drebin (AKA Leslie Nielson)
Naked Gun

Drebin on the "QE2".

Frank wasn’t talking about Capitol Hill, but he could have been, because the girl pointing a gun at his big nose was hypnotized. Our legislators on the Hill are under the influence of their political programs, and they are playing with our beans.

http://www.hogueprophecy.com/2011/07/the-debt-ceiling-and-nostradamus/