US in crisis: a continuing lack of resolution.
Another year, another approach of the Ides of March, and so another Congressional CR threat to another US President is coming down the road. It's the annual "sign off on our budgets or face Shutdown" melodrama.
For the benefit of non-Americans like me, a continuing resolution, or CR, is a temporary measure Congress can use to fund the government for a limited time. CRs are typically used to buy time for lawmakers to enact longer-term spending measures....but in reality, it's a power-squabble between the Hill and the White House - and often a way to block a radical President from cancelling the plans of his predecessor.
All in all, CR is a symptom of the US State's incorrigible tendency to live way, way beyond its means. To give this madness further perspective, the Dollars required to service the US Sovereign debt add up to more than the defence budget: $870 billion on defending America, versus a debt interest cost that's well over a trillion bucks.
The latest post from T.L. Davis nails the issue extremely well - asserting quite rightly that Republican congressmen keen to defend their own largesse are demanding sign off of....
"....the Biden budget, filled with the Green New Deal and Inflation Reduction Act pork, misspending, fraud and waste. They’re changing literally nothing in the future budget. Despite the fact that they have already passed numerous budget appropriation bills, they are not attending to the rest of them and the Senate has done nothing to pass the ones sent to them by the House.....This is Washington DC and it has waged war on the working class of America. We have been warning that simply electing Trump and setting DOGE loose would not solve the problems of this great nation, but we’re about to enter into a very dangerous period without the funds to appropriately attack the problem....These are existential things going on right now, national security issues that congress is willing to risk in order to keep from doing the hard things. By “hard things” I simply mean going about the appropriations process in a way obligated by the rules of the House itself. They haven’t done so for generations, because within those appropriations is where all of the demons live; where the waste comes from; where the fraud is initiated and none of them want to see it. Like children, they hide their eyes from discomfort, squeal and howl with resistance against change, but this nation was never in more dire need of change, change we voted for and change we support. Still, they stand around with their hands in their pockets and shrug. It’s a form of treason."
I got a lot of heat earlier this week for warning about actions that sideline the Congress, but Slog comment threaders rightly point out why Musk-DOGE-Trump measures are inclined to do that: because the lawmakers prefer a feather bed to hard reality....and many of them, following last November's election, are, of course, GOP members. You couldn't make it up.
Equally however, I still averr that two wrongs don't make a right: potential constitutional vandalism in the White House and dubious blackmail in the legislature is not a good look. Whichever way one looks at it, the patriotic, anti illegal migration pay-check America constituency wanting better healthcare extends far beyond MAGA - and remains much bigger than the electorate that favours leftist BLM LGBTQ PC ideological piffle.
Yes, the US remains an existentially divided nation using increasingly dysfunctional legislative procedures.
What does all this mean for Main St America and the rest of us? As all those cheating themselves into extra-marital hanky-panky are wont to observe, "It's complicated".
What the Founding Fathers wanted was a balance of power between legislators and Presidents. What the People are getting today is an infantile pillow-fight between two elites engaged in a power struggle....plus a faceful of feathers. Yet another classic case of the politics of control coming first every time, and the needs of the citizenry coming last: this isn't what they voted for.
So let's get real: the bottom line is very clear - the US must adopt a consistent directional change away from incontinent spending and ideological waste, and towards one of recognising a changing role for itself in the world. As TDL points out: 'There must be peace in Ukraine, whatever that turns out to be, because we must be on somewhat of a friendly reset with Russia'
What many detect in the thinking of President Trump, however, is that there is no way that yet more powerful institutions - the Pentagon, NATO, the CIA, the Warrenites and the DoD - are going to play ball, and so the solution "will have to be" changes in the way UK relations with the rest of the world are "rebalanced" in America's favour.
Hence Vance's attacks of late on Europe's need to step up to the plate and accept more defence costs. Hence, in turn, the Trumpenomic emphasis on raising tariffs on imports to the USA.
To my mind, Euro-defence bashing and Euro-export sabotage are both devious and dangerous. The Vance line [part of building his own power bid for '28] angers Europeans who say, "You want to screw Russia using Ukraine as a cypher, and now you want us all to pay up for yet another mess created by US Imperialism". Similarly, punishing exporters beyond the States because American politicians suffer from double fiscal incontinence will play very badly from Beijing to Barcelona via Canberra and Casablanca. Rather than being a return to isolationism, the US is going to wind up isolated: friendless and therefore vulnerable.
As for the US constituencies that gave The Donald a second shot at MAGA, they too will suffer rising beer, pastry, clothing and automobile costs; while pipeline technology retaliation from China will make waves in Silicon Valley, and interfere with the ever-present cellphone user addiction to instant comms.
All of which will produce stuttering economies - and thus hand another rationale for digitalised central currencies via which we, the depositors and savers, will pay bigtime for past lunacies in the central banking system. Reset will be accelerated To Save the World.
Lurking in the shadows beyond distractive event chains will be the real problem Homo sapiens must face: the only way to avoid destroying ourselves via bio, weather, financial and nuclear weapons is to accept that Unipolar Planetary Hegemony is no longer possible for any superpower or major bloc.
More than any other axis on Earth, the USA needs to accept multipolar co-existence. This is the challenge to come for its political class, and the secret surveillance State still clinging on to hidden power via its fingernails.
In the meantime, those who can must de-bank in favour of income-producing assets. The goal as ever is to survive and evade wipe-out, not profit from the misfortune of others. The lyric below sums up my continuing longer term optimism:
All you rich men whose souls have been infected
by the money-power disease
that lays you low and spreads the sleaze:
You are few but we are many -
we are the ninety-six per cent, Homo sapiens Heaven-sent
