US revolt may trigger global tsunami

Jay Kuten PHOTO/FILE

People sympathetic to the US have been looking to the current actions of the Republican Party with a mixture of fear and wonder. The fear is warranted as a small number of Republican ideologues in one chamber of the Congress have shut down the Government and are threatening to refuse to raise the debt ceiling - ensuring a failure to pay bills on debt Congress has already incurred - and thereby to knock the wheels off the global economic bus. The wonder is how could this be happening?

When George W. Bush actually won election in 2004, a British tabloid headlined "55 million idiots". I took it amiss that the Brits who still had their own problems in Tony Blair, would so demean my fellow citizens. I wrote an op-ed piece to try to explain to local readers how that many people might have voted for the man. I cited wedge issues like gay marriage, brought up by Bush as a means to peel away Catholic voters in the rust belt, and the poorly run campaign of John Kerry to help understand the fateful final outcome.

Among my conservative friends, I can't find any who will now admit to having voted for Bush.

The Republican Party - my party of old - suffered a severe devaluation in the currency of trust among voters as a result of the failures of the Bush years. You might think that a rational response by that party would be a move toward the centre and away from the imperialist jingoist unilateralism of Bush et al. That might be true of a conservative party acting from pragmatic motive. But not this one, which is acting instead from the script of Edgar Allen Poe's Dr Tarr and Professor Fether.

The plain fact is that they are not acting rationally. Genuine moderates and even old Bush hands like Karl Rove, famous for exploiting divisions to enable electoral victory, are describing these ideologues as insane and intent on driving the party to electoral suicide.

Of 435 members of the lower House, 232 - the majority in power - are Republicans. A group of about 40 have been demanding the already enacted health care law - Obamacare - which had been affirmed by the US Supreme Court, be defunded just as it was to go into effect on October 1, or they would refuse to sign legislation to continue Government past September 30. Moreover, they threatened to refuse to raise the debt ceiling by its due date - October 17 - unless an extensive list of demands were met. It happens that the health care act and the other demands were the issues on which Obama ran and won re-election in 2012. But these extremist Republicans, abetted by their not-quite-so-extremist leaders, are convinced that their recalcitrance will make Obama yield what 66 million American voters gave him in 2012, an endorsement of his programme, including the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Essentially, they believe they can overturn that election.

To anyone conversant with the US Constitution, these actions amount to insurrection and that's why even fellow Republicans think these 40 legislative anarchists are suffering under a delusion. Unfortunately, having crazy irresponsible people with their hands on an economic trigger may create a global tsunami that will reach even New Zealand. The full faith and credit of US debt is expressed in short term Treasury bills that are the very lifeblood of international monetary transactions. Default deprives the economies of monetary oxygen. Without oxygen the life of the economic system is unsustainable.

Will it happen? Experts are unsure and some compare this behaviour to the March of Folly that led the crowned heads of Europe to play soldier in 1914 with a loss of 17 million lives. No one who looks at that history can fail to be impressed with how arrogance, ignorance and misspent power can lead to disaster. The best current guess of a default is 50:50. Unless of course, some adults enter the room to keep calm and carry on.