Hmm, 11 posts in and we’re resorting to threadshitting? Confronted with the indisputable point that the GOP is resorting to criminal extortion, and the GOP apologists immediately reach for the false equivalency to change the subject. Do you have any idea how redundant that move is?
Anyway, going back to my comic book motif, the equivalency clearly fails. You’re bringing up an example along the lines of The Joker- a bad villain to be sure, but he kept his mayhem strictly limited to the municipal level i.e. Gotham City.
This shutdown business is on a whole other level. I think we need a new story to keep up with the times. Lex Luthor is, after all, a relic from another time.
–The Story of Dr. No and his minion, Demagog–
The Southern Avenger* was, at first, an ordinary coarse-mannered racist from Kentucky. One day he was casually strolling barefoot through his own excrement at an outdoor latrine deep in Kentucky when he was bitten by a radioactive ringworm, irradiated by regurgitated fracking fluid. In the moment he thought nothing of it, but as the day wore on he became increasingly ill, until by evening he was almost mad with fever. Being without health insurance and unable to afford a doctor’s visit, he holed up at home to ride the thing out, his only treatment being some leftover Paula Deen recipes.
The fever built and built, and the Southern Avenger went truly mad with sickness. For two full days and nights he sweated and hallucinated, but finally it broke. As the Southern Avenger regained his consciousness and his senses, it dawned on him that he was forever changed. He was endowed with extraordinary strength and stamina, and strange new powers. He was no longer his old self- he had been transformed into Demagog. Reflecting on the turn of events, he immediately adopted the slogan, “Toxic sludge is good for you!”
Beware Demagog’s Credulity Beam! His strangest and most awful new power was the ability to effortlessly persuade people to believe anything whatsoever, no matter how nonsensical, by applying his Credulity Beam. At first he did not realize what it was or how to control it, and within a day half the population of the South as well as significant numbers in the Midwest firmly believed that the Earth was 6000 years old. One night, after blacking out during a drinking binge, he left the Credulity Beam active, and by morning, doctors coast to coast were promoting routine infant circumcision without any medical justification whatsoever.
Demagog grew despondent. His initial excitement wore off as he realized he did not know what to do with his new power. But his transformation had not gone unnoticed. Super villain Dr. No, who had been systematically persuading House and Senate Republicans to his radical negatory philosophy via his keenly honed powers of mentalism, had noticed the changes wrought by this raw, new talent. He tracked down Demagog and sought to persuade him to join forces- they would be unstoppable! Demagog at first did not trust Dr. No and tried to use his Credulity Beam on him. However, Dr. No’s keenly honed powers of mentalism, along with his firmly rooted belief in his own bullshit, rendered him, with some effort, immune to its effects.
Demagog was impressed and grew to respect Dr. No’s experience and maturity. He accepted Dr. No’s tutelage and the offer to join forces. In time Dr. No would reveal his master plan: the biggest heist in human history, the plundering of the vaults protecting the wealth to pay the nation’s Social Security and Medicare benefits. It totaled in the trillions! Together, and with ample financial backing from GPS Crossroads, the crime duo set about implementing their dastardly scheme…
Allright, enough with the Ayn Rand-style narrative technique geared to appeal to the sensibilities of Fox-crazed Southern voters and their 8th grade education levels and their cartoonish conception of the issues. The kind of crime I’m getting at here has to do with the $1.73 trillion US corporations are idly sitting on. Accounting for inflation, all that cash is simply losing value. However, the world being what it is, losing value slowly to low inflation may be a better bet than taking the risk of bigger losses on risky investments. Only US treasuries are really a sure-thing, only the yield is currently so low that they are hardly worth the trouble.
Well, Government Shutdown to the rescue! Shutting down the government has already caused treasuries to rise. Riding this thing out until the US credit rating is further damaged, or until the country defaults altogether, is sure to further this trend. Keep in mind that every point increase in Treasury yield rates would cost taxpayers $150 billion per year. Going all the way to default is sure to jack up the rate significantly. If you have ~$2 trillion you don’t know what to do with, well suddenly there is a sure-thing investment that looks really attractive. You can effectively extract hundreds of billions of dollars every year from the American taxpayers and put it in your pocket! Eventually it can be paid for by gutting Social Security and Medicare, and it will all be worth it. Who cares if this is the opposite of solving the US’s “spending problem”, or if it balloons the deficit and the national debt, those perennial bugbears of the right. The beauty of it all is, while you rip off the whole country, those credulous, impenetrable, fucking stupid Southern voters will root you on the whole time since they are so credulous and easily led into voting against their own interests and for radical GOP candidates. I guess they think extortion and what amounts to colossal embezzlement is what Jesus would do, or something… maybe one of those vapid proles can attempt to articulate that line of thinking to us, though by now I seriously doubt it.
Now, that’s a racket :rolleyes:
*The Southern Avenger is a real guy, and Rand Paul’s former Social Media Advisor -Ed.
