Things Have Gotten Worse Than I Could Have Imagined
Each weeknight I watch the nightly news (CBS followed by PBS). Increasingly, I feel like I’m a masochist — a glutton for punishment. The nightly news has always contained lots of really bad news, i.e., wars, murders, and mayhem (I’ve lived through the murders of JFK, RFK, MLK, and 9/11), but lately, it’s become much worse. When I think the news can’t get any worse something happens the next night that is far worse and frequently never occurred before.
I’ve recently read Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman and my biggest takeaway is: how is possible that a significant percentage of American voters would still vote for Donald Trump if ran for President again? We’ve known for decades that Donald Trump is a deceptive, immoral human being who has almost no concern for truth, honor, or democratic values. He consistently cheats and tells half-truths.
Trump embellishes and is dishonest. Then along comes George Santos — a total fraud — who lied about his high school, his college, his faith, his CV, his job history, his mother’s death on 9/11, and his grandmother dying in the Holocaust. There is not a scintilla of truth to George Santos. Santos is even a bigger con man than Donald Trump.
Today’s Republican Party in the House, dominated as it is by a small group of MAGA Republicans, doesn’t want to just reduce the size of government — they want to literally destroy it. They have vowed to vote against increasing the federal debt limit (the U.S. has hit its borrowing limit of $31.4 trillion) unless President Biden agrees to deep spending cuts to government programs including Social Security and Medicare.
It is agreed by reputable forecasters and economists of all political and ideological persuasions that the consequences of the United States defaulting on its debt by failing to pay investors who expect interest and other payments would be catastrophic. The federal government would be immediately impaired from carrying out its basic function, including providing the financial assistance that tens of millions of Americans rely on (Social Security retirement benefits, medical coverage, and veteran disability payments). Further, the government’s ability to provide for the national defense, pandemic, and other emergency responses would also be affected.
A default caused by a failure to raise the debt ceiling would, in all likelihood, trigger a global financial crisis and an international recession as the rest of the world relies on a strong U.S. economy. The U.S. Treasury debt is the world’s benchmark safe asset. Suffice it to say, the effects of a default would be absolutely devastating.
In the past, “Breaching the debt ceiling has always been unthinkable,” said Edward Yardeni, a veteran independent Wall Street economist. “Now, I’m afraid we got to think about it.” The reason we have to think about it is that the House of Representatives is controlled by a small group of Republican nihilists desirous of sabotaging the good faith and credit of the United States to further their tyrannical goal of destroying our democratic institutions and creating chaos.
When I’m not hearing about the destructive actions of the MAGA Republicans — then I’m watching coverage of another mass shooting or another case of police brutality (using excess and unwarranted force against an individual or a group). Suffice it to say violence in all forms in America is rampant. A day doesn’t seem to go by in which there aren’t multiple homicides or a mass murder occurring somewhere in the United States (more than 40 in January). When you feel it couldn’t get any worse, we learn about a
6-year-old first-grader who shot his teacher leaving her in critical condition. While we still do not know all the details, i.e., how the youngster gained access to the gun or what his motivation was, the thought of a firstgrader carrying a 9 mm loaded handgun into a classroom is incomprehensible and really hard to wrap your head around.
Likewise, I still have a very hard time wrapping my head around what transpired on January 6, 2021, in our nation’s Capitol, by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. I’m absolutely incensed that a sitting president summoned the insurrectionists to “take back” their country (knowing that some of them were armed), incited them and condemned Vice President Pence for fulfilling his constitutional responsibility, refused repeated requests that he tells the insurrectionists to disperse and leave the Capitol and never was willing to give the order to the National Guard to deploy to Capitol to thwart the mayhem.
Finally, watching the savage brutal heinous murder of Tyre Nicols by five Memphis police officers, who were sworn to serve and protect the public, was beyond comprehension. No wonder the public has so little faith in our institutions — when the police act like thugs. It conjured up images to me of the tragic callous murder of Emmett Till.
George Santos, members of the House playing Russian roulette with our economy, a sixyear-old shooting his teacher, a sitting President aiding and abetting an insurrection and the inhumane unprovoked beating to death of a young man in the prime of his life by the police — got me thinking about what renowned futurist, Alvin Toffler, wrote in his 1970 seminal work: “Future Shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” Substitute the words “bad news” for “change” above and it’s what I’m feeling. It’s just too much.