Did the American Civil War never quite end?

Most of us have been baffled by the political row in America that forced the Government to shut down completely for 16 days and took $24 billion out of the U.S. economy. The financial services company, Standard & Poor (we rather like the name), said the shutdown reduced projected fourth-quarter GDP growth from 3 percent to 2.4 percent. Not, you would think, a Good Thing.

It came about because the loony fringe Tea Party, on the right wing of the Republican party, declared that the Government was insolvent and insisted that it must close unless it could immediately paid its debts. That is like telling Greece to shape up and pay up, right now – and of course, it couldn’t be done. International economics doesn’t run on real money, it’s an agreed balance of indebtedness. President Obama struggled to find a way out, and finally signed legislation that extended the credit limit until Feb. 7, 2014. But then what?

One would think that pursuing tax evasion cheats would be a first step towards accessing some funds, but the Congressional Budget Office is horrified by a casual admission that tax will not be pursued, although every form of social service will be drastically reduced. Offshore tax havens alone cost the U.S. Treasury $90 billion a year, all of it untaxed in the United States. Yet the myth of the undeserving poor persists, and millions of people in the US are facing an infinitely harder time.

Just to make things worse, a couple of weekends ago, low-income shoppers in 17 states were unable to use their electronic food stamp debit cards. Panic set in. Did the deadlock in Washington mean nutritional assistance was gone for good? In fact, the cause was a glitch at Xerox, the private company that provides computing services for the state welfare agencies. But the bigger picture is an ominous one.

Thom Hartmann said on TV that the Tea Party radicals in Washington today are rebooting ‘the same government obstructionist strategies that have been around since the early days of slavery.’ Hartmann would like to see the Tea Party and its home territory of ‘blue’ America secede from the rest of the United States. Without them, the US could return ‘fulfilling the dreams and visions that our Founding Fathers had. It’s time,’ he said, ‘to let small-minded bigots go back to their plantation-style economies and let them run their states like third-world countries.’

It seems the American Civil War never quite ended.