The people vs. the ruling class

Back in 2008, the "permanent government," as I call the establishment clique that actually runs America, whipped up the people and their elected representatives in Washington into hysteria over an economic crisis that the ruling class had itself perpetrated.

Leaders in both the Republican and Democratic parties told the people dramatic action was necessary to avoid a catastrophe. And that's how we got the TARP bailouts, which now almost everyone recognizes were counterproductive, ill-advised, illegal and immoral.

In 2010, the American people had a chance to repudiate those policies, as well as the reckless, irresponsible, immoral and arguably criminal economic policies of Barack Obama's administration, along with his rubber-stamp Congress. The result was one of the biggest shakeups in the House and Senate in American history.

This year, the Republicans who had taken control of the House of Representatives had a chance to change course – to stop throwing money away, to stop borrowing, to stop piling debt on the shoulders of Americans not yet born, to take a step toward returning Washington to the principles of constitutionally limited government and to demonstrate that the will of the people still meant something in the U.S.

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Republicans who ran in 2010 pledged to do all those things – and they won.

All they had to do to perform was to say no to raise the debt limit. They had total control of the most important political decision to be made by the U.S. government in 2011 and 2012. Had they taken this simple, direct action, borrowing would have stopped, spending would have been reduced to the same level as revenues and America would be on its way to a historic economic and political recovery.

But the "permanent government," that unseen hand of a hardly visible ruling elite, resorted to its old tricks.

From every direction, including the large media corporations that have become part of the ruling elite rather than the independent watchdogs imagined by our Founding Fathers, Americans were bombarded with new hysterical warnings. The debt limit must be raised, these warnings insisted. If the debt limit was not raised, two things were certain:

• America would default on the massive debt that the ruling elite had created for Americans;

• America's AAA credit rating would be downgraded for the first time in the nation's history;

The so-called "default crisis" was a canard from the beginning. The only way the U.S. government would ever default on its debt is if Barack Obama made a conscious decision to do so. It would probably have been an illegal decision. There was plenty of revenue to service the debt. Borrowing only permitted Washington keep spending money it didn't have. It wasn't needed to pay for past obligations.

Nevertheless, night after night, day after day, Federal Reserve officials, their elected stooges and the controlled media equated refusal to increase the debt limit with default. They became synonymous – one in the same.

Then on Friday, just days after House Republicans, elected mainly to stop the policy madness in Washington, capitulated to the demands of the ruling class to raise the debt limit, the second doomsday prediction became a reality anyway. Standard & Poor's downgraded America's credit rating to AA+ and warned it might go lower in the next year if the government didn't get its act together and start cutting spending and reducing its debt – something that could have been accomplished in dramatic form had the government only listened to the popular will of the people instead of the empty threats of doom and gloom from the establishment.

There's plenty of blame to go around:

• Obama should be known from now through the rest of American history as the official who presided over the first (and probably not last) of the government's credit downgrades. No matter what else he does or doesn't do through Election Day 2012, this development should hang around his neck like an albatross. The economic suffering he has inflicted on the American people and the ways he has demonstrated contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law must never be forgotten.

• House Speaker John Boehner and his sidekick, Eric Cantor, should be remembered for blowing the biggest opportunity Americans have had in decades to save their country from going off the cliff economically. They chose, instead, like politicians usually do, to kick the problem down the road. They must not be rewarded for their betrayal of the people who empowered them with another turn in party leadership.

• There were even disappointments among the new faces in town – men and women who were elected to Congress because they pledged to freeze the debt limit and turn Washington around. This was the vote that separated the wheat from the chaff, the men from the boys, the public servants from the politicians.

It would be a mistake to forget what happened last week.

There may be room for forgiveness, for those who recognize what they did and repent. But, unless we want to throw up our hands and give up on the idea of taking America back, we must never forget.