...the damage is done.
We were sliding downhill anyway, as we continue to gut our country internally in order to support the military tentacles we have worldwide. But we had a couple of great advantages, namely: the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and of course the fact that oil was traded using the dollar.
Does anyone really think these things will continue after this debacle? We used to be a bastion of investment safety because of two main reasons: 1 - our financial institutions adhered to strict rules and accounting and were transparent, making them very reliable; and 2 - we always paid our bills, which was encoded into our Constitution, so no one thought it could ever be otherwise.
Well, the 2008 crash took care of #1, but good -- the controls had been off for a long while before that, but the crash made the results evident to the whole world. Now the debt ceiling crisis has taken care of #2 -- it is clear there are strong factions within the US who don't think our debt obligations are that big a deal. Therefore it is now very thinkable that the US could default on its debt, something which was never before within the realm of possibility, absent large scale disaster.
Unless we manage to vote out EACH AND EVERY ONE of the Congress critters who voted against raising the debt ceiling, I think the rest of the world gets the message that these looney toons known as the Tea Party are welcome into our body politic, and they wield an outsized influence compared to their numbers. The fact that the rest of the Republican Party, and the saner business elements in our society, were unable to stop this runaway train until the very last minute, does not inspire confidence.
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