Tom Engelhardt 39

October 17, 2013 Tomgram: Kramer and Comerford, Shutting Down Americans While this country's creditor nations twitched, the global bankers were worried, too, and in campaign mode. In Washington for the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund, a number of them were predicting that a congressional unwillingness to raise the debt ceiling could take down what global “recovery” there had been since the Great Recession. In the meantime, here we were, yet again teetering at the edge of “the cliff.” And what a strange spectacle these last weeks have been! Yes, we all know that there are deep-seated problems in this country, that infrastructure is crumbling, school systems starved for resources, the gap between rich and poor growing, poverty on the rise, and manufacturing jobs still leaving town. Nonetheless, there is no evidence that, absent the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, we would have been at the edge of any cliff at all. The spectacle of these last weeks has been thoroughly ginned up, as fictional as the plot of any Hollywood disaster film. But here’s the thing: when, a few months from now, the debt-ceiling and government shutdown issues return like the walking dead and threaten once again to step off that cliff, what could follow would not be fiction and it would be unpredictable. Real life, unlike Hollywood, is that way. For all any of us know, it could take the global financial system down with it and someday historians would wonder just how such a catastrophe could have been created out of thin air. But we’re not historians of the future, are we? Nor have we simply been spectators at a congressional disaster flick, even if, asTomDispatch regulars Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford of the invaluable National Priorities Project point out today, we’ve been acting that way. Already, as the government “shutdown” unfolded, a startling number of perfectly real Americans found their lives swept up in the House’s fiction, while the economy, too, took a hit. Let’s hope that, before it’s over in 2014 or beyond, we won’t all discover that, willy-nilly, we’ve been swept into that same film as extras in the crowd scenes, and that, peering into the fog on the horizon of our future, we won't suddenly see the first shadowy, lurching figures staggering toward us.Tom What Was “Essential” and What Wasn’t  The Government Shutdown in Perspective  By Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford On a damp Friday morning 11 days into the government shutdown, a “few dozen” truckers took to the Capital Beltway in a demonstration with the Twitter hashtag #T2SDA (Truckers to Shut Down America). They wanted to tell lawmakers they were angry, launch an impeachment campaign against the president, and pressure Congress to end itself. They were on a “ride for the Constitution,” protesting big government and yet the opinion polls were clear. In fact, the numbers were stunning.  One after another, they showed that Americans opposed the shutdown and were hurting because of it. At that moment, according to those polls, nearly one in three Americans said they felt personally affected not by too much government, but by too little, by the sudden freeze in critical services. In reality, that government shutdown was partial and selective. Paychecks, for example, kept flowing to the very lawmakers who most fervently supported it, while the plushcongressional gym with its heated pool, paddleball courts, and flat-screen televisions remained open. That’s because “essential” services continued, even as “nonessential” ones ceased. And it turned out that whether the services you cared about were essential or not was a matter of just who got to do the defining. In that distinction between what was necessary and what wasn’t, it was easy enough to spot the values of the people’s representatives. And what we saw was gut-wrenching. Stomach-churning. Click here to read more of this dispatch.