What is being attempted today in Congress by the far right is little more than an American Putsch, a secretly plotted and suddenly executed attempt to overthrow the government. By distorting the economy and America's standing as economic and political leader of the world they hope that in the long run the American people will turn to them as a "strong hand" to restore America's prestige in the world and to impose their dogma on the American people.
Safe in their gerrymandered districts they do not fear retribution for their acts even if they should fail this time. They should not be treated as merely a "lunatic fringe" in American politics but serious domestic terrorists.
The use of a front group such as the Tea Party to achieve their radical goals is nothing new in America. As Vito Marcantonio one of the great progressives in American political life said on the floor of Congress:
"At that time Abraham Lincoln was being attacked by "Liberty Leaguers" [the Liberty League was an anti-New Deal organization of the 1930's sponsored by big businessmen] and other reactionaries of his day. He had had bitter experiences with these people. War profiteers, especially, who founded a fortune by purchasing condemned rifles from the Government for practically nothing and then selling these same worthless rifles back to the Government at exorbitant prices. How history does repeat itself! The descendants of these Civil War profiteers profited largely out of the last war, and when investigated set up a howl about protecting the memory of the 1917 war leaders. I have just given you a brief history of the house of Morgan. War profiteers, industrialists, and other so-called respectable citizens were attacking Abraham Lincoln, and they were calling him a radical. They did not call people Communists in those days. That word was not well known. Now it has become a fad. Whenever they want to draw a herring across the trail, whenever they want to dodge an issue or protect nefarious plundering of the American people, they call a person a Communist. But in those days they did not use the word "Communist,"... they called him radical."
The equivalent of the war profiteers today, the natural resource profiteers, the military contractors and the parasites on Wall Street who make their living off them, have funded and created today's version of the "Liberty Lobby," "The know Nothing Party" and the other dismal organizations that have flourished in the dark belly of America from its beginnings.
These industries, who rely upon government for their very existence do not fear the radical putsch because they know it will not be them that suffer if the radical right takes over but other industries whose financing is not tied to those industries.
They are not cowed by either polls or media since they believe that once America collapses into chaos, the general public will soon forget who led us there and will turn, as we only so often do, to the strong hand to lead us out of the crisis.
Keeping the American economy in a state of turmoil they believe works to their advantage. The so-called "compromise" to put things off into the early part of next year works to their advantage because the turmoil continues until the next election when the majority of the public will have forgotten who caused it but only seek to turn to whomever proposes the simplest solutions and identifies the most acceptable scapegoat.
We cannot allow it to happen here.
I hope everything I have written is wrong.