From 12/2/04, tompaine.com: Quo Vadis: Playing For Keeps by Patrick Doherty

[MessiahRp]

This article seems quite relative now with the housing market collapse underway....

-Rp


http://www.tompaine.com/print/quo_vadis_playing_for_keeps.php

When the chief economist at Morgan Stanley says we have a one-in-10 chance of avoiding economic Armageddon, one tends to take notice. When America's second-largest creditor tells us to get our economic house in order the same week, two points begin to determine a line. But the Bush administration has not so much as flinched. In the latest installment of Quo Vadis?, Patrick Doherty says that when GOP strategists ask, "Where do we go from here?" they answer, "toward an economic 9/11."

-snip-

“Democrats play for lunch. We play for keeps.” —Grover Norquist

Last week, America received two pieces of monstrously bad news. First, the chief economist of Morgan Stanley (along with Robert Reich, Larry Summers, Paul Krugman, China and the currency markets) warned us that the U.S. economy is about to collapse. Second, we learned that the Bush administration is willing to ignore the likelihood of collapse and will push ahead aggressively with tax and Social Security reform. Put these two pieces of information together and you get a nightmare scenario.

Movement conservatives are willing to tank the economy while they control the federal government in order to remake it according to their liking.

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You know things aren’t looking good when the chief economist of Morgan Stanley uses the word Armageddon in a briefing to the world’s largest equity investing house.

In an article published last Tuesday, Stephen Roach reportedly told his colleagues at Fidelity that America has a one in 10 chance of avoiding economic Armageddon. His comments came toward the end of a string of bad economic omens. China’s central banker told America to get our own house in order, European and Asian central bankers began talk of buying Euro-based securities, and OPEC felt enough pressure to announce that it had no intention, for the moment, of pricing oil in euros instead of dollars.

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Too Crazy To Believe

The movement conservatives leading the GOP have decided that the way to get what they want is to throw out all the rules—whether that means speaking truthfully to American citizens, comity in the Senate, stare decisis in the Supreme Court or fiscal discipline in the budget. These concepts once defined the American form of government and placed the republic above partisanship. But to operatives like Karl Rove and Grover Norquist, they represent Democratic blind spots to be exploited. Bipartisanship, as Norquist once said, is merely another word for date rape.

Destroying the economy in order to remake it is just the kind of gambit that Democrats would believe so unlikely that it is not worth considering. It defies logic and credibility. Just like the possibility that Christian Zionists could take over Congress or that Bush might invade Iraq with no real evidence of a threat.

.... More at link above.

[Demeter]

1. Well the GOP Is Going To Lose It All

by "playing for keeps", the GOP forgot that they didn't get to "keep" other people's futures, livelihoods, and lives, nor their children's, nor their children's children's, etc.

As a result, I fully expect the GOP will be RICOed out of existence, and it's most criminal elements will be stripped of their assets and their freedoms.