Within the economic elite behind the Republican Party, a rift has broadedened to the point of shattering: The small class of hedge fund managers and other quasi-con artists who make their living defrauding the stock market have been driving one disaster after another in the markets, demanding more liquidity (i.e., lower taxes) at all costs at every step of the way so they can just steal the money, but the rest of the market has become suspicious to the point of hostile to their shenanigans. While their astroturf minions in the Tea Party continue to demand an endless supply of money to throw in their own pockets and laugh in the face of potential default, the rest of the financial institituions are begging the GOP to regain some semblance of sanity and act with the interests of the broader economy in mind. Wall St., ladies, and gentlemen, is on our side. It is simply a number of very powerful individuals within it who are not. And the consequences of this split are the GOP is destroying itself as it leaps for a prize it cannot have.
Let me explain where this divergence arises. These executives get paid salaries with bonuses - bonuses often determined by themselves (corporate governance hasn't quite yet worked out the concept of "checks and balances") rather than any kind of objective performance metric or external review. They could bankrupt the company in one day and then sign off on their own $50 million bonus check the next with no repercussions. These are warlords, and they not only have no political interest in seeing the American economy restored to function, they have the opposite interest: The more distressed its institutions are, the better able they are to liquidate their assets and funnel an ever greater amount of the resulting money into their personal bank accounts. These people, if you have not caught on, are the enemies of the United States in this war we are fighting.
The rest of Wall St. is not quite like that. Greedy, yes. Cheap, absolutely. Hostile to progressive programs and government spending, clearly. But they do not want to see government drowned in a bathtub - they need government to implement policies that benefit them, and to bail them out when the shenanigans of the Warlords among them destabilize the entire economy. They need consumers who earn enough money to spend back in the economy. These folks run economies like dairy farms - they fatten up consumers with bubbles, then milk then when bubbles bursts. But even that isn't good enough for the warlords - they want to slaughter the dairy cows, use the wood of the barns for kindling, and then salt the earth behind them just to be malicious. It is pissing off the general business community, and endangering their long-term profits.
Wall St., ladies and gentlemen, is on our side. They don't like being on our side, and they don't want to be on our side longer than they have to be, but they are. Everyone in the world who is not a teabagger is against the teabaggers. The military can't sustain large budgets with massive revenue shortfalls and downward-spiraling economies. Investors won't invest if they're going to be robbed. Businesses can't be profitable if there is no infrasturcture to support them, and the average American doesn't make enough to afford their products. The people behind this manufactured debt crisis are playing a game of Waco, and I don't think it will turn out any better for them this time around than the original.