The Play's The Thing

All because one credit rating agency decided to put its decision where its demands were. All because both parties in Congress felt really determined to out-manoeuvre the other; grumpy and mean-minded. Partisan politics practised as a criminal art with an eye and an ear to the growing disaffected. Bad luck for a president who promised a better society and meant every word he grandiosely, audaciously uttered to an adoring public.

His immediate predecessor inherited a strong economy whose preceding presiding executive authority raised taxes on the wealthy and balanced the nation's books. He took that economy and set it to work funding two foreign wars, while reversing those onerous taxes on America's rich; a truly fateful combination that only innumerate and illiterate presidents could conceive.

But he was a nice man with a good sense of humour.

President Barack Obama, presenting as a saviour for trying times certainly meant well, while making a whole lot of bad decisions. Perhaps he was more confounded than his calm demeanor betrayed by a war he resolved to shut down and another one he determined to wage to completion, while instituting the huge cost of universal medicare and being presented with an unanticipated recession.

None of which would have happened if not for human greed. An ancient and virulently deadly emotion that rears its vicious head everywhere humankind resides. Greed and entitlements make for another truly viperous combination. Wall Street investment houses traded in truly wickedly empty investment schemes that the credit rating agencies found no fault with, infecting the U.S and Europe with worthless paper instruments.

The world's attention was rivetted on the drama of the Republican party and the Democrats having at one another, accusing and demanding, extracting concessions and dramatically enacting a sinister scenario that dragged the U.S. to the cusp of a perceived default, horrifying Europe and Asia and all its trading partners. What's dignified and responsible about witnessing elected lawmakers portraying themselves as feckless yobs?

So here we are, post-agreement to raise the U.S. borrowing ceiling and with it the swollen debt, and the consequences of Standard & Poor's damning denunciation of a diminished rating. As though it might be feasible that the United States of America might ever fail to pay its debts ... Their pledge is as good as gold.

The recovery, shuddering to an unfortunate pause - or might that be a halt? - has brought fear and apprehension to the world economies. The largest consuming nation in the world has suffered a lapse in confidence. Both domestic and international. More, should the stock markets continue to panic, and people refuse to regain confidence, even economies that have prospered will suffer.

Portugal and Greece and Ireland fail. Spain and Italy teeter on the brink of default. The great U.S. of A.? Perish, abandon the very thought. China, for one, won't have it.