They have learned well from our wealthy elite. What the Tea Party has completed is a straightforward leveraged buyout of America. Using the minimal capital of their role as a minority fringe in one party in one house of congress, they have exploited their opponents’ weaknesses - basic decency, moderate expectations, acting in the common interest, compromise - and aggressively leveraged the many-fold larger full faith and credit of the U.S. government to force themselves into a controlling management position, intent on profit, political and otherwise. In this position, and in order to realize their profits through a devastated national economy that will be blamed on their political opposition, they now require the U.S. to enact their management model, austerity. And if the subject of the buyout, the U.S., goes bankrupt, is destroyed, well too bad, their game isn’t for the weak, it’s all in the ideologically pure spirit of creative destruction. It’s a model that has worked wonderfully for our private sector economy, delivering the developed world’s greatest income inequality over the past four decades, why not simply implement it on a national scale? America, we had a pretty good run there for a couple hundred years, didn’t we?