By Tonya Pendleton, Black America Web

We’ve seen this all before. And it’s hard to believe that, more than 50 years later, we’re seeing it again.

We saw it in Virginia in 1958 when segregationist lawmakers opted to shut down the entire public school system of Prince Edward County, Va., rather than allow black students to attend school with white students.

Those schools remained closed until 1964.

We saw it again in 2011, when anti-tax Tea Party congressmen, driven by an obsession with undermining the nation’s first black president and a woeful ignorance of macroeconomics, drove the country to the brink of default by refusing to allow him to raise the debt ceiling.

No matter that their hero, Ronald Reagan, raised the ceiling 18 times and George W. Bush raised it seven times.

While an agreement was finally reached, the political dysfunction on display led Standard and Poor’s – one of the top three credit rating organizations – to downgrade the United States’ credit rating from AAA to AA+.

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