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Sep 07, 2005 12:35 pm |
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re: Katrina - - If ever there were a need for innovation |
John Stephen Veitch
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Hello Everyone:
"If ever there were a need for innovation"
America as seen from the outside is nothing like the country most American's choose to describe.
If you find my posts a year and two years ago on the 500 Citizens network, you'll see that for a long time I've been saying that the USA's political system is broken. It's become a huge money machine controlled by corporate America that controls both the Republicans and the Democrats. These two look alike parties pretend to be in opposition to each other, but they serve the same master. There is no effective political choice in the USA, their hasn't been any for years.
No free press. Courts under political control. Electorate gerrymandered to create safe jobs for party hacks. Contracts offered on a cost plus basis to to political cronies, who fail in their duty but are rewarded anyway.
Both at the state level and at national level there was complete political disconnect from what was really happening and what was being said and done. GW Bush didn't want to go there. No emotion, no understanding of the real events going on. Living in a dream world.
There is enormous need in the USA for legal innovation, for political innovation, for educational innovation, for health care and social welfare innovation, for social innovation. America is the world's most wealthy country, but it's not a place most of us would choose to live in.
USA is a great nation in a process of self destruction. I have said before that political reform is the only way to stop riots in the street. Cities will burn one day. The blatant (but unacknowledged) racism and uncaring attitude towards the difference in education standards, health care and income of most people, and the lot of the bottom 20% of the population is a time bomb ticking away.
There will be in the USA, young radicals who are today thinking of the time when they will be "home grown suicide bombers". They may not be Muslim, the might just be black. Or they might be white, ex-military having served in Iraq with a life destroyed by what they did there, and by what was done to them. Returning home to an ungrateful nation, they might just be a little angry about the lies that led to the war and compounding lies about how well the veterans will be treated.
Tax cuts and massive budget deficits are the legacy of several successive Presidents. Spending has been run down so that the rich can be richer and the poor can be neglected. You can see what you get. A country that can't even run an election and count the votes fairly. A country that doesn't have a process where institutions independent of the political process prepare the rolls and conduct the election. A country the has old voting machines that malfunction and too few machines to efficiently process the vote. That's evidence of what happens when taxes are too low and where nobody cares.
Third world countries are expected to do better under UN supervision, and they do. Jimmy Carter declared that the election of Chavez in Venezuela was very well run, and that the election of GW Bush in the USA clearly failed the same test.
Nothing will get fixed until most American's understand that many things need fixing. Belief that "America is the greatest country in the world" is a stopper that prevents things from being fixed. The Constitution is part of the problem, fixing that is part of the solution. If GW Bush succeeds in stacking the Supreme Court with conservative judges, fixing the Constitution might be delayed 30 years. I can't be sure that the USA has the luxury of 30 years to do it. It increasingly looks to me like we'll have blood in the streets first. Private Reply to John Stephen Veitch (new win) |
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