Talk Elections

Clearly we are not succeeding in the world we created.  Or, rather, we are stagnating and falling behind.  We were the first society to offer free press, free assembly, and a guaranteed right to religious practice, but we insist on inventing religious tests for our leaders.  We invented the internet, but pay far more money for much slower connections than folks in Japan, France, etc.  We spurred the world to open, transparent democracy with the Shot heard 'round the world, but only elect presidents who can buy their way through a very faulty primary system.  We invented "aerobicize," "health food," Richard Simmons, and the "atkins diet" but have one of the highest obesity rates (first among OECD countries) and one of the highest rates of heart disease deaths (13th of 29) in the developed world.  One of our own was the first human to set foot on the Earth's moon, but now we have to hitch a ride with the Russians just to repair our decrepit space satellites.

I always cite literacy.  I know we can read and write, but I mean in the broader sense, we are a very illiterate people.  Oh, not illiterate by the long standards of history, but compared with what we ought to be given our vast natural resources and the forethought with which the Founders created a reasonably just and open society.  I get ten--count 'em, ten--channels of full-time news on my TV (CNN, Fox, Bloomberg, HLN, etc., etc.), but at any time, I can be sure that at least nine of them, and often all ten of them, will be running sensationalistic diatribes or cheerleading fests for or against some candidate or other.  Or running the same two or three stories over and over and over, all day, with various "analysts" giving their opinions.  Consider also that 12% of Americans could point to Iraq on a globe in the summer of 2003, even as 57% of us supported its invasion by a combined military force.  As for the percentage of Americans who can name the Vice President of the United States?  Twenty nine, according to newsweek.com.  Twenty nine percent!  How's that for illiteracy?

I know that greed is a problem, and this poll was inspired by opebo's constant haranguing about cleptocracy in America.  I know that legislatures are quietly funneling taxpayer dollars into corporate accounts when those corporations agree to build a plant within state borders.  I know that both Democrats and Republicans are exploiting the fears of voters in order to pass legislation that redistributes capital to their favorite projects.  I know that the same folks who own Wal Mart ultimately control foreign policy.  But that's just greed run amok.  Greed is natural, but it only pervades every aspect of our legal system when it is allowed to by a desensitized, ignorant, illiterate population.

So I say that ignorance, in and of itself, and not cleptocracy, is the main problem.  What say you?

(You may change your vote at any time and the poll will remain open forever.)

Whites are your problem. Deport them all to their countries of origin, detain those whose origins cannot be determined at Guantanamo, and I'm sure America will be doing fine.

Okay, seriously? This is a chicken-egg question. Why are the people 'ignorant' and 'desensitized'? Who desensitized them?
Also, of course, it's not as if all is golden elsewhere, even in the OECD. There's a lot of crap going on everywhere. I'd be hard pressed to present a fair ranking.

Not at all.  Nor is it a false dichotomy, as I left "other."  The most obvious other is "fear" which isn't a bad choice if you're, for example, a big Michael Moore fan.  I'm not, but he does make a convincing case in Bowling for Columbine.

Anyway, the chicken/egg debate was settled, I think, in 1986 when Thomas Czech, who later won a Nobel Prize for it, discovered a self-replicating RNA molecule, the so-called ribozyme. 

What we have is a literacy problem, and until and unless we start to think critically about issues, the Greed will exploit the Fear.  At least that's my thought, but I'm sort of thinking out loud here, and willing to be convinced otherwise.

Ignorance is a result of cleptocracy.

None of these are real problems. People are largely pretty rational. Everyone whines about other being ignorant or whatever. We will never "defeat" ignorance because there will always people claiming other people are ignorant.

If we do want the biggest problem in America, we probably want to look at social/government structures that are fundamentally broken. I think higher education is a good place to start.

Certainly there are problems in higher education.  Administrative creep with the attendant cost increases are a big problem.  The declining share of the state's support in state-supported institutions create problems as well.  Both of these are legislative issues.  Moreover, many legislatures have proposed consolidation measures to their state institutions, in order to cut costs, and these include eliminating governing boards, increasing class size, and increasing the dependence on less expensive non-tenure adjunct faculty.  You could go on and on when it comes to issues facing our higher education system, but much of it begins with legislative decisions.   And who elects this legislature?  The people.  An intellectually-starved populace led by a sensationalistic press elects a legislature based on hollow or false promises.  Legislative candidates reduce policies to soundbites digestible to a population with a short attention span.  Many of these higher education issues seem, to me, to be symptoms of the overarching problem of societal ignorance.

Moreover, starting there seems awfully hard when the raw material isn't really raw.  It's a mass of eighteen-year-old citizens who haven't been taught to think critically.  Even long before the No Child Left Behind legislation began to channel resources away from all programs which could not be objectively measured in terms of reading and mathematics success, our students were graduating from public secondary institutions ill-prepared to compete economically.  There was a time when you could expect to contribute to the economy with a high school diploma, but now high school counselors are increasingly pushing all students toward four-year universities, where they often spend a couple of years amassing huge tuition debts and then drop out.  But we can't blame it all on the high schools.  Maybe a handful of these students would be better prepared for university-level thinking if their primary schools had better prepared them for secondary school.  I feel that five is a better age to start preparing than eighteen.  No matter how good a local school district may seem on paper--high composite fourth-grade reading and math scores, which is more a result of affluent parental involvement than any decision by that local school board--all public schools are answerable to the state legislature.  We put these legislatures in place, and therefore the burden rests with us, but unless the dialogue between the legislative candidates and the voters is meaningful and informed, we will continue to elect the short-attention span legislators that have created the educational systems we now have. 

Several problems with your assumptions:

1) who is this 'we'?  Do you have a turd in your cuff?

2) What do you mean by 'succeeding'?  The 'we' that actually 'decides' things is 'succeeding' mightily in the sense of getting absolutely everything they want.  Nearly all Americans and foreigners are slaves of this 'we'.

3) your claims about 'stagnating' and 'falling behind' are also rather dubious and beside the point, and quaintly professorial/bourgeois.  Not really worth talking about eh?  The point being I find your concerns petty.

The people of the United States.  Gringos.  Yankees.  Americans.


As an afterthought, I edited it to "falling behind" but I think "failing to sucede" is okay too.  Consider our free and compulsory educational system, and the fact that our students are outperformed by students not only in other OECD nations but in those from the developing world as well.  Consider science, for example.  Everyone who was anyone used to come to the US.  We put a man on the moon.  We built the reactors.  Nowadays, we send our best and brightest to CERN to use their accelerator.  Consider information technology, for example.  Consider the economic opportunity missed because we never built that "information superhighway" that everyone was talking about twenty years ago.  They built one in Japan, where folks really get high-speed internet, and not the clunky service that we know as "high speed" and they get it at a much lower cost than the average consumer pays here.  Consider that we used to lead the world in the percentage of college grads, and now we lag.  Consider the shifting alliances in the Pacific Rim, where the smart governments are slowly, quietly ridding themselves of the very close ties to the US and slowly, quietly establishing relations with China.


and petit bourgeois even.  Maybe.  Still, it affects us all.  So it's neither petty nor particular to the bourgeois.  Folks want a comfortable, independent lifestyle in which they enjoy economic mobility.  We have always had a great deal more of that than the rest of the world.  By most objective measures, our ascension has halted.  We are stagnant in that sense.  Singapore folks have cleaner sidewalks and more comfortable airplanes than we do.  Our roads are crumbling, and in many places worse than Guatemala's.  Bridges are collapsing, killing people, while we spend our time arguing over whether two men can get married.  Our public transit system, once a thriving model for others, is a joke.  We bitch about high fuel prices even as we seem unwilling to invest in a proper transit system.

My complaints are real.  What is subject to debate is not whether we are falling behind, but why.  I've often heard you cite the greed of the ruling class as the chief bane of the Bad Place.  I say it is primarily the lack of greater literacy, or ignorance.  Again, I'm just thinking about it and am willing to be convinced otherwise.  

I guess all other developed countries and quite a few middle income countries do have the free education system as well, and in fact most provide much more for free than the US.  


Wrong on all counts, angus.  Tech is still in the US.  Where else would it go?  As for the idea that countries are warming up to China - au contraire, mon frere - the great phenomenon of Asian international relations is the rehabilitation of the Old-Empire-in-its-Decline by nearly every Asian country.  They all fear China, and the US relationship is looking very appealing by contrast.  The US-Japan alliance is stronger than ever, S. Korea as well - in both cases due to their enthusiasm for it, not ours.  

The Philippines and Vietnam are desperate to improve US relations and keep China at bay, India is slated to become our close and very strong ally for obvious reasons, as well as creating many new cross-Asia relationships (both security and trade) specifically designed as anti-China and obliquely pro-US.  

Myanmar for chrisakes is breaking mightily with China and rushing into American arms at the first sign of loosening of sanctions.  Really only Thailand, Indonesia, Laos, and Cambodia have yet to show any signs of the fear of Chinese potential.

Think about it this way - when Germany was rising up in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who was more dangerous to a small country's sovereignty and well being?  Germany or Great Britain?


Good lord man, Singapore is a tiny place, not an apt comparison.  Better compare with large European countries - all better in almost every way in terms of quality of life, and also real countries.  


That's caused by one thing and one thing only angus, inadequate taxation of the wealthy.


Perhaps but you completely avoid the obvious solution - raise taxes on the rich.  It is the only thing which is different about America from what-it-used-to-be, or from civilized countries now.

Beautiful post, but you make my point for me.  Raising taxes on the rich is not a solution.  We already raise enough revenue to fund schools, but we choose not to.  Many of the state taxes you pay get sent, in the form of kickbacks, to private corporations.  Often businesses are courted by legislatures in this way.  As for federal taxes, the corporate tax rate in the US is nearly 40%.  That's higher than much of the world.  Norway, for example, has a corporate tax rate of about 27%, and has a much higher HDI than the United States.  Yes, I know it's a very small, homogeneous population, and you have already objected to such comparisons, but the point is that you cannot assume that raising marginal tax rates is the solution to any problem.  We already give our government huge amounts of money.  The problem is how they spend it.  They spend it in ways that most people aren't even aware of, and this is exactly the illiteracy I'm talking about.

America's formal corporate tax rate is above average, but our effective corporate tax rate (after accounting for loopholes, deductions, evasions, et cetera) is below average. Of course, that does not mean it should be raised. If the stock market is any indicator, US companies are doing better than most.

Fascinating thread, though. The America in decline story is old and false. There has never been a period of America's predominance to the heights where there were not loud and pervasive prognosticators of decline. Sure, certain things are out of whack here, and there, but it's like Clinton says, "There's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right with America," and he's right.

As for the question, if ignorance is the mother of kleptocracy, then apathy, in my opinion, is the mother of ignorance. And apathy has mothers to - hopelessness and defeatism, for one. Many lower class people accurately perceive that their opinion doesn't matter. Hence, they don't bother to learn about the issues, and would rather watch TV while eating junk food instead. A smart and rational choice, if you ask me.

But you can keep going. It's like the scholastic justification for the existence of God. Every cause has another cause.

The two problems you mention are so inextricably connected that you can't address one unless you also try to fix the second. Cleptocrats will always find a way to prevent change as long as people remain ignorant, and people will remain ignorant as long as cleptocrats are able to invest money in brainwashing them.

Somebody--I forget who--has a similar Eisenhower quote in his signature.  Nothing wrong with America that we can't fix.  That sort of thing.  It's a nice quote.  Good soundbite.

I started thinking about this when I had lunch with a philosopher at an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet last Friday.  He's an interesting guy.  Well informed.  Smart.  Angry, too.  His specialty is the philosophy of political systems.  "Of course they call me by my first name.  Yeah, I drop the F-bomb all the time in class.  Gotta keep it real."  I imagine him in lectures as a cross between Sam Kinneson's character in the Rodney Daingerfield movie "Back to School" and Fray Tormenta of lucha libre fame.  Anyway, over lunch I asked about legislative priorities and he starts going on about greed and ignorance and apathy and fear.  I suggested illiteracy as the greatest underlying problem in society and he seemed to agree.  We didn't have time to delve too deeply into the discussion but I'm sure we'll have lunch together again sometime.  I was just curious about other points of view.

I feel like you are giving 'The Cleptocrats' too much credit by attributing to them the ignorance of the American public.  I do not dispute that 'they' are active in crafting marketing campaigns and ensuring the press is slanted in a way which favors them, but that reality does not directly lead to the functional illiteracy which angus is talking about.  

Over three quarters of the US population has internet access, and if you filter out children not of voting age, I would imagine more like nine out of every ten Americans have internet access.  We have so much information at our finger tips, so many sources which can be cross referenced to extract the truth, so many commentators to choose from, that such a level of ignorance cannot so easily be explained.  If 'The Cleptocrats' held keeping the masses in the dark at such a high priority, they would be fighting to censure the internet (and no, SOPA/PIPA is not an example of this).

Beet, I think, is nearer to the root of the problem.  Americans know they can educate themselves, they know by and large what resources are available to them, but that is not reason enough for most people to do so.  The apathy towards the political process, where not even two thirds of voters show up to the polls and most of those who do are pitifully misinformed, is a sensible reaction to a system in which the voice of the individual counts for nothing.  Everyone 'knows' that their individual choice is irrelevant on the grand scale, and if that is the case, what reason is there to become educated and active?

'The Cleptocrats' are not engaged in a concerted push to keep the masses locked out of politics.  No, they are merely benefiting from an old system which favors the wealthy and the powerful over the common man.  The constitution enshrines this principle in the Electoral College, in which elites are tasked with choosing the President rather than the mob, who the Founding Fathers did not trust.  So long as political knowledge and involvement is subconsciously associated with 'The Cleptocrats', the elite, the powerful, the Others; average people will continue to pay only fleeting attention to current events and not take the opportunity to self-educate.

I also think that qualifies as illiteracy, or ignorance.  Apathy is probably a good "other" like Fear, but apparent apathy which stems less from a lack of concern and more from the misgivings you describe is the result of a faulty reasoning process.  This is also a symptom of general societal ignorance.

This might be long and rambling and aimless and not really my usual style but I'm just going to write what comes to mind and leave it at that.

Yelnoc, you're thinking of this the wrong way. Ultimately I don't think you're that far from what Antonio said. You seem to think that "they" would need to actively engage in something quantifiable to keep people down. You don't need to do that. I'm reminded of Tony Benn's interview in Sicko (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LnY-jy_cE0) where he talks about how democracy is inherently dangerous to elite interests, but only if people are educated and confident, only when they believe they can make a difference if they really try. Otherwise it can just as easily be used against the general interest as anything else.

What Benn was specifically talking about there was that "the system" is benefited by the fear of (or presence of) shackling debt because it makes people grow pessimistic and hopeless, and pessimistic and hopeless people don't vote, but his general point was simply that you don't have to literally put your boot on someone's neck to keep them down, simply demoralize them, pit the lower classes against each other, make them think they have no choice but to continue following orders and following a ruthlessly capitalist system and the focus isn't on how the system is screwing them, it's how the immigrant is why they're losing, how the gay man is why they're losing, how the black man is how they're losing.

We have a 24/7/365 media system pounding accepted, safe, mainstream, patty-cake mentalities into peoples' heads. People need leadership or people that separate from the path to open their minds and make them seek out new ideas. People need leadership to demand more from their politicians, or to stand up and make their voice heard, or to demand better lives, but if that leadership and that recursive, self-reinforcing media system spends all day and night talking about those evil protesters, blocking the streets as they fight for lower tuition, people become easily fooled into hating those protesters for disrupting their day rather than the government or the institution that is screwing a generation with greater debt.

We have a society based on convenience and the establishment exists to maintain that convenience. 9/11 happens and it's not a call to arms, or a call to sacrifice for the greater good of society, we're told to put a smile on and go shopping. We have an ostensibly left-of-center President who has only sought policies that go a half step to accomplishing one goal or another with a minimal disruption to the existing social, economic, and political systems, and a right of center party that only seems to further demolish trust in existing institutions only to further demoralize the voting population.

There's a reason America will never have anything close to the alleged Business Plot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plot) ever again; you don't need to be aggressive to control society, it's happened over the course of decades and we all let it happen because most people became selfish, apathetic, convenience-addicted consumerists and that's what was intended. People are happily useful idiots of the elite; there's plenty of them on this very forum. You don't need to assassinate popular politicians, you just buy off three politicians behind closed doors and block that politicians agenda. You don't need to censor information these days, buy your own newspaper, your very own Fox News, hell, just get your own blog, spread the lie you need to spread, and you automatically win. Combating lies is a hundred times as hard as combating truth, because you have to grab people's attention for more than just a single line.

Beet is right with his last line, about how this question is damn near an infinite regression of problem stemming from problem stemming from another problem, but the simplest place to start is to stop lathering in misery and start caring again. The Montreal student protests were eye opening to me in one respect, it showed there's a place where people still care about these things. If they had simply accepted unwarranted tuition fee hikes, they would still be stuck with them. No one would've stopped to think about it, and Quebec would probably still be in the waning days of a horribly corrupt Liberal government.

But people protested to cause disruption, with the ultimate goal of sparking a new election. They weren't causing havoc just for the fun of it (okay, perhaps a small percentage were, as they always do in these things) but rather they were protesting because they wanted to go vote for something different. They still believed in the institutions of Quebec government and wanted to use their vote as a vehicle of change, and 75% of people went and voted, and those students got the tuition fee freeze. They didn't wallow in misery, they didn't make ironic comments about it and then go booze the night away, they got on the street, bitched, and then voted.

So as much as I agree with people like you on these things up to a point, as much as I agree with people like Beet, Fezzy, even Tweed, about how much things suck, and how deeply screwed we are for the foreseeable future, and how broken American society is right now, you ain't solving any of it by thinking you're insignificant, that your vote doesn't matter, that it's hopeless and you should just go and (in Beet's words) "watch TV while eating junk food instead." Where I part with people on this is that you're not impressing anyone by talking about how doomed we all are. I don't have all the answers, and I don't think there's any one thing that's causing "the problem" or helping "the system." But a good place to start would be for us all to recognize who is actually screwing things up (it's not the illegals or big gubmit), and what can actually help us (it isn't a tax cut), and then to care enough to do something when we have the chance. (And realizing that you have to occasionally vote for a guy that kinda sucks against someone who really sucks in the meantime.)

They'd have banned me long ago if that were prohibitive.  English teachers should play loud rock music and have the students spend the hour writing whatever comes to mind.  They can spend the next fifteen weeks cleaning it up, but first they must be forced to the catharsis.


You want to avoid too much listening to public radio.  A soothing voice constantly repeats that "The world is a terrible place and it's getting worse and there's nothing you can do about it."  It makes you want to take sedative narcotic drugs and lock your doors and never go out.  I admit that since I've moved and now I live 8 miles from work instead of 1.7 miles from work, I no longer bicycle as much.  I swim daily for exercise, but it's the car that gets me to work.  And my radio is tuned to the local public radio station.  I gotta stop that.  It's really, really depressing.  In some sense it's worse than MSNBC and Fox News Channel and Headline News.  Sure, those networks are sensationalistic and shrill and very, very superficial, but at least they try to spur people to action.  NPR just makes you want to commit suicide.

Anyway, the point you make is a good one.  Still, I'm just trying to distill it down to one simple label.  Often folks are put on the spot when some camera crew comes up with a mic and asks, "what's the biggest problem facing the US right now?" and folks say stuff like "oil prices" and "Islamic extremism" and "unemployment" and such.  I always think it's a bunk question, because I can never think of a one-word answer.  It's just not that simple.  But lately I've started thinking about forcing myself to come up with a one word answer, and avoid Beet's Trap.  (I'm going to call it Beet's Trap, but I fall into the same trap myself most of the time.  Too many shades of grey.  Too many interdependencies.)  For the moment, I still say that a democracy can only function when the democrats are enlightened--you seem to agree.  If that's the truth, then illiteracy is the first and foremost problem to solve. 

Really? This reasoning makes perfect sense to me on the individual level.  It only becomes faulty and dangerous to the democratic process when applied to the macro level.  If everyone thought like this, then only those who don't think much at all would be left as voters.  I understand that and so I understand why voting is a civic duty, but notice how I said 'knows' in upside down commas (probably should have used quotation marks).  So yes, perhaps this sort of apathy is an example of ignorance.  But then people who understand this yet refuse to vote anyways could certainly be accused of apathy.

I hope that clears my thinking up; I know I wasn't very clear (I never am in this style :().

That's alright.  Hope you don't mind me breaking me up this way; I'm not trying to break apart your argument for rhetorical purposes, I'm just writing in a similar stream-of-consciousness style and this helps me focus.



As I said in my last post, I don't dispute that certain sections of the elite are actively engaged in shaping a narrative which protects their interests and demoralizes the lions share of voters.  The bit that gets under my skin is the tendency to associate a class consciousness to 'them', 'The Cleptocrats' in this thread, the 1%, the bourgeois or what have you.  We have to recognize that this 'ruthless capitalist system' is composed of independent actors competing with other firms for, in the broadest of terms, profit.  Fox News does put a right-wing spin on their reporting and commentary as part of a Machiavellian plot to keep the '99%' down.  They are merely catering to a market, playing to a demographic in order to boost ratings.  The social effects of such a strategy are not something the decision makers within Fox News consider.  To take a superficially very different example, religious activist groups such as Focus on the Family don't spread homophobic bigotry to distract people from real issues; they are motivated by a deep-seated sense of moral superiority read from their holy book.  Focus on the Family does not care what effect their crusade has on the ability of Americans to participate in the electoral process in a competent manner.

I realize you prefaced what you said with 'you don't need ... to actively engage in something quantifiable to keep people down.'  But then in the succeeding two paragraphs you went on to name ways in which the elites keep everyone else pliable.  I'm sure you don't think there is a literal cabal of bankers, politicians, and media moguls conspiring to maintain their hold on power.  However, you imply that all of these separate actors all want to prevent meaningful participation in politics.  What I tried to demonstrate above is these individuals and firms are all rational actors within a capitalist society, and are doing what is within their immediate best interest without regard for how it actually entrenches their power.  The distinction is important in that it does not remove from people the choice to educate themselves with the resources (ex. internet) available to them.



The assumption that the masses are incapable of thinking for themselves and need a leader seems a bit contrary to your overall message.  What is a leader but a positive substitute for the self-reinforcing media system you so rightly disparage?



Serious question, since I am too young to remember much of the immediate post-9/11 period (though I do vividly remember watching the south tower collapse on live television).  But was that really the response?  Go shopping?  I always thought there was more anger.  Or are you exaggerating for effect?



I'm glad you enjoyed that article about Obama's toryism.  I've been thinking about what the 'whig' and 'radical' equivalents in modern politics would be.  Any ideas?



Again, you're placing the burden of critical thought on the disseminator of truth, the leader, he who can grab The People's attention and counteract the influence of the evil cleptarcs (or whatever the word I'm looking for is ;)).  I feel like any thinking person can rise against the media slant, the corporate campaigns, and the political buzzwords to achieve a state of functional literacy on their own, without the help of a Great Man.

I kept getting the 'your message exceeds the maximum character limit' error, so here is the rest.



The Quebec protests were an excellent example of an educated involved populace participating democratically as a whole.  Interestingly, they did not merely vote.  The people had to act cohesively to draw attention to their plight and force the government to hold elections.  This goes back to the long-winded explanation I gave to your first point, about how there are independent actors within our capitalist society all seeking to maximize profits without regard for the social cost.  In our society everyone is too self-absorbed, be it in firms' pursuit of profit, the layman's pursuit of entertainment, or anyone else's pursuit of happiness to think in the social good.  The people of Quebec did that once, and good for them (though arguably it was only one large segment of society that benefited, while others lost).


Perhaps I sympathize with the 'kleptocrats are the problem' line of thought, even though I have picked it apart.  Perhaps a better rendering would be 'capitalism is the problem.'  But as I also tried to express, not everything can be blamed on the system.  So long as the information is available, people have an obligation to try and educate themselves.  However, education can lead to some depressing realizations and it takes a positive attitude and a special set of circumstances to make the best of a bad situation.

I hope all that makes sense.  I know it's all very disjointed but I kept having to leave and then come back to it and, as you can see, I'm a bit conflicted on the issue myself.  But perhaps you understand my thought process a bit better now?

Oooh, good choice.

Same goes for pretty much every country, to differing degrees. The US has a particularly bad case of it, though.

Indeed, although the injection of fear into the national bloodstream has been profitable to a number of people.  This is the central conceit of Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine.  I'm not a huge fan, in fact, I think he's a creep, but that movie was well done.  Clever and even funny at times.  For a more academic treatment, take a look at The United States of Fear by Tom Englehardt (Haymarket Press, 2011).  He points out, for example, that $790 million spent on the new embassy and consular facilities in Afghanistan could have provided jobs for 22,000 teachers, 15,000 healthcare workers and 13,000 clean energy workers in the US. (not "or" but "and")  He basically makes the case that US foreign policy is dominated by a military industrial complex, for the handsome profit of a few clever entrepreneurs.  Then again, if you buy into that, then you should cite the underlying Greed that is problematic.  I still contend that Greed cannot exploit Fear and Apathy unless Ignorance reigns.

Why are you talking about corporate tax rates?  That's just one small aspect.  Taxes on income (incl. capital gains) are what matters - and the personal income top tax rate is not the 70-90% it was and should be. 


Not at all, angus.  The problem is clearly inadequate spending due to under-taxation of the rich.  Simply doubling budgets for the areas you complain of - roads, schools, etc. - and doubling the top tax rate would return America to both solvency and civilization.  The problem is entirely caused by your benighted party and people like you.

You can keep collecting more revenue, but if all we do is pass it on to private corporations, then it's not going to have the effect you are imagining.  

http://blogs.reuters.com/david-cay-johnston/2012/04/12/taxed-by-the-boss/

Here, for example, is just one of hundreds of articles written on the subject.  I found it as the result of a quick google search.  Your post sums up the ignorance I'm talking about.  You are a college-educated, opinionated, well-informed person reasonably interested politics, and even you have this vague notion that all we need to do to solve all our problems is to let the government take more of our money!  It's not as simple as you are making it out to be.  I don't mean to be shrill, but this is exactly the sort of illiteracy I'm talking about!  

Egotism,  it is a problem that cuts across all levels and layers of society. 

It is your neo-liberal agenda that has put us in this pretty pass of kleptocracy, angus.  Had we never allowed 'free trade', de-unionization, and instead moved further towards progress (nationalization of industries, etc.) instead of away from it since the 70s, we would have political control of 'private property' instead of the rich controlling the State (and us).