What’s wrong with this country? A lot, a great deal of which is beyond our ability to fix, at least right now and another pile of which will have to wait until we solve our financial problems because to people without work, jobs take precedence over everything else. But that doesn’t mean we have to stop thinking about the other problems, that doesn’t mean we have to stop planning on ways to solve them. So let’s look at a couple of them and see what we can do.
***
The Electoral College. It has no practical function and to most people it is vaguely dishonest. It is the reason that Bush was elected in 2004 despite having fewer votes than his opponent. All it does is separate the American voter by one step from seeing his choice elected. Why can’t we get rid of t? Its creation was the result of the widely separated citizenry of the eighteenth century and the impracticality of waiting for all the election results to come in from all the far flung locations. Now that information arrives wherever we want it in a nano-second.
***
We have a history of being an exceptional nation but we have arrived at a point where we can’t get anything done. We built the Empire State building in one year and 45 days. We have been trying to rebuild the World Trade Center for 10 years and we still aren’t finished. The George Washington Bridge took 4 years to build and was finished six months ahead of schedule. It would now take twenty years and still not be done on time. The rinky dink little Henry Hudson Bridge was built in one and a half years. They are now embarking on a repair that they claim will take three years but they have already been repairing it for five years. Why can’t we get anything done?
People work hard and don’t seem to get ahead. Our parents lived well with just one partner working. Today both partners work and they still can’t live like their parents.
***
The courts don’t work. The rich get justice and the poor get jail.
The legal system in general is a mess. I read today where a thief got an award for getting caught under the garage door of a home he was burglarizing. A woman got a $1.7 million dollar judgment after she put her moving mobile home in cruise control and went back to her kitchen to make coffee. Guess what happened to the mobile home. But she won a judgment when she should have been committed, because the manual didn’t warn against leaving he controls when the vehicle was in motion. The concept of justice has disappeared and the stupidity of the people in the jury pools is mesmerizing. And now we’re going to have the military involved, arresting us for spitting on the sidewalk if we’re the wrong color, or of the wrong political bent. Welcome to Germany, 1936. The trains will run but mostly over people who don’t agree with the government.
***
There is no such thing as a standard of honesty. Politicians, publicans and people in the media all lie with no consequences.
***
The Capitalist system doesn’t work anymore. That’s not true. It does work but it has to be controlled. Man is a naturally avaricious beast. Some of us just take it to extremes. Unions featherbed, tycoons work the angles, all in pursuit of the same thing and both are as destructive as the other.
The Republican’s claim that Unions are destructive and dishonest and to some degree they are right but there wouldn’t be any unions if management treated the workers fairly. There wouldn’t be any need for them. Obviously that’s not the case.
***
We hear all the time about the banks being too big to fail. That’s bullshit. Nothing is too big to fail. Rome failed. There is nothing in the world today, including the whole of the United States, that is the equivalent in our world of what Rome was in its world. The banks aren’t too big to fail. They are too big to be run dishonestly and that is currently what is happening. The financial industry, the banks and Wall Street; an industry that produces no product, an industry that supports nothing but itself, an industry that worships the making of money, not bridges or apartment buildings, creates nothing and supports nothing. If you really think that it is too big to fail then it is your duty to shrink it. That is what OWS is doing. That’s why we need OWS and if OWS does nothing else but lead to legislation to shrink the banks and wall street firms then it will have been successful, it will have achieved its goal and will be a lasting monument to the voice of the people.
And here’s a good start. In the last 90 days, , 5.6 million people have moved their bank accounts. Many were inspired by OWS Bank Transfer Day, many by the screwing they were taking from big banks, highlighted by Ban of America’s $5 monthly fee for debit cards. B of A has taken what is probably the biggest hit, experiencing a 20% account closure rate in the last quarter. Consulting firm cg42 estimates that the 10 biggest banks lost as much as $185 billion in deposits with B of A leading the way with a $42 billion loss of deposits. Good work bank users. Keep it up.
***
We are a country of immigrants that exhibits no understanding of the immigrant experience. I have a house in Northwest Connecticut and I constantly hear my fellow residents complaining about immigrants taking their jobs. Of course what you actually hear is “illegal” immigrants, but the people you’re speaking to really have no idea if the immigrants to whom they are referring are legal or illegal. What they do know is that they have dark skin and don’t need to charge $45 per hour to cut grass.
These immigrants are doing exactly what our grandparents did. They are coming here because they were starving in their home countries. They are willing to work hard and for less, in order to get work. Their homegrown competition is used to having it better, to making a higher wage and to maybe not working as hard for that money as their own father’s did.
As for the illegality, no, our grandparents didn’t come here illegally only because the country was in desperate need of workers to build out economy and welcomed them with open arms, if closed fists. The battles over work and territory were the same then only the rivals were separate immigrant groups. Now we have huge unemployment so we don’t want immigrants but we still need them. The problem is that we always think of them as ignorant wetbacks coming across the border from Mexico but that is a very false picture. Most illegal immigrants come into our major airports with student, temporary or tourist visas and just disappear into the crowd. They are often well-educated men and women possessing skills that are badly needed by American industry. By chasing them down and sending them back we are just cutting our own throats.
***
Between 2004 & 2010, 92.5% of House seats and 82.5% of Senate seats went to the candidate that spent the most money. The state of Maine thought they had beaten this problem with a clean election law that limited the money that could be spent on a campaign. The Supreme court flushed this idea down the toilet with the Citizens United decision that proclaimed corporations, persons., a ludicrous concept even for the likes of Scalia, Thomas and Roberts. It is this kind of stupid decision that has people all across the country protesting the way our government is going. You want to talk about class warfare, that decision by the right wing supreme court is the most perfect example of class warfare possible.
Senator Bernie Saunders has proposed an amendment to the constitution, rescinding the Citizens United decision and setting up a situation that will prevent all this useless spending on elections. He is doing it because he understands that it has completely undermined the democratic process and rendered our elections a farce. Why did the Supreme Court make this horrendous decision? The only plausible excuse is that like the politicians, they have also been influenced by the big money on the right. The concept that corporations are people is so absurd, so brain dead, that no other conclusion is possible. With the possible exception of Clarence Thomas, these are not stupid people so what else besides dishonesty could possibly have brought the other four to such a ridiculous conclusion.
I understand that the five who voted to treat corporations as people are right leaning in their philosophies and that is acceptable, but no matter how you lean philosophically you must express some sense of logical thought in your decision making. In this decision there was only partisan politics and the country will suffer for it until, inevitably, it is overturned.