One Sign America Is Not in Decline

As for the comment that "democracies" tend to be peaceful traders, I would point to some questions about which country's are "democracies." The U.S. has had a good deal more war than peace during its two hundred years plus history, and is now and for some time prosecuting two wars that I and many others believe are wars of aggression.

A lot of us do indeed live in a bubble of seeming prosperity. I say seeming because it is precarious and easily lost "prosperity," and the loss is likely not going to be something that's due to anything you have or haven't done. With lives over-loaded with the crap of consumerism and an idiot belief in their getting a fair-shake, the people of the United States are only beginning to wake up to their actual plight. Most of the wealth generated by the work of the last decades hasn't been shared out to most of those producing it, it has instead been carefully vacuumed up by the topmost tier. In hard times some of those living high within that one to five percent top income/property owning class are most responsible for generating without shame demand that the federal government save their asses at the cost of FURTHER pauperizing "ordinary" citizens. Capital, as too the jobs it might have generated here, has been freely fleeing the country for quite some time. Few here do anything to change this.

The media continue to present a "prosperity is just around the corner for you too" lie which only the most foolish of us accept as reality. That same media apparently had no idea that the huge, worldwide crash that has arrived, was coming. Right up until it did, they were hard-line supporters of what has shown itself to be a high-theft, fully disastrous economy.

We've seen these same fools vote against their own economic interests again and again over the years, so there might be some satisfaction in seeing so many of them suffer the fate they've had at least some part in bringing to so many of the rest of us. Both parties, distinguishable but barely so, have helped sell us out. And they are currently proving once again that they are without conscience willing to feed further amidst the economic carnage for their own selfish reasons, none of those viable in the long run. It's also clear that they aren't much interested in the "long run."

In the shorter run, those running and those manipulating both parties have plenty now and plan to have gathered up a lot more before they are through.

The stupidity of believing that the "system" is self correcting in favor of working people or even the middle class extends broadly, a marker for the fact that we don't teach much about politics in our schools.

Terry Baker of OK 12:24PM February 10, 2010