The depth of the political crisis in the US can be seen in the effort to push through the so-called "Trump-care" bill. At the moment it looks like it will fail to pass the House, and even if they do get the seven votes or so that they need to swing it, it looks like it is dead on arrival in the Senate. But here's the thing, if Trump-care fails it will not be because Republican lawmakers have rejected it because it will take literally millions of people off of Medicaid, Medicare, and their insurance, but because the most conservative Republicans in the House (the tragically misnamed "Freedom Caucus") think that it gives TO MUCH to the poor, the sick, and the elderly. This is how bad the US political system has become; the party in power is rejecting a conservative, Trump-sponsored bill because it tries to take care of society's most vulnerable. (And, keep in mind, that these Congress Members who are upset because the Republican establishment is trying to care for people, all call themselves devout Christians!)
The real question that is haunting us today is not "will Trump be impeached?" or "will Trump cause a war?" or even "is Trump mentally unstable?" The real question is - how long can a society last hat is actively promoting detached, callousness toward its own vulnerable citizens?
4 comments:
What makes you believe the U.S. to be a democracy? You should read the Gilens (Princeton) and Page (Northwestern) study released by Princeton in 2014 before Trump entered the Republican nomination contest. They concluded that America had slid from what had been democracy into oligarchy evidenced by, first, political capture (America's "bought and paid for" Congress) and regulatory capture in which federal regulatory boards and tribunals were stacked, effectively controlled, by industry representative appointees.
Galbraith in "The Predator State" contends that the objective of the corporate sector isn't to shrink government or influence it but to actually run it. That seems to be well underway. That ties in with remarks recently made by Lawrence Wilkerson, retired US Army colonel and former chief of staff to state secretary Colin Powell that the American ship of state is sinking and it will take some seismic event to prevent it. His concluding words, "Does that mean revolution? It might."
Sorry, Kirby, Gilens and Page concluded America had transformed into an effective autocracy, not an oligarchy as I initially wrote.
Well Mound, the notion of democracy is fraught with ambiguities from beginning to end. I don't think one can say that any system is a "democracy" per se, but rather that it might occupying various spots on a spectrum. I certainly think that a good case can be made that the US now occupies a rather dubious spot on that spectrum, particularly since the two major FEC cases went through the US supreme court. But I guess my point there was that for a country that had adopted many of the practices of contemporary "western" democracies, the US citizens seem shockingly willing to abandon all notions of democracy and the rule of law.
.. it may be useful to flash back to the GOP 'leadership' campaign.. and goodness knows when it actually started.. tho we do know where it seemingly ended. Whether a 'democracy' of some description can flourish or even breathe after that startling GOP coronation of a toxic fraud like Trumph is a question before us now.. but the alternate realities are equally frightening. In other words, 'the fix is in' and its not really about 'the election' .. its about the process, the distortions, the political manipulations.. greed for money and power. The electorate are mere dupes. I won't even mention the alternative Party, the farcical Democrats who lost the election while running Hillary Clinton, who patiently waited and worked for 'her turn' only to be denied. Hell, in a race to see who's 'turn it is' The Donald was equally deserving and equally not what the USA needed.
So here we are folks..a completely confused country, the USA, is in complete turmoil, as the so-called government and its vaguely related GOP Party try to weasel their way through astonishing layers of scandal, malfeasance, idiocy & quite possibly treason. Canadians of course are simply like friendly fleas riding aboard massive herds of rabid political dogs. We have little to zero control of the situation.
So add up all the facts, fake news, realities, actual events - all being twisted into layer upon layer of stunning cover-up, obstruction, deceit, and those are just the headlines.. We have Zero idea of the totality of how politics and governance is being manipulated today. Trumph/Bannon may actuall do North Americans a huge favor, by showing us via ludicrous greed & astounding stupidity & astonishing duplicity, just how screwed any pretensions of 'democracy' actually are..
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