Everything is broken.

More than could be fixed, anyway. And they would all be very difficult repairs.

Dylan always did have a way with words.

jglammi

8 million illegal aliens hold American jobs

Another broken situation. To fix that, it would be necessary to fix their countries of origin. Many of those are basket cases because of predatory US economic policies.

Congress has been protecting American businesses instead of American workers.

The Executive enforces the laws, not congress. Which is to say, they are somewhat enforced. People in other countries could just wait for US companies to export jobs to them. How many millions of those are there?

You could try to buy American, if you can find anything American to buy.

The problem isn't with FreeScore.com or Ben Stein per se.

The problem is that the country is loaded with people much worse than Stein who are more than willing to make a buck selling out the country to corporations much worse than FreeScore.com.

Perpetrators besides Stein have nationally syndicated media shows, corporations besides FreeScore.com have busy offices on K Street, and these operate on a vastly larger scale.

Stein and FreeScore.com are only minor symptoms of a fatal national disease.

"Option" mortgages to explode, officials warn

It gets worse the more you look at it:

Facing the next real-estate collapse

Most commercial properties bought or refinanced in the last five years are now upside-down on their loans -- that is, the property can't be sold for its finance value or purchase price. Real Capital Analytics reports that owners have lost their entire down payments on about $1.3 trillion worth of property.

Nearly half of all US commercial-real-estate-mortgage loans come due within the next five years. Deutsche Bank believes that 65 percent or more will fail to qualify for refinancing ...

As things stand, this next wave of the crisis will sabotage the recovery -- driving up bank failures, FDIC bailouts and problems for some large insurance companies. Indeed, Congress will surely wind up having to bail out the FDIC itself.

https://www.rcanalytics.com/article/811/Facing-the-next-real-estate-collapse.aspx

It's conceivable that the US could eventually overcome its financial and economic problems if its national character were still positive, which is what enabled the country to reform itself in the course of the Great Depression, endure WWII, and enter into the general prosperity of the last fifty years.

But as I said, both the government and a substantial percentage of the people appear to have become hopelessly corrupt, and ultimately that corruption makes it impossible for the US to recover the present crisis and ultimately ensures its failure:

Can America Be Salvaged?

The entire premise of a self-ruling democracy rests on some reasonable degree of rationality and some reasonable degree of an ability to discriminate between real information and falsehoods. Today's American democracy seems to lack these qualities in increasingly abundant amounts.

And yet it goes deeper than that still. The entire premise of a society - any society, democracy or not - is that it possesses a certain degree of shared community, a ‘we-ness' that transcends narrower tribalisms and self-interest in critical ways and at critical moments.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/18-2

I'm not seeing a Lincoln or a Roosevelt saving the country this time around. Obama simply isn't up to it, and neither are the people.

This nation can never be conquered from without. If it is ever to fall it will be from within.

- Abraham Lincoln

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

- John Adams

Ugly, and after that, weird ugly.

Not a chance. The Obama administration's policy to deal with Amerika's debts is to ... run up more debts.

This policy keeps the wolf from the door, but only for a while, and makes the wolf a lot hungrier. The consequences of Amerika's failed economic policies have been put off into the future at the expense of making them worse.

Scorpio69er

“But no one has the guts to say let’s bite the bullet.”

Eventually it will be necessary to actually deal with the problem. It's only possible to avoid reality for a time, and Obama is buying time at a steep price.

Like I've said, t's going to be ugly, and then it's going to be weird ugly.