Re, your observation

Our Broken System

The political system of the United States is fundementally broken. We no longer have the ability to deal with complex issues...

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Since 1986 we have been in an environmental sustainability deficit. We are now running at about 125-130% of capacity, a figure estimated to rise to 200% by 2050 or sooner (and anthropocene era climate change is inextricable in that). Literally, we are eating/consuming the future. Now, add to that the recent exposure of a Potemkin financial sector, one where more than 40% of corporate profits this decade have come from the "financial services" sector -- meaning they were largely phony -- built on now unenforceable paper obligations many iterations removed from any underlying recoupable tangible assets, as evidenced by the recent unprecedented bursting of the bubble (I have written at some length about that, having worked in subprime securitization risk modeling).

Add to all of THAT what I would call an accrued "intellectual/sociopolitical capacity deficit." Recall the documentaries of a generation ago recounting the failures in our educational system? Kids who couldn't find a country or foreign capitol on a map, and didn't care? Kids who couldn't do basic arithmetic, and didn't care? Aliterate kids who couldn't formulate a coherent sentence, and didn't care?

These people are now in their 30's and 40's and are seen angrily drooling 120 decibel rhetorical spittle inanities at "Town Hell" meetings. (Yeah, that's unkind, and a generalization. It's more complex than just that.)

I taught undergrad "critical thinking" for several years recently at UNLV. Fully 60% of incoming freshmen had/have to be remanded to remedial English. My students HATED to read analytically -- but all expected at least a "B" simply for showing up. They came to critical thinking class simply because they wanted to endlessly, narcissistically shout about their own pet peeves (and because it partially filled a "math requirement"owing to the minimal logic/set theory component -- which they hated equally).

We approach a world population of 7 billion, all in competition for increasingly scarce resources, many of these people ignorant, impoverished, and increasingly angry (and all capable of being taught to pull a trigger). In the U.S. in particular, we have never had to shlep through our own bombed-out cities, never had to deal with the kind of persistent miseries that have long characterized the lot of much of the rest of humanity. We comprise 5% of world population while consuming 25% of its resources, a circumstance we have come to regard as our birthright.

A reckoning draws nigh, ever so slowly, but with a quickening pace. The awareness of this remains largely inchoate, but I think peoples' blind, irrational resistance to any kind of change may be a function of it. A sheltered society such as ours, long accustomed to having whatever we want, could easily descend into unimaginable savagery once push comes seriously to shove.

Read Jared Diamond's book "Collapse." Also, view a recent talk he gave:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collapse.html

I would love to be wrong regarding my anxieties here.

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

My dad actually fought the Nazis (along with all four of his brother). He left a leg behind in Europe doing so (link in my name).

He died in May 2008 just shy of his 92nd birthday.

Neither he nor my uncles (my mother's brothers fought as well; one of them was in the D-Day landing) every bragged about "fighting the Nazis." They pretty much didn't want to talk about it.

"Five bills, thousands of pages, "as it says on page 346, paragraph 3, subsection D." No one knows what will be passed, what will make its way through House-Senate "conference." ...

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Yeah, I've been reading through most of it.

HR 676 is 30 pages long.

Single Payer. Yeah, I know, we can't have that. Because it won't be "perfect."

(But really because it won't permit obscene profitabilty-as-usual)

Come on over (link in my name). Comment.

But, I'm not really "on the left." I'm far more interested in the empirical than the ideological.

H.R. 3200, as it stands today, looks to me simply like a corporate welfare bill and an outright "welfare" bill (the latter needed to support the former).

Of course, we've yet to see what the Senate will come up with.

The people who are asking questions at town hall meeting are getting answers, when they finally allow the senators to speak.

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Yeah, LOL.

I watched almost all of Specter's Town Hall yesterday. At one point he tries to calm this questioner by saying "Look, there's no bill yet. There have been 5 or 6 House committees working on it, but there's no bill yet..."

Whereupon he goes on to mention HR3200, almost as an aside, while saying that the Senate has yet to proffer a bill (not entirely true either, there is in fact an unnumbered Senate draft).

Then. later in the Q&A he goes on to assert this & that about what IS and IS NOT in the "plan."

Everyone is pretty much talking out the ass here.

This shit is startin' to give me a headache.