Just saying, I think Jody has a point.

"Yes, Miss Festive."

but i think you'd have to do some kind of end run around how americans vote.

and the basic corruption of representatives when they do get elected.

marmar has thread up in good reads about how if we want change -- we have to build a real Left.

i agree -- but would also note that seems from this vantage point to be almost impossible.

So it becomes a matter of consciousness raising, but you still have to talk about government, for consciousness raising, and government is where any future solution will be enacted, made into law and enforced or flouted, same as today. So I think we have two different sides of the same problem, and we neglect either side at our peril. In a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people", you see that the people have to be big players, but then they are players in the government.

And I have to say, looking back over my lifetime. we've had some good success with this consciousness raising stuff, we're far from done, but we've come a long way from what I remember too.

We have made some Progress in consciousness.

But things are seeming precarious right now.

My primary motive to protect my health these days is so I can see how this all comes out, and I just might live long enough, the way things are going.

The corporations stand as paragons of virtue in your universe?

The people behind the corruption of government?

The people who peddle GW denial, all forms of deregulation and corporate and bank bailouts, and who just generally behave like gangsters in the schoolyard, these people re not corrupt?

Where is your head?

Corruption is the "effect".

What you address is the "cause".

If the corporations were not corrupt--or were at least restrained in the range of their corruption--then We the People would be able to clean up the government.

Anyway, I think we're engaging in some rather pointless debate here. The fact is that most of our major social and economic institutions have become massively corrupt, and we seem to lack effective institutional means to do much about it.

just as many unemployed have given up looking for a job.

How much longer before enough people have simply given up and what happens then to the grand experiment in government called the United States?

I view re-electing Obama as a way of buying a little more time for the planet. That's a little more time for us to find non-institutional means. Like maybe some sort of massive cultural transformation. Such things have happened in the past, and are well documented in both the anthropological and historical literature.

I look to things like the spirit of Madison 2011, and that of the Occupy movement, as carrying the seeds of change.

Interesting thought.

I take your point.

crimes and go to prison....