What hope is there for us if America is driven to the brink of meltdown?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/17/obama-america-economic-meltdown-murdoch

There has always been this fundamentalist strand in US life, but what has inflamed it over the last decade is a twofold process – a wrong-headed understanding of why US economic pre-eminence is being challenged, closely linked to the breakdown of a public realm in which ideas are discussed, traded and exchanged in a climate which respects argument. The abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which required all broadcasters fairly to represent all points of view, has created a mass media shouting, ranting, sloganising and overwhelmingly from the political right.

The leader in the charge is Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, a TV channel with an audience of 100 million in which all news and comment have to be shoehorned – subtly in its news operation and overtly in its commentary – into a conservative worldview. It operates, as the former White House communications director Anita Dunn has said, "as either the research or communications arm of the Republican party". Leading Republican stars such as Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin are on its payroll. Its political shows pull no punches: the hosts are hard-line Republicans. If Fox News were to permit the case for tax increases to be fairly reported or discussed it would not be doing its job. Murdoch, refusing in a Fox News interview last week even to discuss the News of the World, would be displeased.

...totally selfish, without intelligence and devoid of reason.

"The inmates are running the asylum" is no joke.

And I ain't talking about republican dumbasses in Texas; more like New England going it's own way.

...no longer find common ground nor tolerate the very fibre of the other's being, they split up. If the hate from both sides keeps going along, lead by the insightful smart asses on TV shows with their righteous indignation, I see no reason why we wouldn't or shouldn't split. Why live with people you hate? Living in constant hatred of "those people" is no way to live. Maybe they can go their own way and have all the oil and nukes, we'll take the wind farms and hydro damns. We get all the immigrants, they can close their borders. Prius's and Leafs for us, F350's and V-8 Chargers for them. They can have the beef, and we can get the veggies. We'll get all the weed, and they can have all the guns. Win-Win... OK, probably not. I don't think it's quite that black and white. :sarcasm: I think we'd fight over all that stuff, but for different reasons.

"a wide refocusing of the mechanisms of our society towards the crucial obsession of oligarchs: wealth and income defense."

- Mike Konczal



http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/the-political-economy-of-the-lesser-depression/

to correcting so many problems in the US

The number of people walking around without a clue is astonishing