Everything that's wrong with this country,...

--- Everything that's wrong with this country,... the USA,... is the result of our failure to put the decision-making process in the hands of the best-intentioned and most capable people. Instead, our political system allows the richest and greediest people to make all significant decisions. Our entire political system is based on their money. And the politicians who accept it do not let them down.

--- Should Big Oil capitalists be making the decisions about syn-fuels and electric cars? Or, for that matter, about elective wars against mideast oil states?

--- Should Wall Street financiers be making decisions about Social Security?

--- Should Big Pharma be writing the laws that govern health care?

--- Should defense & security judgements be made by the wealthy industrialists who build the weapons systems?

--- Should political ideologues be making decisions about scientific issues?

--- Should Constitutional issues be the exclusive province of a like-minded fraternity of rich fascist neocons?

---The phrase "conflict of interest" seems to have lost all meaning, eh? Not one fucking thing happens in this country nowadays without a rich person making a profit from it. Can anyone see the pattern here? The GOP is all about "privatization." The sons of bitches want to privatize water! What does that tell you? (You can't live more than about five days without water.) Did people with the best interests of the American people at heart decide that water ought to be a private enterprise?

--- NO! People who wanted to make a profit from your life & death relationship with the most basic resource made that decision. It would be a deal that would make a mafia loan shark cry.

--- People have to have water. They have to have electricity. They have to have gasoline. They have to have food. These are needs which are too colossal in scope and magnitude to be left up to the fucking "market." Or up to the whims of people who have never known deprivation or wanted for anything. Are we going to let people who spend fifty million dollars on a wedding party also decide how much gas should cost,... or how to ready ourselves for a resource scarcity in the future? No, of course not.

--- We should let smart people make those decisions. People who see the problem and who can contrive solutions in the best interests of ALL the people ----- NOT people who are trying to make a buck off human need and misery. Some things have got to change.

--- And nothing will change until "politics," ... the operation of the government,... is entirely removed from the influence of money. It does not matter how we do it. We could follow the French model of 1789 and execute 17,000 aristocrats. We can move toward the dreaded epithet of "socialism" in government,.. or we can go through a cataclysmic economic event which would necessarily lead to a better system. But we cannot go on this way.

--- The decision-making process has to be returned to the American middle class. And 17,000 isn't such a big number.

:applause: and a recommend!!!

What will change? I keep thinking the event that turns this whole mad world around will be the running out of cheap oil. We will be forced to find a better way. I also wonder if we will destroy our planet and our health before we wake up and make the necessary changes.

if we make it the issue we will win big again.

--- The Big Oil influence in the Iraq war has to be a major issue (Cheney's secret Energy Panel, eh?) And with a little investigation, who knows what may be discovered?

--- Incidentally, it is my personal opinion that Big Oil and their major shareholders should be given a "bill" for the war in Iraq,...... and given no choice but to pay for it. Do you know what I mean by "no choice?"

Privatization might not be the right method but something has to be done about the coming scarcity of water.

until the economy goes to hell.

--- On especially bad days, I feel the same way.