The sad state of the US people.

[SlorgNet]

The American people are fine, it's our political and economic system which is fundamentally broken. How broken? Let us count the ways...

1. Trillion dollar Imperial war machine, despite no Cold War enemies - we can't afford this, and military power is useless in 4th generation, 21st century conflicts anyway.

2. Broken health care system - the rich get treatment, the poor die. The US has some of the worst infant mortality and life expectancy indexes of any industrial country - people in Canada live 2 years longer on average than we do. Millions go bankrupt paying medical bills, unlike Canada, Japan or the EU. The US system is stupefyingly expensive - 15% of GDP, far more than Germany (8% GDP). The cost doesn't give us better care, it's waste, drained away by a parasitic insurance and pharmaceutical industry.

3. Broken media system - giant corporations own the media and spin the news, lie us into evil colonial wars, blame poor people instead of the real corporate welfare queens (otherwise known as military-industrial contractors)

4. Broken industrial base - US ruling elites smashed unions, underfunded schools, and offshored factories overseas, forcing the US to run gargantuan trade deficits (i.e. buy products from economies which DID invest in their workers), paid for by huge amounts of debt from China, Japan, Russia, petro-states galore

5. Broken financial system: free market fundamentalists claimed the welfare state was evil and doomed, and everyone would get rich on 401Ks and rising housing prices. Instead, Social Security is rocksolid as ever, while the US middle class is seeing its retirement funds and home value annihilated in the Great Crash

6. Broken social contract: for 35 years, the rich have been getting richer and richer, the poor poorer, and the middle class squeezed - real hourly wages have declined for 70% of non-supervisory workers since 1973 (BLS data). Result: the middle class worked longer hours, went deeper and deeper into debt, to buy homes, pay bills, get medical care, go to college. Wall Street bankers made trillions packaging loans for the middle class, hooking them on debt, while schoolteachers had to scrimp for pennies. Now the whole house of credit cards is collapsing.

The good news is, it looks like the American people are finally waking up to their plight and realizing THINGS DONT NEED TO BE THIS WAY. We can have a different economy, which is fairer for all, but we're going to have to fight for it.