America, can the system be fixed?

[Klingers]

I'll preface this by saying as an Australian I'm on the outside looking in... But I actually do care about America because of shared values, histories and the fact that the only good TV we get here is American.

The core problem I see with American society today is the enforcement and expansion of rights given to corporations and merchant banks while the rights of average citizens to self-determination, privacy and quality of life are being eroded and encroached upon. No one knows enough to cry fowl on this and fight back.

Who even runs the show anymore? Stupid selfish and greedy bankers and corporate executives run giant companies that don't even have real owners anymore now. Most of those companies' shares are traded in milisecond intervals by giant server farms running day trading algorithms.

Everything is ultra-short-term profit and protection of the monopoly. Which new market can we deregulate to bleed dry and cripple? Who can we lobby to make life harder for legitimate consumers so we can protect our now-inferior business model in favor of a better option? Which sand-ridden dirthole can we invade and carpet-bomb so we can award reconstruction and private security contracts to our buddys?

But you know, it's all OK. We'll just keep printing money and selling government bonds to the Chinese... Because that works indefinitely, doesn't it?

As for liberalism, small government etc, what's the line on that? Personally I think that the same arguments people make for laws that support small business unfortunately also let your Walmarts and Amazons roll into town and use their buying power to price you out of business. Is some level of regulation needed to level the playing field, or do you want your entire economy eventually dominated by five companies that employee everyone, dictate government policy on wages and effectively move the entire middle class into perpetual indentured servitude?

Is this something that bothers people in America itself? Is there general awareness of Just How Screwed You Are™, or do most people either disbelieve this or shake it off? Generally interested to know. Can America be fixed long-term?

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Can it be fixed? Yes.

Will it be fixed? No. There is too much profit to be made with the system as it is.

[Imadraenei]

I generally think everyone exaggerates everything here, we're a country full of Chicken Littles, but many who will post in this thread disagree. The problem isn't the system itself, it's the people that keep getting voted in (and, therefore, the voters themselves).

[TEHPALLYTANK]

We hide under the sheets of ignorance and disbelief from the corporation(s) about to jump into bed with us. If we pretend it isn't there enough then we think it isn't there and go on with our daily lives. I want to expand on this analogy but it will only go downhill...

[bellabulldog]

I generally think everyone exaggerates everything here, we're a country full of Chicken Littles, but many who will post in this thread disagree. The problem isn't the system itself, it's the people that keep getting voted in (and, therefore, the voters themselves).

The American people are to blame and should be held liable for treason for the poor stewardship of the nation.

Nothing can be done. The virulence of corruption is too great in my nation and nothing but collapse will purge it.

[Feardotwin]

Hello, in it's current state dispite the massive part on borrowing against our dollar. If the world currency changes from the dollar. The U.S. cannot print more money. In doing so, we will suffer greatly from this atrocious deficit never seen sine the 1930's. And, anyone who denies this possibility is truly ignorant and misinformed. The numbers the government are giving out on stats. Are wrong or misconstrued.

As is right now happening. The euro is being rejected, a new currency rolls in. But with consequences. We as Americans will suffer great consequences regardless or a currency dump or not.

The AAA+ country status is being degraded. So countries are fleeing the dollar. And choosing commodities instead. In doing so, from devaluating the dollar ourselves by overprinting. And this flight. The state of the country falls 2 fold.

The United States of America is in a dark part of it's history, and it only just begun.


P.S. before you reject and spout BS. Do your homework from unbiased affiliations and come party with a big boy. Get out the dirt.

[Dazzy]

It can but won't be anytime soon.

Tax everyone.
No tax breaks for outsourcing jobs.
Get corporations and religious groups out of the pockets of elected officials.
Elect a president that actually cares about making it a better place, instead of trying to get re-elected from day 1 of his first term.
Set term limits to 1 on congress/senate seats unless there is a balanced budget (I guarantee it would motivate them).

[Feardotwin]

It can but won't be anytime soon.

Tax everyone.
No tax breaks for outsourcing jobs.
Get corporations and religious groups out of the pockets of elected officials.
Elect a president that actually cares about making it a better place, instead of trying to get re-elected from day 1 of his first term.
Set term limits to 1 on congress/senate seats unless there is a balanced budget (I guarantee it would motivate them).

Regardless of overtaxing the American people even at 100% it cannot resolve the problem, hence unfixable. Next?

[Name Not Available]

^ Pretty much this, also I've always been skeptical on term limits, but that'd be going off-topic.
Staying on-topic things will likely stay the same until the current congress members die off (I'm not encouraging assassination or anything) or we immediately replace them with some new blood, its the same old people in office, catering to their special interest groups and own agendas, not the American people. If anyone pays attention to the news, you'll see how much money is raised for each candidate and where it come's from ( and I'm willing to bet it's not out of the goodness of the donors' hearts).

[Merie]

I believe that someone somewhere has the solutions for America's problems. But whoever that person is, he or she is not running for president. Even if they were, and even if they won, it still wouldn't matter. By the time they got that "solution" through Congress, it would be so stretched, squashed, warped and watered down before it got the votes it needed to pass that it would scarcely resemble what it was to begin with. But even if one could get such legislation through unaltered, it STILL would not matter. As the opposing party would spend millions on propaganda ad campaigns to turn public opinion against it and do everything under the sun to set the stage for failure. Their work complete, they would then leverage that engineered failure into a political win to leech off more votes for their party the next go around, the tables turn and wash/rinse/repeat.

America is doomed. Not today, not tomorrow. Not ten years from now. But in coming decades the heart and resolve it's citizens have will be lost as their voice and jobs evaporate. Though the country may "persist", much of what gave it's citizens hope and compassion will have been gradually eroded away.

[Audivi Vocem]

Burn it down, give everyone a pitchfork, start over.

[Violent]

But you know, it's all OK. We'll just keep printing money and selling government bonds to the Chinese... Because that works indefinitely, doesn't it?

Until it comes time to call in a favor.

OT: I don't think it can be fixed because so many, don't see a problem and/or just ignore it because "they" have it good. As you mentioned American TV... There's hundreds of movies about the rich man being clueless to the problems then thrown into the gutter, now suddenly, he wants to get back up and fix it all.. I know this isn't the movies but that shit hits a point.. "They" don't care because it isn't affecting them yet. And "They" are clueless, because it will someday, and the higher "they" get the further "they'll" fall. Along with the rest of us.

[Feardotwin]

Burn it down, give everyone a pitchfork, start over.

Hahahaha QFT

Good one. Unfortunately U.S. is too powerful for that like Russia. We cannot overthrow the government.

Even though its stated in a document that "If the government does not provide and fulfill the wishes of every man, it shall be removed" something like that. It was speaking about the USA.

[wvx]

I generally think everyone exaggerates everything here, we're a country full of Chicken Littles, but many who will post in this thread disagree. The problem isn't the system itself, it's the people that keep getting voted in (and, therefore, the voters themselves).

Well , I don't know how it is in your country , but unfortunately in my country , the worst thing is that the persons you can vote are just some corrupt , useless pricks who don't know anything about how to help the country evolve , they only care about 2 things :
1 - Bribes ;
2 - What else they can steal/sell (for bribes) .
Now at the next president vote I can chose mainly between 2 people , 1 is a puppet of some old moneyhungry persons and the other one is a complete useless "man" that each time that he speaks you wonder what stupid stuff he will say .

[Name Not Available]

It can, it wont be anytime soon, but it can, it's all essentially a big problem that needs to be taken care of bit by bit, starting with some of the below, but ya, many don't see the problem or care as it doesn't affect them, and that's the basic mentality of people until people develop their own opinion and stop letting the media brainwash them and do something about the status quo, we'll be in this situation for a while.

Tax everyone.
No tax breaks for outsourcing jobs.
Get corporations and religious groups out of the pockets of elected officials.
Elect a president that actually cares about making it a better place, instead of trying to get re-elected from day 1 of his first term.
Set term limits to 1 on congress/senate seats unless there is a balanced budget (I guarantee it would motivate them).

[Klingers]

Hello, in it's current state dispite the massive part on borrowing against our dollar. If the world currency changes from the dollar. The U.S. cannot print more money. In doing so, we will suffer greatly from this atrocious deficit never seen sine the 1930's. And, anyone who denies this possibility is truly ignorant and misinformed. The numbers the government are giving out on stats. Are wrong or misconstrued.

Merchant banks, companies like Halliburton, your nation-wide big-box retailers, tech giants. Aren't much different than good ol' Roman Emporter Nero Claudius Caesar from 54AD to 68AD.

See, what Nero did is that he order built a freaking giant palace for himself on the ground that the Colloseum now sits. Nero basically levied crippling taxes against the entire length and width of the Roman empire to pay for his own phallace-compensator of a palace. Eventually what he was doing proved so fundamentally unsustainable that the Roman senate was forced to pull him off the throne and execute him or face the anger of the Roman populace.

What we see today is no different. Goldman Sachs and their cronies engineered the housing bubble, the dot-com boom, deregulated commodity futures and countless other very clever and catastrophically destructive little booms so they could hoover up your money.

We don't need to go into a long discussion about Halliburton and Cheny et al.

Your Walmarts and Best Buys roll into town and use unsurmountable buying power to push your friend's small business out the door. They just can't compete. It's not a matter of competition, it's like having Michael Jordan smashing the crap out of your kids in a peewee basketball league.

If you have a new tech idea these days create a marketable product, you'll either get a crushing buyout offer from Google or Apple, you'll get your idea stolen by Zynga and then lost in the white-noise of their vastly larger user-base, or you'll get the lobbyists out in force to regulate in favor of an entrenched player.

Either way, all that money gets hoovered back into giant server farms where it flys around as ones and zeroes as day trading algorithms work for merchant banks and investment funds to trade ownership of corporations at such a pace that you can never define a real "owner".

The people currently running your country are these guys' best buddies. Ex-coleagues in office or lobby firms on retainer. You as an everyman don't get a say. Unfortunately there'll never be a Nero to drag to the gallows because it's so decentralised. The system itself needs a scorched-earth policy.

[Mormigil]

America isn't in as bad of a situation as is often portrayed. I think that the main problem with the economy currently and ever since 2008 is an overvaluing of what goods were worth. Prices like in the housing market were in my opinion artificially inflated, people talk about the bubble and I think they generally make a good point. The problem with this is that the government works to keep the economy moving forward even if it was moving too fast, so we suffer prolonged slow growth as the actual economy catches up. Now this is a gross oversimplification, and certainly not a conclusive answer but I think it explains our problems on a broad level somewhat well.

I also dislike all the talk of deficit being a problem because its not as big of a problem as the economic situation. No one complained so much about deficit before and it seems to be much more of a political topic. It is entirely normal for the government to spend more during recessions since that is the only acceptable aid that governments can give. The other option is to let the economy contract and slowly correct it as was done during the 70's and 80's to fix stagflation. However correcting inflation is something that we certainly don't need to do right now. We would much rather inflation go up a little to get things moving.

Anyway enough economics talk, the other problems are obviously things like political gridlock. I think that these problems come from rapid changes in society. New techniques to winning campaigns and easier ways to reach people outpace the political world which grinds slowly on despite the whole world moving faster. I think they will stay bad until we can have larger infrastructure changes that fix the problem, but those may not ever come. Regardless, I expect technological advances to start fixing our problems more than the government and maybe one day provide adequate tools for the government to do a good job in the modern world instead of just doing whatever they think is best.

---------- Post added 2012-07-24 at 12:13 AM ----------

Clearly most tech companies are not as vicious as you claim. The rise and fall of tech companies is how the modern world works. Apple, Google, and Microsoft may be the most constant players, but obviously a new huge player like Facebook can enter the market. Also the idea that large retail crushing small business is inherently bad doesn't really make that much sense. The large retail successfully charges lower prices for similar products they are able to mass produce and help their customers make better purchases. Sure its nice to have small local stores, but clearly that is a niche market that isn't as driven by actual prices. Also as Amazon becomes more successful and in general shopping moves online retail stores will lose their place to the company that can make it cheaper.[COLOR="red"]

[Shadee]

Only the strong survive (see evolution). Capitalism is working as intended, stop expecting handouts imo.

[oblivionx]

The question of America, can the system be fixed implies that it's broken.

There are refinements to be made, but America isn't broken.

[Dbone]

Merchant banks, companies like Halliburton, your nation-wide big-box retailers, tech giants. Aren't much different than good ol' Roman Emporter Nero Claudius Caesar from 54AD to 68AD.

See, what Nero did is that he order built a freaking giant palace for himself on the ground that the Colloseum now sits. Nero basically levied crippling taxes against the entire length and width of the Roman empire to pay for his own phallace-compensator of a palace. Eventually what he was doing proved so fundamentally unsustainable that the Roman senate was forced to pull him off the throne and execute him or face the anger of the Roman populace.

What we see today is no different. Goldman Sachs and their cronies engineered the housing bubble, the dot-com boom, deregulated commodity futures and countless other very clever and catastrophically destructive little booms so they could hoover up your money.

We don't need to go into a long discussion about Halliburton and Cheny et al.

Your Walmarts and Best Buys roll into town and use unsurmountable buying power to push your friend's small business out the door. They just can't compete. It's not a matter of competition, it's like having Michael Jordan smashing the crap out of your kids in a peewee basketball league.

If you have a new tech idea these days create a marketable product, you'll either get a crushing buyout offer from Google or Apple, you'll get your idea stolen by Zynga and then lost in the white-noise of their vastly larger user-base, or you'll get the lobbyists out in force to regulate in favor of an entrenched player.

Either way, all that money gets hoovered back into giant server farms where it flys around as ones and zeroes as day trading algorithms work for merchant banks and investment funds to trade ownership of corporations at such a pace that you can never define a real "owner".

The people currently running your country are these guys' best buddies. Ex-coleagues in office or lobby firms on retainer. You as an everyman don't get a say. Unfortunately there'll never be a Nero to drag to the gallows because it's so decentralised. The system itself needs a scorched-earth policy.

Gotta love capitalism.

A walmart comes to town, puts 5 mom and pops out of business... Hires 350 people, saves the entire town time and money... That town now has a walmart - more people start moving there / around there... other businesses open... Oh, poor 5 mom/pops...

The greatest thing about America is that ANYONE can build a business and eventually achieve the success of Walmart... Of course Walmart is a bit unlikely but still possible. It is all up to the individual what they want to do with their lives - and that is what makes it great.