Failed state

I fully intend to take up Melissa's challenge, but before doing so I'd like to talk a bit about the recent senate election in Massachusetts.  In particular, I'd like to mark this as the official end of my commentary on national politics in this blog.  I can find little reason to waste any more time talking about a useless and broken system.

At this point, any reasonable person in America must conclude that we have a non-functioning government.  We have just gone through an entire year where one of the so-called major political parties has wielded a historic majority - a majority that was given to them by the citizens of this country with a clear mandate to make massive changes in the face of great hardship - and yet was unable to pass legislation on THE central issue of their platform.

In the meantime, we've discovered that the only effective grassroots activist organization in the country appears to be a group so divorced from reality that they had no idea their nom de guerre gets regularly used as innuendo for balls-in-the-mouth.  No matter.  The elite classes of America hate them just as much as they hate progressives, and a Congress populated by Scott Browns will ultimately be just as useless as the current set of blowhards.  In a few years, and after many more electoral victories, the Tea Baggers will feel the same deep humilation and embarrassment that many progressives feel now as they realize their elected officals never really intended to represent them.

To top this off, just this morning the Supreme Court brazenly rejected established law and reversed long-standing limits on corporate funding of political campaigns.

Today, at a meeting at the place that very kindly employs me, the general manager - in a discussion related to healthcare - half jokingly referred to the US as a 'failed state'.  Harsh rhetoric, indeed, especially when we usually think of places like Afghanistan and Somalia when this term gets used.  Unfortunately, when considering the major health and poverty issues our country faces that will absolutely never be addressed by our government, I can think of few other descriptions that apply.