Short Quiz

[johnkarls]

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SHORT QUIZ - Come Home America

1. Is Greider merely providing an optimistic version of what we already studied 16 months ago in Feb 2008 when our topic was - "The Best Government Money Can Buy: Bribery and Extortion" focusing on "The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity" by Norm Scheiber (New Republic Senior Editor) and "Homo Politicus" by Dana Milbank (Washington Post Columnist), both of whom described Washington as a cess pool in which "campaign contributions" (aka bribes) dictate everything that happens, except when the pols turn the tables by "shaking down" the lobbyists for "campaign contributions" (aka extortion)?

2. What makes Greider think for a moment that the citizenry, using such tools as the internet, have the time or interest in taking control of their own democracy?

3. What does our own experience with Drinking Liberally and Reading Liberally tell us with regard to Question 2? For example, of the 332 Living Liberally chapters, how many of them are Reading Liberally chapters that examine issues in any depth?

4. And how many of our members normally respond to our six-degrees-of-separation appeals to contact our elected officials with regard to specific issues and contact their friends/acquaintances in a never-ending chain to do the same (please see, for example, all of the appeals listed on this bulletin board starting with this month's on "Separate BUT UNEQUAL Public Schools" and last month's on "Human Intelligence vs. Surging in Afghanistan From 17,000 U.S. Troops to 70,000 and Beyond")?

5. Where would the citizenry obtain the necessary information to take control of their own democracy?

6. True, the news media is being transformed away from print newspapers and traditional TV network news programs toward bloggers, but doesn't this really mean a major degradation in obtaining news since (a) nobody can afford any longer to maintain a staff of reporters to cover, for example, foreign affairs whereas in the past there was considerable competition among news organizations to provide coverage, and (b) what quality control exists over the content of the bloggers, even the large ones that are able to maintain a staff?

7. The media and academics often decry low voter turnout rates, but would we really want anyone who doesn't even have enough interest in voting to have a voice in our democracy?

8. Is President Obama a good example of the potential for citizens taking control of their government?

9. Will President Obama be able to accomplish much of anything with a Congress whose committees (regardless of which party is in control) are described by Norm Scheiber and Dana Milbank (please see Question 1) as "wholly-owned subsidiaries" of the companies/industries they supposedly oversee?

10. Is Greider's faith in democracy misplaced? After all, U.S. Senators were not popularly elected until 1913 (prior to that they were typically appointed by state governors and/or legislatures), and the Electoral College for electing the U.S. President shares a similar history of distrust by the Founding Fathers of entrusting decisions to mere citizens!

11. In this regard (faith in democracy), and taking as an example one specific policy recommendation that both President Obama and William Greider have made, is it really possible to tax U.S.-based multinational companies to make them behave the way President Obama and William Greider would like to see (specifically, retaining American jobs rather than exporting them to China and India)?

12. Taking another specific policy recommendation that both President Obama and William Greider have made (eliminating American nuclear weapons), how does that ideal square with the "common wisdom" following World War II that that war had been caused by America's isolationism following World War I?

13. With regard to the question of obtaining and properly evaluating information, how is it that nobody has uttered a peep about the decision of Congress to remove several trillion dollars from the U.S. commercial paper market prior to the recent economic collapse? And why is that catastrophic decision papered over by both Congress and the media with the myth that lending to U.S. corporations was primarily done by banks?