There is a very simple answer for these questions. The answer to all of them is “conservatives.”
Why would anyone oppose national healthcare?
Why are top chief executives paid 300 to 400 times as much as an average employee?
Why do two-thirds of American college students finish in the red, some owing $100,000 or more?
Why do 1 in 3 children lives in poverty?
Why were the multitrillion-dollar wars of Presidents George W. Bush and Obama fought on a credit card, to be paid off by the kids?
Why can’t you shut down that concentration camp in Cuba?
Why can’t you stop interfering with women’s healthcare?
What is it about science and climate change you can’t understand?
Why do you send your military all over the world to stir up trouble for all of us?
Of course, once you understand that the answer to all those questions is “conservatives,” it invites the follow-on question, “Why do you have so many of them?”
And I suppose the simplest answer to that is that we were founded as a colonialist slave-powered penal colony where the only decent people were still religious fanatics.
We must have done something right, though. After all, you complain a lot but you’re mainly content to leave all the heavy lifting to us.
This isn’t really the full answer, or course. Thanks to the corrosive and virtually unregulated power of Big Money (sanctioned by a Supreme Court that never sees a problem with its influence in politics) we are devolving back to the Social Darwinism of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. It wasn’t like this even in Nixon’s time. But stand tall, and proud. Only in America!
Aww shucks BooMan, even the religious fanatics in places like New England were bastards from the get go. Mr. Wiki reminds us:
The Pequot War was an armed conflict between the Pequot tribe and an alliance of the English colonists of the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Saybrook colonies and their Native American allies (the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes) which occurred between 1634 and 1638. The Pequots lost the war. At the end, about seven hundred Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity.[1] Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery to the West Indies.[2] Other survivors were dispersed. The result was the elimination of the Pequot as a viable polity in what is present-day Southern New England.
It would take the Pequot more than three and a half centuries to regain political and economic power in their traditional homeland along the Pequot (present-day Thames) and Mystic rivers in what is now southeastern Connecticut.[3]
Thank you for linking to that article, which was a well written “step back and take a look at the big picture” from someone who doesn’t live in the US but is still very aware of its legacy and problems. It’s very seldom that we see that in the “media”.
It’s not that we have so many conservatives. It’s that we have so few of the remaining population willing to oppose their ranting and intimidation. Look at what has happened to so many Thanksgiving dinners with Fox-watching parents or other relatives. Look at the silence in the workplace as the conservative loudmouths are allowed to rant under cover of the boss. Look at how forceful and determined conservatives have vitiated mainline church congregations.
Did William Butler Yeats not describe the situation a century ago?
Conservatives are the “how”.
Greed is the “why”.
I have a friend in Finland who is a very intelligent guy. He has done a lot of international travel, including the US. I am always interested in hearing his perspective on the States.
He is appalled by the gun violence. He has military experience and he is a hunter and he’s amazed by the number of gun related deaths here.
Another thing that is vastly different in their country is the tax structure. Finland has good medical insurance, excellent schools, and college is free. These things are supported by a 32% tax rate on citizens. We pay about 11%. Imagine asking the American public to pay triple their tax dollars!
But the United States is a melting pot, not the relatively “monochromatic” population of Finland, and of course the size of our country vs theirs is huge. The comparisons are apples and oranges in many respects, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from other countries.
I sometimes get overwhelmed by the problems in this country, but I’m still glad to live here. I just have to make my voice heard and keep moving forward.
Its also the size of the entire EU. While we share many things just consider the differences between how Booman sees assholes with his east coast eyes and how I tend to being from the upper Midwest. If say Mississippi bans abortions the effects on me in Minnesota are negligable.
The public would oppose a tripling of income tax rates, but wouldn’t notice a gradual rise in corporate taxes.
If they thought about it, most wouldn’t oppose the tripling if it meant free health care and free education. Including long term care, nursing homes and LTC insurance are a crime in this country. A friend of mine is 80 years old and is paying $900 every two weeks for LTCI equal to his take home pay. He is literally working to pay the future nursing home. my wife and i considered this carefully and soberly decided on a suicide pact before we would let one of Rauner’s abusive nursing homes steal our daughter’s/grandson’s inheritance.
Barely literate bare-footed rubes drunk on Ambien, Prozac, Viagra and crotch-shots on Fox Kool-Aid blindly following a charismatic “leader” to extinction, dragging the rest of us with them. A clear and present danger to my grandchildren’s survival. That, changes everything.
We have reached a point of statistical ivevitibility, the model no longer sustainable, the now hollow perpetual motion machine will as it is bound by the laws of nature fail. Something, has to change.
I’ve no concerns about the Revolution, I’ve concerns about after…
Difficult not to be depressed about the reality of the situation.
Remedy: education, education, education.
Also, to keep in mind, Norway wasn’t always Norway itself.
Just difficult to deal with what the “Reagan Revolution” has squandered in terms of most ppl’s options in order to benefit the Kochs etc.
Just ran into a beautiful piece on the role of nonviolence (who knew?) in breaking the political monopoly of the one percent and bringing working class interests into the power structure in Sweden and Norway in the 1920s and 1930s
fascinating, thanks for link!
There is a very simple answer for these questions. The answer to all of them is BLACK PEOPLE.
straight up. no chaser.
And fjords. Can’t forget the fjords. </sarcasm>
“Why do you have so many of them?”
I would dare to say a polluted environment has helped to produce this problem. By infecting a large portion of the world’s population with a form of insanity that is called CONSERVATISM!!
No, it’s the lasting legacy of the Civil war, which never really ended.
It’s the bloody Scots-Irish! You read that section of Albion’s Seed, and it’s like, “I know these people!” Aggressive, xenophobic, superstitious–barbarians, really. And guess where they settled?
Although, fortunately, your description is a bit one-sided. The Quakers, at least, were more menschlich than a lot of the other colonists, what with being nonviolent and reasonably egalitarian, and willing to live peacefully with other cultures. That spirit is still with us, too, even if we haven’t pacified the fucking barbarians yet.
Norway does not have a large evangelical population pushing for an war in the middle east. You know, end of times, not get left behind, get into heaven. This creates all that stuff on your list….as there exists no vision for the future beyond going to heaven and enables the greedy to accumulate/hoard money.
“After all, you complain a lot but you’re mainly content to leave all the heavy lifting to us. “
I find that statement quite offensive