[Growler]

The simplest distillation of the current situation is that nothing is working as may have been initially intended. Education, as tater pointed out, is plainly broken. Social services = broke. Election processes = broke. Accountability of elected officials = broke. Corporate responsibility extends now only to shareholder dividends on a quarterly basis - that's three months. If a retailer isn't reporting double digit sales growth every three months, they're a failure. That kind of growth isn't sustainable; the only way to achieve those kind of profits is to cut other expenses - lower lighting levels at night, fewer on-hand employees, reduced benefits, lower salaries. Eventually, you get what exists today: Salaries too low to pay for people to even live in the communities where they work, or unemployment, creating a strain on social services that could otherwise be more efficient in helping others, ramping up their costs, which leads to calls for tax hikes, ad nauseum.

What's called for is a wholesale revamp of the way this country does business - literally and figuratively. We cannot continue to support a Congress and White House - either party - that is controlled by what the chief "sponsors" tell them to do. They're no longer accountable to the public they allegedly serve; they've become lackeys of special interests on all sides, at all levels. Both parties are experts at spin, making it look like the other guys' sides' fault, while the special interests go marching along with their agendas and benefits.

Meanwhile, we need to see fair wages instituted for workers, and jobs kept in this country. In order to do that, this quarterly profit sharing dividends model bullpucky has to stop. The reason jobs are outsourced is because they're cheaper, which leads to more profits to keep the shareholders happy. We have become a nation ruled by shareholders who, by their power, dictate what they want from business, who then goes to Washington to get what they need to post those profits from Congress, who pays for it all off of taxpayer dollars. That model has to change.

But it won't. We still believe in some dude who created all of the world, to whom we owe our very souls, and who will reward us for being sheep in this life by making us shepherds in the next. So if we can still, after all the advances of society and technology, believe in a middle-ages-serf-control method today, why should the lords change anything about how they work, either?