The Decay of An Educated Electorate

Contributed by Jersey McJones;

Let's take a look at what's wrong with America and how that precludes the developement of an educated electorate...

It is the gradual social and infrastructural decay brought on by the sleazy corporate media entertainment sector, the dumbing down of the American body politic by that same sleazy corporate media thanks to Reagan's evil destruction of the Fairness Doctrine on the PUBLIC AIRWAVES that have amounted to 24 hour free advertising for the GOP for a generation, the stagnant wages spanning an entire generation brought about by Reagan and Greenspan and their "inflation control", the reactionary Young Turk movement of the Religious Right (historically a sure sign of the demise of empire), the ever growing disparity of wealth as exemplified perfectly by the walled cities of the

West Coast and maintained by the cap on the payroll tax which also is destroying SSI, a "progressive" tax system so laden with loop holes and layers the top income earners only pay 27% in total taxes while the bottom 60% pay 40%, a healthcare system that even Cuba's is superior to that is the joke of the developed world and kills our competitiveness with ridiculous overhead because the filthy rich are heavily vested in the insurance industry (re: Investment Brokerages) and pharmacuetical industries (re: Advertisers for drugs invented at the US taxpayor's and tuition payor's expense in our universities), the sick devotion to the individual self above all other things leading to a generation of children with "ADD" (re: MTV) broken homes and mass depression, the flawed head-count based Electoral College (re: the census) that put's dingbats from states like Wyoming in the halls of power, 2 year terms for representatives that essentially require endless democracy-pandering campaigning over careful law-making, the looting of Social Security beginning under Carter and played out by every "president" since, draconian drug laws designed to eradicate entire social classes for the sake of racism resulting in a virtual police state that does everything but protect the public from anything that could actually harm them (good job on DUI prevention, though), local school systems that are all exactly alike and all suck instead of regional systems with a variety of school types, a university system that is so expensive people can not be educated in anything but law and medicine if they ever hope to be able to pay back the ludicrous loans, the destruction of the labor sector (see above: stagnant wages) both directly and because of overhead (see Insurance) and "free trade" that is only free to everyone else, the Young Earth Creationist movement and it's ties to Home-Schooling which will undoubtedly lead to a country filled to the brim with poor and uneducated Branch Davidian-types, trade policy akin to running America like a bordello that rapes the poorest and most vulnerable nations through agro commodity dumping, the death of the Line Item Veto, Clarence Thomas (enough said there alone!), the raping of the people's national forests for lumber (under the guise of "fire control") and mining and oil interests, regulatory infrastructure that puts Martha Stewart in prison but can't do a damned thing about Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay, the abandonment of the Antitrust laws by the FCC and other regulatory bodies leading to the monopolization of cable television and radio and television and music production and computers and a cadre of other sectors leading to a artistic culture akin to Nero's Rome, a military industrial complex that sucks off 20% of our GDP and forces us to ill-thought-out wars just for the sake of it...

Oosh... I'm out of breath... Anybody?