President, Inc.

[mcbartko]

Yesterday's news about the Supreme Court overturning previous rulings on corporate campaign financing really scares me. The fact that corporations can now freely spend as much as they wish on campaign advertisements is alarming and a wake-up call to the people of this country: YOUR vote is in jeopardy. Regardless of whether you're a Republican,

Comments

[mizukaze]

I'm kind of "meh" about the whole thing. We've been in decline as a society (I place a lot of the blame on the education system and the parenting that goes/went with it) for a long time, and right now we're in the "suck out as much as you can for you and yours from the dying old man" phase of the Republic. Eventually we hit our Julius Caesar moment, and cross over into full-fledged Empire, or we dissipate to some extent, whether that actually means a breakup of the country or not, it definitely means some substantial decline.

A big problem is that while everyone bemoans the death of manufacturing, and how that leaves people jobless and beholden to megacorporations, etc, etc, the thing even more than "free trade" and "globalization" that hurts the prospects for unskilled, uneducated Americans is the fact that a computer or robot can do an enormous number of the jobs that used to require a human, of however low raw intelligence; consequently, we may not see a big rebound in employment numbers... possibly ever, especially since our population is barely, just barely growing, and much of that is through immigration not of skilled laborers, but of ones who compete out the "native-born" workers.

Democracy in the US has been a joke for a long time, the more I look at it, but that's kind of inevitable, it seems to be a built-in weakness of long-running democracies. Eventually they become what amounts to an oligarchy, or a state run by an aristocracy. I know I'm not going to have a place with those people barring some miraculous connection-building I don't foresee, but I can accept that development, largely because a violent revolution of the sort that would be required to make any real change to the system would require a populace to be widely outraged and to have an understanding of what's actually at stake for them in terms of their essentially becoming consumer-serfs, with unrecognizably controlled lives a la Brave New World minus the automated birth process.

That's my kind of sloppy analysis of it. I guess as I've gotten older, and seen what people are "really" like, I have little capacity to get upset about much of anything in terms of the development of civilizations, largely because it just numbs you when you look at humans on a timescale longer than your lifetime. There's nothing you can do about it without becoming a target for the powers-that-be, and at the moment, the powers-that-be are the most able in the history of humanity to secure their own power indefinitely, and with the cooperation and ignorant assent of the governed. It's kind of sad, but to me, for the present, not worth getting upset over.

/my two cents