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Originally Posted by host
I could not disagree with you more, and I can make a reasonable case to support my contrary opinion:
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You've misunderstood me. I'm not saying there aren't rich and powerful people who wish to maintain their wealth and status, I'm saying they're nothing new, nothing interesting, and as evidenced by Gen. Butler, there are always people who resist.
There is nothing special about the Business plot, it's predecessors are riddled throughout history in every family, tribe, and country since time immemorial. From your posting I'd say your view of society is too narrow and short-term. How much do you know about the history of the world? It's been 230 years since our nation was founded (the first time!). When our vaunted Constitution was written, we codified the worth of a slave as 3/5 of a man and the disenfranchisement of women. It's been 90 years since women won suffrage and 44 years since all citizens were finally ensured their right to vote. What more basic a right is there in a representative republic than the right to vote, and 81% of our history had at least some form of legal disenfranchisement. Change comes slowly, from the bottom up, and we're just starting to get the basics right.
The rich have always had undue influence, have often caused the suffering of hundreds, thousands, even millions in the course of their pursuits. The industrial revolution gave rise to far greater concentrations of money and power in the merchant class, but they're just people, and their reigns are by structure ephemeral.
It's a miracle of our age that so much information is available to the working class. It's driving our governments to behave more ethically, and when they fail, at least in the western world, we have at our disposal orderly revolutions to usurp failed leaders. Now that the merchant class has grown to be more powerful, and proportionally less responsible to it's counterparts in society, we've started to push, from the bottom up, to restrain and correct that imbalance. We've only been at this struggle for 150 years, and won some major battles along the way (unions, Sherman Act, etc.).
It's been less than 100 years since we had a global pandemic. The spread of AIDS, though urgent in it's need for attention, pales in comparison to the Spanish flu. Literacy and suffrage has never been higher in the world. Every single health indicator since we began recording these statistics has risen steadily. We have a (mostly) neutral world diplomacy organization for crissakes.
I'm not saying there are no problems, or that they shouldn't be confronted aggressively. I'm saying we
are confronting the social, economic, and political problems of the world as aggressively as is reasonably possible. When we read about the Business Plot, or Enron, or Duke Cunningham, or Alberto Gonzales it should cause outrage, it should heighten our vigilance, but don't go looking for the core of the problem. The core of the problem is evident and intractable: It's humanity, in all our imperfection, failing ourselves and each other. The core of the problem can't be solved, so we must work, in the system, to improve the system. To eliminate, to the best of our ability, user error. Once we've done everything, once all solutions have been implemented, if the system still fails, that's when we change things. To do so before hand is impetuous and cruel.
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Originally Posted by host
I am trying to convey to you that I am not privy to exactly who calls the shots and what the agenda is, but I can post with a high level of confidence, and back it up....that the political dynamic in the US is not what you think it is, and the problems you perceive, (trial lawyers, and muslim extremists, for example) are the distractions, not the problems.
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Again, you're too narrow and temporary in your analysis. What you're describing is demagoguery, and yes, it works, sadly, on a great swathe of the populace. You're perceiving the lie, and you're sensing who manipulates that lie, industrialists and politicians, but you're missing the point of demagoguery. People always need someone to blame. Politicians seize that fear and anger to garner votes. Merchants seize that fear and anger to sell their goods. You're doing no different, you're just demagoguing demagogists (demagoguerists?). Fear-monger the fear mongers. That's how Obama's winning, that's where Ron Paul's support came from, that's how politics works. The system works independently of demagoguery, and the better the demagogue, the less you notice the system working.