Burn the Fucking System to the Ground (2013)
popehat.com
popehat.com
My own tired example "half of the fraud" is fiscal management: one-half focus only on income (via raising taxes) and the others on cutting expenses. No successful family or company does fiscal management this way. It's both sides, and it's even deeper than that: usually we need to re-assess the priorities which underpin expenses and taxing strategies. And fix those too. Heck, the GOP has even given up on talking the talk. Not even that is around anymore.
Like other commenters here outrage isn't an answer. Yes, it's the present currency for talking heads on TV and crap talkers on the radio. Like a Woody Allen movie without the humor or intellect or pretense of trying, each side tries extract more outrage, more anger, and to guilt the other side into change. It's stupid. As one corporate owner put it (paraphrasing) Americans prefer to be entertained than to deal better with the truth. So we play into this.
Why outrage? Because we have no agency in the present. We gotta fix that.
MLK had two easy outs: give up beating a dead horse, and open a barber shop or preach. Or payback. He, thankfully, chose the middle course. The middle course in America will travel through both political parties re-examining their political planks, since without them, they are lobbying fodder.
--------------------------------------------------------
The leftists and the rightists each see half of the fraud. The lefties correctly note that a poor kid caught with cocaine goes to jail, while a Bush can write it off as a youthful mistake (they somehow overlook the fact that their man Barrack hasn't granted clemency to any one of the people doing federal time for the same felonies he committed). The righties note that government subsidized windmills kill protected eagles with impunity while Joe Sixpack would be deep in the crap if he even picked up a dead eagle from the side of the road. The lefties note that no one was prosecuted over the financial meltdown. The righties note that the Obama administration rewrote bankruptcy law on the fly to loot value from GM stockholders and hand it to the unions. The lefties note that Republicans tweak export rules to give big corporations subsidies. Every now and then both sides join together to note that, hey! the government is spying on every one of us…or that, hey! the government stole a bunch of people's houses and gave them to Pfizer, because a privately owned for-profit corporation is apparently what the Constitution means by "public use".
I certainly remember Clark stepping way over the line more than a few times. It got pretty gross.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of classism, but in my experience whenever I ask people what concrete changes they would support (in the old system or the new), they are at a loss. This is disappointing to me because it seems pretty trivial to come up with dozens of great changes (e.g. judges being blind to the class of the person they are sentencing, or perhaps juries, etc...). Then most interestingly of all, the people who seemed so angry about these problems seem deflated/annoyed by the suggestion of solutions rather than energized and aligned.
That being said, rage is probably not the least appropriate emotional response to the learned helplessness of being a cog in the belly of a great political, social, and economic machine. At least it means they're kind of paying attention.
The founders basically knew they were delivering a MVP with some expectation it won't be perfect. Hence the large number of early Constitutional amendments. Jefferson was famously keen on having the whole thing tossed out every 25 years. In a way, he anticipated the gradual loss of product-market fit long before it was a term.
At some point, the US government became the entrenched legacy system. We can look at other countries and see they have modern shiny features like ranked-choice voting and being able to respond to crises in an integrated manner, but everyone is too afraid to break the existing system.
I wonder if we could apply what we know from engineering and software development lifecycles to political process. I could imagine reorganizing the US as an EU style relationship of three or four sub-nations, who have a permanent movement/trade/currency/foreign policy union, but can each run on different constitutions and nuts-and-bolts government structures. Instead of the protective mechanism of making constitutional change expensive and difficult, we can use the sub-nations as test branches, making changes liberally, with the understanding that the successful changes will be propagated to the rest of the country.