Yeah, we know.
The anti-intellectualism of the American citizenry is just killing us. They won’t be impressed: they’ll just point to the 13th panel and say, “Haw haw, we can kick your ass.”
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
USA…USA…USA
(Nothing else need be said)
A study by two Princeton University researchers, Martin Gilens & Benjamin Page, released last month, tracked 1800 U.S. policy changes between 1981 & 2002, & compared the outcome with the expressed preferences of median-income Americans, the affluent, business interests, & powerful lobbies. They concluded that average citizens “have little or no independent influence” on policy in the U.S., while the rich & their hires mouthpieces routinely get their way. “The majority does not rule”, they wrote.
What more does one have to say? America is fucked.
And this is why I wish I lived in one of the Nordic Countries. The UK used to be like this on tertiary education and now “my” generation of politicians – who all enjoyed free uni themselves, even the ones who are dripping money – has thoroughly fucked it up, probably for all time to come.
If one of my kids happened to have the good fortune to be able to move to one of them I’d say go.
Yes, we are traveling in Europe right now, and I’m seeing evidence that the USA is being left behind. We’re traveling by train, which is a wonderful thing in Europe. Trains are for the most part fast, comfortable and on-time. We explored some cities by using their undergrounds and then took the sleek fast ones to travel to other countries. Going through the Chunnel from England to France was an experience.
The Europeans take renewable energy very seriously. From our train windows, we saw many wind farms and solar panels on the roofs of apartments, schools, houses, farmhouses, old barns that looked well over 100 years old and even on church roofs. Many farms had alternating fields of crops and solar panels, making us speculate that the governments must be subsidizing them.
We’ve been seeing many clever money and energy saving inventions as we have traveled. We marveled at how people have adapted to living on the water in Venice. From our hotel terrace, I watched as garbage was being loaded onto a boat. A bag split, and some water taxi drivers who were loitering nearby started berating the garbage collectors for polluting the canal. Perhaps Miami should take some notes?
CNN is still primarily news in Europe rather than all of the silly entertainment shows that it broadcasts in the US. I saw a wonderful PSA in Germany that took global warming very seriously and was a message from Mother Earth to her people.
The first statement of the PSA was the scientific age of the Earth. Heads would have spun in the US.
It’s no wonder that the conservatives don’t want middle class Americans to be educated and travel to learn more about the world. More Americans would realize that the US is not so exceptional after all.
They hate us for our freedoms.
Magistramarla, thirty years ago, I moved from Canada to England. England seemed rather backward then. I fairly recently moved back to Canada, & see the situation as reversed now. (But Canada is a lot nicer, & much less crowded, so I’m staying.)
Marcus, did you forget a “snark” comment?
The US has the best government money can buy…
Nah, whenever comparisons are made between the U.S. and more civilized nations come up, my fellow Americans tend to whine about all the terrible, horrible, TAXES people are forced to pay in Europe. As if governments were competing department stores and everyone wants to find the bargain prices even when the merchandise is shoddy, the employees are paid crap., and the bathrooms haven’t been cleaned in weeks
America: the Wal-Mart of Western economics.
I guess most conservatives will point to the fifth panel and explain that inequality is their goal, not something to be reduced.
Now, as an European I advise my fellow Europeans to not act too smug. In most European countries at the moment we get politicians who see the USA as an example to be followed and a large part of the population supports them wholeheartedly.
It’s not just universities that the rightwing nuts are attacking.
1. They really hate public education for kids. And completely ignore the fact that generations of public education made America the Exceptional Last Superpower it is.
(This is snark. We aren’t all that exceptional any more but the USA is still the largest economy and a leader in science.)
2. In GOP states, they’ve been cutting taxes and then cutting services to balance their budgets. Half of all state taxes go to..public education. So they cut that as much as they can without the citizens noticing.
3. From their viewpoint, the nice thing about cutting public education is that it won’t have an immediate effect. Until a decade or two when employers notice that job seekers can’t fill out an application and workers can’t read written directions.
4. We can’t run a complicated Hi Tech society with low educated people. Places like that are called…the Third World.
But if we educate the people, how will the Republican Party get votes? Obviously education is a liberal plot.
Dick @#7, seriously? Of course I was snarking. Check the batteries in your detector. It should have lit up even on the “low” setting.
Sorry Marcus, but I do have a tendency to take things literally.
Marcus, maybe I should have added that I understand that many Merkans, & even educated Americans, do actually believe that they enjoy exceptional freedoms.
One of the few true bright spots in the USA is our university system. 30 of the top 40 research universities in the world are in the USA.
An American college education is prized elsewhere in the world. The elites of many developing countries send their kids here. For example, most of the Iranian leadership was educated in…the USA. This makes us the New Rome and gives us a lot of influence down the line.
The GOP theory that nothing good can go unattacked is in play again!!!
They’ve been beating up on their universities in Red states. Walker in Wisconsin is cutting the budget a lot for the U. of Wisconsin system, once thought to be among the best with UW Madison. Same thing in Arizona.
It’s a myth that the GOP is pro family values or pro America. They hate the present USA and want the imaginary USA of the 1950’s.
You might be trying to be sarcastic. But that happens to be true.
And that is why the rightwing nuts hate it and are doing it some serious damage right now.
My friend’s theory is that the 1% oligarchy are trying to produce a large permanent underclass of uneducated, unemployed people by restricing birth control and education. So they can use them as cannon fodder in our endless wars. I won’t go that far yet, but I couldn’t refute it either. In any event that is the path we are on, deliberate or not.
They hate the present USA and want the imaginary USA of the 1950’s.
1850s.
It all makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. The genes that make the rich fuck over the poor give the offspring of the rich an advantage. Of course genes can’t think so they do things that in the long run will cause their own extinction. The Nigerian version is called Boko Haram.
I am not surprised in the least. I remember the republican and conservative party line saying the government is the problem and it should be greatly reduced they were using many graphic images to describe these ideas. with the eventual goal of killing government. They seem to me that they are being remarkably consistent and upfront and well along in their ultimate objective. I just wonder when the vast majority of the population will understand what this really means and what are the results?
uncle frogy
Wonder that myself. It could be a long time.
1. The peasants do occasionally grab their pitch forks and torches and storm the castles.
It’s happened during the French revolution, the Bolshevik takeover, the collapse of the Bolshevik takeover, and a number of other agrarian and peasant revolts.
2. The best current example is Greece which just elected an atheist former commie. Things are bad, 25% unemployment and something like half the population is looking poverty in the eye. Iceland is another recent example. They actually threw some bankers in prison and almost threw their former leader in prison.
3. The answer seems to be that things have to get truly horrible before the hoi polloi notice and do something. The USA has enough momentum that it could take a few generations.
the only problem with the idea of creating a large uneducated and unemployed underclass for canon fodder comes back to the core policy and stated goal of reducing and eventually killing government. Modern warfare and as we have seen recently even when it is a modified or limited form of guerrilla war like we are involved in now is immensely expensive. Only a prosperous population which can be taxed can engage in it or it has to have some other source of money like Putin has with his oil wealth.
No manufacturer is going to supply the expensive high tech weaponry endlessly for credit and in the same way no for profit schools or prisons are going continue without that same prosperous population or source of money.
The conservatives have no ability nor desire to tax those with money nor to allow any policy that would result in higher income for people who have to work for a living.
The direction and outcome looks pretty easy to predict there will come a time when the whole thing will just grind to a stop of maybe we will just peter out as a Noble Experiment but a failure in the end.
uncle frogy
The main thing missing from the comic IMO (and, specifically from panel 13) is that not only do the US spend more than the next 14 countries combined, but the majority of those other countries are their allies. (Maybe even all except Russia, depending on how loosely you define “ally”.)
This links in with the common right-wing call that “Amuurica is NOT a Democracy, it’s a REPUBLIC!” Only the “Banana” is silent…
You can apply this to most things that aren’t the military.
When people here learned about the state of the infrastructure in the U.S. they couldn’t understand why the maintenance for the lifetime of said infrastructure is normally not included in the costs.
Same thing for universal healthcare. Yes it seems to cost more, but the amount saved due to preventative action it allows, more then makes up for it (And it does help that insurers are supposed to be non profits).
Granted not all is hosanna and manna and in the case of the Netherlands we have an incentive to co-operate (and keep the civil parts of the government funded) or we’d lose half the place to the sea.
Right wing thought leaders have understood that education was their enemy at least as far back as the John Birch society.
Perhaps even further back; the book The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth, often credited as a major influence in the early development of Christian Fundamentalism, was funded by wealthy oil barons … although, at that time the fundamentalists were not yet aligned with the right wing.
All through the following decades, a large rat’s nest of loosely associated right wing organizations, such as AEI, CEI, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, have aggressively promoted policies that damage education, on the grounds that this would lead to less government regulations, which would in turn result in much greater profits.
They seem sure that much of their economic and political power is attributable to their long running attacks on education – and they fully intend to continue that program.
They have a deep ideological commitment to the belief that ignorance is strength.
well I tried and failed at that so let me do that in plain text
@ 25 said “They have a deep ideological commitment to the belief that ignorance is strength.”
they have indeed drank deeply of that ridiculous and poisonous idea in practice themselves until they do not seem able to form coherent thoughts that match up with observed reality at all.
uncle frogy
You don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. You might meet Alex Jones and other bullshit NWO conspiracy theorists down there, and nothing good will come of it.
Good old greed and blinkered self-interest is all that’s necessary, when combined by a political ideology that enables and rewards this behavior. Then, if you believe wealth is a reliable measure of morality and how deserving you are, it becomes self-propagating mythology.
Marcus
No it’s the 1950’s, their childhood that they remember well. A childish, supremely privileged existence where they could roam the countryside kicking anyone and anything they felt like and get away with it. And reading comic books. With white heroes.
Who Cares, #25
It doesn’t even seem to cost more to have universal health care. Americans spend more on health care as % of GDP than pretty much anywhere else. The per capita spending is far higher than other countries with universal healthcare, over $8000 per capita, with at least $4400 of that government spending, according to http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jun/30/healthcare-spending-world-country. That level of government spending is higher than the total per capita spent by most countries with universal health care.
Did I just hear that in Texas, textbooks will now list Moses as a Founding Father?
Repubs, “We don’t need no edukashun.” Tom Cotton said on TV that we must stop Iran because, “They already control Tehran…”. tip of the hat to Crooks&Liars.
This is one of the uses of racism in the USA – preventing the understanding of neighborly common citizenship which is necessary for a higher tax rate and functional social services.
Can’t have proper schools if THOSE PEOPLE are going to benefit. THEY don’t deserve it.
I still can’t believe that nothing really has been done to address the crippling amount of student debt out there. And I imagine that if they do get a fix, it won’t affect those already dealing with debt. I believe there was something about “free tuition” to community colleges, which does very little to address the problem (I had “free tuition” to a state university. It did fuck all, because most of the college cost came from “fees” anyway). And I know there has been a new way to pay off federal loans where if your income is small enough you can make small or even $0 payments, and if you keep it for long enough, it is paid off. Which is a nice safety net, but it only benefits you if you went to college, got a job that pays worse than a job you could get right out of high school, and keep it that way for 25 years. Fucking band-aids all around, and no one cares, because it doesn’t directly impact the 1% in the short term, so politicians don’t really give a shit. And because of that, they are playing with fire, likely creating a massive economic issue in the future, but since it is a distant enough future, they don’t particularly care because politicians are myopic little creatures.