Let me get this straight, we are cutting public works on our crumbling infrastructure

[WCGreen]

Raising the cost of College by increasing the interest rates new students coming on line will charged, lets face it, for the bulk of their lives and Drilling baby Drilling so that we can push forward the implementation of clean energy when they can gain control of that as well.

This, to me at least, sounds like a recipe for disaster especially in a country that has become nothing more than a small number of money changers at the top while everything else for the rest of us 99% is stagnating or crumbling.

[blkmusclmachine]

1. .

.

[gopiscrap]

2. Our priorities as a nation are fucked up

we are going to hear more and more of this stuff going on

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. Those folks in charge could not care less...

They just want to rake in the funds while they can.

They don't care if that screws the rest of us over...

It sure is a recipe for disaster.

[TreasonousBastard]

4. We've been doing this for many years...

it started when politicians discovered they could take credit for big new projects, but no one cared about maintenance.

Well, people did actually care about maintenance, but there was no way to get ribbon-cutting ceremonies, big news stories, or anything else to catch the public attention, and when something broke there was always a speech about fixing it and blaming someone else.

And there was never nearly as much to steal in maintenance contrracts as in new construction.

[msongs]

5. "we" are not doing this the president and congress are jointly doing this nt

[hrmjustin]

6. K & R!

[dkf]

7. Oh but the 99% got their tax break.

Unfortunately the case for everyone to pay for their government services wasn't made by either party.

The normal guy no longer wants to pay for government services and thinks he/she deserves it all at no cost.

[Rhiannon12866]

8. Allowing our bridges to fall down and educating fewer young people?

Continuing to pollute the environment and making reproductive choice and birth control unavailable? Sounds like a plan to me!

[SheilaT]

9. Face it. The truth is that the American Empire is crumbling.

We are only nominally the most powerful nation on the planet. True, we spend as much as the rest of the world combined on our military, but meanwhile we let our schools go unfunded, our infrastructure crumbles, too many of our citizens without proper healthcare. We can maintain the appearance of power for some time to come, but we're rather like Rome in perhaps 300 AD. The barbarians are at the gates, and there's almost nothing we can do.

[iemitsu]

13. Except, perhaps we are the barbarians or

have become the barbarians.
Our strength used to stem from our dynamic ingenuity and the production of goods and ideas that that dynamism sponsored. Today whatever strength we have is due to our military and its advanced technologies. We have no moral authority any longer so the military has become our primary tool for directing foreign relations.
We have sacrificed our health care, our infrastructure, and our job and old age security for the world's largest military. And now we can't afford it either.
The privatization of public agencies and services and any crisis (social, economic, military) work together as tools that direct public funds into private pockets (trickle-up economics).
Clearly, it can't go on forever but it difficult to imagine what would work to change our course.

[ananda]

16. Flood-up economics...

... not trickle-up.

[iemitsu]

20. Yeah, it does seems like a flood.

[airplaneman]

10. On the college interest rates

We could charge 0.75% like Elizabeth Warren has suggested or we could charge 0% like the government of Australia actually does. Most likely we will do something that puts us on the bottom of the industrialized list that will make it undeniable that we really doesn't give a shit about our own people, or infrastructure for that matter.
-Airplane

[iemitsu]

11. Yesterday, north of me on I-5, a bridge, spanning the Skagit River

collapsed, dropping two cars and three people into the chilly river below. Fortunately, the people got out of the river safely.
We used to maintain our interstate highway system. It is vital to our living in this area.
Union organized, civil service engineers and crews were employed by state and local governments to make sure these arteries were kept open. It was good for business and good for people.
Today, we are broke, or told we are broke. The professional government crews are gone, the result of the insane push to privatize every public asset, and they have been replaced by expensive, profit driven mega-firms and their cost cutting policies and under-paid, non-union employees.
Anti-tax initiatives (which benefit only business owners and the wealthy) are on the ballot every election cycle. Everyone is broke so they vote for the anti-tax measures and things get worse.
The cost of higher education is creating a generation of debt peons. This is unacceptable and unfair. American students can't afford advanced degrees because their debt requires servitude while foreign students, with little or no debt, take all the places in our graduate programs.
As long as money dictates politics I don't see things getting any better.

[love_katz]

12. Exactly.

You hit all the points.

The problem is that taxes are unpopular...and make an easy target for the lousy Repukes to use to gain their real goals: selling us and our country off to the highest (campaign)bidder.

I wish we could take the lying GOP obstructors/sell-outs, and put them in a car and drive them off of this bridge.

Vote for campaign finance reform, people, and in the mean time...figure out ways to get things done with local people working together. Look to groups like City Repair to get ideas of how to work with consensus and local initiative.

Yeah, I know this won't work on really big projects, like the collapsed bridge, but try to help each other, any way we can. Our government is currently a subsidiary of Greed, Inc.

[iemitsu]

14. Your points are more, to the point. The clarity is nice.

Getting the money out of politics is our only hope of saving anything good about the United States. Several of those reforms have been introduced and were adopted but they only made things worse (citizens united having the largest impact on our loss of power). This doesn't mean I don't think we need to work for campaign finance reform. We ought to dump the two party system for a multi-party model too. I believe we need publicly financed campaigns that support multiple candidates, who could more truly represent us in congress.
That said I really want to applaud and recommend your push for community action and working together, with our neighbors, to solve local problems.
Here is a post I made last night in response to a similar idea being promoted by Le Taz Hot, here on DU. I have pasted it here because it is late and I am too tired to rework the ideas well.

An excellent post, Le Taz Hot. You have pinpointed

the absolute best action (political, social, economic, or religious) that any and all of us can afford to take.
We need to go out and talk to, and listen to, other people in our communities. If the problems we face as a nation/society are to be addressed and solved, it is we, the community, who will have to solve them.
Your assertion that the American people have more interests and goals in common than we are led to believe is 100% on target.
I too, have bridged the artificial divide, designed to weaken and distract us, with right winged relatives, neighbors, and work-place contacts, many times. It is not hard to do, in fact, it is the natural, human, and polite way to act and most of us do it every single day. Yes, we are unique individuals but we have the same needs and desires, we share the same hopes and dreams, and our ethics and values, are for the most part, compatible.
When the tornado strikes it will be our neighbors, who help us or are helped by us. Our survival will depend on each other, not on some distant entity or institution (the distant aid should be provided but the community should decide how to put itself back together), that will want compensation for its efforts.
The "old wives" were right, "If you want something done well you have to do it yourself". Hiring/electing/asking a third party to solve one's problems is fool-hearty. The hireling will have no interest in fixing the problem, he/she was hired to solve, because once the problem is solved he/she will be out of a job. They don't know or represent what is in the best interests of the community (disputing parties) and their proposed solutions will reflect their own bias and conflicts of interest. They take away our individual sovereignty and they take vital resources (needed in the community) as compensation for their efforts, further weakening the community and making it harder for it to solve its own problems.
We need to sponsor and encourage block parties, communal garage sales, public celebrations and any other events to get people together. When we talk to each other, share our concerns and goals, and re-establish a common language (accepting standard definitions for words and concepts) we will discover our true strength and we can work together to oust false governance and anti-democratic and anti-community legislation and attitudes from our midst.
Thank you for reminding us of our own power, and our responsibility to use that power to better our own lives and the lives of other beings on the planet.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2895979

[love_katz]

15. Thank you.

I guess I was just thinking that the folks who best survive hard times are the people who have lots of friends. The idea of the lone hero who pulls themselves up by their bootstraps doesn't work out that well for most of us.

And, sometimes we can manage to work with folks we might otherwise not agree with, if we focus on what we do have in common, especially regarding local needs.

Thank you for including the additional post. It is nice to see people trying to think together about how to get around our current government gridlock and social conflicts/impasses.

[iemitsu]

19. You're very welcome. I appreciate you comments as well.

We do need to work together to solve our problems. In fact, many of the problems we face would likely not exist if Americans were paying attention to and discussing, politics and the economy, with their neighbors and friends. Then we could reach compromises that we understood and that each side could accept, instead we get to choose between what the uber-rich want and what the uber-rich will accept when neither choice is good for Americans.
Our elected officials are their stooges so we must be vigilant to keep them honest.
I too am glad to see others grappling with the current situation by offering sound and reasonable advice.

PS. The rugged individual myth was created and promoted by healthy fit and selfish young men, who did not want any of their youthful energy directed toward those in need. The myth exists to justify greed. Society can not function when that attitude reigns.

[bahrbearian]

17. We offset the cost of College by , allowing more H1B1 visas.

[datasuspect]

18. billionaires can use helicopters just as easily as cars

in fact, from a security perspective, it just makes more sense.