Where would we be without our corporately owned news networks?

In a strong recovery? With a functioning Congress? In the dark about how oil companies are really care about the environment, schools and puppies?

One thing that America greatly values is its free press…which is why its been locked up in a safe that’s hidden miles below the Earth’s surface. Filling in for it, we have a corporatized Mainstream Media which looks just like the real thing only less filling. Having a corporately owned media is a bit of  a trade off for America, like buying a McDonalds hamburger. One one hand, you get a cheap, non-nutritious product that contains excesses of substances that are bad for you and on the other hand…well…maybe there’s not an other hand but you get the idea.

Due to the 24 hour news cycle, news channels are hungry for news all the time. Unfortunately, they have the digestive systems of cows so they digest the same stories in one show after another throughout one or more days. They are also very particular about what stories they consume, they must be high in conflict and rich in advertising dollars. So many stories, despite how true they may be, simply aren’t on the menu for any of the news channels.

Listed below are ten things you will never hear on a news channel for the above reasons…unless we include a celebrity nip slip in this page…which we are still debating.

TEN THINGS YOU WILL NEVER HEAR ON A NEWS CHANNEL:

1. Crazy things that Republicans say aren’t actually equal to sane things Democrats say in response.

2. The oil company commercials we run constantly are full of lies but even though that’s a conflict of interest for a news channel that’s supposed to present truths, we need the ad revenue.

3. Our hosts aren’t really outraged at everything they say they are, they’re more like performers and it’s just an act to get ratings.

4. We miss Sarah Palin.

5. Most of our coverage about President Obama is negative because he’s been too far ahead of Romney and we make more money from advertisers if the Presidential race is tighter because more people will tune in each day to see who’s up or down. Also, our corporate ownership and shareholders want the tax breaks that Republicans would give us.

6. Polls this far away from an election really don’t mean anything but by treating them as if they do, we can create all kinds of stories based upon them that urge our viewers to be greatly concerned .

7. Our gesture towards balance and fairness is having a token person with overly strident views that are the opposite of our core viewers so that they only confirm our core viewers dislike of them and others with the same views.

8. Faves include any story involving sex, missing white girls and threats to Americans. Dislikes include peace talks, good economic news and substantive conversations about issues.

9. We flip a coin to decide which stories we’ll call “Breaking News”.

10. Nothing truly important happened today, sorry.  You could always read a book or get some exercise.

What if Mitt Romney was actually elected President, how might America be transformed?

Based on the statements he has made and his pandering allegiance to the right wing extremists in his party, one can reasonably extrapolate out what policies and laws Romney would support and approve.

To begin, it is conceivable that the GOP could retain the House and win over the Senate. It’s also conceivable that having seen how effective their use of the filibuster was against Obama, Senate Republicans could pass rules limiting the use of it by Democrats.

In such an admittedly hypothetical scenario, the damage to the American society and democracy we have come to know could be severe and long term, with numerous permanent aspects.

The End of Medicare as an Entitlement

The Ryan Plan, which Romney heartily supports, transforms Medicare from being an entitlement into a partial subsidy for buying health insurance. Thus, Americans would no longer be entitled to health insurance when they grew older. This would have a profound and devastating impact on tens of millions of seniors and society in general.

The amount a senior would received from Medicare, as a Ryan-type subsidy program, would be insufficient to fully pay for corporate insurance premiums. At current rates, seniors would have to pay an additional $6,000 a year to have basic medical insurance that would give them less coverage than they receive now between Medicare and Part B. As time goes by, that gap and the percentage of their premium they will have to pay will grow, requiring them to pay $10,000 annually, then $20,000 and on and on until more and more are priced out of being able to afford health insurance. The CBO estimates that by 2030, under the Ryan plan, 65 year olds would be required to pay 68% of the total cost of their coverage, which includes premiums, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket costs.  That compares with the 25 percent they would pay under current law.

And if seniors can’t afford to pay that growing amount of their premium that their subsidy doesn’t cover? They don’t get partial insurance, they get none. No health insurance. End of story. There are around 40 million senior citizens, many of whom live on a very limited budget with Social Security as their primary income (more on this below) and simply can’t afford this additional expense. The numbers of  uninsured senior citizens will grow and one result will be that millions of Americans will die younger as part of this Romney/GOP plan to make the wealthy wealthier.

Ryan and the GOP have cynically played the selfish card on seniors to win their support, assuring them that their changes to Medicare wouldn’t affect them, just their children and grandchildren. In other words, we assume you’re greedy and selfish like us so as long as you get yours, screw the rest of your family. Fortunately, the push back by seniors after Ryan’s first proposed budget reflected that even elderly parents care about the welfare of their children and grandchildren. However, with Romney in the White House and Republican control of Congress, there may be no stopping such a drastic change.

So in addition to the shocking precedent of shrinking lifespans in a modern, industrialized nation, how else might our society be affected by having tens of millions of seniors unable to afford health insurance?

Emergency rooms would likely become increasingly congested with the millions of elderly who don’t have insurance. Since they would not have been treated regularly, many will have more severe conditions, requiring more time and resources at emergency rooms. This will severely tax the already burdened emergency room system, financially and staff-wise, eventually past the point of their capabilities. In such an environment, what kind of care, resources and attention will those without insurance, who only have the emergency room for treatment, receive? And what about people who are brought to an emergency room due to a car accident or severe illness? How quickly will they be able to receive care when many other patients are ahead of them with just as urgent life-threatening conditions?

What happens when the ranks of the uninsured swell towards one third of the nation’s population? When emergency rooms and hospitals have waiting times that double and triple? Or after hospitals close from being bankrupted by their unpaid emergency room costs that multiply? When the resulting domino effect is created that overloads and bankrupts other emergency rooms?

And add to that the cost to society of the potential for mass outbreaks of illnesses and diseases that result from so many Americans not having regular medical care.

This viable scenario would devastate our society.

The End of Social Security as an Entitlement

There was a time in our past when people who worked their whole lives would get too old and/or ill to keep a job and live out the remainder of their lives as desperate and indigent. Some might bring a financial burden on their children, others might be reduced to a horrible life of squalor. To most Americans, that would seem like a tragedy of the past but for Mitt Romney and the GOP, they welcome our returning to those times.

The reason for their wanting to privatize Social Security is obvious. They want to take the over $2.6 trillion in the Social Security trust fund out of government hands and pour it into Wall Street coffers where it can be sucked away by them in part or in whole.

We all know what can happen to the majority’s money when Wall Street has their hands on it. As bad as it has been, imagine what would have happened in the midst of the 2008 economic crash if the 40 million senior citizens who rely primarily on Social Security to pay their monthly expenses and Medicare Part B insurance, had that money in the stock market instead of Social Security. What kind of hell would America be with the majority of seniors unable to pay for a roof over their head, food, health insurance and medicine (add the privatizing of Medicare into the mix and you multiply the disaster)?

This massive economic crash would have been made exponentially worse if seniors had all of their Social Security money in the market and in a crisis, they had to sell their stocks for whatever they could get. Add to that, the steep loss of seniors’ spending that would result and further deepen an economic disaster (which of course didn’t occur and helped the economy in this recent case, thanks to Social Security being as it is).

The depth of such a depression that would result from seniors losing everything because their Social Security was in the stock market could dwarf the original Depression and fully climbing out under such a rigged system might not even be possible.

How can we choose to have 99% of our elderly vulnerable to losing their home, food and health insurance when the market has its next crash?

That is of no concern to Mitt Romney and the GOP. Though many of them inherited their wealth and advantage in society as Romney did, they will give lip service to “the dignity of self determination” while actually working to take away the security and independence of the elderly because it interferes with the wealthy achieving greater wealth.

The Destruction of Democracy, the Middle Class and an Inclusive Economy

It is a cornerstone of the modern GOP to continue down the path of cutting taxes for the wealthy and gutting services for the poor and the rest of the 99% of Americans who aren’t wealthy. The overall scheme includes keeping downward pressure on salaries, limiting economic mobility and gaming the system to maximize the accumulation of wealth for the top 1% by taking it from the bottom 99%. Along with this is the perversion of our democracy into a plutocracy, where those with money control elections and use their advertising and marketing expertise to sell the public on voting for “products” that will, in the end, serve only the wealthy.

The ideal America for Romney and his Republican colleagues is one where the wealthy freely buy the White House and Congress that best serves them, reroute the tax revenues from social programs into their pockets, remove all regulations that prevent them from polluting, economic fraud and harming the public if preventing it interferes with greater profits.

Their America has only two classes, the wealthy and workers. The middle class is already shrinking and hastening this is part of the scheme. Attacking unions (which created the Middle Class), job protections, rights and through off shoring, depressing the salary value of American workers.

In 2000, corporate America was already off shoring jobs at a fast clip, sharply reducing the number of jobs it had in the US. When the economic crash of 2008 hit, it just accelerated the off shoring.

These are jobs that are lost forever and are never coming back…unless American wages drop down to being more competitive with third world wages. The whole Free Trade scam was presented as something that would bring up wages around the world and add more jobs in the US due to exports. In fact, it was designed to do just the opposite, to slash labor costs for corporations and put severe downward pressure on workers’ wages in the US. And it has worked well.

The Romney/GOP agenda is to seal the deal on America as a plutocracy, a country of the wealthy, for the wealthy and by the wealthy. They have drilled Orwellian terms into the minds of Americans, deeming the greedy as benevolent “Job Creators” even though all evidence proves that they are willfully not creating high paid jobs in America (the job growth in the public sector has been coming primarily from small businesses).

Romney is running on being wealthy, that is his central platform, “I made a lot of money so that means I’m a good businessman and would make a good President.” Donald Trump flirted with running for President for the same reason, because they define wealth as success. So the reverse would be true, those like Romney view those who aren’t wealthy as failures and lesser people. Thus, it is not so bewildering to see how Romney stumbles around regular Americans like a king trying to pander to those he sees more like odd human-like animals than people like him.

So the concept of the majority’s purpose being that of serving Romney and his ilk is a mentality they already possess. For them, empathy for most Americans just doesn’t compute. With such a President, the depth of exploitation and oppression of the majority would have no limit, there would not be a conscience to say, “That policy would hurt too many people’s lives,” so even if he does it merely to benefit his fellow elitists and isn’t motivated by harming others, he could be capable of subjecting the American people to damaging things and being as oblivious of its impact as he is of how his constant gaffes are perceived.

A President Romney would be in a position to appoint perhaps two or more Supreme Court justices which could cement a right wing SCOTUS for generations. The lasting damage from the last dozen years of Gore v. Bush, Citizens United, etc. is already profound but another thirty to forty years of such pro-corporate, anti-democratic decisions could permanently cast the nation in the image of the wealthy and the majority of Americans as powerless, second class citizens.

War and Conflict That Destroys Our Future

America is pretty war weary. We’re getting out of Iraq, we’re slowly getting out of Afghanistan but trillions of dollars and precious lives have already been lost and continue to be. Americans want it to be over.

To that, Mitt Romney says, “My party’s core says, ‘Screw that! War rocks!’ so I do too!”

Romney has absolutely no foreign affairs experience or education so he merely adopts the stances of those in the Republican right wing he panders to and has hired as consultants. And they profit from the military industry. So, war with Iran sounds good to them. Hostility towards China and calling Russia our enemy, that’s good for business.

If not influenced by others, Romney doesn’t seem like the war mongering type but being greedy and self-serving, Romney would take any position if it benefited him. And threatening war with one country after another yields a gold mine of campaign donations.

What would happen if the US started a war with Iran? Even if it was just air strikes, it could create a hostile backlash against the US around the world while miring us in a very complicated war we could never win, using an already overused and depleted military that could deteriorate as a whole.

What would happen to gas prices and oil prices in this fragile economy, if the Straight of Hormuz became a war zone? How would it affect inflation and jobs in this country if the price of gas went up towards $10 per gallon?

Yes, Romney and the GOP exude hypocrisy when attacking Obama on gas prices while whipping up support for war with Iran but it would be naive to think they wouldn’t be just fine with energy costs skyrocketing…along with revenues for oil companies…who are the top GOP sponsors anyway.

Our remarkable volunteer army has been stretched thin in two simultaneous wars over the last ten years and another war could require more soldiers than we have able to serve. By creating a growing lower class of unemployed and economically excluded people, they have created a great ongoing supply of cannon fodder for their eternal wars-for-profit, draining our nation of blood and treasure.

The Ryan budget and Romney’s budget greatly increase military spending while insisting on reducing the deficit and balancing budgets so there is no alternative but for ongoing war to be financed by degrading America’s social and physical infrastructure even more than it has been and it is already past the point of sustainability.

At the same time, their insistence on cutting taxes paid by the wealthy will transfer that loss of revenue from social programs to the wealthy, adding a greater hacking away at social programs on top of what would already be occurring.

Conclusion

A Romney Presidency, especially when coupled with a Republican Congress could be a profound and devastating blow to the future of this nation. This is not because Romney is a worse person than other GOP candidates (GW Bush can’t be argued to be better) but because America is at a tipping point in so many ways that each Presidential term during this period is make or break.

Had President Obama made disastrous decisions after taking office, never passing a stimulus bill, agreeing to drastic slashing of Medicare and Social Security with no revenue increases, we could have tumbled down into an economic depression beyond what we could have imagined.

If Romney is enabled to tear apart Medicare and Social Security, lock in a pro-corporate SCOTUS for 30 years, cement plutocracy and economic injustice into place and be the vehicle for legally oppressing minorities and women in America, it would be hard to imagine ever fully reversing the damage to the nation.

These are the concrete kind of considerations that should be discussed on the MSM instead of  “scandals” like President Obama not literally saying that he supports gay marriage or puff pieces on how Ann Romney helps “humanize” Romney.

There are serious and powerful issues at stake right now, we can’t afford to be distracted by the trivia of the horse race and gotcha games in the media.

We need to have the public discussing what really matters and what country America is going to be in reality, not just in mindless nationalistic blather.

There might not be a more important election in our lifetimes than the one we will have in November. The value of keeping that in mind and impressing that on others can’t be understated.

In the high stakes game of Presidential one-upmanship, Mitt Romney has responded to President Obama’s support of gay marriage by declaring that he supports the right of corporations to marry.

“Corporations are people, my friend. White people with nice hair and attractive shoes. They can propagate and multiply just as people do and as any businessperson can attest, they can screw multiple partners,” Romney explained. “Why should they be denied the same ability to get divorced and be paid alimony that other people have?”

Announcing his position at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Romney went on to explain that gun manufacturing corporations should be allowed to have shotgun weddings, the energy industry deserves to have a nuclear family if they so choose and competing corporations should have the moral right to get into bed with each other.

When asked about Same State Corporation Marriage, Romney stated that he opposes it. “I believe in the absolute commitment to the ideals that marriage represents but depending upon what’s reflected in the latest polls, I can be flexible on that,” Romney smiled.

Romney also announced a new internet business he is launching that will be an online dating service for single corporations to meet other single corporations, with marriage in mind, called, “eHaromney”.

Dismissing the protests against corporate marriage as “fear mongering” and “prejudiced”, Romney stated that it doesn’t weaken the institution of marriage to open it up to corporations, it strengthens it.

“When you have corporations investing themselves in marriage, it affirms marriage…even if they sell short down the line and cause it to crash,” Romney added. “Marriage should not be dictated by politicians who decide who should or shouldn’t be married…if you’re straight of course…marriage should be dictated by the free market. I am a firm believer in supply side marriage, meaning that the more marriages wealthy people and corporations have, the more marriages will trickle down to the majority of Americans. We can’t afford to have a marriage deficit in this country and thanks to Obama and his regulations, we have less marriages in this nation than we should. Every time you look at the bill for your or your children’s weddings, remember who’s responsible for it being so high…Barack Obama. If we allowed corporations to provide more marriages in this country, prices would go down and we’d have more domestic, domestic security.”

Romney chuckled about having a crush on Exxon when he was a teenager and said that he can understand what corporations and those who love them are going through when they’re denied the right to marry.

“There were times in my youth when I wished so hard that I could marry who I really loved but society wouldn’t let me. I remember being taunted by lesser children, ‘If you love money so much, why don’t you marry it?’ I wish I could have and I know many like me wish they could today. Well, we may not be there yet but we are in a time where the highest court in the land has declared that corporations are people and all people…who don’t like Broadway showtunes that is…should have the right to marry in this country.”

Though he wants to return the focus of his campaign back to the economy, this is a cause Romney vows to continue to pursue.

“I’ll take credit for freeing the slaves and winning World War II but taking credit for corporations being able to marry will be the most satisfying of my preposterous claims to date,” declared Romney.

When faced with an unrelenting media that was convinced that it had cornered President Obama in a compromising position on gay marriage, President Obama responded with the cool, class and principle that he typically demonstrates and made it clear that he does indeed support marriage equality for all Americans, including those in the LGBT community.

It is poignant that the first African American president of the US has also been the first one to state that he believes all American men and women are entitled to the right to marry another who they love without exception.

However, Barack Obama was already on record as supporting gay marriage when he ran for Senator. It was only when he ran for President that he modified his public opinion to that of supporting civil unions but not gay marriage. Considering that the 2004 election was heavily swayed against John Kerry and Democrats by Karl Rove’s hammering on gay marriage as a divisive issue, one might say that it would only be prudent not to invite the same hateful campaign and potential results by openly supporting gay marriage in a 2008 Presidential campaign. Some may find that as not being courageous but others may argue that it is more pragmatic to hold back such an opinion in the short term to be able to help the LGBT community in the long term than to announce it and possibly lose the White House to an anti-gay Republican who would harm the LGBT community.

In a purely factual sense, did anything really change yesterday? Did President Obama really change his mind on gay marriage or was his explanation of evolving on it just being diplomatic? Admittedly, only Barack Obama knows what he thinks so it must be stipulated that this is all supposition.

We do know that President Obama has always supported gay rights as President, through hate crime legislation, repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) and not defending The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) from legal challenges. There doesn’t seem to be any specific item that benefits the LGBT community that Obama hasn’t already been supporting. So though yesterday’s statement was a change in rhetoric, it doesn’t seem to be a change in Obama’s absolute support for LGBT issues.

The instigation for all of this was an interview on a news media show, NBC’s Meet The Press. A guest on the show, Vice President Biden was asked if he supported same sex marriage and he explained that he did. This was not news, Biden has been a supporter of gay marriage for some time. Yet, his expressing an openly known view on this was apparently, just the opening the Mainstream Media was looking for.

The MSM treated that statement of well established fact as if it was a big scandal which it wasn’t. They seemed very energized about having a juicy hot button issue with which to go after Obama. Their incessant pounding on this finally bore fruit yesterday with Obama’s declaration.

Is this a case of the media creating an exploitative story for financial and/or political benefit or were they just doing their job and holding a politician’s feet to the fire? One might consider the MSM’s simultaneous lack of interest in holding Mitt Romney’s feet to the fire on claiming credit for the GM bailout, something he flatly opposed and is an enormous lie or his weaseling around on immigration, now claiming he is trying to figure out his position even though he has stated his anti-immigrant “self-deportation” mentality in front of the whole nation.  The MSM doesn’t seem to pursue this ongoing gusher of Romney lies with much fervor. However, if Barack Obama had lied or flip-flopped about supporting gay rights, the resulting firestorm could easily be envisioned.

On the down side, “news” and conflict was once again manufactured by the MSM. On the up side, the  LGBT community now has their President clearly expressing his support for marriage equality. There is good that has come out of this but that does not appear to have been the intention.

The media coverage of Obama was particularly rough at the beginning of the year, with an average of nearly 47% negative stories compared with slightly more than 15% positive stories during the first four weeks of January, Pew found. As the economy and his poll numbers improved in March, so did the favorability of his media coverage, but the president still has yet to see more positive coverage than negative in 2012.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/23/news/la-pn-obama-suffers-more-negative-press-than-gop-pew-study-shows-20120423

There is a clear and distinct pattern in the MSM of promoting negativity towards Obama as the above study reflects. This is not to say that Obama expressing support for same sex marriage is a negative thing but the reality is that it may alienate some voters in swing states. Understanding that right now the country is evenly divided on the issue of gay marriage and knowing its track record in being used against Democrats to defeat them, it seems more intuitive to view the MSM as knowing that blowing this up into a huge story could have been damaging to Obama’s campaign hopes.

What if they threw a scandal and nobody came? Unfortunately for the MSM, this is what they’re having to scramble over today. In the aftermath of President Obama’s announcement, the outrage has been narrowly limited to the usual suspects, right wing evangelical homophobes and Republicans in the House…if there’s a difference. The media continues trying to fan the flames this morning with little oxygen being added, the surprise and disappointment is palpable. So, the principled MSM has pulled a Romney and is now spinning to the memes, “It will be a wash,” and “This could mainly benefit Obama with his base.” What a difference a day makes in the world of failed MSM memes.

Meanwhile, staying true to form, the House Republicans have leaped over helping the economy and Americans once again to pass today a bill that would prohibit the Department of Justice from using taxpayers dollars in any future fight against DOMA. Now that should create a lot more jobs and freedom!

It’s pretty much a moot point now to question whether this statement from Obama should have been positioned as “earth shattering” since the MSM’s pronouncement of it being so makes it so. But it remains a meaningful question to ask if our corporate media is meddling in our elections and democracy to benefit themselves. After all, a closer race means more avid viewing of their networks and greater ad revenue. What is also unavoidable is that the corporations which own the news networks would realize big financial gains from the tax cuts proposed by Romney and the GOP. Since all corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to provide the greatest revenues possible to them, how are these corporations not obligated to support the politicians and party that will allow them to do so?

Is the corporately-owned media actually in the business of dictating what happens day to day in our democratic campaigns and possibly even the results? Are they deciding what issues will be debated and which ones won’t? Or are they just reporting what they should and what Americans are most interested in…or what will lure in the most viewers and ad revenue?

There are so many critical issues right now in this nation, the economy, health care, energy, entitlements, class warfare, women’s rights and on and on. Yet, for whatever motivation, the MSM often elevates the more emotional and superficial edges of issues than the core of issues.

If the MSM truly is creating news instead of reporting it, if the corporations that own the media can hobble the candidates they don’t support and promote the ones they do, we are living in dangerous times indeed.

There has been declining trust in the MSM as a news source, more and more people are turning to other sources, especially blogs and other internet resources. This is a positive trend and one that should be promoted. It makes sense to remain aware of what the MSM is pitching day to day so a complete boycott would leave one under-informed though reducing one’s viewing of corporate news outlets is one sure way to hit them where it hurts and weaken them.

“Free Press” used to be descriptive, now it’s a demand and one that if more realized, will empower Americans and their democracy far more.

Agar is a gelatin material that’s used in Petri dishes to grow microorganisms such as bacteria. When stepping back to look at American society as a whole, it seems to be submerged in a sociological agar that cultivates the growth of a bacteria that continues to eat away at the nation.

Whether it’s a fair and sustainable economy, our political system, a constructive level of discourse, a sense of community, education, racial and religious tolerance, many of the aspects of America that have been points of pride in the past, continue to decline and in doing so, corrode American society.

There are a variety of “cultures” in modern day America’s agar-rich Petri dish that are decaying what America is capable of being but among the most toxic is injustice.

Americans have been eyewitnesses to crimes committed by the wealthy and powerful and have seen that typically, they escape justice. Wall Street clearly robbed trillions from the world’s economy through sophisticated fraud, the Bush Administration violated the Geneva Convention by using torture and violated our Constitution by secretly spying on the American people, even the Supreme Court has been an accomplice to the wealthy rigging and buying our elections…and no one pays a price.

No one goes to jail. No one is fired. No one is held responsible for their actions. At least, not when they are wealthy or politically connected.

On the other end of the spectrum, we see police let the white murderers of young black men walk free and harsh criminal sentences applied against young men of color.

We see those fervent about their superiority through religion or race given equal time and presented as “balance” against those who stand for equality and justice.

Some may ask at times why some people plan and do such cruel things to others but simply put, an unjust society is an incubator for terrible things. It creates an environment where some feel they have the right to express their own prejudices and pursue agendas that harm the many while benefiting them and the few like them. They have permission because society doesn’t insist on and enforce justice as an absolute and necessary principle.

Living in an unjust America breeds a sense of discouragement and resignation among many that it is just the way things are that the wealthy are above the law and the expectation of simple human decency.

What does that do to the Petri dish of American society when injustice is virulent? Doesn’t it create an ideal breeding ground for the kind of racism, intolerance, chauvinism and venomous “debate” that has become so mainstream today? Doesn’t it foster the growth and broad acceptance of hateful extremism such as that which has overtaken the Republican Party? In fact, could today’s GOP exist as it is if not for being in an “agar” of injustice?

If Americans witnessed on a regular basis that no one is above the law, especially the wealthy and powerful, might there not be at least some shared belief in justice and fairness amongst most Americans? And if that was the case, might there be more common ground and civility expected of each other?

Instead, in an environment where the law only applies to “the little people”, living in an unjust society is eventually taken for granted by the majority and they become more accepting of seeing that reflected all around them.

By the time the Dems won back Congress in 2006, Nancy Pelosi had already promised in the campaign that Democrats would not seek to impeach Bush for crimes he clearly committed. It’s easy to understand her caution, she likely was concerned that such an action could boomerang against them and generate greater support for Bush, as well as dominate their new term and keep them from accomplishing much of anything.

However, one could connect a direct line between that decision and the decline of the nation’s faith in their government, let alone the rise of the racist Tea Party and the de-evolution of the GOP into a hate machine. We had a President who violated our Constitution and international law (not to mention seizing an unprecedented expansion of power for the Executive Branch) and yet, out of political expedience, the other political party chose to give him a Mulligan because of political considerations.

After that, did anyone really expect that the CEO of Goldman Sachs might go to jail for criminal acts? Or BP execs whose intentional skirting of safety rules caused a platform to explode that killed people and destroyed the livelihoods of many others?

The public outcry and protest to bring George Zimmerman to trial for shooting the unarmed Trayvon Martin was a victory that people can be proud of but consider that in 2012, the functioning of justice in this nation is so hobbled that it required a huge public groundswell just to arrest a white man for killing a black teen.

The entire GOP/Mitt Romney platform is amazingly built right on the principle of injustice. The wealthy should have more, the majority and the poor should have less and give more of their tax money to enrich the wealthy. Health Care and education should only be available to the wealthy, corporations should be free to poison most Americans and be unfettered from robbing them of fair pay and their nest eggs.

How can such injustices be so broadly presented as a viable platform to run on? Of course, the rabid Right Wingers just want Repubs to win, they’re too tunnelvisioned to see they’re voting against their own futures and interests but as the media presents such injustices as reasonable, many others climb on board.

It seems surreal that most all of the historic injustices exhibited throughout American history including racism against blacks and Hispanics, religious intolerance, male domination of women and their rights, the wealthy dominating the majority and their democracy, homophobia, The Confederacy’s animosity and opposition to The North, all of these hateful and unjust sensibilities are all rolled into the basis of the 2012 GOP.

The media cooperates by presenting the GOP and their commitment to injustice as an equal alternative to the Democrats’ views of a fairer society. Really? Prejudice is equivalent to tolerance? Greed is equivalent to fairness? Hate is equivalent to compassion?

Of course these are not equivalents and presenting them as such undermines what should be shared principles of all Americans.

Though I think it is only a weak camouflage for greed, I could accept a GOP that believed in Trickle Down economics as more viable than Keynesian economics…as long as they shared the principles of compassion for Americans who weren’t among those promising to trickle down wealth. I don’t think it would be a better world if there was only one party in America, there is a role for a GOP in American politics but not as a party of unrestrained greed and hate. Those are not constructive political values, they are instead what have traditionally been called sins and failings of human beings.

A number of Americans appear to be so fed up with injustice that they have become activists and rise up against them when they appear.

As Americans, we sit back and hope for our nation’s economy to be repaired so we can get back to where we were. When it comes to justice, that’s not the way it works. It will take the people continuing to gather behind the principles that unite us all as Americans and make it clear to the rest of our society, including the media and the GOP, that we won’t accept injustice as a reasonable alternative to what is just, we won’t accept having it constantly presented or proposed as an equivalent or valid position on any issue.

If there is justice for all in our economy, politics and society, many of the problems we face today as a nation could be addressed. People will accept sacrifices for the greater good when it is fair and all people, rich and poor, are asked to reach down just as deep to help. And in a society where justice prevails especially against the wealthy and powerful, there is no breeding environment for the hateful prejudice and class warfare of the current GOP.

There can be confidence again in America’s government and society but not until there is a return to being a nation of laws and justice. Americans are empowered and work together in a culture of justice and fairness, they become apathetic and divided when injustice dominates.

People need to be held accountable for their actions, no matter who they are. Allowing people to be “Too Big to Jail” and refusing to apply justice due to political calculations, no matter how well intended, is a miscalculation.

Americans need to see that we have a just society, they need to have some universal values such as a sense of fairness to be able to live and work together on the big problems we face. And the huge partisan gulf in this nation needs to be bridged, greater injustice won’t do that.

As a kid, I must’ve recited The Pledge of Allegiance thousands of times but did the meaning of the words really register? Though I’m not a rabid nationalist and not too sure about having national Pledges of Allegiance, the final part of it should be listened to repeatedly by the MSM and the GOP until it sticks:

…with liberty and justice for all.