Glenn Greenwald is one of my favorite columnists. He is a tireless advocate of civil liberties. He has a piece in the Guardian where he points out:
Most of what matters in American political life is nowhere to be found in its national election debates. Penal policies vividly illustrate this point. America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation on earth by far, including countries with far greater populations. As the New York Times reported in April 2008: "The United States has less than 5% of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.".....One in every four African-American men is likely to be imprisoned. Black and Latino drug users are arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned at far higher rates than whites, even though usage among all groups is relatively equal. The human cost of this sprawling penal state is obviously horrific: families are broken up, communities are decimated, and those jailed are rendered all but unemployable upon release. But the financial costs are just as devastating. California now spends more on its prison system than it does on higher education, a warped trend repeated around the country.
He continues:
Yet none of these issues will even be mentioned, let alone debated, by Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. That is because they have no discernible differences when it comes to any of the underlying policies,....This same dynamic repeats itself in other crucial realms. President Obama's dramatically escalated drone attacks in numerous countries have generated massive anger in the Muslim world, continuously kill civilians, and are of dubious legality at best. His claimed right to target even American citizens for extrajudicial assassinations, without a whiff of transparency or oversight, is as radical a power as any seized by George Bush and Dick Cheney.Yet Americans whose political perceptions are shaped by attentiveness to the presidential campaign would hardly know that such radical and consequential policies even exist. That is because here too there is absolute consensus between the two parties.
(see link)
Individual freedom, group think, cognitive bias all are at play here.
I believe Mr. Greenwald is right on virtually every point he makes here. The kind of democracy that we have at the federal level is dishonest at best, and kleptocratic at worst, only the wealthiest Americans can reasonably vie for office, and even then they are still completely beholden to their political action committees. Reducing the scale of government, to a more local level would make those in government more directly accountable to their constituents. In concert with this, the state national guard reserves should take on a more active role in the American military community, while the national defense establishment would concentrate less on offense. The US's political establishment is too inflexible, and too corrupt to be the model for the global community. A return to states (and local municipalities) rights might diminish international prestige in a sense, but it could be just the way to restore responsibility to the system.
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