On Nov 10, 2008, at 12:19 AM, Andrew Crystall wrote: > On 10 Nov 2008 at 3:07, William T Goodall wrote: > >> On 9 Nov 2008, at 23:04, Jon Louis Mann wrote: >>> >>> part of the reason government sometimes makes bad decisions is >>> because it attracts corrupt people, easily influenced by greedy, >>> unscrupulous lobbyists. >> >> The American system was designed to have congress, senate, president >> and supreme court neutralise each other so that it's quite hard to >> corrupt. With the political consensus in the USA now so narrow >> (republicans and democrats are much closer than opposition parties in >> other western democracies) that's not working so well. The parties >> are > > Wait, what's that? Oh, it's me making a rude sound. They're further > apart in fundermental positions that Labour and Conservative. > > The countries which tend to have actually different parties are those > with coalition government systems.
A Liverpool-born, naturalized US citizen friend of mine notes that in the US system, despite the fact that we talk about electing a person or persons (Obiden v McPalin), we're really electing their entire party to the administrative branch, along with whatever judicial appointments may come up during their 4- or 8-year presidency. With a Democratic administration, Senate and House replacing a Republican administration, Senate and House, we'll get to see just how different they may be. As to the two parties being nearly identical, I stopped listening to that old out-of-tune song a long time ago. The outbound party is the one that thinks that there's not a damn thing that government can do well (except, apparently, invade countries that were no threat to us, trample all over the constitution, authorize the use of torture and generally reduce the USA to an international pariah). Evidently, the people decided that it's not the _government_ that can't do right, it was _that particular_ government. The inbound party is the one that seems to believe that a well-run government represents the collective will, wealth and power of the people of the nation. Proof that it can be well-run by that party exists in the form of the budgetary surplus that existed at the end of the supposedly tax-and- spend Clinton administration. Dave _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
