Dear Lise
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Getting to the truth about America today is difficult. We'll not find it in the American mass media or from our politicians, as we've sadly discovered across our past five presidential administrations, regardless of their differing partisan persuasions. Our leaders and our mainstream media are all indentured to the same masters.
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There is an occasional exception, such as Congressman Kucinich from Ohio, but such as he face an overwhelming majority of apparatchiks in service to the system, a system that now takes the support of millions of dollars of "contributions" to successfully elect a congressman, tens of millions for a senator, and hundreds of millions for a president. Upon election, those elected owe their supporters a debt, a debt that can be paid off only by actions and legislation favorable to their sponsors. The system has become so thoroughly corrupted that some have now labeled our country a "pre-fascist state."
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You may well wonder what is my stake in all this. An ex-lifelong Democrat, I am now politically independent. I am not a revolutionary nor a zealot for any political extremism or academic model of the "ideal" social order. I have, however, become progressively more disgusted with my own government's indecency, its employment of slaughter and lies in service to its commercial masters, its misrepresentation (in medical care, for instance) to the best interests of our people, and, frankly, I am scared of the direction all this ultimately leads us.
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What to do? Well, we could start by illegalizing all political campaign contributions, and finance the campaigns from our treasury. Trust in this: it would be the abundantly less costly route to go, both in the avoidance of indentured representation and simply in public money now channeled to the means of war and other exploitive interests. Our elected government would then actually owe their jobs to the electorate rather than to private greed-interests. Perhaps then we could afford a national healthcare system somewhat better than our current world ranking of 37th (!) down the list.
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We could also bust up the massive and uniformly suppressive media conglomerates, as was the case years ago when there were legal restrictions against newspapers, television, internet and radio companies under the same controlling interests, as well a limit of media outlets owned by one interest within a geographical area.
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Will we do these things? Most probably not, the current system "working so well" for those who profit from it and who owe their positions, income and life-styles to it. But of course, as history advises of all treacherous regimes, this one too will eventually come down. We can only hope that the event does not hurt too many good people then, nor that too many suffer in the interim.
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Here is a daily news and commentary link we can trust: newsletter@truthdig.com
Today's edition carries a column by the trustworthy Robert Scheer, as well as one by Chris Hedges.
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Kari joins in wishing our family and Norway to know -- despite over abundance of evidence to the contrary -- that there are indeed some fairly intelligent and quite decent Americans.
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