Sorry to butt in Mick...but you're wrong.

"You see, Doug, what made our system so successful up until the Reagan years, is that the sides didn't vilify one another, question their patriotism and call them disgusting. What made it work is that the sides understood that their job, in a pluralistic society, was to find consensus with one another for the common good. Sure the side with the majority got to have the plums in the pudding. That is democracy. But there was respect of one another. That is sauce that is missing from todays pasta."

What made our system work, was that we were "kings of the shitheap" we used our economic power to steal resources everywhere, we bullied and subverted democracy wherever we could, installing puppet govts and supporting dictators at will...how dare you...a member of the left, hold up the US /UK system as an example of democracy.

Respect for one another! Our leaders had to be dragged screaming and kicking to treat blacks as equals....most of us remember that.

What we see in front of us, is a system which has become unsustainable in an economic and an environmental sense, and the sad sight of a population being hoodwinked into thinking that it can be fixed, by weasel politicians, while they drain the last few drop of blood out of the carcase...Ake