What gets me, looking at things American from afar in Aust is just how dumb some people can be to support parties, policies and politicians whose sole objective is to cling onto or gain power and control in ways that are so patently contrary to the interests of the ordinary person and the common good. Joe Bageant traced this process and how it came to be in America so eloquently and vividly in his book Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War.. Check it out and see how this came to be.

The tragedy is that what is happening in the US is being replicated all around the globe. Australia being the good buddy of the US has been following readily down the same sluice gate ever since one of our stupid Prime Ministers in the '60s said "All the way with LBJ". And so we did right into Vietnam. In latter years we swallowed the "weapons of mass destruction" line and landed into yet another US led mess. In the mean time our parties, policies and politicians are behaving and talking in ways that are rapidly becoming indistinguishable from that lot in the US.

Just take the current debate and policy paralysis over a handful of asylum seekers trying to get away from all the madness in the Middle East and parts of Asia as one example. When you actually look at the policies of both our major parties they are full of variants of the same neoliberal rhetoric that you hear in the US. In the end these parties are literally indistinguishable from each other apart from their particular brand of 'spin'.

In the meantime parts of Australia have a third world health service. Elsewhere unemployed people are expected to live on $35.00 a day while trying to find work that is regularly being sent off shore in the name of 'efficiency and competition' and all the while we claim that we are a first world country!

All this is happening while government doesnt blink in handing out subsidies to unprofitable and poorly managed industries that amount to little more than 'business welfare'. The local Murdoch press actively tells people here that this is a good thing and because they don't have the critical skills an awful lot of people here believe the lies just like the US viewers of Fox News do over there.

It could be worse though, I guess we could be grateful as we haven't got our own Tea Party, apart from a few wannabees, trying to 'convert' the population and set the political agenda.....so far!

Good on you Little Hawk for telling it how it is. You're not alone out there in the land of sanity and reason.

Cheers,

Andrez