From Jane Smiley's post on the Huffington Post, third paragraph.
We are a country that can no longer pay our bills, no longer wage an effective military action, and no longer protect our citizens from disaster. And it doesn't matter what fiscal responsibility individuals show, what bravery individual soldiers show, or what generosity individual Americans show. As a nation-as a geopolitical entity-we have been stripped of all of our superpowers and many of our powers, and it has been done quickly and efficiently, in the name of blind patriotism, by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and their neocon advisors....
From the second paragraph from the bottom:
...A decent place to live is one where a large employed middle class can most of the time afford to house, feed, educate, and care for their children, who are, in the regular course of events, safe. Canada is a decent place to live. The US is divided largely between those who live in indecent ghost-towns that have been gutted by the evaporation of jobs and those who live in indecent affluent communities that they can barely afford but are terrified to leave. When the corporatocracy paid the Reagan revolutionaries to roll back any and all regulations so that they could do every short-sighted and selfish thing they wanted to, they started us down the road to this. ...Link
Not only are we busted in the big picture, but locally most of our communities can no longer afford to provide many basic services. Funding schools, largely supported by outrageously high property taxes, is helping to break the back of the middle class, especially senior citizens.
Reagan and the Bushes have managed to wreck the place, top to bottom.
Read Jane Smiley's post.
