What is going on south of that Canada-United States of America border? Democrats are turning on Obama. Republicans are disavowing their motley leadership. The rock that used to be Standard and Poors has turned thumbs down on the American economy.
With the plunging stock market, those of us on fixed incomes have just seen our retirement savings go south again. The stock market does not crash these days, it just bounces like a perpetual motion India rubber ball—not higher and higher, just lower and lower. We are all getting mad as hell and we are not going to take this any more. (You might have heard that before but so what?)
Americans are telling their politicians how mad they are and you can hardly blame them. It is bad enough that the greed of Wall Street drove us all into recession three years ago. For the American politicians to create a stupid, destructive, ignorant artificial crisis such as an arbitrary, unfounded debt limit was a vicious and flagrant disregard for the people they were supposed to serve. They should all be spanked and sent home and the voters should replace them with adults.
One of the obstacles we repeatedly run into calling for a Canadian Constitutional Conference is the people who are deathly afraid that you want a system of government similar to the Americans. Good grief no! Canadians have indirectly suffered the worst effects of the American Constitution for over two hundred years and hardly deserve such a flawed system of government themselves.
But as has been said many times, democracy itself is hardly perfect. It is just much better than the alternatives. The basic problem of the American Constitution is that it is based on a union of states and not a union of people. Even the subsequent civil war that the country suffered only produced necessary band-aids to the problems rather than solutions.
This writer would not have the temerity to suggest what the Americans should do to clean up their act. What they might do is reflect long and hard on the original objectives of their constitutional congress. They were supposed to assure Americans of the individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Concentrating on making that happen would be a damn good start.
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