Diane Dimond, who writes a Saturday column for the Albuquerque Journal, indicated her lack of trust in a wide variety of U.S. institutions. She began with singling out John Edwards as emblematic of why she doesn't trust politicians; however, she believes all branches of government are broken and the agencies of government are "so deeply mired in creating work for themselves that I think hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted on needless bureaucracy and failure to streamline government." She is similarly wary of financial institutions, with the huge paydays of top executives and the failure of banks to lend money in "this unstable time."
Dimond is also very dissatisfied with the U.S. educational system but she sympatizes with the teachers, who complain of lack of money and the emphasis in public schools on "testing, testing, testing." She also fears that tuitions in private school and colleges are so high that they may need to shut their doors, because so few Americans can afford them.
Organized sports, organized religion and the media, her chosen profession, come in for severe criticism. She castigates professional athletes who take steroids and lie about it; those who pay money to maim opponents; or father babies with multiple girlfreinds and think nothing of it. Dimond believes that religion still offers more positives than negatives but she has soured on it due to the Catholic Church sex abuse scandals. The media is a "tarnished institution" to Dimond, in which "journalism got lumped in with the product of raving TV hosts and untrained Internet bloggers so readers don't know who to trust -- so they trust none of it."
When Diane Dimond threw all government agencies under the bus, she didn't single out those heavily funded parts of government that are costing us most dearly: a bloated Pentagon, a sprawling intelligence empire, a huge inventory of nuclear destructive power and a paranoid focus on homeland security. These giant consumers of government funding, materials and human resources come under the general label of national security and are thus largely immune from close scrutiny and needed criticism, even though they contribute to our national insecurity. The erosion of our civil liberties since World War II -- and especially after 9/11 -- can be attributed, in large part, to our exaggerated fear of an enemy nation(s) or nonstate groups labeled as terrorists.
Polling suggests that roughly two-thirds of Americans share Diane Dimond's belief that the nation is headed in the wrong direction; however, these disaffected citizens, by and large, don't have a clue as to what direction the nation should go. One poll revealed this great uncertainty about direction when it asked the simple question: Do you want more government or less government? About half wanted more government and half wanted less government.
Hercules was assigned 12 great labors to perform; however, the labors of Hercules were child's play compared to what must be done to find remedies for the neglect of this nation's infrastructure and the misbegotten policies and priorities we have been following for lo these many years. Given that the deck is stacked against third parties, the best course of action is to reconstruct the Democratic Party. This blog, then, is designed to delineate the policy and other changes that must be made to fundamentally change the direction of the country.
