Has anyone noticed that the do nothing U.S. Congress is back in session after being on vacation all of August until now.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just six percent (6%) of likely U.S. Voters think Congress is doing a good or excellent job, unchanged from a month ago.
Sixty-five percent (65%) rate its performance as poor.
Just eight percent (8%) of voters think most members of Congress get reelected because they do a good job representing their constituents. Sixty-seven percent (67%) think it’s because election rules are rigged to benefit incumbents, but 25% are not sure.
Only 25% think their own member of Congress deserves reelection, the lowest finding in nearly five years.
74% of voters believe Congress has been unproductive this year.
And they’re right. As of last Wednesday this Congress had enacted only 142 laws, according to Pew Research Center.
That’s the fewest of any Congress in 20 years. And just 108 of them were substantive pieces of legislation. Pew also found that the House and Senate have been in session for fewer days and hours this year than most sessions of Congress.
Members of Congress used to spend much of their time away from Washington holding open forums and town-hall meetings as well as campaigning in public. But those activities have waned. Fewer members hold truly open meetings. Most fill their district schedules with events with business leaders, local and state elected officials, supporters and fundraisers.
Avoiding disaffected voters and the opportunity for unpleasant sound bites has taken precedence over meeting constituents.
Congress is the institution that's supposed to protect us from dictatorship, and yet we hate it.
So, Congress will meet now for less than three weeks, just long enough to keep the government going until December, and then go back home to try to get re-elected.
During their upcoming campaigns, you'll hear a lot about various crises which may require us to bomb countries for their own good.
But no-one will seriously address the most important issues victimizing many of us, the economic crisis especially related to the question of jobs: what to do about jobs and incomes as the old industrial economy continues to shed middle class jobs?
As the rich get richer, the gap between them and the rest of us is increasing, spiraling out of control. It is becoming increasingly difficult to financially survive for most Americans.
The manufacturing economy is dead at least from the standpoint of providing middle class incomes and long term job security for a third of the American workforce.
If America can’t create new, post manufacturing jobs to replace the old ones, nothing we do will turn out very well.
Then there’s the service and infrastructure crunch. The country’s demand for services like education, health care, better systems of transportation, energy is growing rapidly, but our ability to produce the quantity and quality of services demanded can’t match the need.
The systems we have to produce and deliver these services are increasingly dysfunctional. As a result, we are seeing ruinous inflation in costs like college, university tuition and the health care system.
These problems must be addressed; health care costs are on course to bankrupt the country and education costs have already saddled the younger generation with crippling debt.
These problems won’t go away on their own; as time goes on the country is going to need more health care, more education, rather than less, and we also want the quality of both to improve.
In too many ways, all levels of government in the United States are too expensive, too cumbersome and too clumsy.
It’s both ironic and unsettling that just as the United States is leading the world towards a new kind of service based economy, our largest and most important service based industries are so inefficient and poorly organized.
Technology, poor education, alienation has so dumbed down the average American, that mediocrity is the new norm, and work ethic pride is all but gone.
We can’t be a successful service economy until our biggest service sectors start working well.
Then there’s the demographic transition. Public and private pension systems and entitlement programs face a variety of challenges as the competition between retirees, elderly, disabled, poor, other vulnerable deserving members of our Country, and the rest of the population for resources is getting fierce.
One of the ways that a society should be judged is how it treats the most vulnerable of its members. These are supposed to be decided by cultural, social and spiritual values.
They cannot be solved by callous ideas or government policy changes. But they are real, and unless we address them wisely the country is unlikely to thrive.
Getting back to our bombing other Countries for their own good.
I find that concept pretty weird because you look at many of the current worldwide crises: Ukraine vs Russia, the Islamic State versus everybody else, Middle Eastern, African conflicts, and what they boil down to is various religious and ethnic groups that have been shut out of the political systems that controls their lives.
Yet here in the United States we have huge numbers of citizens who can vote, but don't, so that government "by the people" is turning into government by the angriest people, because they're the only ones ticked off enough to pick up a pencil.
You only have to look around to see where that kind of system leads. So I hope we fix this soon.
Because I would really hate to see the day when some other Country or Group decides it has to bomb us for our own good.
