Yes, even Reagan, whom I liked a lot, was used. In fact, the powers that be played him like a fiddle, although they allowed him his Grace Commission and to lower taxes. Still, the war on drugs heated up under Reagan, leading to the militarization of police and our insane policies in Central and South America.

As to free trade, Newt Gingrich spelled it out concerning GATT.........

"I am just saying that we need to be honest about the fact that we are transferring from the United States at a practical level significant authority to a new organization. This is a transformational moment. I would feel better if the people who favor this would just be honest about the scale of change.... This is not just another trade agreement. This is adopting something which twice, once in the 1940s and once in the 1950s, the U.S. Congress rejected. I am not even saying that we should reject it; I, in fact, lean toward it. But I think we have to be very careful, because it is a very big transfer of power."

NWV Exclusive -- America Can Get Out of The WTO in 2005

Free trade, actually, so called free trade, is a tool of the globalists.

Global government is impossible until the US economy is weakened and other economies of the world are strengthened.

Kissinger on NAFTA........

Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, a member of the Trilateral Commission's executive committee and a longtime power in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), called the vote on NAFTA the single most important decision that Congress would make during Mr. Clinton's first term. Indeed, Kissinger acknowledged in the Los Angeles Times that passage "will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War. . . ." NAFTA "is not a conventional trade agreement," he asserted, "but the architecture of a new international system."

NAFTA

Just look at how ADM, CARGILL and Monsanto have taken control of a large share of the world's food production since NAFTA was passed.

When it comes to grain production, we now have an oligopoly controlling over half the world's production, processing and distribution of grain.

And that's bad for America?

Yes, it's bad for America and for the world.

If you do a search on these 3 words, you will see why......

"cargill adm monopoly"

Uhm, just because someone works more hours than another person doesn't necessarily mean he's more productive.

My colleague and I both have a 37.5 hour week. We do exactly the same work. I barely work more than my 37.5 hours while she has a lot of overtime. Why? Because she spends most of the day writing private e-mails, surfing the net, spends hours on the phone talking privately to colleagues in other units and some other shit like that. Sure, she works longer but I get my work done in less time than she does. Unfortunately I know a lot of people like her who betray their employers. And the most ironic part is that our boss thinks she's a very good and dedicated employee because of her overtime hours. If only he knew.

That being said I'm well aware of the fact that americans work longer than most europeans when it comes to hours but that doesn't mean americans are harder workers than others in general. It also doesn't make europeans lazy.

__________________
"People try nonviolence for a week and when it doesn't work they go back to violence which hasn't worked for centuries"
Theodore Roszak

What an absurd thread.

I assume, of course, that the vast majority here who are openly contemptous of the unwashed masses of Americans would never include themselves in this group?

How patronziing and arrogant can one get?

Let's take a look at our high school students............

One third of these American high school students could not identify the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as coming from the Declaration of Independence and even those who identified the phrase correctly could not articulate the document's significance; some who found the phrase familiar thought it came from the Gettysburg Address.

Three quarters of the students did not know when Abraham Lincoln was president; three of every ten could not place the Civil War in the proper half-century. More than a third could not place the writing of the Constitution in the proper half-century. Map questions revealed only the most elementary knowledge of American or European geography; many girls, black and Hispanic students had trouble locating Great Britain. For the most part what information or misinformation students had about world events and great works of literature seem to come from movies and television rather than from school.

Fast forward to last week's New York Times article. Twenty-five years after the wake-up call of "A Nation at Risk," twenty years after the depressing answer to "What Do Our Seventeen-Year Olds Know," the news in 2008 is that our schools still aren't doing their job and that our high school students remain ignorant of basic U.S. and world history and literature. The familiar story reported by the Times: Fewer than half of today's American teenagers today asked questions from the 1986 survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one in four said Columbus sailed to the New World "some time after 1750." (The Times adds to the last sentence "not in 1492," in case some of its readers might not know the date either. After all, they are products of America's schools.)

Other results were equally appalling when one considers that these are the citizens who will choose the next generation of the country's leaders - and who might even be among those leaders themselves. About a quarter of today's high school juniors were unable to identify Hitler as Germany's leader in World War II. The rest guessed he was a munitions maker, an Austrian premier or the German Kaiser.

Who Is To Blame for American Teens Ignorant of History and Literature?

I could post more, but what's the point. If you do not understand how ignorant most Americans are, then either you don't live here, or you are blind.

The ignorance of the American masses is overwhelming.

Allright, one more piece..........

While critics tend to rely on the three-decades long decline of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to document the dumbing down of American education, more alarming is our performance against the students of other industrialized countries. By virtually every measure of achievement, American students lag far behind their counterparts in both Asia and Europe, especially in math and science. Moreover, the evidence suggests that they are falling farther and farther behind. As educational researcher Harold Stevenson notes, although "the U.S. is among the countries expending the highest proportion of their gross national product on education, our elementary school and secondary school students never place above the median in comparative studies of academic achievement."

Part of the reason is that neither our schools nor our students spend very much time at it. The National Education Commission on Time and Learning found that most American students spend less than half their day actually studying academic subjects. The commission's two-year study found that American students spent only about 41 percent of the school day on basic academics. Their schedules jammed with course work in self-esteem, personal safety, AIDS education, family life, consumer training, driver's ed, holistic health, and gym, the typical American high school student spends only 1,460 hours on subjects like math, science, and history during their four years in high schools. Meanwhile, their counterparts in Japan will spend 3,170 hours on basic subjects, students in France will spend 3,280 on academics, while students in Germany will spend 3,528 hours studying such subjects - nearly three times the hours devoted in American schools.

Dumbing Down Our Kids, Losing the Educational Race by Charles J. Sykes; statistics, comparisons.

*approaches Tim respectfully*

matey, this strikes me as somewhat unfair.

if this were a physics forum and i asked ye all, "are most americans ignorant 'o the principles 'o physics?", i'd expect the answer to be resoundingly "AYE".
and justly so.

as ye well know, this be a political forum, so i'd expect all these wonky sailors to view 'o thar fellow americans to be deficient on many 'o the issues covered here.

*bows*

- MeadHallPirate

One of my favorite quotes..........

“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.”--Winston Churchill

Not so much about Americans, as it is about people in general.

Re: are americans stupid / uninformed?

No, the media serve the elite by dividing the masses...

These white, fringe, Clear Channel teabaggers, are making the USA look like

Planet of the Apes, its choreographed by fake outrage...

Old man whitey stays in power by playing people against one another.

Fox makes it their agenda, Limbaugh a career, Glenn Beck

"you're bringing down America!" but are nothing but B-grade actors in a schmaltzy soap opera pitting middle Americans against one another for the benefit of the ruling class, who want to abolish progress or change.

Same goes for the Olberman v. Fox bickering competition.

So tell me who benefis from the bickering stage play distraction pitting brother versus brother?

The arms manufacturer?

What are you talking about? Ronald Reagan loved socialism.

The entire "establishment"

Ya know, the MIC, the Bankers, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agri, Insurance Industry, Lawyers, Foundations, Wall Street, etc, etc.

You said no, Americans aren't stupid, or uninformed, but if that were true, we would not keep re-electing Republicans and Democrats. For none are as dumb as those who believe that either party gives a flying fuck about the American people.

I believe Americans are terribly uninformed. Back during the election I remember a discussion w/a coworker who was an arch-conservative. When I mention people like William F. Buckley, George Will, Peggy Noonan and Grover Norquist he had no idea who I was talking about, but he knew who Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck et al were.

I would bet that a lot of the teabaggers and other demonstrators couldn't really describe what they're so angry about. Like the woman that wanted her country back, but couldn't explain what had so drastically changed.

I live in a very red district in a very red state, so most of the Dems tend to be better informed. I don't think that is a function of party, but rather a function of going against the flow. I find many Ron Paul supporters to be better informed, again I think that is a result of swimming upstream. I would imagine that Reps who live in largely blue districts are better informed.

However, I don't see how we can blame television, video games, the government or public schools for the American public for being so ignorant , it is our own fault. Sure we work a lot, I worked over 60 hrs this week, sorry no excuse. I've said this before but it is still true. WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT. Americans that are uninformed had decided to either let others think for them or have decided that it isn't important.

A sad state of affairs

The teabaggers were caught on video with Aetna shirts on. They're industry hacks.

Certainly, young people in the USA will be dumber than Genx which is me.
The cell phone texting and vid games made their attention span tiny.

But the press is so carefully manipulated by BiG BROTHER, a paper like the LA Times is even censored/spun so that the govmnt/big business chicanery, when uncovered, is termed a victory as in the case of the 11 yr old kidnap victim found alive at 18 yrs old.

America has had so many defeats: wars/economy/corruption/sports stars/ news anchors lying/newspapers dying/ but these are the fault of big business conglomerates and greed.

Blackmailing states to produce a test score in a kid to gain funding is short sighted, and foolish and - like tax cuts - will bite you tomorrow.

Kids of tomorrow will not believe in the system unlesss they see it working. Obama must be allowed to make real change. Kids will be dumber because TV news is woefully ignorant and shallow.

You make a valid point, but it is the American people who allowed a handful of corporations to take over the US media. While I do blame the government/media, we still stood by and watched it happen. What I found a few years ago really shocked me, as I found an article from The Atlantic Monthly which had a former FCC Commissioner warning us about how corporations were starting to buy up the media. This was in 1968.


The Media Barons and the Public Interest: An FCC Commissioner's Warning

The Media Barons and the Public Interest - 68.06

I think the internet has provided an opportunity for a more well informed electorate.

Hypothetically, there is nothing preventing a "Capitalist" party from drafting the richest guy in the republic or the guy who made the largest bonus in the history of the republic. It could even be considered a form of market based metric inherent in Capitalism.