I concur in many ways, but take issue with certain points.

I do think that we are tolerating a fundamental unfairness with respect to other nations that is unseemly and will bring us trouble as the world turns. The pressures at our southern border are a strong case in point. We deserve to eat a turd sandwich for promoting cartels down south so that we can promote prisons here at home. I don't care how many jobs are at stake... this state of affairs is wrong as well as impractical.

I dont think there is any value in teaching children enmity toward their own. Finding common cause is the stuff of progress, and such enmity implies division against ones own. This is the mistake of Christian fundamentalists and firebrand Liberals alike... both would strike at our tree with the axe, even though we built our fort in it.

The wider question to me is 'who governs us?'. I have not seen it framed in this way, but I think it should be... to the extent that big companies make up the important parts of the world, *they are our government*. This is a side effect of wild privatization that does not get fair mention. In this view, *bank fees are taxes*, as are unavoidable fees of any kind, and from my lowly perch I see no reason not to call them that.

So we get to the fundamental push that got our nation started to begin with: No taxation without representation. The more our Dextrous (as opposed to Sinister) friends sell the works of our nation to themselves, the more government is isolated from the people by way of being converted into business.

I am of two minds about this, since I count myself among those who see our bicameral party system as being fundamentally unable to make choices of any kind. Business can at least hold their own line. Still, we have drifted to oligarchy, and I am a patriot yet... I will *at least* hold out always for a republic, if democracy should prove too fickle. A Randian utopia will not arise from this morass without tromping most of us underfoot.

Truthfully, I prefer Democracy, but I have said since I was a pollywog that if you can control all the information, you can make the people vote for whatever you wish. This is why I am doing the happy dance every time I see a tooth get knocked out of Rupert Murdoch's grin. Keep on punching, world; wipe the smile off of that face. Still, it remains to be seen if this will lead to better reporting. Looks to me like we should be promoting Wikileaks if we think an informed populace is of value.

I think my greatest concern in the long haul is the engrained mistrust of a unified world. To some extent I share in this mistrust, but I see nationalism as the root and path to war. If we have a real war again, we can stop worrying about the possibility of climate change on that very day. It will become certainty.

Do not despair, fellow American, of our lingering dream of American dominion. We are kept under the mushroom theory of management: feed us crap and keep us in the dark... the Faux News network is but one arm of a larger octopus. Believe me when I tell you, other parts of the world are surging forward right now. We are losing secret wars; change will come one way or another. It is the changes from within that will define us; our borrowed habit of scapegoating (again, more a habit of the starboard half) could lead us down very terrible paths. History shows these tactics bringing results, but history also shows feedom prevailing.

I do believe that America will stem the tide. We have quite a surplus to squander, though we work so very fast to spend it... My biggest qualm is our racist tendencies; we snookered the world by learning their languages, and now we are too mighty to see the need to continue. The rest of the world learns our English while their laws are done in their own tongues; we shall be hoisted by our own petard. And that more insidious undermining... the shift of governance to nationless multinational companies... while it offers some bulwark against the imbalance in language, those companies cannot be regarded as American in any sense.

I know I have dodged your question about slavery, but in a sense the big companies were always the only power even then, and ultimately the life or death of that 'peculiar institution'. You miss the mark if you lay that global framework solely at the feet of white people. Exploitation no less terrible is with us to this day. Still, I hold a faith for my nation even yet, and so should you and any children you have the honor of infuencing. The poison of cynicism is really the fire under this cauldron; pride and principle are a bulwark against it.