Even more pernicious than having banks that are too big to fail is the American propensity to perpetuate problems that are too big to solve.
Once such problem, brought to the fore by yet another mass killing spree, is our guns. More than 300 million of them. Even as citizens and politicians renewed the clamor for gun control legislation, skeptics pointed out why it can't be done. Nearly half of us -- 47 per cent -- own at least one firearm. We have more registered gun dealers (130,000) than we have grocery stores. Yet 40 per cent of gun sales are unregulated transactions made by private, unlicensed vendors, mostly at gun shows and conventions. In 2008, the Supreme Court Gang of Five wrongly ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment provided for an individual right to bear firearms. This destroyed the more logical argument that the amendment applied only to militias. Abraham Lincoln, the lawyer, once pointed out that the law is what the lawmaker intended, and it's clear to anyone not in the thrall of the National Rifle Association what the writers of the Second Amendment intended. And so we're stuck with a problem that's too big to solve and mass killings of innocent men, women and children -- eight this year alone -- will continue. What can we do? Get used to it.
Some say the climate that tolerates mass killings exists in this country because of our own government's policy of endless war, of covert killing of innocents, of death by drone. This is another problem that's too big to solve. The greatest single engine driving our otherwise sick economy is the massive war machine and all of its accoutrements. Shut it down and the economy collapses. The most powerful corporations, outfits like Exxon Mobile and Chevron, owe their obescene profits to the U.S. military, the largest single consumer of fossil fuel in the history of the planet. Even if public opinion were absolutely unanimous for peace, it wouldn't change one mind in the corporate suites of those who derive their money and influence from warmaking.
Our government is corrupt. Office holders become corrupted because corporations legally are people, with a First Amendment right to throw unlimited cash at candidates until they own their very minds and souls. Even if every single taxpayer in the United States demanded legislation to change this, nothing would come of it, because the votes would be cast by the corrupted. Another problem that has become too big to solve.
Our corrupt government is militarizing local and state police forces, the better to suppress any possible insurrection against a dysfunctional and oppressive system. And so our society plummets crazily down the sinkhole to enslavement. And there's nothing We, the People, can do about it.
The problem is way too big to solve.
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
