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[smjjames]

And now for something completely different!!

Merry Christmas Mr Mnuchin!!

The <pick a species> poo prank is so classic, lol....

[sluissa]

In other words, being specific isn't necessarily the point.

At least in the Civil Rights case, they were targeting a specific subset of laws and government policy. The so called "Jim Crow Laws" that more or less existed primarily on a local and state level but even somewhat within the Federal government as well.
That's not to say individuals didn't use the soapbox to push their own agenda aside from that, but the main goal was to get the Federal government to give them protection from laws that targeted their minority, generally in the form of poll taxes and "separate but equal" segregation.

This is something Occupy didn't have, or at least not coherently enough that you could pick it out from among the "It's not fair" screaming. Aside from that, when the federal government is in the pocket of the corporations, there's nobody left to run to. This isn't a case where a few bad actor localities are the majority of the problem, this is nation wide, global even. The UN might be a good place to start, but they're largely toothless and given the problems they tend to focus on, would probably look upon citizens of the US coming to them to complain in a sort of #FirstWorldProblems light.

So on this fine Christmas Eve, reading here many complaints about American society... what would you folks envision as a more desirable end state, specifically?  What would make you all feel at peace with yourself and your neighbor?

More relevant, perhaps, what can you do, today, to help bring peace to your neighbors and yourself?  Even if only in small ways.

Weird's list is a good start.

I'd push the Health care and Education angles a little harder. They're very much intertwined and there's plenty of places to chip away at from various angles on each of them.

Campaign funding and lobbying reform need to happen bad, probably first. Health Care and Education are our long term investments and should happen as soon as possible. But nothing will happen as long as the government is in the pockets of lobbyists and donors.

I'd add to that list some sort of basic welfare system that's not a broken mess and impossible to navigate and subject to a hundred stipulations which cuts out large chunks of the population from qualifying. This should include, at minimum, housing assistance, food assistance, utility assistance, and transport assistance. A smarter idea might be to wrap this up into a basic income system or negative income tax if only for simplicity sake and on the growing assumption that people do in fact tend to make good choices when you give them the opportunity. Even if we can't get THAT far with things at this moment though, welfare does need reform of some sort if only to equalize the opportunity. It often focuses too much on specific demographics.

Finally, and probably least likely is some sort of heavy tax on wealth beyond a certain point that's not being used in some public economic manner. If you've got 100 million but it's flowing through a business, creating trade and jobs, I have less of a problem there than if you have 100 million in land as an "investment" just sitting unused. That sort of thing. Economics is complicated though, and those aren't the only cases that'd need to be thought about. But there needs to be something done about the wealth that flows upwards and gets stuck there in places that's hard to dislodge. Offshore accounts, luxury goods, property. The estate tax was a decent way of helping with that over the long term, but that's getting chipped away.

As for helping neighbors, just do what you can. I'm not in a position to afford economic help to others. But I freely lend an extra hand to people. If that means helping someone move, or clean, fixing a simple plumbing problem here or there, computer issues, easy automotive fixes, even something as simple as baby/pet sitting. You may not be able to give someone $100, but you might have skills that could save them $100 that would otherwise have to come out of their pockets and not necessarily cost you nearly that much. I'm often offered a meal for my help, and most people are willing to reciprocate with a helping hand when they can.

[EnigmaticHat]

More relevant, perhaps, what can you do, today, to help bring peace to your neighbors and yourself?  Even if only in small ways.

Individual people in America aren’t the problem.  Most places in America are, on the ground level, peaceful.  Most people in America are decent to their neighbors.  There’s not much individuals need to do in their own loves to fix things.

There are places on Earth that have had a general social breakdown.   America does not resemble them.

Re: Civil Rights movement, it existed before and after Jim Crow.  Th civil rights movement of the 50s-70s had multiple different factions with many different goals, many of which did not succeed.

[TheBiggerFish]

The UN might be a good place to start, but they're largely toothless and given the problems they tend to focus on, would probably look upon citizens of the US coming to them to complain in a sort of #FirstWorldProblems light.

There was the UN Special Rapporteur in Alabama...It is getting that bad, and I really think something needs to be done.

Of course, the US has a dang veto.  :/

[alway]

That report is actually up now (or at least part of it? not sure): http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22533&LangID=E
The Guardian also followed along for some of it, and has their own little reports you could probably find if you searched them out.

[wierd]

Pretty damning stuff, but nothing I have not already witnessed first hand (and why I am livid about this "tax reform" and the other horseshit I see.)  Much of the "Poor people are damnable parasites!" rhetoric comes from the boomer generation, who believes it with passion, since things were much easier in their generation and they refuse to accept that the situation is different now. Oh no-- these kids are all just lazy wastrels-- nevermind that they are starving to death and have their teeth rotting out of their damned heads while working 3 part time jobs, because there is no demand for full time, because then the champions of industry would have to pay benefits to them.

The issue with poverty is precisely why Iamplit what I did on the "What can ordinary people do" question earlier.  Tremendous research was invested into how people enter poverty in the US, and the biggest one is a one-off occurrence that disrupts their ability to provide for themselves, leading to an escalating and spiraling cycle of inescapable debts (Often in the many thousands of dollars)-- that in the early onset, can often be totally averted for just a few hundred dollars.  I have helped 4 people this way this christmas alone. One was my boss, who's apartment burned down, and who's insurance company is giving the run-around, and refusing to pay on. I spotted her 500$, no interest, to land with a soft bounce instead of a hard thud.  She has since paid me back, and the deadly debt cycle was averted.  What angers me is not that I felt compelled to lend this funding (I would gladly do so again!), it is that the powers that be in this damn country refuse to act to make this shit illegal, and think that ruining people who literally just fucking lost everything is somehow perfectly OK.

I might seem like an arrogant ass some times, but I am not a heartless arrogant ass.  I was super poor myself once, and KNOW, FIRST HAND, what that is fucking like. NO. This shit needs to stop, and Trump is NOT the cure, he is the damn disease.  The Boomer generation just refuses to accept this. 

[EnigmaticHat]

Highlight of the report for me:

America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, ahead of Turkmenistan, El Salvador, Cuba, Thailand and the Russian Federation. Its rate is nearly 5 times the OECD average.

The youth poverty rate in the United States is the highest across the OECD with one quarter of youth living in poverty compared to less than 14% across the OECD.

We have more people in prison than Russia apparently.  In capitalist USA, the soap drops you!  Or something.  I'm tired.

Not cynical enough to suggest that we're worse than an authoritarian regime like Russia (because... I don't actually believe that), but that's still startling that we have more people in prison than countries that routinely make people vanish.  Also youth poverty, yay.  Wonder what they define youth as, if 40 million is the number they're using for poverty I'd imagine that statistic ends at somewhere between 14-18.

[wierd]

The issue with having THE WORLDS HIGHEST incarceration rate is not lost on me.  I seem to recall about 3 weeks ago, we waxed philosophical about the problem with private prisons, and their insatiable hunger to cause revolving door criminality by encouraging recidivism, rather than serving as actually CORRECTIONAL institutions. (They exists exclusively to extract money from poor people and their families, to enrich private prison owners, and the politicians they grease up.)

[redwallzyl]

This is a very good report. Thanks.

[RadtheCad]

I mean, a capitalist or socialist system is never a substitute for social fabric.  As shown in your case, wierd.

[McTraveller]

This quote from that UN article explains my main beef with all things health care in the US, and why I was personally opposed to trying to fix health care through making insurance more affordable/accessible:

"US health care expenditures per capita are double the OECD average and much higher than in all other countries. But there are many fewer doctors and hospital beds per person than the OECD average."  (emphasis mine)

Trying to solve health care from the demand side, by making insurance more affordable, will never bring costs down if we don't address the lack of health care providers.

Same as most other 'social' programs - you can't solve them merely by giving people more dollars, you have to also increase the ability to provide goods and services you want people to be able to buy with those dollars.  The US is really bad at this one - if you just give people money to spend on rent without changing local zoning laws and the way property taxes are assessed to allow for a larger number of property owners and developers. What we have now often just encourages a few massive property owners, which captures the local housing market and just facilitates (heh) rent-seeking.

[MrRoboto75]

I remember this year some door-to-door guy druming up support for one of the governors that was running this year.  His plan was to pay for healthcare by cutting mental health.  It honestly seemed backward and genuinely insulted me somehow.

[Frumple]

Fairly sure the amount the patients pay doesn't really have much to do with the supply of doctors, save maybe for the incentives it gives to hospitals to hire the fewest doctors/nurses and maintain the fewest beds they can get away with in order to maximize profits,* or the extent it reduces demand and subsequently puts less pressure on hospitals to move towards a larger staff.  Gods know I've forgotten the details, though.

Or to put it another way, the costs in the US, particularly for the patients, has roughly fuck all to do with how many beds or doctors a hospital has. Near as I can remember, the major bottlenecks (to the extent there actually is one, considering the various resources the US has to throw around if it gives enough of a shit to do it) is more education costs, profit minded hospitals being skinflint, and defunding efforts near entirely led with GOP politicians at the head.

Basically, least if my memory's not horribly failing me, patient costs are effectively orthogonal to most of the logistics issues involved with running hospitals so far as the US's fucked up healthcare system goes. Aiming to reduce demand side problems isn't likely to do terribly much save make things less hella' shite for lots of people on the demand side of things.

E: Well, and maybe fuck over the health insurance industry a bit. Which, uh. I'm not sure you're going to find many people not part of it shedding much in the way of tears about the health insurance industry getting a portion of the shaft they've been inflicting on everyone for the last long while.

* You'd think they'd be encouraged to get the most beds they can, but the fucked up pricing, among other things, means there's no few number of incentives to limit them in order to reduce the number of people that can't pay in part or at all. US healthcare is a case study in perverse incentives, heh.

[Magistrum]

I never quite understood America's healthcare price problem. On one side, of  course most peocedures would be a bit more expensive purely due to the higher price of labor, but then again it doesn't matter what angle I look; total cost; cost to production; cost to household income...

I now get that insurance gets a sweet cut on that, but it is still far too much over the common cost in developed and undeveloped nations.

[Lord Shonus]

One of the biggest parts is insurance-related, but it is complicated. To put it simply, insurance is in a position to force a massive discount because they represent so many people, and thus can kill the business of any healthcare provider that won't play ball. I've seen differences of 60, 70, and even 80 percent between insurance price and non-insurance price. Since most people go through a private insurer, hospitals responded by setting their "full" price really high, so that the insurance companies pay an actually workable rate.