I get free healthcare in Georgia. I'm not real worried about gaps in coverage because I am uninsured right now anyway.

Likewise I'll have coverage while I'm away, but I can't afford a new policy between when I get back and when the health reform finally kicks in.

Basically if I can't get a policy then I'm going to be stuck paying most of my paycheck for health insurance. Right now the policy I could get would be over $500 a month. Since I had a heat stroke last year, I can't really afford to be without coverage.

Don't take this the wrong way, as it's not directed at you specifically and your point is valid, but I'm sick and tired of hearing Americans and Brits talking about "wealthy criminal classes" and "corrupt politicians".

Corruption is watching firefighters stand by watching a house burn down, because they know they will get twice as much in bribes from the adjoining houses to put out the fire once they realise it will spread to them. Corruption is rounding up hundreds of thousands of pennieless voters, putting them in the back of a truck, and leaving them in the middle of an isolated rice field during elections. Corruption is when the Prime Minister's nephew crashes his car into a coconut seller infront of a large crowd of people, then gets out with an automatic assault rifle and starts massacring the witnesses, with total impunity.

Complain about corruption and criminality all you want, but it sounds like a spoiled kid in a Bentley telling his dad that a Rolls Royce would be far more reliable.

I realise this won't be a popular post, but I wanted to say it anyway.

Bummer. I'm generally healthy, despite being a fatty. Also I hope to get a teaching job relatively quickly once I get back, so I should only be without coverage for a little while.

Corruption is corruption, you should really come over here before you say those sorts of things. Yes, the poor in the US have it really good compared with most of the world, but most of the world hasn't experience the sort of affluence that the current kleptocratic oligarchy is stealing.

Things do vary, but to be in such a rich company worrying about things like healthcare, housing and food is completely unacceptable.

Just wait until we come after Cambodia because the masses have been convinced that things will turn around if we start another war to fund the military industrial complex.

Before I say what sort of things? I merely said that the "corruption" you're talking about is nothing compared to many, many places in the world. Perhaps you should take a visit to Cambodia before deciding what is or isn't a "kleptocratic oligarchy".

You already did. By American estimates you killed over 300,000 innocent civilians, though local estimates are more than double that, during a secret and illegal bombing campaign that the US didn't even own up to until around 40 years later. It also led to one of the worst genocides in the history of our species.

Corruption is the act of allowing outside forces dictate the actions of you in your job performance instead of doing what is morally or ethically correct for your position.

If you were a school teacher, and started banging some hot mom so you gave her kid better grades you are a corrupt teacher. If you are a police officer and let a criminal loose because they give you a percentage of their ill-gotten gains you are a corrupt police officer.

A politician, whose primary and truly only goal is to represent the people who elected them to the best of their abilities,then taking money or property from an outside force and then forcing through the policies that company supports but most citizens or effected organizations of that legislation are opposed to is corruption.

You're missing the point. The American kleptocracy has seen the largest movement of wealth in the history of the world. Whatever you're talking is small potatoes compared with the trillions of dollars that have been shifted in the US over the last few decades. We're talking about literally thousands of dollars per person in the entire world concentrated on a country of only 310m or so.

In other words, it's extremely arrogant of you to come in here and lecture us about what we're allowed to feel and think. What's going on in most of the rest of the world does nothing to change the fact that there's huge sums of money being siphoned off the poor to subsidize the oligarchy.

Yes, our poor are better off than the poor are in most of the rest of the world, but it's still not legitimate for you to claim that we don't have the right to complain about or kleptocracy. Your country doesn't deal with as much money in the last century as has been shifted from the poor to the rich in the US.

There's much more corruption than that. Please check where one of the aides that helped draft SOPA now works. How come Paulson is not in prison yet the FBI spent two years hunting down some dumbass kid to who DDOSed Gene Simmons' website?

Just because they can't generally murder people in broad daylight and get away with it doesn't mean there's no corruption (though I guess Ted Kennedy got away with nearly that).

I personally don't think that's the case. In my opinion, what you have in most of the western world are individual cases of corruption. I'm talking about nations where you literally can't even drive a car without paying cash to police. I'm simply stating that relatively speaking, US corruption just isn't comparable to corruption in most less fortunate parts of the world.


I don't think I lectured anyone about what you're allowed to think and feel. I simply expressed my point of view. It's arrogant of you to suggest that I shouldn't.

Again, I never claimed that you don't have a right to complain, and it's pretty rude of you to say I did. I simply made comparisons to create context.

As for your final statement, this is the epitomy of arrogance. "My country" (by the way, I'm English in case there's any confusion here, but I've lived in Cambodia all my adult life) was systematically destroyed by yours, that means if we want to measure things like corruption, it has to be on a relative scale. It may be "small potatoes" to you, but a rice farmer losing 40% of his $30 per month salary due to corruption has a far bigger relative impact than somone on $3k per month getting shafted out of a couple of hundred bucks. Again, it's all relative, and to suggest that it's more important in the US simply because you're dealing with bigger overall numbers is absurd.

Yes, that's why I made sure to start my post by stating that the original points being discussed are valid. I never said there is no corruption in the US, that would be nuts. I was just giving it some context.

[sorry for double post - I suck, and it won't let me delete this one and just put it all in the other post]

The taking away personal freedom stance on fighting terrorism everywhere and always is kind of like doing suicide as prevention of killing. If you can be held in prison without legal investigation indefinitely this is really bad. No even worse, there is probably not a suitable word for it. I thought in the constitution it's all about freedom but you cannot keep it by taking it away. This will lead ultimately to an oppressing dictatorship state.

Apart from that the political two party system maybe also is not the best. Each party knows, after a while they will vote for us again, because they are feed up with the other party even if we are not any better or only a little bit better. Not enough incentive for competition.

When the American people want another party they can elect one. That's one of the funny things about most of the flaws people get up in arms about over here: they could all be fixed if a large percentage of the population gave a shit, but they don't. Our main issue in America is complacency, but honestly complacency implies they're satisfied does it not?

In any case my main issue with US politics is that money is considered free speech, which means all our politicians are bought and paid for.

But dont those special interest groups amount to the conspiratorial bunch? The notion that i get is that the usa and most of the world, is controlled by a few, powerful, amazingly wealthy individuals, who want to dry out the middle classes in the world. Watch They Live, that movie pretty much sums it all up.