Comment on: "The Way We Were", by Thomas Friedman, NYT, Sept 25, 2013

For original editorial, see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/opinion/friedman-the-way-we-were.html?ref=international

Mr. Friedman is at it again, trying to coin phrases with supposedly deep truths and high information content - "high-imagination enabling", which have some kernel of truth, but ultimately add nothing to the discussion or the search for answers to America's problems.

There are deep, deep problems with America's social and political development over the past thirty years, as evidenced by America steady decline in the OECD rankings among most, if not all of its social, economic and political indicators. No amount of pontificating about American exceptionalism and high-imaginationa enabling can, or indeed should, obscure the deep structural problems in our political and social institutions.

Our representative government is the laughingstock of the world. When the highest achievement of our Congress is to endlessly pontificate before empty chambers with the express purpose of achieving nothing, then one has to ask serious questions about whether our political institutions have reached their limits.

When the wealth and power of a tiny 1%, or even more dramatically, 0.1%, keeps increasing and more and more people are driven from the Middle Class into poverty and dependence, then our society is turning back into exactly the one which we originally fought to abolish.

We pride ourselves with having abolished slavery, but what if not a modern form of slavery is it when people have to have two or three "full-time" jobs, and then still need government support to subsist.