Rot in America and
Decline of the American Dream

The decline of life for many Americans, the decline of the United States itself, the rot in America, can best be shown from the evidence of systemic corruption and systemic cover-ups by the media, members of Congress, and virtually every other check and balance, and these being made possible by the actions, inactions, the culture of the American public.

Almost everywhere a person looks there are the signs of a nation in sad shape and facing worsening deterioration:

• Infrastructure in decline or outright decay, as compared to many foreign countries.
  

• A high unemployment rate as jobs that made possible the American dream for many Americans have gone to other nations, never to return, due to policies adopted by U.S. politicians.
  

• A crime and incarceration rate among the highest in any developed country, often on falsified evidence and paid perjury, by prosecutors seeking to advance their careers.
  

• A large segment of the public engaging in brutal crimes, killing people at random, with many U.S. cities having a higher crime and murder rate than almost any other country; where murder of innocent people, even children, exceeds that by far of most any other developed country.
  

• A continuing steady decline in morals, with the public obsessed with sex, some of it considered deviated in many societies.
  

• A continuing series of financial crimes inflicting harm upon the people, made possible by bribe-taking members of Congress; and government regulators either too lazy or cowardly to perform their oversight duties or more interested in the revolving door benefits in leaving government for the industry they were responsible to regulate. (See the book, America's Housing and Financial Frauds.)
  

• The corruption by members of Congress and the universal practice of quid pro quo bribe taking members of Congress from lobbyists and industry groups or individuals. (See the book, Congress and Other Cesspools.)
  

• The history of corruption by employees of the U.S. Department of  Justice. (See the book, Crimes of the FBI-DOJ, Mafia, and al Qaeda.)
  

• The huge financial deficits, present and future, of local, state and federal government, being ignored by borrowings that worsens the future for the people, and enables government officials to ignore responsibility for the woes that they enabled to occur.
  

• The continued decline in the intelligence and morality of America's youth, obsessed with trivia, drugs, and crime, while the young of most other nations, especially in the Far East, far surpass the intelligence level of U.S. youths.
  

• The culture of America's intrusion into the affairs of foreign nations, including continuing wars, undermining foreign governments.
  

• The cost of the debt and interest payments, into several trillion dollars, to pay for the past wars ordered by U.S. politicians on a basis of lies that an otherwise attention-paying public would have recognized as lies, and which were enabled by large segments of the public that supported the wars and the politicians responsible for starting them.
  

• Outrageous salaries and retirement benefits for government employees which were provided by politicians seeking political support from powerful government employees unions, and which the American public cannot afford to pay.
  

• Change of values and culture from the migration into the United States of people with different values that once existed n the United States shortly after the end of World War II.
  

• Continued failure of the American people to recognize how bad is the future with the problems now in the pipeline.
  

• The dismal level of intelligence by the American public that it obsessed with trivia, blissfully uninterested in the facts, and prone to believe wacky conspiracy theories while ignoring facts and documentation provided by insiders that suffer the consequences for speaking out.
  

• The level of corruption throughout the state and federal courts, among federal judges, and even the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.
  

• The dismal recognition of the American public to the rot throughout the United States and the decades of great harm caused or enabled by this rot. Examples of this can be found in such places and in such areas as the following examples:

An article in The Nation magazine (November 29, 2010) titled, "America's Knowledge Deficit," described how the American public has substituted for knowledge obtained from dreading, and reason, to opinion and prejudice, much of which arising from spinning of the  truth by political pundits, and even the news media. The article stated in part:

 President Barack Obama complained that politics was tough because "facts and science and argument" do not seem to be winning the day all the time." He was echoing President Clinton and others who have complained that voters know more about football than political issues and, with their minds made up, can't be "bothered with the facts." In 2004 John Kerry voiced the same worry: "Facts, science, truth seem to be significantly absent from what we call our political dialogue."

We already know too many Americans know rather too little. A recent Pew survey confirmed that the religious are often "profoundly ignorant about religion, above all, their own. At least in the survey, one's level of education was a predictor of knowledge. Not so in other domains. College students remap  woefully ignorant about history and geography; year in and year out, many of my students cannot place the Civil War in the right century or Iraq on the right continent.

But is it not what Americans  don't know that is so pernicious to our deemocracy (they can always be educated); it is that they don't know what knowing actually is. Standing in the background of Obama's and Kerry's complaints, as well as of our radical political polarization and the multiplication of candidates (some of whom won on November 2) making preposterous claims about witchcraft, ... 9/11 conspiracy theories [!!!]

The article went into a more sophisticated explanation of telling the difference between the truth and untruth. inability to separate facts from opinion or bias, which much of the American people should start to recognize. The article continued:

We hear about the democratic deficit all the time, but it is the epistemological deficit that is putting democracy at risk. Epistemology signifiers the "science of knowing" and expressed a civilizational conviction that truth, objectivity, science, fact and reason are fundamentally different from opinion, subjectivity, prejudice, feeling and irrationality. The science of knowing insists on the fundamental distinction made by the Geeks between episteme (true knowledge) and doxa (opinion or prejudice, a root of our word "orthodoxy"). 

Knowledge as episteme denotes claims that can be backed up by facts, good reasons and sound arguments. This doesn't mean that there is perfect truth, but it does mean there are good and bad arguments—claims that can be verified by empirical facts or rooted in logically demonstrable arguments and those that cannot be. Because democracy relies on words rather than force, reason rather than compulsion and an agreement about the value if not the substance of objectivity, it works only when we agree on the distinction between knowledge and opinion, between claims that can be verified by facts and validated by sound reasoning and subjective personal beliefs that, however deeply felt, are incapable of being corroborated or falsified.

* Epistemology, it is the theory of knowledge, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. and addresses (a) what is knowledge? (b) how is knowledge acquired? and (c) how do we know what we know? Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to connected notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims.

 Steps Needed to Be Taken to Survive the
Worse That Has Yet to Come

Those in control of the system will continue to protect each other against the public intrusion. It is therefore up to experienced and responsible people with a history of intelligence comments and actions. With over 50 percent of the public stating in surveys in 2010 that Sarah Palin could be considered for the president of the United States, all consideration of taking intelligence actions against the existing and arising problems is almost impossible to even consider. Facing complex financial problems, threats of nuclear attacks, a proven record of lack of intelligence but reciting of short feel-nice comments won't do it. What is several decades overdue are:

• More vocal people reading articles and books written by professionals and former government insiders.
  

• Understanding the difference between outright lying and ludricous statements, which requires devoting significant amout of time to reading the words of professionals and people with creditable backgrounds.
  

• Ombudsmen: What is needed to addressed the systematic corruption at every level of local, state, and federal government are a series of ombudsmen with the power to subpoena and prosecute, composed of independent personnel, and further overseen by master ombudsmen responsible for the proper performance of individual ombudsmen.