We start with Stephen Walt’s observation, “Corruption and decadence doesn’t occur all at once; it’s a progressive disease with no clear tipping point.” Walt looks at where the roots of the US decline might lie and their cancerous effects on the body politic. Juan Cole starts in his world in America, in which “the minds of the sheep are kept off their fleecing by substituting celebrity gossip, sex scandals, and half-disguised bigotry for genuine news.” He calls this “our news” and contrasts “their news,” “with its dramatic stories of personal risk and human tragedy and bold challenge to a rotten status quo.” Nicholas Kristof, in the NY Times, looks at the kind of nation the T-party want the U.S. to become (low taxes, religious focus, unquestioned military)… and finds it’s Pakistan.

And last week in Florida, justice went up for sale, when a 36 year old who ran over and killed two visiting British businessmen while drag racing his Porsche was given two years of house arrest in his parents’ rich oceanside mansion, after paying the widows several million dollars. The Chicago Sun-Times sums it up accurately in the opening to its editorial: “Let’s be clear: Prison is for poor people. Prison is not for rich people.” Or, as Alan Price once sang, “We all want justice, but you’ve got to have the money to buy it.”

Full story and links here, on Tikkunista.

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