A recent op-ed in The Bulletin addressed the issue of dumbing down democracy in America.

Unless one buys into the hype about our democracy, it is difficult to see how it could be degraded further without switching to some autocratic system. Not since the presidency of FDR can any government honestly claim to have been one of the people, for the people and by the people. Our governments have for generations been run by a duopoly comprising the oligarchs of the Democratic and Republican parties in league with their financiers from corporate America and the Israeli lobby, but since 1994 the right wing of the Republican Party and now the tea party have been trying to change the system to a monopoly under their draconian ideologies. The only remaining semblance of democracy is that people have some say in which politicians will do the bidding of their creditors.

The real problems are the dumbing down of the American people and a consequent greater prevalence of inhumanity. During the first half of the 20th century, the United States, in concert with other nations, made significant steps toward elevating the standards of our civilization by promoting the Geneva Conventions on war and torture. The process was advanced with the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the early months of the Cold War, the Truman administration gained the moral high ground by using humanitarian aid through the Marshall Plan. Since then we have been in moral and intellectual decline with our Vietnam, Central American and other wars and installation and support of dictators around the world — Iran, Iraq, Chile, Guatemala, etc. Now international polls show the United States with a much more negative than positive image.

If instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars in a few days on our current wars we spent part of it saving hundreds of thousands of children from hunger here and abroad, we would create friends instead of enemies.

After the tragic events of 9/11 people were in shock asking why “they” hate us. This question was easily answered by that minority paying attention and recognizing the arrogance and abuses of power exercised by one administration after the other. A more interesting question might be why the people of Latin America don’t hate us if we consider our violent history against people of that region.

When the Bush administration campaigned for a war on Iraq, 70-plus percent of the people supported this illegal action because of arrogance, ignorance and gullibility. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard economist Linda Bilmes have estimated that this totally unnecessary war will eventually cost the United States $3 trillion when all costs are added. That doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of destroyed and impaired lives and the regional chaos that now prevails. This and other wars have revealed utter contempt and indifference by successive administrations and the American people for the aforementioned Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights, as well as domestic and international laws and the Constitution. Without their moral imperative, the more likely prospect for this nation is one of continuing decline. How much dumber than that can we get? Well, how about paying attention to the same pundits who were disastrously wrong on Iraq and are now promoting more wars?

Then again, there was the deregulation of banks that tossed aside lessons learned from the Great Depression to enable another of our current disasters. And the American people have repeatedly re-elected most of the perpetrators who are now tasked with resolving the consequences of that blunder.

In the present campaign to decide which of two eventual candidates might be the lesser evil to occupy the White House in 2013, there are preliminary auditions with politicians propagating nonsense, lies and other deceptions to gain popularity. Based on previous elections we can conclude only a very small minority will reject the chicanery of both major parties.

There is, fortunately, some, if limited, hope that a majority of Americans are waking up to threats against their well-being. Recent polls have shown that people are not buying into the right-wing attempts to smear the word “entitlements” but have enough sense to realize they are entitled as much to Social Security and Medicare payments as they are to auto and home insurance reimbursements because they have paid for those benefits.

Another hopeful sign comes from a poll that showed 65 percent of the American people believe the budget for our war department should be cut and our troops should be brought home. There is other good news. Millions of people know what is needed — somebody should do something. The problem is they really mean “somebody else” should do something.