Self Governance

As Tehran seethes with tales of a stolen election, something that we are quite familiar with here in the allegedly stable and democratic United States, I was wondering who we elect to represent us.

Our president is a lawyer, although he never really practiced, choosing instead to teach, to organize, and to run for public office.

According to Harper's Index, the July issue, 53 of our 99 Senators, have law degrees. Our 100th Senator, Al Franken, if he ever gets certified, will have been trained as a satirist.

China's Communist Party's governing body are all trained as engineers.

That says something about where our countries are going. Perhaps we need to understand more about how things are built and maintained and less about cleverness and greed. Too many politicians are too closely connected with the same industries that they are supposed to be regulating. See the June 12, 2009 truthout.org piece on just how much stock our senators own in the banks that were bailed out. Let's get teachers, doctors, engineers, chemists, physicists, artists, and farmers engaged and running for office. Let's try to get stuff to work.

Unfortunately, also reported in the July Harper's Index is the discouraging statistic that 1 in 4 Americans thinks "the Jews" were moderately or very much to blame for the financial crisis. Even with a bi-racial or African American president, whichever label one prefers, we just can't seem to get away from that anti-semitism.