"Entitlements?"

[patrice]

5. What is our agreement with one another that universally & concretely makes us a nation?

Whether it's intended or not, Laws, the Constitution, apply more or less differently to different people.

Certainly "our" economic system is not Just; money is a cruel joke, because it's value is arbitrary & controlled by private financial powers and yet is the measure of all things public. We argue about public debt, but money itself is practically nothing but debt, managed by a private entity, the Federal Reserve. Fractional Reserve lending has made it so and we saw the effects of that rolling out of our toxic financial sector in September 2008, although our entire financial shows the same cycles of exploitation over and over.

Whatever money is, it is not one-to-one with value. All money is somekind(?) of value, but not all value is money.

Why shouldn't we decide for ourselves what the basic authentic values are that make us one nation? Why shouldn't we consider defining those values in the most concretely physical, least arbitrary, ways possible: health care, education, and a basic level of financial subsistance that is independent of PRIVATE manipulation? Whose country is this anyway?

Entitlements is not a bad word.