Like many Americans, I was shocked that our president ran what amounts to a transnational mafia in bed with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs who benefit from Russian President Vladimir Putins war for totalitarian control of Ukraine against a free people who have struggled and suffered so much for their freedom.

We might be even more shocked if we had the transcript of Trumps call with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey and friend of Putin, which led to our betrayal of the Kurdish allies who did most of the hard ground fighting against ISIS for us. The ethnic cleansing of Kurds out of northern Syria is a crime against humanity and should have been included in the articles of impeachment.

But while we are focused on the vileness of Rudolph Guiliani and other mobsters, experts and pundits discussing these events completely ignore the massive, glaring questions of how to prevent such things from happening again. Even impeachment and conviction in the Senate, which will never happen, would not solve problems far bigger than Donald Trumps serious abuses of powers.

We need amendments to protect the professional civil service (especially in law enforcement and foreign affairs), to counter corruption in the federal government (e.g. by requiring tax-return disclosure), to clarify grounds for impeachment, and to limit pardon powers. It is staggering that even these problems so directly linked with current controversies never come up in mainstream coverage.

And this is only the beginning: We all really need to stop focusing solely on this impeachment, despite the cowardly way many Republicans are trying to defend Trump with conspiracy-spins drawn directly from Russian propaganda.

To solve the roots of this polarization that is making too many Americans on the political extremes prefer ideology to reality, we need constitutional change to end the dominance of two major parties with automatic runoffs, to rotate primaries between all states so Iowa and New Hampshire no longer go first every time, to prevent gerrymandering and dark money in our elections, to establish uniform national voting and count procedures, set Supreme Court terms and ban the filibuster in Congress. It is colossal collective folly that we focus only on the symptoms while ignoring the root problems that prevent fair elections and perpetuate endless gridlock in D.C.

Even before the Ukraine news broke, we were largely ignoring many other urgent issues that will have much profounder effects on our children and grandchildren. Climate change gets deserved attention, but there are several other dangers that, taken together, could harm human prospects even more than climate change, although they get virtually no attention in this country.

The regime in China, which now holds more than a million of its people in concentration camps in a genocidal effort to erase an entire minority culture, is creating a nightmare of totalitarian control a hundred times worse than anything Orwell ever imagined. At home, its facial-recognition cameras are everywhere and all its people will be increasingly monitored via data collection.

China also is pressuring many other countries in Asia and Africa to obey its commands, and the strong-arm tactics we have seen used against the NBA and Asian journalists are only the tip of the iceberg. It will not help our grandchildren much to be saved from climate change only to live as slaves under a global tyranny run from Beijing and Moscow.

Yet, almost no Americans understand that we are going to wake up in a couple years to discover that China has invaded Taiwan and that NATO will not do anything to stop it because we want the money from trade.

Similarly, because of the gridlock in D.C. caused by constitutional flaws, you may wake up one day a decade from now to discover that the American government is defaulting on a federal debt that maybe exceeds $50 trillion ($50,000 billion) in 15 years or less, sending the world into a new Great Depression which finally cements Chinas dominance in the aftermath.

That is, if loose nukes getting to terrorists or pandemic diseases originating in the worlds poorest nations or cybercrime viruses running rampant do not take us into economic armageddon first. Remember this as Democrats and Republicans promote the new brand of moronic isolationism rather than seeking new arrangements to share essential tasks effectively among our allies.

This staggering collective blindness is a result of the deepest flaw of all in our social system: In the 20th century, as television and radio appeared, we were content to allow mass media to be delivered on a for-profit basis. For a long time, editors and producers felt responsible to cover stories that people needed to hear because of their objective importance, whether they grabbed high ratings or not.

Today, that ethic is so completely gone that CNN, which I have watched since it was founded, covers almost no global news at all. In fact, for more than four years, it has covered almost nothing but American federal politics.

Fox also has focused almost solely on American federal politics, with a few other cherry-picked stories to appeal to its base like an occasional immigrant committing some crime or some stupid campus activists trying to no-platform a right-wing speaker. Their international coverage is limited to things that might seem to boost Trump, such as a happy Turkish general proclaiming the safe zone in northern Syria that is, a zone made safe from Kurds in the same way that the Trail of Tears made eastern states safe from the Cherokee. This propaganda machine heavily influences the nation now.

More broadly, internet medias focus entirely and solely on what is trending or popular with its group of viewers, which will include few events beyond our shores. Most Americans never see a major newspaper with fact-checked journalism; they finish high school without learning about current world affairs or even the basics of American civics, such as key numbers for parts of the federal budget or the history of main tax rates, the federal deficit, projections for Medicare, etc. let alone elementary critical thinking that would enable them to distinguish reliable sources from total crap.

Combined, these problems mean the death of democracy through completely manipulable voters. Both could be fixed by fairly simple constitutional reforms to improve our mass medias and education requirements.

The stupidity resulting from only-trendy media is so colossal today that even domestic issues that are massively in our face everywhere get only the most superficial analysis. Federal anti-monopoly laws have not been seriously updated in almost 100 years, and yet we wonder how Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook can own more and more parts of supply chains, buy up all competitors and abuse power in service of profit.

When a small handful of corporations own most of the systems on which our lives totally depend, sell all our private information to insurance companies and marketers, and crush any dissenting opinion with their ability to manipulate what people view, it will be much harder to unwind this plutocracy. Yet it never even occurs to us to discuss the smallest countermeasures, like EU-style laws protecting data privacy.

Of course, this will not matter much if Google has unleashed a smart Artificial Intelligence system that does more damage than climate change. Or if genetic engineering to enhance human capacities has become so common among the richest 5 percent across the world that they have become a new species poised to control the rest more decisively than was possible in the past.

Our chance to control these threats with smart laws and global partnerships will be distant memories by then. But you did not know about this danger because not enough celebrities have tweeted about it!

We all need to refocus on the fundamental structural flaws that are disabling our political system from making effective laws and preventing too many America
ns from learning the most basic things they need to be responsible citizens. We cannot fix the substantive problems without working political tools, and our tools are so broken that we neither diagnose most of the problems nor fix them.

What would we think of a mechanic who is so outraged by an expensive broken car headlight that he does not notice that the steering column is broken and that the tools he is taking to the headlight are rusted through? First things first: fix the political system and fix the education of citizens by fixing the Constitution.

Link:
COMMENTARY: Obsessed with Trump, our blindness to urgent issues grows - New Jersey Hills