US government has long been a problem for Americans: Analyst

The foreign policy of previous US administrations has been more damaging to the welfare of the country than President Donald Trump’s policies, an issue that Americans have forgotten due to their short attention span, a political analyst in Maryland says.

Successive US governments have sacrificed the wellbeing of Americans for decades in order to finance wars around the globe, said Myles Hoenig, who ran for Congress in 2016 as a Green Party candidate.

“We have to question why so many liberals and progressives are so much opposed to Trump when Presidents Obama, Clinton and Bush did as much, if not more damage to the welfare of the American people and world security,” Hoenig said in an interview with Press TV on Friday.

“In part it's due to the short attention span we as a nation have, or as Gore Vidal called it “The United States of Amnesia,” he added. “This is perpetrated by our main stream media that will not do deep analysis of a problem, but only a surface level critique. They may be good at laying out chronologies, but on the level of higher order thinking skills, that ranks pretty low.”

PressTV-35% in US name government as greatest problem: Poll

More than a third of Americans say that government dysfunction and poor leadership is the greatest problem facing United States, a new poll shows.

More than a third of Americans say government dysfunction and poor leadership is the greatest problem facing the United States, the highest percentage ever recorded to say so, according to a survey released last week by Gallup.

The 35 percent of Americans that said government was the most important problem is nearly twice as high as the 18 percent recorded in November, the poll found.

The previous high of 33 percent was recorded during the 2013 US government shutdown. Prior to 2001, the highest percentage mentioning government was 26 percent during the Watergate scandal in 1972. Thus, the current measure is the highest in at least 55 years.

An analysis of the responses to the question from the latest Gallup survey finds that 11 percent of Americans specifically cite the current Republican president as the most important problem, while 5 percent name the Democratic Party and 1 percent name Congress.

Trump's first two years in office so far have produced the highest average mentions of government as the most important problem for recent presidents, Gallup said.

“It is not a surprise that the largest percent of Americans ever  think that government is our greatest problem,” Hoenig noted.

“Our government has long been a problem. We can go back to the real start of American imperialism in 1898 or to the end of WW ll and our fight against independence movements worldwide but most would look only as far back as 9/11,” he said.

 “Yet most Americans don’t see how our foreign involvements are the crux of much of our dysfunction as a government. Being that both parties are lock step in support of our imperial ambitions, the theft of our tax dollars to the war industries makes quality of life issues in America that much more precarious” Hoeing added.

“It would not be a surprise that our government would be functional if it didn’t spend a majority of its revenues supporting wars and Wall Street. With so much money and resources available, issues like health care, homelessness, environmental protection would not be in such dire straits as it is today.”

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