30% of Americans Still Trust Their Government

Corruption, Crony Capitalism and Trampling on the Bill of Rights Lead to Widespread Distrust

Trust in government has plummeted … due to institutional corruption. And see this.
More and more Americans realize that the government has bailed out the super-elite of the big banks,  and enabled their fraud … while  hosing the little guy again and again (and again).
People see that we have socialism for the rich, but cut-throat, sink-or-swim capitalism for everyone else.   They see that we have a malignant synergism between D.C. politicians and giant companies. Look here, here, here.
At the same time, the government spies on virtually all Americans, and has threatened to assassinate or indefinitely detain American citizens on U.S. soil.
Folks are starting to wake up to the fact that Obama is a lot like Bush. Indeed, he’s continued many of the horrible Bush programs he promised to stop, covered up for Cheney and company, and allowed even worse inequality and trampling of the Constitution.
So people are starting to see that the mainstream Republican and Democratic parties are virtually identical regarding core issues including:

• Allowing the trampling of our liberty and see this

• Launching preemptive war and aggression

• Re-distributing the nation’s wealth from the people to the ultra-elite

• Bailing out the giant banks while shafting the little guy

• Otherwise selling out to the big banks (and see this)

And that any apparent difference is just a scripted show.
No wonder a new poll by Pew shows that only 3 in 10 Americans trust our government:

For the past seven years, a period covering the final two years of the Bush administration and President Obama’s first term, no more than about three-in-ten Americans have said they trust the federal government to do the right thing always or most of the time.

Our Jan. 2013 survey found only 26% saying they can trust government always or most of the time, while 73% say they can trust the government only some of the time or never. Majorities across all partisan and demographic groups express little or no trust in government

As CBS news notes:

The Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. has found that fewer Americans than ever trust the decisions made by the government.

Indeed, we noted in February that more and more Americans see the government as a threat, rather than a protector:

For years, “conservative” pollsters have said that Americans are furious at the government:

• Rasmussen noted in 2010 that only a small minority of the American people think that the government has the consent of the governed, and that the sentiment was “pre-revolutionary”

• Gallup noted in 2011 that a higher percentage of American liked King George during the colonial days than currently like Congress

• And last year, Gallup noted that trust was plummeting in virtually all institutions

Liberals may be tempted to think that this is a slanted perspective.   But non-partisan and liberal pollsters are saying the same thing:

• An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from 2011 found that  76% of Americans believe that the country’s current financial and political structures favor the rich over the rest of the country

• The Washington Post reported in 2011 that Congress was less popular than communism, BP during the Gulf oil spill or Nixon during Watergate

• Public Policy Polling added last month that Congress is also less popular than cockroaches, lice, root canals, colonoscopies, traffic jams, used car salesman and Genghis Khan

• And the liberal Pew Charitable Trusts noted last week that – for the first time – a majority of the public says that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms:

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Jan. 9-13 among 1,502 adults, finds that 53% think that the federal government threatens their own personal rights and freedoms while 43% disagree.
In March 2010, opinions were divided over whether the government represented a threat to personal freedom; 47% said it did while 50% disagreed. In surveys between 1995 and 2003, majorities rejected the idea that the government threatened people’s rights and freedoms.
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The survey finds continued widespread distrust in government. About a quarter of Americans (26%) trust the government in Washington to do the right thing just about always or most of the time; 73% say they can trust the government only some of the time or volunteer that they can never trust the government.
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Majorities across all partisan and demographic groups express little or no trust in government.

Obviously, Democrats are currently more trusting in government than Republicans.  For example:

The Pew Research Center’s 2010 study of attitudes toward government found that, since the 1950s, the party in control of the White House has expressed more trust in government than the so-called “out party.”

But given that even a growing percentage of Dems believe that government is a threat to their freedom, things are indeed getting interesting …

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
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