Does anything in America work any more?

The NFL is fighting between the owners and the players over who can keep a bigger piece of the football pie. The NBA is about to shut down, it appears, and quite possibly for the entire season. Now Minnesota's government has shut down, for the Independence Day holiday, at least. The Republican leadership in Congress is coming close to shutting down the country--and putting the world's economy in a tailspin--by not raising the debt ceiling for the country just so they can continue to hand out tax cuts for the wealthiest of us and tax subsidies for "Big Oil", etc., etc. It just leads you to ask: does anything work in this country any more? Are we all just greedheads? Can we not all work together? Can we not compromise? Are we not all, in the end, just Americans? Can we not work together for a greater good for the country? It surely doesn't look that way. Links: http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news?slug=aw-wojnarowski_nba_lockout_players_063011; http://news.yahoo.com/noticeable-casualties-minn-shutdown-074321209.html; http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/F490YD/UU8SCS/X0GXOU/WYW5VQ/Y9LD3/50/h; http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/the-minnesota-shutdown-the-nba-and-the-death-of-compromise/2011/07/01/AGeV6ntH_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpolitics