Cartoon by Michael Ramirez

Our political system is supposed to be set up to allow us to elect representatives that will look out for our best interests and defend against the inevitable tendency of those with the most wealth and power to exploit their advantage over the rest of us. One look at the current state of politics in this country and its’ pretty obvious the inevitable has happened. So much so that those with the most wealth and power have literally taken control of our entire government and political process.



They have distorted the purpose of elections from a way to choose worthy representatives into a big sporting event to determine which of the two dominate political parties will control the purse strings in Congress. They have successfully conned everyone into believing that the whole point is whether or not your 'party' wins. It’s become nothing more than another big American sporting event. If you doubt it, just imagine what a crowd screaming and yelling at a football game looks like and what a crowd at a major political convention looks like. They may be dressed a bit better at the convention, but there’s not much difference in the way they act. And when the game is over, all we really get is to feel we either won or lost. And really, nowadays, even the winning team starts to feel they actually lost as well. When Congress resumes business, we see that absolutely nothing of consequence has changed for the people controlling the game.



For many, there is nothing more important than winning, getting 'their party's people' into office, regardless of whether or not those people are actually going to be the best people we can find. In fact, we know most all the people we get to choose from have sold us out long before they ended up on the ballots. We know full well we never get anything but a pile of opportunists and we get to pick the least bad choice. Virtually all of them have been completely groomed to make sure business as usual continues in government. They are primarily career politicians that know full well “we the people” have very little to do with who gets elected.