Disclaimer: This is not going to be a data heavy diary. This is my mental vomit only. OK, my mental vomit and some fun cartoons I found. Also, there are exceptions to everything. Always.
We DO NOT have a representative democracy. History speaks for itself on this one. A massive percentage of the US population was against TARP, but it happened.
Right now, we want jobs. They aren't even talking about jobs. They are having some ridiculous debate about a made up deadline by which we have to decide whether or not we are going to pay our bills. Meanwhile...no jobs.
We got Bin Laden. Why the hell are we in Afghanistan? Don't even get me started on Iraq
Why the hell is Bradley Manning in...wherever the heck they've got him. What are they doing to that young man, for gods sake?!
A majority of the population was for a public option (and I have to suspect that some of the people who were against it thought the way they did because they wanted single payer instead). We didn't get it.
So where am I going with this? Beyond the squiggle of destiny, of course!
The government is useless, ineffective and outdated. It's to the point where a Teabagger could walk in, throw Obama bodily out of his chair, sit down and call himself president and what? What would be done?
The people would say it's wrong, Obama would tell the bagger he could keep the chair as long as he got to sit on the ottoman while they tried to come to a bipartisan solution, the D caucus would write a strongly worded letter and the Supreme Court would review the matter in 18 months.
Oh, and a congressperson would say something stupid about a black guy or a gay guy or a lady so the media would talk about it incessantly. Ok, that might not be fair. They might actually vote on something relevant to black guys, gay guys or ladies instead.
These people (IE, the government) can do WHATEVER they want. ANYTHING they want. Then they fake ineptitude and uselessness to get away with it, and we are absolutely powerless to stop them
They have fooled us with process and bureaucracy into just accepting that government is lacking in agility. They take these stagnant paths to compromise on purpose, so the people become used to nothing getting done.
I think part of it is that if we are used to nothing being done, we won't watch what the hell they are doing because we "know" the answer is nothing.
This government has nothing to do with the people anymore. It's not our government. It's their government. The government of itself and wealth.
I don't even blame the government anymore. I get it. I truly do. We let the money make the rules, so the money is making the rules. The government is now doing the inevitable, catering to the powerful. The government derives it's power from the wealthy, not the other way around. It's not that government keeps making it easier on the wealthy. It's that the wealthy will allow government to continue to "function" for as long as government does what it wants.
Our forefathers had this great idea about a representative democracy, back in the day when there weren't phones and intertubes and therefore people didn't actually have the ability to decide for themselves. Getting everyone's opinion would take forever. It was a GREAT idea then, saving that they didn't make a law that said "oh, but hey...you have to actually represent the people, k?" Guess they thought it went without saying...
Now, however, we know what the people want, speaking in a very general sense. And the government won't even address our concerns. They won't even consider talking about doing something about what we, the people, want, unless they can find a way to use that debate to give their employers want they want. I am not talking about progressives here. I am talking about the population of the country that government is supposed to be representing.
This system is seriously and massively broken and it disgusts me.