Terry Spragg wrote:
The problem is political decisions made at the behest of business ...

We've gotten around that problem by having business lobbyists author the
legislation. Cuts out the middleman!


Vito wrote:
Each political party is designed to be run from the bottom "grass root"
level.

??? Maybe 100 years ago that was true.

.... You did take part in this process didn't you?

No, all I did was vote. That *should* be enough... this (the U.S.) is a
democratic republic, right?

... You
did attend precinct meetings and offer yourself as a candidate for state and
national conventions, didn't you? And you did raise money for your party's
candidates at each level, right?

Aha! Now we get to the root of the matter... money. Politicians feel
beholden to those who give them money... big surprise. But does money
put them in office? No, the voters do. So what do they do with the
money? Buy expensive campaign ads, and hire top-salaried consultants to
tell them what to say about the issues.

Voters have been complicit in this process by electing the people who
spent the most money, for the most part, in the past 50 years. For a
while there in the late 1980s and mid 1990s, it looked like this trend
was going to reverse. But ever larger infusions of under-the-table cash
straightened it out again, and now we are happily on the road to
totalitarian plutocracy.

A novelty was the politically slanted entrtainment program. Every single
item was given a "spin" and hammered relentlessly into the listeners.
Surprisingly, some of these shows turned out to be popular. Now we have
whole networks devoted to nothing but political campaigning, with a
large segment of the population so hypnotized that when the most utter
nonsense is ballyhoo'd, they all shout in chorus 'Yes, that's right,
hooray for our side and let's kill those other guys.' Kind of scary...
it also makes you wonder why the current administration bothered to
spend hundreds of millions of Federal dollars filming & distributing
slanted fake news for political purposes.


The Communist party was set up the same way but when nobody showed for
precinct meetings Stalin ended up running the show.


Nah, he just set about killing the people who disagreed with him. AFAIK
he's got the all-time heavyweight world record, too.

DSK