mr smith makes several good points in this essay which i'd suspect many of you have already considered in various forms. we're not the democracy we keep being told about but fascist at least and an oligarchy as well, which will continue until we get up the motivation to do something about it;

January 7, 2022

If we no longer have the capacity to distinguish between moral legitimacy and self-serving corruption, then we might as well eliminate the Middleman and vote directly for Pfizer or Merck.

There's a fancy word for cutting out the Middleman: disintermediation. Removing intermediaries who take a cut but neither produce nor add value makes perfect sense, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

Maybe it's time to eliminate the politicians who soak up hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from corporations and the super-wealthy and just elect Pfizer, Merck, Amazon, General Dynamics, etc. directly. Since corporate lobbyists write most of the legislation anyway, why not cut out the intermediaries in the process?

The super-wealthy buy political power via Political Action Committees (PACs and Super-PACs), think tanks and philanthro-capitalist foundations (Gates Foundation, et al.). Now that it takes tens of millions of dollars to buy the conventional "winning campaign," the political class spends much of its time fund-raising, i.e. lavishing kisses on the derrieres of corporations and the super-wealthy, implicitly promising to do their bidding better than the alternative candidates that the corporations and super-wealthy could buy.

Recall Smith's Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic authoritarian government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

The reality that our elected government doesn't respond to voters has been well-established: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.

Politics has been reduced to claiming to serve the public while serving as handmaidens to a neofeudal autocracy. The public would be well-served by stripping away the obfuscating artifice and fakery and revealing just who's in charge.

Our "democracy" is nothing but an invitation-only auction of political power cloaked with fine-sounding excuses. Politics has always been about money, so this is nothing new; I would love to serve the public interest but gosh-darn it, I need to raise $30 million pronto or I'll lose my seat at the banquet; we're the party of noble idealism and public service, blah blah blah.............read more.......