Just to add some relevance to yhe conversation: Do you know what a hijacked programme is? No? You are, as well as your whole country. The same laughing fascism hides in the skin of both your charismatic leaders. It leaked into your machines of bureaucracy and already reigns your lives.
The more improvement we make, the worse we get. This travesty directly results from our sordid 2-party system where Paul was a non-entity. He would have brought home ALL the "defenders of our country" instead of forcing them to languish 9,000 miles away from our shores and their own families with the lie "you are defending our country." Now we reap the disaster of our corrupt election system. """
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I agree with both of you. But where you see two parties, I see one: The War and Welfare Party. Obama and the Republicans serve the same master, so it's no surprise that Obama capitulates to the R's. The D-and-R rivalry is theater: It keeps us on the bottom at each other's throats, while pacifying us with the illusion that we ourselves have chosen the regime that plunders us and destroys us.
Aristotle and Montesquieu warn that elections lead to oligarchy, not democracy. Instead of "rule by the people", we get rule by the powerful criminal elements that are best able to manipulate and deceive the people. I advocate aleatory democracy or sortition as an alternative -- abolish parties and select our representatives randomly, as we now select jurors or poll participants. Aleatory democracy produces proportional representation over time at minimal cost, while eliminating all of the evils that come with elections -- financial dependency, demagogy, disinformation, cynicism, division....