Several years ago a pivotal study by Professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page looked at more than 20 years’ worth of data to answer one simple question: does Congress represent the will of the people?

To no one’s shock, the answer was a resounding NO.

Their study, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. When they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did, they found that the opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all on which laws eventually get passed.

Bribery played a major role, however.

The vast majority of Americans want reasonable, responsible gun control legislation. Thanks to our deadlocked, partisan, non-functioning government, NOTHING WILL BE DONE.

Most Americans support police reforms.

Most Americans want the rich and the corporations to pay their fare share of taxes.

Most Americans support a woman’s right to choose and equal rights for everyone.

Most Americans want liveable wages, affordable health care and a decent education for all citizens.

BUT NONE OF THESE THINGS WILL EVER COME TO PASS – BECAUSE WE NO LONGER HAVE A REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT.

They don’t even pretend to care anymore. No longer will Our Rulers give up even a few measly crumbs to appease the masses, like they used to in the old days, when Communism was still around. They know they don’t need to even pretend like they give a shit…

This is what fascism looks like, folks. It may be ‘friendly’ fascism, but it’s not even friendly anymore. It is what it is…an illegitimate, un-elected military Junta masquerading as a democracy.

Ever since the dark days of the Ronald Reagan era, the GOP has been able to convince vast swathes of the American people that rewarding the rich will benefit society as a whole; aka the sham of ‘trickle-down’ economics. Of course, just as all of the real economists had predicted at the time, the exact opposite happened and the wealth gap increased exponentially. The BIG LIE of neo-liberal economics is one of the main contributors to the gross inequities endemic to our broken economy.

But we still can’t really talk about that. Not in the good ole freedom lovin’ USA, at least…

By sowing political division and making elections extremely expensive, Our Rulers have maintained a  virtual stranglehold on our political process.  We currently have a rigged system where elected officials must prostitute themselves for cash to win elections, instead of serving their actual constituents. Meanwhile, half of our citizens have disengaged entirely from the political process, feeling that their vote doesn’t count – and who can blame them?

According to a recent poll, fully 57% of Americans want to see a third political party, because finally even some of the unwashed masses are beginning to see through the “two party” charade.

Guess what? It ain’t gonna happen. See above…

In the USA, politicians are corporate shills, raking in millions of dollars in bribes at the expense of education, healthcare, transportation, communication or any form of infrastructure. The “president” himself recently posed in the Oval Office with a line of Goya food products. His daughter was photographed shilling a can of black beans like Carol Merrill from The Price Is Right.

Instead of investing in the youth of our nation and empowering our young people to do good works for their communities or to pursue an education to help create a healthier, more productive society, we send them off to kill foreigners or we burden them with  enormous debt to the point where they will never have more than their parents. Meanwhile, the political class continues to give huge tax cuts to their corporate donors, starving the nation and refusing to fix any of our social problems.

It’s been said that democracy can’t work without an engaged and thoughtful electorate. It also doesn’t work when one doesn’t really live in a democracy. And we don’t. Instead, we live in a profoundly corrupt, grossly incompetent kakistocracy, as the Gilens and Page study proved. They demonstrated conclusively that the business of the US government has absolutely nothing to do with what the American people actually want.

But alas, Americans are too dumb to even care and too fat and lazy to do anything about it. They are bred to be ignorant; chattel abused and shamed into believing that anything outside of their servitude to The State is the delusional aspiration of fools. Your typical American wallows in magical beliefs about the world around them, and they fully believe in this fantasy which allows Our Rulers to hide behind their shamelessness, indecency, immorality, hypocrisy and lies – as they rape the planet.

What we call ‘democracy’ in America is a system engineered exclusively to glorify the evildoers while vilifying those who would point out the consequences of a system which perennially screws them.

The predator state serves the narrow corporate class by siphoning national assets and wealth upwards, away from the general population and to the wealthiest individuals. Defending both the state and its corporate masters are a phalanx of experts, analysts, fake journalists and ideologues, whose main goal is to justify this flow of income while combatting attempts at political change.

The simple fact that tRump ordered US troops against peaceful protesters for a mere photo op during the George Floyd protests shows how far he is willing to go to use every tool of his now unlimited presidential power to appease his vicious, unhinged followers – all for the sake of his reelection.

This is THE moment he’s been waiting for. The new norm is now federal soldiers in full combat gear on the streets of every major city in Umerka from here on out. Federal executions are back on track and ramping up.

I don’t see how we can ever come back from this, barring an all-out revolution.

It’s literally the death of the nation.