It is not just the electoral process in America that makes our democracy a sham; it’s what our legislators do once they are actually in office that makes our democracy a sham.

Coal, Oil & Gas shill Joe Manchin and minimum wage killer Kirsten Sinema aren’t centrists. They are obstructionists. The ‘system’ they work for is all about profiteering and obstructing any progressive legislation which might benefit the people in their own states.

Is American democracy working? It is if the goal is minority rule.

Voting rights legislation, election reform Bills and minimum wage laws are consistently stymied thanks to arcane, anti-democratic processes like the filibuster. Meanwhile, the bloated defense budget, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate handouts enjoy massive bi-partisan support, with legislation flying through both houses in record time with little if any debate.

Any laws which might benefit the majority of citizens are left to die on the Senate floor.

Paid leave? Nah; it doesn’t fit the reconciliation agenda. Medicare expansion? No way. Lowering prescription drug prices? Of course not. Raise taxes on the ultra-rich? Are you kidding me?

We are supposed to be a rewarding society and not a billionaire socialist welfare state. It’s absurd; it’s pathetic; but this is what’s happening.

It saddens me when I hear people who claim to be progressive hailing the fact that “maybe, possibly, hopefully someday some truly progressive legislation might get passed, even if it is virtually unrecognizable by the time it gets signed into law and won’t make a difference anyway…”

We’ve had two presidents in a row with catastrophically low approval ratings. Vice President Kamala Harris currently has lower ratings than her deeply unpopular predecessor, Mike Pence. A two party state is not a viable democracy when a society is so divided, and when citizens have lost all trust in their government and the media.

Homeless people aren’t allowed to vote, and the USA makes it as difficult as possible for poor people to vote. Corporate America routinely denies workers time off to perform their civic duty, and polls are made to close before many folks get off work and are able to cast a ballot. This is by design.

And when we have a sham election every 4 years, we can’t even get that right. In America, we’re so brainwashed that it can take up to 4 hours just to stand in line to vote – and yet we celebrate this global embarrassment as if it’s something to be PROUD OF! Fuck.

In some states it’s virtually impossible to vote remotely, and other states, like Texas, have recently put punitive and unnecessary restrictions on early voting and mail-in ballots, and they have removed hundreds of ballot drop boxes in poorer communities.

I felt kinda guilty about not voting in the last “election.” Not anymore. I feel like I did back in the 1980s when I began to seriously doubt the legitimacy of our government.

Now I just don’t care.

America is not a democracy, nor can it reasonably considered a republic anymore.

Since 1963, America has been ruled by a military Junta, supported and maintained by the most powerful and invasive intelligence apparatus ever devised, backed up by the world’s most sophisticated propaganda network.

The ‘president’ is a temporary employee. He is elected through a “first across the finish line” Electoral College system which is not in any way democratic. The Electoral College ‘delegate’ system means that only 13 of the 50 states actually matter on election night. The other 37 make no difference whatsoever to the eventual outcome.

And even though the US is supposedly a ‘capitalist’ country – somehow the sparsely populated border states such as Wyoming and Montana, and the poor, regressive southern states like South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi get the same number of votes as states like New York, Oregon, Washington, Colorado or California [currently the world’s seventh largest economy]. The northern states are much wealthier, are far more populous – and so they should be more powerful. But that’s not how it works in the USA.

Worse still, the poor southern states are a net negative to the Gross Domestic Product in USA because the wages there are low, educational levels are low, and union participation is low.

The economies in the ‘Bible Belt’ are so bad the US government is basically forced to subsidize those states with funds from the wealthier states in order to keep them solvent. It’s like someone staying in your house, not paying any rent and then taking a dump in your bathroom without flushing the toilet: double the insult.

That’s the American economy, stupid.