What exactly are we supposed to do?
That's a question we Americans will be faced with in less than a year on November 6, 2012.
Focusing on the presidency, will there be a real choice for the people to make i.e. a candidate that really represents the 99%, whose integrity is still intact based on his (her) positions, statements and actions on key problems and issues, someone who is not beholden to Wall Street and the other mega corporations largesse who underwrote their previous campaigns or a sycophant to the military/industrial complex that wants endless war to continue unabated?
Ralph Nader, who should have been president but was never given a chance by the MSM or even allowed to participate in the presidential debates, isn't going to run again.
Senator Bernie Sanders I. VT, whose honesty and integrity has yet to be impugned, who has openly stated the Supreme Court's decision in "Citizen's United" in 2010 must be overturned and is a co-sponsor of an amendment to the Constitution to overturn this greatest threat to completely destroy what's left of our representative democracy, isn't running.
The same goes for ex-Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin who was defeated in his last re-election bid by Republican Ron Johnson, a toady who was squarely in the financial embrace of the likes of the Koch Bros. and their ilk whose fortunes essentially determined the outcome of that election and the majority of other Congressional elections in 2010, the first year since SCOTUS gave full personhood and 1 st Amendment rights to non-human corporations.
Rocky Anderson, the former Mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah has indicated he's starting a 3 rd party, the "Justice Party" has announced his candidacy. He's of course a relative unknown. Yet to read about his progressivism success in that city in the reddest of red states Utah, his ideas, thoughts and recognition of the current gilded age we're in and the widening disparity of income between the richest 1% and the rest of us, could be someone the occupy movement and their supporters could rally around.
Or is this next presidential election the one where an overwhelming majority just sit on the sidelines, refusing to consider any of the woebegone Republicans who may get their party's nomination as so out of touch and removed from the real issues and problems facing this country, who are so anti government they'd eliminate the last vestiges of the social safety net of social security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps and privatize the police, fire departments, public schools, prisons et al and further the corporate oligarchs ownership of the country who have now usurped the electoral process to do its bidding"or consider re-electing Barack Obama who has betrayed his signature "change you can believe in" mantra that got him elected in 2008 by continuing most of the policies of his predecessor, expanding the war in Afghanistan, increasing the drone strikes and missile attacks in Pakistan and Yemen, continued wireless wiretapping without warrants, the extraordinary rendition and indefinite detention of suspects and denial of habeas corpus, while authorizing the assassination of an American citizen and foregoing due process; who has surrounded himself with Wall Street apologists who rescued the financial interests that perpetrated the meltdown of 2008 and brought the ravages of the great recession without holding the miscreants accountable and prosecuting them for their misdeeds as it all fell on the backs of Main Street and the 99% of Americans.
Neither of the two established party's represent the interests of the people and as constituted could make any real difference. The current plutocracy of oligarchs, the 1% will continue to reign, their tentacles reaching ever deeper into the psyches of the young and impressionable even while the country slides into further economic decline, widening income disparity, huge unemployment, foreclosure, bankruptcy and expansion of the poor.
This country is in need of systemic change that begins with the overhaul of our current electoral process which has been corrupted and usurped by the corporate interest's largesse.
Without this fundamental change, which is THE core issue that underlies every other issue we face, nothing will in fact change.
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