- Because the presidential elections are controlled by money.
- People don't have to let themselves be influenced by paid advertisements.
- How do you propose to get the people to stop letting themselves be influenced?
- I don't know.
- The protesters think they know. Government is the tool of society. If the tool is broken, the choices the two parties offer between more or less concern for others in society is meaningless.
- The government hasn't broken down. People live, vote....
- People live, and have some influence over their government, as slaves have over masters who depend on them to serve and to feed their habit of exercising power. That is not much to be proud of. In reality, the choice voters now make between social dreams is totally undermined by private interests.
- Which interests?
- The Swiss Federal Institute Of Technology recently studied connections in ownership of 37 million companies and 47,000 global companies. They found that 147 companies controlled about forty percent of the world's wealth, 737 controlled 80 percent. They found that 5 companies controlled the 147 companies, the largest being Goldman Sachs, which has been repeatedly caught in large scale financial fraud and in effect looted the Federal Treasury.
- What's your point?
- Why do you think these very few people with such tight connections to each other and such power over the world's wealth are going to allow you to stop them in their cheating?
- A new president could do it.
- How can such a president get elected? A genuine reformer, in action not only words, cannot compete in the selling of social dreams, even the dream of revolution. The only way the reformer can compete is by repeatedly declaring that no dream of society, whether tighter or looser, will ever be realized by a corrupt government.
- You are saying that it's an electoral tactic, not the truth, that corruption cannot be ended except by throwing them all out?
- It's an electoral tactic, and the truth. A president could end the corruption, if we could get such a president, but under current conditions we cannot. What is the real alternative? Let the government try to fix the economic system so it runs more smoothly in the future, and then hope for small increments of improvement, as George Soros suggests? That might have worked in the past, when the interests had less firm control over the government, still needed occasionally to satisfy the expectations of voters to keep in control. Under the present conditions, where any vote is a vote for them, where both parties sell dreams of society the corrupted government has no intention of making real, it is no longer a possibility.
- That is a question of fact, whether it is true, or not.
- So then let's bring the debate into the open and find out the truth.
