Recommended Reading: "Pity the Billionaire" by Thomas Frank.

Here is another book by Thomas Frank that explores the crazy political and economic situation we are in now.  Frank deftly explains how after the 2008 economic crash many people expected a return to Keynesian economics.   You know John Maynard Keynes, he basically said that in order to have a strong economy the common folk have to remain employed in order to in turn have the money to spend to pump up the economy and create economic growth.  This has to be done at all costs, even if the federal government has to be the employer of last resort, creating jobs where the private sector just won't.   Of course the government would have to tax the wealthy to pay for all this, and this has now become a taboo topic.

What happened after 2008 was pretty much the opposite the bailout was a supply side solution basically giving money to banks and other financial institutions that were too big to fail.  This of course never trickled down to the common folk an we still have high unemployment today. 

Frank illustrates how adamantly the right-wing yahoos and the wealthy wan to keep the United States on the same course of tax cuts for the wealthy, a government that is shrunk down into an ineffectual peanut, and big business given a wide berth to do what every the hell it wants. 

Recently the Huffington Post had a blended picture of George W. Bush and President Obama calling him George W. Obama to illustrate how the Obama administration is pretty much just a continuation of the Bush administration.  Obama certainly wasn't the agent of change he promised to be.  So are Titanic of an economy is not getting turned around we are just headed for the same iceberg over and over again. 

I wish more people would read Frank's book.   You can buy a copy from Amazon.com here:

Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank.

Only clean elections and an end to corporate lobbying can save America...

Abraham Lincoln in his famous Gettysburg address said that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."  I am not sure that it ever existed, at least not in the United States, especially not now.

What we have now in the United States is a government for the wealthy, the multi-national corporations, and any special interest that can rub more than two Lincoln pennies together.   And because of this the U.S. government appears to have its policy skewed on a seemingly inexorable path to the destruction of the middle class and everything that set America apart from the rest of the world. 

The only way to really have a democracy of the people, by the people, and for the people is for a constitutional amendment that will put an end to corporations, and the wealthy lobbying congress, and financing their political candidates of choice.

Only individuals should have the right to lobby the legislative and executive branches, and election campaigns should be entirely state run to put every candidate on an equal footing. 

However, the problem lies in the old saying "Money talks and BS walks."  There is little incentive for politicians to do the right thing and enact campaign finance reform.  There is great incentive for them to line their pockets with cash, which in any other profession would be called payola, and be totally illegal.  And suggesting that lobbying come to end would be unconstitutional. 

The Constitution needs to be amended to protect the rights of and empower the individual and greatly limit the rights of corporate entities.  Then we can really have the government Lincoln envisioned.