this country is worth trillions of dollars

[leftofthedial]

we have military might (although the bush cabal has done its best to break that), wealth, resources . . .

but our entire federal government can be bought for a few billion dollars in campaign contributions (aka bribes).

Any wonder that the Saudis, Israelis, Chinese, et al wield more power than the electorate?


Where is serious discussion of campaign and election reform?

[SergeyDovlatov]

1. Electorate is not paying attention

Unlike special interest groups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

One of the basic claims that results from public choice theory is that good government policies in a democracy are an underprovided public good, because of the rational ignorance of the voters. Each voter is faced with a tiny probability that his vote will change the result of the elections, while gathering the relevant information necessary for a well-informed voting decision requires substantial time and effort. Therefore, the rational decision for each voter is to be generally ignorant of politics and perhaps even abstain from voting. Rational choice theorists claim that this explains the gross ignorance of most citizens in modern democracies as well as low voter turnout.

While good government tends to be a pure public good for the mass of voters, there may be many interest groups that have strong incentives for lobbying the government to implement specific inefficient policies that would benefit them at the expense of the general public. For example, lobbying by the sugar manufacturers might result in an inefficient subsidy for the production of sugar, either direct or by protectionist measures. The costs of such inefficient policy are dispersed over all citizens, and therefore unnoticeable to each individual. On the other hand, the benefits are shared by a small special-interest group with a strong incentive to perpetuate the policy by further lobbying. The vast majority of voters will be unaware of the effort due to rational ignorance. Therefore, theorists expect that numerous special interests will be able to successfully lobby for various inefficient policies