The collapse of the American Empire is unfolding before our eyes. Bridges are no longer being repaired, we just put up signs warning heavy trucks to stay off. Schools are closing and villages are merging with towns and counties to save costs. One of the great things about the Internet is that people of like minds can find one another and share views. One of the bad things about the Internet is that people of like minds can find one another and share ideas. So, while we get solutions to problems we also get the rise of the Fascists. The damage the Party has done to the election industry is being felt as a compulsive liar and reality show host is presented as the best of the Right and a power hungry compulsive liar is the darling of the so-called Left. I suppose being Left of Right counts, but since the Right in question is so far to the right it wears a swastika a left leaning person could still be a fascist police state advocate.
Then we have Bernie Sanders.
The Powers in charge misunderstood just how pissed off the People are over the decades of lies, the up-flow of all wealth to the .1%, and the costs of getting their children an education compared to every other civilized nation. So while they teased us allowing Bernie to run as a "Democrat" they pt all their power and money towards a Hilary for President. They can't just put her up as the candidate and still call themselves "Democrats", in reference to the concept of "democracy", so they just do what they can to sabotage his campaign. The heavy-handedness with which they have approached their self-made "problem" is so obvious even Democrats can see it. The vocabulary used to cover the stories is glow-in-the-dark clear: Hilary crushes her opponent whereas Bernie only wins or takes votes.... but whenever they can scrape off votes he earned and give them to Hillary, they do. Not exactly rigged per se, but certainly very little is left to chance or democratic principles.
I often wonder what a society would look like as a democracy. If People could write laws and present them to the People for review, comments and votes, what laws would exist, what kinds of regulations? Now we can have a single person with wealth and power send up a Bill which financially benefits them and their business partners, post it at midnight and weasel enough votes by dawn that it becomes law, once the trained President is allowed to sign it. In a democracy I could draw up a Bill using forms online and present it to the voters for several weeks of comments and perhaps revision before the entire population is allowed to cast a vote and upon winning the majority of the votes, my Bill would become law! At the moment it is against the law for people to write their own laws and vote on them in a general election, this being New York, one of the most corrupt and fascist of states. Furthermore it should be that in a democracy we have Bills which are written on a single subject, no additional unrelated sub-bills allowed. In this way we don't get a Bill to finance the government with an "Easter egg" of concealed perks for a few businessmen.
Most people have been trained to accept any small portion of democracy permitted by the fascists, primarily harmless Bills which declare today to be national bullshit day or some such thing. It brings in extra cash to be part of a committee looking over these useless laws, so our lawmakers like to have plenty of them. It has been observed by the great philosopher Fred Brighton that when all the good and necessary laws have been written we should stop writing new laws, but Congress gets paid both by salary and by number of laws passed, so we then start getting absurd and sometimes even illegal laws passed, which then make lawyers tons of money while they go to the Supreme Republican Court for a Party declared correction. We have "corrected" the Bill of Rights to include the Right of a President to murder American citizens remotely or by proxy so long as they first declare the victim to be a "bad guy". Anyone standing near the victim will also be blown apart but that is what we call, "incidental collateral damage to structures".
If Bernie somehow is allowed to take the White House and if Bernie does not stop the fascist wars we are waging, or does not stop the slaughter by drones, then we can declare America to be a "democracy free zone" and we should quietly begin finding a refuge somewhere else on the planet, assuming they allow us to leave.
