Recommended Reading: The Quiet Coup

[elfs]

Simon Johnson's The Quiet Coup is the sort of thing that ought to depress the hell out of you. He follows the current financial logic to its logical conclusion: we are not a representative democracy. We are an oligarchy; the election process is a farce to put people into chairs who, regardless of party affiliation, find themselves embedded in an economic machine that empowers them only to act in the interests of the oligarchs, where those in bureaucratic political power (rather than elected) come from the financial world, and return to it, regularly, and find themselves rewarded at both ends.