I agree. We are a plutocracy now.
It would cost about 1 billion a year to have publicly funded federal elections, but it would save far far more than that by cutting corporate welfare.
http://www.citizen.org/prezview/articles.cfm?ID=16835
But like you said, what can you do? The people with the power don’t want to give it up.
A declining economy and an everlasting wish to control the world despite the lack of an ability to do so.
Says the great IOZ:
US’s biggest problems, IMO, are lack of education and the predominance of religion. These are not unrelated in my view, either. I am completely unaware what can be done about it. All other problems are related to one of these two. I don’t wish to abolish religion, and I do not believe everyone requires even a high school education, but if I could magically make it so, I would remove all religion and ensure everyone has a high school education. Two wishes from a genie in a bottle. The third would probably be something terribly selfish and personal.
I know that seems kind of dismissive of discussion, but “what could be done” about education is very hard to answer in any other way. We could reduce military spending and put it towards education, as a first approximation. We could loosen immigration laws to stop creating an underclass of illegals. These two things would work together to reduce the population of unskilled laborers (I am not asserting all illegals are unskilled). We could end the war on drugs and expand programs attempting to integrate immigrants. If people want to come to this country to get an education and find work, well, those are exactly the sort of people I want in my country. If you don’t want to work and don’t want an education for yourself or your family, I don’t want you here, natural born citizen or not.
But this is no further from the genie in the bottle, because how are we going to reallocate resources this way? If people wanted to, we’d already be doing it. I continue to argue (mostly IRL) against tough immigration laws and against the war on drugs and for lowering barriers to education. Basically, it’s all I’ve got until I find a genie in a bottle.
If you are so interested in education, you might want to increase the predominance of religion. As catholic schools perform better, on average than public.
And that might be a good idea if more money were the answer. It’s not. There are districts that spend an incredible amount of money that perform abysmally. (See '“The Kansas City Experiment”.) There are others that spend much less and re stellar. No, money ain’t the problem. I wish it were. THAT would be easy to fix.
So, you’d like to make it easier for illegals and increase legal immigration while we have a 10% unemployment rate. Interesting. Don’t you think our efforts should help those people first? Then if we need more people, open the spigot.
If you can demonstrate that this is because they are catholic then I will happily reconsider and learn something amazing in the process. I believe that the hypothesis, otherwise, would be that there is something other than religion at work.
Well, like I said, my primary recourse is the genie in the bottle. I wasn’t joking, unfortunately! Also, it seems that the evidence provided by the case you mention is not conclusive, as I see it. For one, the method of increasing funding was quite haphazard. Still, I was not aware of this case and thank you for the reference, about which I will have to read more.
Increasing immigration will always increase unemployment, for reasons that I assume are obvious. I believe people and business should be free to relocate around the world to places of their liking. Relocation already has large costs associated with it; I do not see the pressing need to make it worse by government fiat.
Do you not think US foreign policy treats nations differently, and correlated to that different treatment is the race of the population of those nations?
Of course. Why do you think Darfur (Caucasian Arab population oppresses blacks) was such a successful Outrage of the Week, while Zimbabwe (Black government terrorizes white farmers, leading to economic collapse) was not?
The root cause of many of the issues in the OP is that Americans these days want to get stuff without paying for it. This problem crosses party lines. It explains why we in California vote for lots of expensive propositions and yell about lack of service at the DMV while being dead set against restoring the vehicle license fees whose removal accounts for 1/3 of the deficit. It is why people expect to be able to graduate into good jobs without working in schools, or, worse yet, laughing at those who do. It is why people play the Lottery. It is why people buy stuff they can’t afford, on credit. It’s why people wanted to invade Iraq and not pay for it, or add drugs to Medicare, and put it on the deficit tab. It’s why bankers thought they could get more money out of riskier investments without the risk ever coming back to bite them.
Climate change is just one more example of putting things on credit - I think a lot of the opposition to doing something about it is because it is easier to keep the profits and convenience now and put the carbon on our credit card. When we go environmentally bankrupt, they’ll all scream “why didn’t anyone tell me!”
Even if I assume the Zimbabwe land seizures were a moral equivalent of the Darfur attacks, can you explain to me what the US foreign policy response was that was so much greater to Darfur than to Zimbabwe. Especially giventhat we happily bombed the shit out of the Serbian government for committing smaller scale acts of violence against European people.
And an obesity epidemic of the, well, fairly sizable.
Some problems solve each other! 
The main problem is ignorance. If people don’t have knowledge of a problem they have no hope of finding a solution. Last century the world was pumping out tons of CFCs blissfully unaware of the danger they caused. A lack of knowledge makes people vote based on emotion and opinion. Voting based on a careful weighing of the facts would be much better IMHO.
How do you fix ignorance? That is a hard one. Maybe we could get more people to read the SD that would be a start.
I sent my kids to Catholic schools and it was worth every penny. They are stand up adults with good jobs and ethics. If I sent them to public school they may have multiple body piercings and look like Lady Gaga. They may have come out fine but I did not want to chance it so I worked to pay for private school.
The biggest problem I see is greed at the gov/corporate level on down. Greed has taken down many a great empire. When money becomes more important then human life and liberty we are becoming like Rome. A bunch of fat, lazy pervs that think the world owes them.
My other gripe is the social slobberers that think we are entitled to get everything for free. I had to work hard to get what I have. It is good for a person to work hard to achieve things. This whole everyone rides for free bus has to be stopped. Free health care isn’t free. Working people pay for it and that is why it is the best in the world. You get what you pay for in this world.