Kids in American society are brought up to believe that all you need to have real democracy is to arbitrarily divide a society up into 2 competitive political parties, trot out 2 sets of stuffed dummies at regular intervals, and pick the dummy of your choice. I remember how it was set up in our student council elections (when I was living in New York state)...a carbon copy of the 2-party system...and about equally stupid. We were being primed to go out as adults and naively vote for Republicans or Democrats.

What good does it do when the same huge vested corporate interests fund and own both those parties, as well as funding and owning the few huge media chains that dominate TV?

It's almost meaningless...although it is still true that one party's candidate may be somewhat preferable to the other party's candidate at any given moment (sigh).

But in the end it makes about as much difference as choosing between a liberal communist and a conservative communist candidate in the old Soviet system. The $ySStem still rules, regardless. Only the curtains get changed on the windows.

It's called "divide and conquer". If you can fool one half of the people into fighting with the other half over which set of curtains gets put on the windows, you've got them distracted enough that they won't notice what you're really up to, which is robbing them of their country.

The political infighting between different religious groups within Christianity or within Islam (Shiites and Sunnis) is similarly divisive, similarly pointless, and similarly effective in keeping their general public distracted and caught up in endlessly fighting with one another to their mutual detriment, instead of questioning the whole basic premise.

What needs to be done is to question the whole basic premise. It's a false premise. This is true of most organized religion and it's true of our mainstream political systems as well. It's also true of the economic systems we are presently accustomed to. We live on a planet that is drunk on its own mythologies...and not just the religious ones. There is mythology at every level.