Ebbie, I think your disagreement with me rests on a couple of misunderstandings of what I am saying.

When I speak of "the Democrats" or "the Republicans" as a party, and in the context I was speaking in the post you were referring to, I am not speaking of all the millions of ordinary citizens who are members of those parties. I am not speaking of citizens who went to caucus meetings, etc. I am speaking of quite a small group of highly influential power brokers who are at the very top of those two parties...the "kingmakers", as it were, who make important policy decisions at the highest level of the party structure.

You say, "There are many good people serving in both of those parties." ABSOLUTELY! And I would never say otherwise. There are many good people serving in virtually any large hierarchical power structure. I was not referring to those many people, I was referring to a few very powerful people at the top of the pyramid. You will find that they are usually people with a lot of money...usually "old" money...and they've been playing the partisan game for their entire adult lives, and they all know each other (right across those party lines).

Furthermore, I am NOT, repeat, NOT saying that it is a great conspiracy! I have said again and again on different threads that it is not a conspiracy...it is simply the natural way that a system which is based on certain monetary forces plays itself out. The entrenched power structures in a society always play themselves out in such a way as naturally suits them and benefits them, simply because that's how it works.

Now, if you have an economy which has built itself around a constant high level of arms production, for instance, as the USA has ever since WWII then you have a built-in imperative to use those arms in frequent wars or supply them to wars and that in itself helps to set in motion policies in the world which lead to more wars. This was as true for the Roman Empire or many past empires as it is for the present American Empire.

It's not a conspiracy, it's simply the nature of the beast. Now, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul were directly confronting that warmaking structure in society and saying, "We should stop doing this."

In so doing they were confronting tremendous established ways of doing things in the USA, ways that are supported by vast industrial and financial concerns. For those people to laugh nervously at Ron Paul and dismiss Kucinich as a "weirdo" is not a conspiracy...it's just good business taking care of itself.

You don't NEED a conspiracy when people's self-interest and greed (and the force of established habits) takes care of the matter all by itself.

So, I am not criticizing you or any other ordinary American citizen who happens to be a Republican or a Democrat on the basis of their party affiliation or the work they do for their party. I am criticizing the fundamental values that underly the present whole USA society (and Canada's as well) at a much deeper level, and I'm saying that those two parties you have in the USA are willy nilly serving outmoded, harmful, and entrenched interests because that's where the money is and the money controls the agenda.

You don't need a "conspiracy" to have that happen. All you need is a system where the money controls the agenda, and that's what you've got. That in itself is enough to royally screw both the USA and the world in general, because money is an artificial notion and if you base a whole society on pursuing and serving an artificial thing that someone made up in his mind you will find out in time that that society has lost touch with reality.

That's what happened to the Easter Islanders...and that is what is happening to our present societies right now....but on a much, much larger playing field, of course.

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The tricks that were used to keep Kucinich out of some of those TV debates, by the way, were not legitimate in the least...but it's a long argument, and I don't have much motivation to pursue it at the moment. It wouldn't change anything anyway.