For the rich and powerful, the fact that everyone can vote in this country is a real nuisance. They would prefer it if they could just fight among themselves without the masses who they consider are too stupid and ignorant to make any judgment.
Imagine if you were a billionaire on Wall Street, and you want some bank regulations changed in your favor. Naturally, not all rich people would agree. You would have enemies you have to fight to get what you want. The problem, however, is that you cannot directly fight your opponents. You have to fight indirectly by helping the representatives on your side win the elections, but to do this, you would have to get the masses involved because they have the votes. The masses are not going to understand, or be interested in, any bank regulations. The fight would have to be about the issues that the masses can understand and relate to. So, you, as a Wall Street billionaire, have no choice but to figure out how to play up the issues that have nothing to do with the issues that matter to you.
In this manner, the election war is like a cockfight financed by the rich and powerful in order to make the masses vote in their favor. The control that the masses think they have over their own situations is an illusion. As an ordinary citizen, if you happen to get what you wanted as a result of the election, that is because your opinion happens to coincide with that of some rich and powerful people who orchestrated and manipulated the media circus.
This research by a Princeton professor is interesting in that he and his team have proved statistically what we all have been speculating about the rich and powerful. It’s not a conspiracy theory. And, reading the leaked emails of Hillary Clinton supports this too. They are feeding us this cockfight and trying to make us believe that we have the power to decide our future, when in fact we don’t. When the small number of rich and powerful disagree with the rest of us, they always get what they want. What they are really after are the issues that we are not even aware of. We are fighting over their decoys.
This is another problem of representative democracy where many issues are bundled into one representative. The politicians abuse their power over the issues that the public has no knowledge of.
