The way things are right now, it doesn’t matter who wins the next presidential election because whoever wins will just get sucked into the corruption that is the business of our government.

Slow change over two hundred years is hard to detect yet can be very significant. That's what’s happened with our "We the People" relationship with our Government. Our founding fathers created an ingenious representative government that was "of the people, by the people and for the people". It has however evolved into a government “of big oil, by pharmaceuticals and for healthcare". At this point "We the People" are only needed to pay taxes and vote. So our candidates do and say whatever they need to get us to vote for them, and if they are elected, they make all their future decisions based on the highest bidder, not for us. They’re also not accountable for keeping their campaign promises (the reasons we elected them). Barring some national emergency, any elected official should be fired and replaced if they go against their campaign promises. Let’s get them working for us again! We're losing out on this deal!
The flaw in the system is that there's no law preventing our representatives and their party’s from receiving all forms of compensation from any businesses, trade groups or individuals. This includes gifts, trips, campaign contributions, promises of future employment and gifts to their families, charities or foundations. Businesses, trade groups and individuals can not be allowed to influence our representatives in their work for us, the people, in this way. Can you imagine if judges were allowed to receive "stuff" to influence the decisions they make? Our judicial system would be in chaos and justice could not be served. Well that's exactly what we have in our government.

Here are 2 examples of how this approach would eliminate so many of our most serious problems:
1) Our election system now is designed to bring people to power who have access to money contributed in return for "IOU's" that can be cashed in if they are elected. So half of their election term is spent paying back IOU's from the last election, and the other half making promises/collecting money for the next election. When do they do our business?
We really have to get our government to represent the people again as opposed to the “very generous” business community and extremely wealthy people as they do now. We need a major reform where if a qualified candidate gets a fixed number of signatures, then the government gives them a fixed dollar amount to run their campaign. And that’s all the money they’re allowed to spend. None of their money and no other contributions can be used and how they do spend the fixed dollar amount will be fully audited. It should be illegal for any candidate or government representative to accept any money or gifts from any business, trade group or individual. It would be wonderful for elected officials to only be obligated to the “People”!

2) We are the most powerful country this planet has ever seen and yet we have a gigantic national energy emergency which our government is not dealing with. The US cannot produce a large percentage of our energy we use. Because of that we are at war in Iraq, the money we pay for our energy strengthens our enemies and we have lost international credibility.
The only rational solution is to lose our dependency on fossil fuels by developing unlimited, renewable, clean, environmentally friendly power which can run our cars, our homes, and our country. We have all the resources to accomplish this, what we lack is the leadership. We need our government to bring together our best scientific minds including NASA to create a "Manhattan" type project to become independent and great again. We did this once before and it was equally difficult and important and it ended WW2 with Japan. Let’s be energy independent so we don’t find ourselves in this vulnerable situation again. This is a national emergency. It’s such an obvious solution, but it's not hard to understand why we haven't done it. The oil companies benefit from staying the oil course and they have recently been making record obscene profits. And since the Bush administration is heavily tied to the oil companies, our government isn’t doing anything to solve this crisis. See how it works? The government has completely lost sight of the people they work for, us and the best way to keep their attention is to remove their distractions (the corporate lobbyists).
As we continue to deviate from our brilliant constitution, America continues to lose its greatness. And the “last great hope of mankind” will find itself a common, ordinary ex-superpower.

Our country has been great because of our principles and fairness. Because of that we have always had the respect and envy of the free world and have provided hope for those who are not free. I'm not suggesting that we should make any changes to our founding fathers ingenious government; the changes have already been made. I suggest we put it back to serve us as it was intended. Let's be great again!

Sincerely - Bill Shanahan