>Moreover, it's about time that we recognize this country's electoral
>process as plutocratic and oligarchic, rather than democratic.
Yes and no - it's neither one nor the other, but full of contradictions. Christian Parenti writes from Colombia, where he's researching a piece for The Nation, quoting a local left politico: "To run for office from the left in colombia, you have to be willing to die." Now that's a real plutocracy. In the US, to run for office from the left, you have to be willing to risk mocking press coverage or none at all. Yeah, the big guys dominate the public sphere, and a couple of centuries of bourgeois common sense have been drilled into our heads, but we're not terrorized and we're not powerless. You have to take seriously the possibility that many, maybe most, Americans are pretty satisfied with the status quo.
Doug