From Of Two Minds

Spot on observation

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan22/cut-middleman1-22.html

There's a fancy word for cutting out the Middleman: disintermediation.Removing intermediaries who take a cut but neither produce nor add value makes perfect sense, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

Maybe it's time to eliminate the politicians who soak up hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from corporations and the super-wealthy and just elect Pfizer, Merck, Amazon, General Dynamics, etc. directly. Since corporate lobbyists write most of the legislation anyway, why not cut out the intermediaries in the process?

The super-wealthy buy political power via Political Action Committees (PACs and Super-PACs), think tanks and philanthro-capitalist foundations (Gates Foundation, et al.). Now that it takes tens of millions of dollars to buy the conventional "winning campaign," the political class spends much of its time fund-raising, i.e. lavishing kisses on the derrieres of corporations and the super-wealthy, implicitly promising to do their bidding better than the alternative candidates that the corporations and super-wealthy could buy.

Recall Smith's Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic authoritarian government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

The reality that our elected government doesn't respond to voters has been well-established: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.