How come that two-party circus worked so well and for so long in the US? Is it because the majority of Americans have always been well-informed and free to make up their own mind and make their own decisions or is it because all opinions are valued in the American Media?

It's called "controlled media"..... of course with the two parties also controlling who can "play in their game" helped.

All about "air time" and who is "allowed" to participate in the debates. But even if you are "allowed" in the debates, doesn't mean you are "allowed" equal time or to even play at all.

The "R" or "D" leaning, corporate sponsored media of course chooses the moderators for ALL debates...... who control the allotted time and who "gets" the questions

Dr Paul got 58 seconds of a 2 hour debate during the 2012 cycle...... and that was only for a rebuttal because of a statement directed at him by another "favored" candidate

and the funny part about that is Dr., veteran, congressman Ron Paul still destroyed everybody in the debates on every subject.

The two parties USED to stand for something.

Now there is no difference between them other than their corporate or special interest backers. Their goals are exactly the same......CONTROL!

"D" = Unions, corporations, banks

"R" = War machine, corporations, banks

Two sides of the same coin and no matter how you toss it, the people lose!

The only thing that stands in their way is that pesky old document called the Constitution...... and they are BOTH doing their best to make that a non-issue

Their media can handle what the people think...... and has for years!

200+ years of this nations growth and the 'POWERS' that be {the people behind our nations growth}:
1 Rockefeller Family Standard Oil
2 Morgan Family J. P. Morgan & Co.
3 Ford Family Ford Motors
4 Harkness Family Standard Oil
5 Mellon Family Aluminum Company
6 Vanderbilt Family NY Central R&R
7 Whitney Family Standard Oil
8 Standard Oil Families Standard Oil
9 Du Pont Family DuPont
10 McCormick Family International Harvester, Chicago Times
*************************
We trusted these 'RICH FAT CATS' because they represented what was building this great nation; would they screw us all over for their own greedy sake? Well, that wasn't what my grandparents thought - they looked up to those people as something akin to 'GOD LIKE HUMANS'...that was what Americans must aspire to be like - those family names built this country - why, they'd never do anything to ruin it...RIGHT!

But then, the pick'ns became less & less and the slice of the pie became more of a dog fight to maintain and manage and 'CONTROLLING' the percentages became the GAME PLAN and getting your fair haired representative elected to bolster your interest became the high stakes gamble and we the working class Americans were nothing more then PAWNS in the chess game that the WEALTHY used to shove us around.

And in a brief 200+ years that GREED & MONEY MUNIPULATION has now ground down into a boondoggle of special interest/lobbyist/subsidies and graft to politicians...and what do we all do?

We leave it up to the off balance/out of kilter 'Electoral College' to tell us whom our next president will be...

First they'll tell you, you can't sleep alone in a strange place. Then they'll tell you, you can't sleep with somebody else.

"Economic freedom creates habits of liberty and habits of liberty create expectations of democracy, trade freely with China because time is on our side"...Guess who said that...George W. Bush said it in one of his foreign policy speeches...How well do you think that type of logic would go over today?..."Cultural influence is a powerful thing until it starts to decline...As countries grow and prosper, they don't imitate the political system of the countries they are overtaking, the countries who are falling behind imitate them"...hummmm....

It's four pages long, but well worth the time investment!...Read Forbes 05/06/15 article, "The Illusion of Democracy", then mix yourself a strong drink...

Here is the last paragraph...

We have already seen the rise of entirely new kinds of virtual communities that were unimaginable a few generations ago. Sometimes these networks empower the weak, bringing down autocratic rulers; other times they give formidable new weapons to the already mighty. We are standing at the threshold of a brave new world, although we cannot yet see what it will look like. Perhaps it will be a place where mankind merges through its machines into a kind of single superorganism, which takes democracy far beyond anything we have seen so far. Or then again, perhaps all gains will flow to a tiny elite that sets itself so far above the rest of humanity that democracy will once again become irrelevant. The democratic boom of the 18th through 20th centuries, like the democratic boom in ancient Greece, might be revealed as one of the exceptions that proves the rule of humanity's inexorable, long-term march toward hierarchy.

And in that case, Xi Jinping will surely be remembered as the first great man of the 21st century.


*clink*

Oh, that is rich.

I really wish citizens were required to have a real education in American History. Almost no one gets more than the special propaganda version of it that prevails in grade school.

The two-party system has ALWAYS been fraught with problems of corruption, of wealthy people bribing or outright buying representatives, of ballot box packing, and you name it. If anything, there have been a few improvements recently, many of which were discarded as soon as the modern Republicans got to be in control. It's more difficult to rig ballots now, though some of the MOST recent ideas, to make everything electronic, and to allow only one party to select the voting computers makes that another laffer.

Remember that old Lincoln quote, about some of the people all of the time? He didn't come up with that because people were NOT being fooled, ya know.

Igor. That was sarcasm