The New Yorker’s George Packer has an excellent essay about the current US Senate and its inability to get anything useful done for the country. It’s definitely worth five or ten minutes of your time. The headline says it all:
There’s a lot of meat in the article, but this is one of the appetizers:
Between 1998 and 2004, half the senators who left office became lobbyists. In 2007, Trent Lott, a Republican leader in the Senate less than a year into his fourth term, abruptly resigned and formed a lobbying firm with former Senator John Breaux, just a few weeks before a new law took effect requiring a two-year waiting period between serving and lobbying.
Isn’t that charming? And some folks think the unfettered use of corporate money in elections is no big deal.
I read about a quarter of that and had to quit and get some actual stuff done, like, pay bills. Unlike the Senate. It is truly depressing.