If you're a Democrat, you're an excuse maker. You blame the congress for Obama's not getting things done. Note I do not use the word failure. 

If you're a Democrat, you blame Mitch McConnell for the Democratic majority in the senate not getting anything done-- because of that nasty filibuster.  I don't just blame McConnell. I blame Harry Reid just as much. The two of them-- Reid and McConnell are a team, working together. 

Here's what I think. Our political system has evolved, or better yet, devolved to a game where people attempt to stay as long as they can, or until they get an offer to run some org that pays them seven figures a year. 

The annoying thing about being a member of congress is you have to vote-- on all kinds of topics. And some of those votes are bound to irritate or enrage some of your constituents, even ones who voted for you. 

The members of congress have come up with a few ways around the need to vote. 

1- In the senate, the filibusters rescues senators from voting  on most issues. Now don't jump to just blaming Mitch McConnell. Harry Reid could have made it a lot more difficult to start and maintain a filibuster. He decided not to. So we have the situation where Reid rarely tries to do anything, ostensibly because malicious Mitch will do the bad thing and block the bill from reaching the mythical 60 votes.  This saves almost all of the senators from voting on anything that is difficult. 

2-In the house, it's a piece of cake. Thanks to Gerrymandering and a brilliant state level stratagem that has put the Republicans in deep, strong control of the south and the midwest, the Republicans have a strong advantage in the House, even though the democrats had over a million more votes. John Boehner lets the herd ride him and they end up proposing legislation that is strictly partisan or that will never ever get past the senate. 

The end result of both these strategies is congressional gridlock. But it's a gridlock that the members of congress embrace and use to save their sorry butts. 

There are some ways to end it. But they're unlikely to be accomplished if efforts are aimed within the political system as we know it. That system is designed to protect the status quo, and to secure, protect and maximize the interests of big multinational corporations and the top one tenth of the one percent. 

If major change is going to happen, it's not going to happen from within congress. 

Buckminster Fuller, the architect who invented the Geodesic dome-- talk about thinking out side the box-- said, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

This is not easy, not obvious and you never know where this new model will emerge from. Fuller also says, "There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly."   For all we know, some activist, or perhaps some disgruntled employee or some person who was treated unfairly or just flat out pissed off is trying something odd, something that everyone else is saying won't work, that it's crazy or stupid and certainly a waste of time. That's what they said about Occupy, and electrity and even home computers. 

We probably won't recognize it when we see it. Arthur Clarke has said that if a technology is advanced enough, it appears to be magic. Perhaps the paradigm shift that makes the existing model we are afflicted with now obsolete will also look like a metaphorical caterpillar. Most likely people will mock and question and challenge it. So perhaps that is where we should be looking-- at ideas that our reflexes tell us "Not really."  Perhaps we need to be generating a lot more new ideas, or using old approaches-- I like to look for ones that have appeared in nature-- in animals or in indigenous cultures. 

But one thing we should not be doing is digging a deeper hole, continuing to use an approach that we already know is not working-- and I'm talking about putting time into the legislative process. 

These elected officials, from Obama on down, are not failing, they're not be obstructed by the other side. They are getting exactly what they want. They are, in fact, colluding to maintain the failure, the gridlock, the do-nothingness. 

Do not allow yourself to forgive these people. Do not allow the idea of excusing them by blaming the other side. That is not what's happening. It is what they want you to think. 

The USA's two party system is deeply ill, afflicted with so many lesions and malignancies that it is not salvageable. The solution is to refuse to vote for either of the two parties. In the last presidential election, 45% said they were voting for the lesser of two evils. There are ways that people can express this at the ballot box. Many nations and municipalities allow instant run-off voting or variants that allow people to specify their first, second and third choices. It is obscene that in a three way race a winner can  have less than 50% plus one vote. 

The real solution is to support independent or third party candidates. We have Bernie Sanders and Angus King in the senate. We need 98 more independents. We need to en masse, end our registration as Democrats and Republicans and register as independents, or OTHER or in  third party. 

We need to get THIS conversation going all over the place so just the idea that a politician is a member of either party is a liability for a growing number of voters. 

The Democratic party is no longer the party of the middle class. The Republican party never was. The 99% have to find a way to work together. Maybe the trick is to make a truce on some issues. I'm not going to list possible ones because that will get some or many squawking. But right now, we're all being screwed because we're segmented and divided over wedge issues. What if independents could promise to just leave certain issues alone-- not change them-- and in exchange, they could agree on some big items-- 

-get rid of too big to fail companies

-prosecute bankers and other corporate heads who break the law or engage in fraud

-Clean up elections so people with the most money don't have unequal influence

-make sure that every ballot cast can actually be re-counted-- and get rid of electronic voting

-don't allow elected officials or their family members to take jobs with corporations that they had the slightest connection with, or voted on legislation that affected them-- forever. 

I believe it's possible to identify at least 50, probably more like 100 substantive issues that 60% or more of the population support. If we could take the top 10 and used them as the litmus test of independent candidates we just might start putting more and more independents in the Senate and the house. 

If you look to Israel, something impossible in the US happened in the last election. Netanyahu failed to get the support he was expecting from the collection of coalitions in the Israeli "parliament." There, in Israel, there are many different parties and new ones come and go.  This is what many newer nations have-- nations that no longer look to the US constitution as their inspirational model. 

We need to move outside the box. We need to look for caterpillars. We won't find them in the ballot booth under the D or R. 

The world is moving to become a much more bottom up kind of place. That means de-centralization, decrease or elimination of hierarchies and taking back of control from dominators at the central level. That is a wave towards the future that is unstoppable. The two party system, frozen and immobilized by old time, co-dependent deal-makers like Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell is a dying dinosaur. They will disappear. We must churn the inventiveness of our National culture to come up with what will become the butterfly-- the new model that makes the current one obsolete. 

Things fall apart (a gesture of respect to the late Chinua Achebe) when new models emerge. That will be the price of freeing the butterfly-- and it will be a process of freeing, because I know and believe that that butterfly is there, within, us, full of potential, ready to lift us all-- when we simply take the steps and see the possibilities that are waiting to unfold.