New Gallup Poll Shows Only 7% of Americans Trust Congress-- My Take-- video and transcript

You can see the video at the above link or here's the transcript:

I think one of the reasons is the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court and the following ruling that came out-- they basically have allowed billionaires and big corporations and really even money from outside of the United States to totally flood the political arena, so that Congress is now basically built with the group of people who have bought their way in.

This current election is going to be the worse one ever, where billionaires are putting in hundreds of millions of their own money to buy Congress. How can anybody respect that? How can anybody trust that?

When I talk to anybody who cares about what is happening in America I say we cannot trust politics, you need to vote but don't depend on it because voting alone is not going to do the job. It is going to take more than that in America for people to make changes happen.

And as long as every billionaire and multimillionaire can influence the elections disproportionately, we are going to have these kinds of problems. It has been forty years since forty percent of the Americans trusted Congress and it is only going to get worse, and frankly it should.

Press TV: Well what is interesting about this poll that has come out and the results is that a lot of people are saying they are concerned because Congress is struggling to even pass routine measures.

Now do you find the fault in the fact that we have a partisan system in Congress as some people may believe or do you see the problem in the structure of Congress or as you mentioned earlier is this the result of outside influence on Congress?

Kall: Well the trust in Congress, I think, is lost because people are saying that nothing is getting done and nothing is getting done because there is a very partisan situation there and it is so broken.

For example, more than a million more Democrats voted for members of Congress than Republicans, yet the Republicans have the majority. Now that is because of what is called gerrymandering where people make these bizarre shapes for districts that people vote in and that is another reason that we see such a broken political system.

I don't see much hope for the future in the near-term either, unless something really major happens and it really means that the US is going to become more and more dysfunctional for the people.

Now there are people who it is working just fine for it. If you are very wealthy then the US is serving you well. It is the 99.9 percent of the people who are not doing well, that are being dis-served by Congress functioning like it is or not functioning like it is.