Politicians worship money and power. Every politician worth his salt secretly aspires to be a dictator, although they dare not admit this as it is not exactly politically correct. The ultimate goal of the consummate politician is to have absolute power, and be able to boss everyone else about, to have unlimited access to public funds for the purposes of profligate personal consumption and more importantly self aggrandizement, as well as to bribe and reward supporters, and to kill or otherwise neutralize anyone who disagrees or creates any opposition. The reasons that General Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, has become such a pariah are a combination of envy and hypocrisy. General Pinochet lived the politician's dream - he cleaned up Chile with an iron fist, and those who opposed him at times found themselves on a short one-way flight over the Pacific, which did not involve the expenditure of much fuel as Chile has a 5000 km long coastline.

The natural tendency of politicians to aspire to dictatorship and all the advantages it confers is of course at odds with the concept of democracy, which involves taking into account the views of others, or at least the views of the majority, so it could be said that politicians and the electorate they rule over have a permanent conflict of interest. It is for this reason that people who live in a democracy, and wish to continue to doing so, must maintain vigilance at all times and keep their politicians under close scrutiny and demand that they account for their actions. Failure to do so invites eventual dictatorship. Politicians are well aware of this and in the United States in particular they have developed sophisticated techniques to discourage citizens from holding them to account, some of which involve the exploitation of human weakness. The principal technique employed in the US is to get people so busy that they don't have time to think about anything, and it is important to remember that with one person, one vote, this doesn't have to be everyone, just the majority. Thus, both men and women are encouraged to work long hours and coerced into accepting work with virtually no vacation time, and a sizable proportion of their free time is eaten up by bureaucratic concerns, such as paying bills etc. With what little time they have left they are often too fatigued to do much else and end up doing something like watching a movie. The long working hours and lack of vacation time also mean more profits for the politicians' pals and associates in the business world. Another technique involves what is called atomization in order to undermine the sense of community and the empowerment that a sense of community brings. This is achieved again through distraction, the principal weapon being the television, but also trivia such as video games. A simple example of the way this works would be a person choosing to stay home and play a video game rather than going to have a chat with a neighbour. Still another important technique employed is obfuscation - making it hard for ordinary citizens to connect them with particular actions by acting as a group or through intermediaries. Perhaps the greatest factor contributing to the concentration of power and impending end of democracy in the US however is comfort. The majority of citizens have lived comfortable, affluent lives for many decades. This has led to unquestioning trust in politicians and a "leave it to them" attitude. Many people have more important things to do than keep tabs on what their politicians are up to, such as watching the ball game, drinking with their pals or going to the racetrack. The attitude has also been cultivated amongst all classes of society that "money talks" and "might is right". Just a year or two ago when you stopped people on the streets of Chicago or New York and asked them what they thought of the huge salaries and bonuses of Wall St executives, a common reply was "What's wrong with it if they get results?" - the result of this attitude of course was that those with the power to do so voted themselves ever greater pay increases until the companies they worked for became little more than vehicles to funnel money