Make no mistake, while Americans are busy quibbling over which political savior is best-suited to rescue us from certain destruction, the government’s outrages—runaway spending, graft, pork barrel legislation, corporate collusion, and so on—are continuing to mount. Unmitigated waste, profligate spending and inexcusable mismanagement—the common denominators between all government agencies—perfectly illustrate the magnitude of the problem we face when it comes to an out-of-control, bureaucratic government that marches in lockstep with the corporate state.

“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

With less than eight months to go before the next presidential election, political chatter among the candidates is ramping up and serious political discourse is declining. All the while, the corrupt government machine is taking advantage of a populace distracted by the political theater to advance agendas that are completely at odds with the nation’s fiscal, legislative and constitutional priorities. Indeed, the process of voting and electing a new president has become little more than an expensive, sophisticated ruse designed to deceive us into thinking we actually have a say in what happens in our government. However, the sad fact is that the United States government has ballooned into an overreaching, out-of-control bureaucracy accountable to no one in particular—not Congress or the president and least of all the taxpayers.

Thus, while the candidates mug for the cameras, American taxpayers are being taken to the cleaners—a different kind of mugging, altogether—by government officials eager to placate their corporate benefactors. While the surveillance state is slowly being erected around us, our civil liberties are systemically being dismantled. While our government wages war after endless war abroad, the war on the American people—fought with sound cannons, tasers and drones—is entering its early stages. And while the partisan rancor over who will occupy the White House becomes more toxic with each passing day, the elephant in the room—what no one is talking about—is the fact that it doesn’t really matter who gets elected, because no matter how often we change out the resident of the Oval Office, the immense, intractable, implacable, bureaucratic colossus that is our federal government remains entrenched.

In other words, the more things change, the more they remain the same. On Wednesday, November 7, the day after the next president is elected, the government as we have come to know it—corrupt, bloated and controlled by big-money corporations, lobbyists and special interest groups—will be largely unchanged. And “we the people”—overtaxed, overpoliced, overburdened by big government, underrepresented by those who should speak for us and blissfully ignorant of the prison walls closing in on us—will continue to trudge along a path of misery.

Make no mistake, while Americans are busy quibbling over which political savior is best-suited to rescue us from certain destruction, the government’s outrages—runaway spending, graft, pork barrel legislation, corporate collusion, and so on—are continuing to mount. Unmitigated waste, profligate spending and inexcusable mismanagement—the common denominators between all government agencies—perfectly illustrate the magnitude of the problem we face when it comes to an out-of-control, bureaucratic government that marches in lockstep with the corporate state.

For a start, consider national defense spending, which enriches the military-industrial complex to the tune of $740 billion and routinely falls prey to corruption and mismanagement. Who could forget the ten C-17 cargo planes purchased by Congress at the urging of the defense industry for a whopping $2.4 billion, despite the fact that the Pentagon insisted it didn’t need them? Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

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