Richard C. Cook thinks that Bernie Sanders could become the next president.

But could Sanders make any difference?

Obama’s regime was totally different than his campaign messages, just as George W. Bush’s regime was different from his campaign messages. The neoconservatives created the specter of terrorism and successfully used it to create a warfare/police state. The One Percent rakes in the billions of dollars from US financial and military hegemony. These formidable private powers also own Congress.

Any president who tried to redress the power imbalance would likely find himself outgunned.

Americans have a history of being easily manipulated and brainwashed, but a couple of decades of economic disappointment is finally producing some dissatisfaction. Mike Whitney explains Donald Trump’s popularity with voters:

“The point we’re trying to make is that Donald Trump’s meteoric rise in the GOP can be traced back to the failed economic policies of prior administrations. He’s the political beneficiary of 3 decades of stagnant wages, falling incomes, declining living standards, and a cataclysmic financial crisis that wiped out trillions of dollars in home equity leaving behind a battered middle class and sluggish economy that doesn’t grow, doesn’t generate opportunities for upward mobility, and only produces low-paying, deadend, service-sector jobs that barely pay the rent.”

You have heard me say the same thing many times.

Some Americans are waking up. As the hardships they suffer intensify, perhaps a movement will arise that can force through changes. However, as former president Jimmy Carter says, America is no longer a democracy; it is an oligarchy. Elections are manipulated in order to strengthen the oligarchy. As the electorate has no presence in Washington, violence is emerging as the only possible method of change.