Description

"We’re Americans. We have the best government money can buy."

With these words, Edgar and Shamus Award-winning mystery writer Steven Womack begins his investigation of one of the greatest crimes ever committed against the American people: the American political system.

The first in a series of eight "broadsides" examining issues in contemporary American life, WHY POLITICS SUCKS is a hard look at our dysfunctional, thoroughly corrupt, inefficient and broken, political system. Contemporary politics has descended into a cesspool of influence buying, lobbying, and pandering to the worst instincts in our national psyche. Our political life has never seemed more toxic, angry, bitter, and out-of-touch with the realities of American life. Our infrastructure decays, our children fall behind the rest of the world in education, the middle class disappears, while the poor, sick, and elderly are abandoned to survive as best they can. Meanwhile, the corporations, the connected, the powerful and the wealthy have literally raced to outbid each other for control of what should be our government.

As Womack reveals, politics has never been a pretty business. From the earliest days of the republic, politicians, legal scholars, and ordinary citizens have struggled to even figure out what corruption is. How does a democracy exist when it is for sale to the highest bidder?

All is not lost, though. Womack offers, as the subtitle suggests, a few modest proposals that might just turn things around and make politics suck just a little less.