Millions of us will go to the polls in November, desperately seeking to put this country back on the tracks. Something like 92% of Americans think that this country is headed in the wrong direction but we can’t seem to get our message across to the corrupt politicians who promise the world but do the bidding of their corporate masters. Same old, same old, dressed up in spiffy new promises.

I stumbled across a site that might offer real hope of breaking the stranglehold that the two party system in this country has on the electorate. It is called Re-Inventing Democracy and seems to be a cross of social networking and politics. The site isn’t up and running yet, but I encourage those who have lost hope in the political process in this country to at least go and take a look at the site. I’m not real sure how it will work, but it allows people of like minds to connect and form voting blocs and electoral coalitions to put pressure on politicians. Apparently, if there are enough like-minded people, a candidate can be put on the ballot and possibly elected, thus doing an end run around the gerrymandered districts created by the Democratic and Republican parties that only serve to keep the same corrupt politicians in power year after year.

There is an overview of the system at Fire Dog Lake that simplifies, somewhat, the explanation given at the Re-Inventing Democracy website. Here is a snippet taken from the Fire Dog Lake website that gives an idea of what people might accomplish by using this system:

* Define their own policy options and prioritize them to create policy agendas,
* Social network with others who have similar agendas to their own,
* Work together to create collective policy agendas, voting blocs, and electoral coalitions that work within existing parties or build new political parties, and
* Hold elected representatives accountable by monitoring and evaluating how well their performance matches the policy agendas of the voting blocs that have elected them to office.

Check it out. There might be something here that will give us hope for the change that we thought we were getting in 2006 and 2008.