Well said, on the whole. My one beef with your line of thinking is that it a counsel of futility, encouraging people to withdraw from politics altogether since “they’re all corrupt.” Well—yes and no. Republicans and Democrats may both be corporate whores, as you suggest, but there is still an important distinction between them: Democrats are corporate whores as a matter of necessity; they need infusions of big corporate donations to stay in office, so they pander, often shamelessly, to corporate greed (especially the Military-Industrial Complex). But Republicans are corporate whores as a matter of principle: they are sworn believers in unregulated corporate oligarchy (which they mislabel as “the free market”) and they consider the public interest to be no more than the sum total of private interests, just like their corporate masters! So it STILL matters who gets your vote; if Democrats only occasionally serve the public interest, they are still better than Republicans, who are sworn to serve only big money, and for whom no concept of “the public interest” even exists in their political vocabulary!