As I mentioned in my last post, our Congress is catering to the wealthy and powerful.  But it is worse than that, the wishes of the poor and middle-class are ignored.  As Ezra Klein stated in a recent blog post:

Martin Gilens, a political scientist at Princeton University, has been collecting the results of nearly 2,000 survey questions reaching back to the 1980s, looking for evidence that when opinions change, so too does policy. And he found it—but only for the rich. Policy changes with majority support didn’t become law except when that majority support included voters at the top of the income distribution. When the opinions of the poor diverged from the opinions of the rich, the opinions of the poor did not appear to matter. If 90 percent of the poor supported a policy change, its chances of passage were no better than if 10 percent of the poor supported it.

The link to Professor Gilens's research is here: http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/content/69/5/778.full.pdf

Folks have asked me why I think I am qualified to run for Congress.  I answer them in all seriousness that one of my main qualifications is that I lost my job in 2007 and know the toll unemployment takes on an individual and his/her family.  It is time that the House of Representatives begins to represent everyone.  If the trend that Professor Gilens found continues, the dream of the Founding Fathers will be broken and unattainable for future generations.