Our concept of politicians is a bit skewed. Or maybe we don't make a necessary distinction between two types of politicians; front-end politicians and a back-end politicians. Before I proceed it might be useful to look at Wikipedia's definition of a Politician.
A Politican is a person who is involved in influencing public policy and decision making. This includes people who hold decision-making positions in government, and people who seek those positions, whether by means of election,inheritance, coup d'état, appointment, electoral fraud, conquest, divine right, or other means.
The functional word in the above definition is influencing public policy and decision making, and I believe this is not actually done by those whom we usually refer to as politicians. Let's take the United States for a minute. I think it is clear to everyone who chooses not to fool himself, that the policy making is done by pressure groups, lobbies, and corporations. A fact that is manifested by the advancement of interests of big corporations, banks, oil companies and foreign interests represented by a rich and dominant minority in the states like Israel and its AIPAC. Iraq war was not supported by the population. It was supported by the above-mentioned entities. So these guys are what we could rightly call back-end politicians. And like computer software, the back-end is the core and it is what really matters. The front-end is an interface. A pleasant presentation that soothes the users' (read public) eyes. Everything though is cooked at the back-end. So if you look at Obama and congressmen, they are nothing more than mouthpieces (front-end interfaces) for corporations and lobbying elites. Entities that buy these mouthpieces for campaigning money, and use their ambition and greed for their own interest. That is why for example American politicians have always supported the Israeli camp while in office, while some of them like Carter defected to the other side once their office terms ended. That is also why American politicians were always in search of an enemy to fight, a land to invade, and a place to use or sell weapons. More recently, that is why the result of the latest financial crisis was that banks got bigger and stronger while average Joe suffered.
these front-end politicians are there to protect the interest of the back-end ones! Banks got bigger and their executives became richer. And now there is a feeling that these institutes are too big to fail. In other words, these shouldn't fail. The public have been tamed to believe that it is their national duty to make sure these banks never go bankrupt. Because if they do, the whole system will collapse. No banks means no liquidity, means nobody will have money to buy and as a result no one will sell, which means no company will make profit and consequently no jobs and no salaries. It has been enshrined and now it is almost like a religion. A pagan one reminiscent of those in the old times where human sacrifice was necessary to keep the gods happy. So every time a big bank or corporation is going down, a sacrifice is offered by the public in the form of bailouts, lay-offs, few bankrupt people here and there, and others behind bars. The bank/ god and his angels (executives and CEO's) feed on the blood of the sacrifice and become more powerful and richer. All of this is done to avoid the wrath of the gods.
So welcome to the new world of paganism. What we call politicians are priests of those gold and blood-thirsty pagan gods, otherwise known as banks, corporations and pressure groups. Your new gods are your elites. Running the show from the back-end while we are nothing more than hordes living our days to make these gods happy.
Many of us are fighting to support secularism and atheism. All we're doing is converting from one religion to another.