Our political system is breaking. This has become the age of corporatized politics. The United States used to stand for democracy and equality and Americans were proud of their ideals. We believed in taking care of everyone, and building strong communities. Now, however, class warfare is breaking loose.
AlterNet recently described the problem clearly:

Many of us feel the President can and should do much more to rein in Wall Street, create jobs, and defend Medicare and Social Security. But any likely opponent would probably be far worse. Politicians in this post-Citizens United world are either limited by corporate power or prostituted to it. So we must work around, as well as within, the electoral system. That means getting the truth out, speaking for the majority’s viewpoint, and outlining the real choices we face. That’s especially hard when almost everyone in Washington is pushing austerity over jobs and growth (no matter how many Nobel Prize-winning economists tell them they’re wrong), and when media empires mislead us about our situation and its causes. So we must wage a war for the mind – a war against corporate think tanks and TV talking heads who tell us our problems arise from self-indulgence and those in need, not corporate malfeasance and runaway greed.

And no one has rescued the middle class yet. The Founders believed in common purpose. George Washington’s goal was “protecting the rights of humane nature and establishing an Asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions.” Now, an American life is equated with his or her bank account, and an American’s well-being is only worth protecting if he or she is filthy rich. Aristocratic control has already reached the US Supreme Court, too. Another example is that on Monday, June 27th 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of more corporate influence on elections – making it even more difficult for a candidate to win without business funding.
Read more about this here.
We see freedoms of the people disappearing every day, as the increasing corporate profits require constantly more protection. Take the story below, a woman who was gang-raped by 7 Halliburton employees had “signed away” her right to sue.

Access to justice – like access to elected office, let alone a pundit’s perch – is becoming a perk just for the rich and powerful. Take the young woman now testifying in court in Texas. Jamie Leigh Jones claims she was drugged and gang-raped while working for military contractor KBR in Iraq (at the time, a division of Halliburton). Jones, now 26, was on her fourth day in post in Baghdad in 2005 when she says she was assaulted by seven contractors and held captive, under armed guard by two KBR police, in a shipping container. When the criminal courts failed to act, her lawyers filed a civil suit, only to be met with Halliburton’s response that all her claims were to be decided in arbitration – because she’d signed away her rights to bring the company to court when she signed her employment contract. As Leigh testified before Congress, in October 2009, “I had signed away my right to a jury trial at the age of 20 and without the advice of counsel.” It was a matter of sign or resign. “I had no idea that the clause was part of the contract, what the clause actually meant,” testified Jones. You’ve probably done the very same thing without even knowing it. When it comes to consumer claims, mandatory arbitration is the new normal. According to research by Public Citizen and others, corporations are inserting “forced arbitration” clauses into the fine print of contracts for work, for cell phone service, for credit cards, even nursing home contracts, requiring clients to give up their right to sue if they are harmed. Arbitration is a no-judge, no-jury, no-appeal world, where arbitrators are (often by contract) selected by the company and all decisions are private – and final.
Yes, that is the America we live in today. Gone is the balance of power in our political system, and opportunity for all. The power of the people is slowly bleeding out.

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