These corporations, not we, pick who runs for president, for Congress, for judgeships, and for most state legislatures. You cannot, in most instances, be a viable candidate without their blessing and money. These corporations, including the Commission on Presidential Debates (a private and corporately controlled organization), determine who gets to speak and what issues candidates can or cannot challenge -- from universal, not-for-profit, single-payer health care to Wall Street bailouts, to NAFTA. If you do not follow the corporate script, you will certainly become as marginal and invisible as Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, or Cynthia McKinney.
This is why most Democrats opposed Pennsylvania Democratic House Representative John Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq -- something that would dry up profits for companies like Halliburton -- and instead supported continued funding for the war. It is why most voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act. It is why the party opposed an amendment that was part of a bankruptcy bill that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30%. It is why corporatist politicians opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872 which allows mineral companies to plunder federal land for profit. It is why they did not back the single-payer health-care bill House Resolution 676, sponsored by Representatives Kucinich and John Conyers and supported by three-quarters of the American people they supposedly represent. It is why so many politicians advocate nuclear power. It is why many backed the class-action "reform" bill -- the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) -- that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms. CAFA would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits. Workers, under CAFA, would no longer have redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporations. CAFA moves these cases into corporate-friendly federal courts dominated by Republican judges.
The ever expanding war against American workers
The assault on the American working class is nearly complete. In the past three years, nearly one in five U.S. workers was laid off. Among workers laid off from full-time work, roughly one-fourth were earning less than $40,000 annually. Today most of them make significantly less. As a result of all the layoffs over the last decade, there are whole sections of the United States that now resemble the developing world. There has been a Weimarization of the American working class. And the assault on the middle class is now under way. Anything that can be put on software -- from finance to architecture to engineering -- can and is being outsourced to workers in countries such as India or China, who accept pay that is a fraction of what their Western counterparts receive, and without benefits. And make no mistake, both the Republican and Democratic parties, beholden to corporations for money and power, have allowed this to happen.
Over the past few decades, we have watched the rise of a powerful web of interlocking corporate entities create a network of arrangements to diminish and often abolish outside control and oversight. In their quest for ever more extraordinary profits and executive compensation, these corporations have neutralized national, state, and judicial authority. The corporate state, begun under Ronald Reagan and pushed forward by every president since, has destroyed the public and private institutions that protected workers and safeguarded citizens. Only 8% of workers in the private sector are now unionized. This is about the same percentage as in the early 1900s. The result? There are now 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called "near poverty."
Washington has become our Versailles
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