The way I see it, our country is running a huge experiment. We are trying to find out if a democracy can function for very long without being taken over and controlled by the power of capital. In other words, we are trying to see which is stronger: the power of individuals to vote in their best interest, or the power of capital to corrupt and control the democratic process.
We have been running this experiment for a couple of hundred years now, and the results are becoming pretty clear. The average American citizen has been fleeced time after time by the forces of capitalism. Just within my lifetime, we have had a series of pointless wars that served mainly to enrich corporate interests, a savings and loan crisis that costs us billions, and now we have a war in Iraq that is estimated to cost us three trillion dollars by the time it's over. We have an electoral process that is deeply corrupted by the influence of financial contributors and lobbyists. Corporate interests have distorted our government policies so much that many business risks are now borne by taxpayers, while more and more businesses are profiting from irresponsible tax breaks and from government outsourcing (Halliburton, etc.). The rich keep getting richer, and the average guy struggles to make ends meet.
The current mortgage crisis is just one more example of the failure of our government to protect the interests of the average American. Your tax dollars will by spent to bail out the big mortgage lenders. When are we going to take our government back, and make it work for us, instead of the wealthy?
