U.S.: Land of suffering for many

An unholy alliance occurred over the past 40 years or more. Corporations asserted their economic power and, since Reagan, have made our government a captive subsidiary of the military-industrial-financial complex. Pragmatically, the concept of representative democracy in America has been transformed into a fiction, useful only to monopolists and plutocrats.

The United States is the richest nation on Earth, but for a significant number of our citizens, it has become a land of scarcity and unjustifiable suffering. The average working Americans suffer from a form of mass hypnosis. They work diligently and without question digging their own economic and political graves while the their corporate masters enjoy the fruits of their labors.

It does not matter what color the chains hourly or salaried workers wears. Those old enough to remember will never forget the old copper collar of the Anaconda Company in Montana. Those were the good old days of free market capitalism gone berserk. Slavery comes in many sizes, shapes and colors, but exploitation always demeans and destroys the worker. Changing the name of your authoritarian ideology matters nothing.

Simon Johnson, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, said, "Once banks are allowed to become too big to fail and too big to save, they have captured our government and society. That spells the end of any pretense of democracy. This is, of course, partly about the political power of corporations. But corporations are, in this sense, merely a veil - this is really all about which people have what kind of power in our society. To what extent are we really still a democracy - and how far have we already slipped down the road to oligarchy?"

J. ALBERT ROWE ([email protected])

Coeur d'Alene