Welcome to the plutocracy formally known as the United States

The insidious tentacles of the corporate state are tightening their grip around our hearts and minds as they reach into every facet of our daily lives. From naming sports arenas to product placement in every form of entertainment we view (read the Salon article about the music industry selling out) to the government using the NSA and CIA for corporate spying, our business overlords pretty much own us and are shaping our sense of reality.

Even US foreign policy is controlled by the .01 percent. Noam Chomsky said of the controversial TPP agreement, it is “designed to carry forward the neoliberal project to maximize profit and domination, and to set the working people in the world in competition with one another so as to lower wages to increase insecurity.” Despite Obama’s spin, the TPP will benefit the wealthy at the expense of working Americans.

We live in a plutocracy now, were the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations call the shots. Politicians in Washington, D.C., including the President, are bought and paid for and have been reduced to merely carrying water for the true powers working behind the curtain. Need an example? We are living in the midst of catastrophic man-made climate change, yet the greedy, short-sighted titans of industry like the Kochs and their minions in Congress have successfully confused the public and prevented any meaningful action to address this important issue.

To the corporate state, our only reason for being is to purchase products and our senses are under continual assault from marketers 24/7 to buy, buy, buy. Our worth as human beings is based on what we wear, drive and eat, not on who we are. Creativity is only tolerated if it can be packaged and sold, and even religion, primarily fundamentalist Christianity, has morphed into a selective rationale for why greed is good.

Like the Germans of the 1930s, I fear the American people will realize what’s going too late to make a difference. Distracted by shiny objects and deluded into believing myths about American Exceptionalism, my fellow citizens continue to live under the illusion that this is still a democracy where their voice counts. I also fear that it will take a catastrophic event to shake them from their slumbers, and that event is coming sooner or later.