Corporate profits have never been higher! The stock market just hit an all-time peak. A typical CEO makes more in a day than an average employee makes in a year. All of the gains in our economy from 2009 to 2011 (the last year for which there is data) went to the richest 1% of Americans. For the rest of us, not even the proverbial trickle. Meanwhile, Congress and the White House are sinking in the quicksand of a completely false deficit “crisis.” Blind or indifferent to its impact on everything from meat inspections to airport lines to job losses, Congress drove the country into the sequester, unnecessarily jeopardizing critical public safeguards and services. Congress — and, it must be said, and with disappointment, President Obama — are seriously considering cuts to Social Security and Medicare, two of the most effective and vital public programs in our nation’s history. Millions of Americans who want and need work can’t get a job, while those with jobs see their wages stagnate even as they have become more productive than ever before. Millions of Americans go hungry and do not have health care. Millions of Americans lost their homes or their savings or their pensions to Wall Street’s pathological pursuit of profits. It just doesn’t add up. The mega-rich and corporatized are doing as well or better than ever. Yet the rest of us are being asked to continue scraping along. There is enough — more than enough — to go around. The key phrase there being “go around.” Prosperity doesn’t go around anymore. It is, instead, sucked up and socked away by the few who already have it as if it is their birthright and theirs alone. The greediest individuals and corporations maniacally rake in all they can grab while muttering “mine, mine, mine.” Why is this happening? Why can’t our politicians see what’s right in front of them: Over here, people are suffering; over there, people with more money than they could ever spend are demanding still more? The reason, while insidious and dispiriting, is quite plain: Our politicians have become beholden to those with the money to keep them in or out of office. The problem of money in politics affects every challenge facing us as a society. You know better than to ignore this systemic and fundamental problem for sounding too “inside-the-Beltway” or seeming to be a step removed from other issues you care about. Think it’s long overdue that we join our peers throughout the developed world who ensure that affordable, quality health care is available to every one of their citizens? The insurance and pharmaceutical industries put puppets in office who will shout “socialized medicine” and “death panels” at the merest mention of an expanded and improved Medicare-For-All program that will at last provide health care as a matter of right and end our inhumane infatuation with allowing a handful of giant corporations to profit at the expense of millions of our fellow Americans. Think we ought to enact some commonsense curbs on Wall Street’s basest impulses — to which it has shown a seemingly bottomless susceptibility — before the Big Banks barrel toward the brink of disaster again? The financial behemoths spend practically without limit to push their agenda in the White House and on Capitol Hill. That agenda basically boils down to “Trust us.” Do you trust them? Think we should look at whether some industries have offshored too many good jobs? Special interests with deep pockets are scheming to extend NAFTA-style trade pacts over the entire globe in a race to the bottom for health and safety standards, environmental protections and worker rights. Think we should talk more about the morality of using drones — even to target U.S. citizens on U.S. soil? Some politicians will put your life — and the Constitution — in robotic crosshairs if it means increasing the stock value of their military-industrial sponsors. Think we should invest even a little more in solar and wind energy before we open up every wild space to drilling, allow BP to crack open the ocean floor again, and pipe toxic sludge from Canada straight through our nation’s heartland just so more oil can be exported overseas? The oil industry spends and spends and spends to get politicians elected who will perpetuate our addiction to fossil fuels and deny the science proving that we’re endangering our planet’s ability to sustain us. What can you do about it? Join Move To Amend and PARTICIPATE! https://movetoamend.org/ Until we take back our democracy from the billionaires and multinationals, nothing is safe from their greed. That’s why Public Citizen devotes so much of our resources to researching, exposing and fighting — in all branches of government and at the grassroots; at the local, state and national levels — the ways corporate money corrupts our democracy. Together "We the People" can take back our country.  We can put people back in charge of our lives and our future. Mega-Corporations are not people.  Mega-Coporations should not be able to use their voice, their money, just as we have  Constitutional rights of "free speech".  A pathogen is rotting our democracy from the inside out. We can eradicate it. But only with your help. Get involved!  Move To Amend and Public Citizen need your help.  What are you willing to do to help them?