Are Democracy And Opportunity The Same Thing?

The U.S. presents itself as "The land of opportunity" and that is true. Entrepreneurs from the Silicon Valley and elsewhere across the nation take risk and some reap enormous rewards, while some others make a very nice living.

No place else in the world offers this magnitude of opportunity as young companies that are now global giants such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Intel and Twitter can confirm.

This "land of opportunity" is what brings enormous numbers of immigrants to the U.S. Everyone wants a piece of the action and a chance to financially live a better life, even as so many Middle Class Americans working for large corporate or government employers have hit headwinds the past three decades, as jobs have shifted overseas or were eliminated by technology.

But while the U.S. is teaming with entrepreneurial opportunities for some people, its democracy has been sharply on the decline. Corporations and their lobbyists run the two party monopoly based government while the typical voter has no voice and his vote counts only in theory.

This is why despite causing a near global financial collapse, no one from Wall Street was ever prosecuted, and despite being the perpetrators, got king's ransom bailouts and bonuses. It is why the U.S. has fought in so many wars since World War II and is now fighting endless wars, all of this to the benefit of the military industrial complex.

In addition, the government is now spying on all of its citizens, has kill teams with thousands of names on hit lists, tortures prisoners while holding many of them indefinitely without charges and ignores the Geneva Convention, the United Nations charter it helped to write and the U.S. Constitution it claims to hold sacred. It also declares much of what it does "National Security," thus prohibiting its citizens from even attempting to hold it accountable for what it does.

Does this sound like a democracy to you?

But as long as entrepreneurs, giant corporations and stock market investors can make money, the U.S. will remain the "land of opportunity" even as in stages it surrenders what is left of its democracy.

Dick