Somehow, they realized that there were no consequences for their bad behavior. Like a child that tests the parents with a few infractions, the ruling class took more and more chances, and found out that they could get away with it.
Last year, the Congress handed over the Treasury to Wall Street. Obama and McCain both stopped their campaigns to go back to Washington, DC and vote for the bill that 95% of the American people opposed. Yet we are told that 99% of the people in this country voted for one of the two of them the next month. Wow. Talking about getting away with it!
Emboldened, this year, Congress passed a law forcing every American to directly hand over money to health insurance companies. Wow!
Cheney hunted with Scalia, while he had a case in front of the Supreme Court. They openly scoffed at people who protested. This was after the Supreme Court handed the Presidency to Bush, although Scalia and Thomas both should have recused themselves due to conflicts of interest.
Whatareyougunnadoaboutit?
They openly brag about a "jobless recovery", making it obvious to all but the braindead that the ruling class no longer even pretends to care about the working class.
America now openly invades other countries. They openly assassinate people. They openly kidnap and murder people. Whatareyougunnadoaboutit?
They put in computerized voting machines, even though people protested. So what? When Mike Connell was finally scheduled to testify about the stolen 2004 election, he died in a plane crash. Whatareyougunnadoaboutit?
Now Obama is putting a Raytheon executive in a high position at the Pentagon. Here is the change we can believe in. They are waiving the ethics rule. See the difference? The Bushies just broke the home rules. Obama waives them. But not the international rules. Nope. Obama is just as lawless as Bush when roaming the planet with the American military machine.
This is what happened in the USSR, in my opinion. After decades of pretending to have socialism, the ruling oligarchs found out that they could just grab the riches of the Soviet Union and divide it among themselves. There was protest, until Yeltsin turned tanks on the Russian White House and cemented the demise of the Soviet Union, for which he is still hailed as a "hero" by the US corporate media. Millions of people died and millions were impoverished, which is called "freedom" by our media.
We used to pretend to have democracy in this country, with elections and writing your congressman and a court system to turn to for justice and all that. While the forms still exist, the vast majority of Americans know that they are hollow. Most people don't even bother to vote, although there is great corporate pressure to do so. That will probably stop soon. All they have to do is program the computers to show a big turnout, thus "legitimizing" the system in the last way they cling to.
In the meantime, we the people slip more and more into poverty and oppression. And, really, what are we going to do about it?
Read more!