REBLOG: Ten ways Americans have lost their freedom

This is the sort of blog post I always wanted to write - but which I never get to because of time.  Like so many of you, I suffer from, and battle against these losses of freedom.  And it is those losses that drive me ever left-ward in my political views:

On issue after issue, the wishes of most Americans are ignored or marginalized by the nation’s political and media elite. Views that are held by most Republicans – and in some cases even by most Tea Party members – are dismissed as “extreme” inside the Beltway. While 75 percent of most Americans and 76 percent of Tea Party supporters opposed Social Security cuts to balance the budget, leaders in both political parties were meeting to negotiate those cuts. (They were scuttled by a fallout between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner; similar cuts were being negotiated between Speaker Newt Gingrich and President Bill Clinton when the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted.)

Most Americans want tighter control on US banks, and that’s considered politically impossible. They want much higher taxes for millionaires, which is also dismissed. Meanwhile, the nation continues to pursue policies that benefit the most unpopular institutions in the nation, according to that Gallup poll: big corporations, HMOs, and Wall Street banks. The only thing on Gallup’s list that’s more unpopular than these three institutions? Congress.

Read more at Salon:  Ten ways Americans have lost their freedom