The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. 

America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father's father and his father's father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country's founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable.  

I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return. The "consent of the governed" has become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science are obsolete.  

Our state, our nation, has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations and a narrow, selfish political elite, a small and privileged group which governs on behalf of moneyed interests.  

We are undergoing, as John Ralston Saul wrote, "a coup d'etat in slow motion." We are being impoverished -- legally, economically, spiritually and politically.  

And unless we soon reverse this tide, unless we wrest the state away from corporate hands, we will be sucked into the dark and turbulent world of globalization where there are only masters and serfs, where the American dream will be no more than that -- a dream, where those who work hard for a living can no longer earn a decent wage to sustain themselves or their families, whether in sweatshops in China or the decaying rust belt of Ohio, where democratic dissent is condemned as treason and ruthlessly silenced. 

America's Democratic Collapse