Corporations extorting the public has really gotten out of control. Also today on HN I viewed a video showing how free-to-air TV is being encrypted and being pu

Corporations extorting the public has really gotten out of control. Also today on HN I viewed a video showing how free-to-air TV is being encrypted and being pushed into a subscription model. This is outrageous. The problem is everywhere, Redhat circumventing open source software licenses, Microsoft turning its Windows O/S into a data collection operation, Facebook privacy violations, rampant selling of personal information without owner's permission, and so on. It's now so bad it's causing significant damaging to our societies. Why aren't our politicians and political systems stopping this? Perhaps, a better question to ask is why aren't they capable of stopping it. It's not only happening in the US, it's everywhere, these greedy corporations have influenced US trade deals and just about every country is now beholdened to unreasonable US patent and copyright laws. What we're witnessing is governance by corporations, democracy is essentially dead. If politicians don't take charge and start rolling back the power of corporations it'll soon be too late. When the populous finally wakes up about how it's been screwed, things could turn very ugly and we could end up with another Marxist-like revolution, and that's the last thing we need. Revolutions rarely solve anything and cause much pain. What's truly worrying is the complacency of the population in that it's letting itself be manipulated by these corporations without a fight. What we do about it is the big question. It seems to me we need a new political movement that brings together all the disparate groups who are struggling with each part of the problem. There's nothing like strength of numbers to bring about change. History has shown that many times.