Republic, Lost (my favorite version)

Because of institutional corruption. Lawrence Lessig has some great talks about this topic, here's one of them: link Here's another one: ▶ this video (Lawrence Lessig, a law professor, was one of the founders of Creative Commons. He later tried to change US copyright laws to be more consumer-friendly, but concluded that it's almost impossible to do so as long as corporate interests rule politics. He then shifted his research topics to institutional corruption in politics. He actually ran for presidency a few years ago, with funding only from the popuplation, and limited to a certain amount. It failed, he wasn't even invited to TV debates because "if he doesn't take company money he doesn't have a chance".)

Dear Internet, America has become a very strange place. At the same time our military was "bringing freedom to the Iraqi peoples", our legislature and executive conspired to remove or automate much judicial review of spying. In effect American citizens lost another type of liberty. We seem to be better at protecting our access to riffles. Most of the liberties created by America's founding fathers (women were not allowed to vote) were designed to thwart the power of a monarchy and the power of the Roman-Catholic church. Many of these founding fathers were members of a fraternity called the Free Masons and read authors like John Locke. My point is they were a fairly homogeneous group of Englishmen. Since then America has expanded civil rights explicit in the Constitution to include people of all races and genders. But the Industrial age has been a constant force of erosion of our liberties. Our elections are not publicly funded. This means there is a huge advantage to material wealth and the wealthy have steered Congress to benefit themselves. The bright shinning star of hope for The Land of The Free is our government is not systemically corrupt, at least not in the traditional meaning of corrupt. I think this is a good discussion by Prof Lessig, "Republic Lost": ▶ this video

I strongly encourage you to develop a (much) better understanding of what Lessig has been arguing. A good place to start is here: ▶ this video Also worth noting: the problem you describe (corrupting influences on the economy originating in Washington, as opposed to private interests capturing Washington) is something Lessig addressed in his recent appearance on Jon Stewart's program. There, he pointed out that these apparently divergent forms of corruption are entirely compatible, and that they actually share the same root, which is the obscene reliance of elected officials on a vanishingly small number of campaign donors. Depending on the day of the week, these donors can find themselves initiating bribes, or being shaken down for bribes by officials wanting to increase their takes. The stink flows both ways. And it ensnares people who, left to their own devices, would have nothing to do with 'the trade' whatsoever. Accordingly, Lessig is illuminating the entire economy of corruption, correctly observing that you cannot choose to attack one branch instead of another. Instead, you have to ignore all the branches, and go straight for the root. If any good comes from SOPA, it will be in generating a backlash strong enough to go after the root directly. The nerds, for what it's worth, are the people to lead this. Why? Because we are, by nature, systems thinkers. And this is a systemic problem of the very severest degree.