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More and more, we hear that nothing can be done to tax major corporations because of the threat of how they would respond. Likewise, we cannot stop their price gouging or even the government subsidies and tax loopholes they enjoy. For example, as the oil majors reap stunning profits from high oil and gas prices, we are told it is impossible to tax their windfall profits or stop the billions they get in government subsidies and tax loopholes. There appears to be no way for the government to secure lower energy prices or seriously impose and enforce environmental protection laws. Likewise, despite high and fast rising drug and medicine prices, we are told that it is impossible to raise taxes on pharmaceutical companies or have the government secure lower pharmaceutical prices. And so on.

Democrat or Republican, Libertarian or Socialist, politically active and not we are reaping the bitter reward of a political and legal system designed to maximize corporate profits at the expense of our environment, our livelihood, and our very lives. Our society is unraveling. We all know this. This is not idle conspiracy theory. These are well established facts. We are ruled by a headless beast that is no longer accountable to us. That it is headless makes it no less beastly. But there is a silver bullet. It's within our power to restore a functioning free market; to take back our democracy. We must end limited liability for corporations. Only when wealthy investors are no longer shielded from the costs that we collectively bear in their stead, only when they can no longer hide from the burden they have placed on us, only then can we expect the end of corporate plunder.   We are running out of time. Millions of Germans lost faith in the free market and capitalism during the Great Depression, and "with the failure of the left to provide a viable alternative, they became vulnerable to the rhetoric of a party that, once it came to power, combined Keynesian pump-priming measures that brought unemployment down to 3 percent with a devastating counterrevolutionary social and cultural program."