I am in yet another dispute with yet another DSL provider, which is attempting to charge me five hundred dollars for an installation they had originally told me was free, and I cannot help but wonder what the hell has gone wrong with the world. These are people who continued to charge me for broadband service in my old apartment for two months after I cancelled it because, even though I had called to have them transfer service to my new apartment, they could find no record of my specifically saying, “Please cancel the account as of this day,” which I actually did do. In fact, I did it twice, but because they are either inefficient or incompetent enough to have not processed that, I am the one who has to either pay or stress myself out by fighting them tooth and claw.

You can guess which option I chose.

A couple of weeks ago, I was planning a trip and realized that I could change the day of my return trip in order to attend a very special event. I called the airline, expecting to have to pay a hundred-dollar fee to make the switch, and was informed that it would cost over five hundred dollars to change the return trip (the original round-trip ticket cost less than four hundred), and I could not change the flight out at all because it was less than a week in advance. I ended up buying a one-way ticket to return on another airline and when I showed up, I was informed that, even though I had paid full price for a ticket over a week in advance, and even though I had already picked out my seat on the Internet, and even though I had gotten to the airport so early that the gate was actually deserted when I arrived, I would not be guaranteed a seat on the flight because they had overbooked it. If they could persuade someone to give up their seat, for a fairly paltry credit, I might get on.

So I ask again, what the hell is going on? Companies used to go to extraordinary lengths to make their customers happy and earn their loyalty. They used to exist for our convenience. Now, we citizens and consumers (and these words are interchangeable for corporations that shape national policy, including recent wars in oil-rich countries) exist only to serve their bottom line. We are cajoled, tricked, and threatened into handing over our hard-earned money, our votes, and even our lives, only to be shoved into the whirlpool of their self-serving policies and bludgeoned with their hidden conditions and caveats.

Normally, I would blame Republicans for this—and they are certainly the standard-bearers for the graft, market deregulations, and flailing economy that have created this nauseating state of affairs—but current and past Democratic “leadership” has gone along for the ride because it fills their coffers, too. We now have a government that is of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations . . . in other words, fascism. “Fascism,” according to the Italian fascist leader Mussolini, who was certainly in a position to know, “should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is a merge of state and corporate power.”

Sorry to be so dramatic. It is not everyone who can link a bill dispute to the collapse of democracy, I realize, but they are symptoms of the same thing. One happens with increasing frequency, and the other is too awful to contemplate, but they exist hand-in-hand.

At least Mussolini made the trains run on time. My flights were all late.