Politics:
According to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States the following quote can be attributed to Gustavus Myers' History of the Great American Fortunes:

The whole institution of Law saw nothing out of the way in these conditions, and very significantly so, because, to repeat over and over again, Law did not represent the ethics or ideals of advanced humanity; it exactly reflected, as a pool reflects the sky, the demands and self-interest of the growing propertied classes...

Wow. That was 1910 and yet Mr. Myers quote nearly exactly describes the situation we have in America today:

The current Bush administration ruthlessly and efficiently represents their constituency. It exactly represents the demands and self-interest of a small selection the extremely wealthy, and it manipulates the law, and the American people into serving those interests without regard to human life, human suffering, and human rights. The really, really sad thing is that roughly fifty million voting Americans still believe the illusion rather than opening their eyes to see how they have been exploited, again, by their government.

Sad. Frightening. Any suppressed society, held down long enough with no peaceful way out will eventually rise up in violent revolution. America appears to be a long way from that, but how far is it really?