The following is an excerpt of the US Human Rights Record from 1999 to 2021 on political rights:

1999
 
In the United States, the safety of the general public and individuals is threatened by the huge number of privately owned firearms and widespread violent crime. According to the latest estimates by the US Department of Justice, Americans now own about 235 million guns, roughly one per person on average.
 
According to a Reuters report on April 22, 1999, the United States reported an average of 1 million gun-related murders annually. Since 1972, over 30,000 people have died in gun related homicides, accidents and suicides every year.
 
An AP report on April 16, 1998, citing a government study, showed that "the United States has by far the highest rate of gun deaths: murders, suicides, and accidents, among the world's 36 richest nations."
 
DPA, the German news agency, reported on May 10, 1999, that in 1995 there were 21,600 murders and accidental killings in2 the United States, including 15,551 shootings causing 35,673 deaths. Between 1985-95, the number of juvenile crimes tripled, while the number of gun-related murders by juveniles quadrupled. In 1997, there were 6,044 gun related murders involving young people between 15-24 years old.
 
Shooting rampages at high schools have frequently made headlines in the United States, with one out of every 10 schools witnessing at least one severe criminal incident every year. The number of cases of gun-related violence has been increasing. In 1997-98, 48 people were killed as a result of violence in schools. In April 1999, in the most notorious and tragic case in US history, two high school students with guns and home-made bombs slaughtered 13 teachers and students and injured another 25 at Columbine High School in Colorado.
 
According to official statistics, an average of 15 out of every 100,000 young Americans are shot dead annually. The accidental shooting death rate among American children under 15 years of age is 15 times higher than that of the total of the other 25 industrialized countries.
 
Police brutality is common in the United States and cases of judicial corruption are on the rise. According to a US newspaper, Workers World, on March 25, 1999, 65 incidents of police brutality were reported in Chicago between 1972-91, but none of the police officers involved were dealt with. In 1996, 3,000 people sued local police officers in this American city, but none of the accused were dismissed. In San Francisco, between 1990-95, 4.1 out of every 100 murders were caused by police shootings. And not a single police officer has been sued for shooting at random in the city, though there were 1,000-2,000 complaints against local police officers each year.
 
In the last five years, 756 former law enforcement officials have been convicted of corruption, brutal conduct and other crimes, setting a new record in this regard. By June 1999, there had been 655 inmates in federal prisons who were formerly law enforcement officials, compared with 107 inmates in 1994, an increase of five times, according to USA Today's report on July 29, 1999.
 
The United States, which calls itself the "land of the free," ranks first in the world in the proportion of prisoners among its population. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the US Department of Justice in 1999, the number of American adults in prison, on probation and on parole topped 5.92 million in 1998, accounting for 3 per cent of the total population. In all 1.82 million of them were incarcerated in state or federal prisons, more than double the figure of 744,000 reported at the end of 1985 and setting a new record.
 
Between 1985-98, the number of prisoners in the country increased by 7.3 per cent annually. Meanwhile, the imprisonment rate went up by more than 100 per cent as the number of prisoners out of every 100,000 Americans increased from 313 to 668.
 
This year, AFP reported on February 16 that by February 15 the number of American prisoners had topped 2 million, to account for one-fourth of the world's total, ranking the US first in the world.
 
In overcrowded American prisons, inmates are mistreated and violence is commonplace. Between 1990-97, the average jail term of American prisoners increased from 22 months to 27 months, while the rate of inmates to be released dropped to 31 per cent from 37 per cent every year; the number of paroled convicts sentenced again increased by 39 per cent; and the number of new inmates rose by 4 per cent, according to a report by Chicago Tribune on March 22, 1999. By December 31, 1998, state prisons reported they were housing 13-22 per cent more convicts than their facilities were designed to accommodate. That figure was 27 per cent in federal prisons and 100 per cent in 33 state prisons.
 
The New York Times reported in April of 1999, that in a prison in Nassau County in the state of New York, a shockingly large number of inmates had been brutally beaten and some died as a result of abuse. None of the prison guards involved were charged with criminal behaviour.
 
In 1999, there were over 36,000 elderly inmates, compared with around 9,500 in the early 1980s. Over 220,000 more inmates are expected to join the ranks of the aged within 10 years.
 
American prisons have used a large number of inmates as labourers to generate profits. These prisoner-workers are paid between US$0.23 and US$1.15 a day, though the minimum wage set by the US Government stands at US$5.15 per hour.
 
The Boston Globe reported on September 26, 1999, that prisoners in 94 federal prisons under the US Department of Justice were working for a company to manufacture electronic parts, furniture, clothing and other goods. In 1998, the company generated nearly US$540 million in sales.
 
Some American prisons have begun to charge prisoners for imprisonment. American companies that were looking for cheap labour abroad in the 1980s are now taking advantage of the 1.8 million prisoner-labourers at home. Two American firms have signed contracts with government departments on managing and charging nearly 100,000 inmates in over 100 jails. The two contractors would charge US$35 per prisoner per day for food and management and could earn US$12.78 million within the contract term, if the number of the prisoners would not decline, the US Insight Weekly reported in its May 4, 1999 edition.
 
The United States insists that there are no political prisoners in the country. But the April 29, 1999 issue of the US-based bi-monthly Workers' World reported that at least 150 political prisoners were jailed in the country. Many of them were incarcerated as a result of an FBI counter-intelligence operation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which targeted all those who took part in campaigns against oppression and Southeast Asian wars and supported the independence of Puerto Rico. Some 768 members of the Black Panther organization were arrested and jailed following the FBI operation.
 
The self-proclaimed freedom of the United States has always served the interests of a small number of wealthy people. In 1998, a book titled "The Buy of Congress: How Special Interests Have Stolen Your Right to Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of Happiness" was published in the United States, exposing how the US Congress has become a tool of special interest groups.
 
According to the book, between 1987-96, 500 large American companies donated at least US$182 million to congressmen and US$73 million to Democratic and Republican parties.
 
In the same period, "donations" from major US cigarette manufacturers to congressmen and the two parties exceeded US$30 million. Health and medical companies donated US$72 million to congressmen, while the US Congress helped large and medium-sized firms reduce the cost of medical insurance for their employees.
 
Although gun-related tragedies have become all too common in the United States, the National Rifle Association (NRA) spent US$1.5 million over a two-month period to lobby the congressmen who bowed to the NRA and vetoed a gun control bill which was strongly favored by the majority of the American people. The veto of the bill, coupled with other practices, has soured the American people on politics, and the voting rate for the 1998 mid-term election hit a record low of 36.1 per cent. Compared with 1994, voting rates in 36 states declined, with a 4.3 per cent drop for Republican voters and a 2.1 per cent fall for Democrats.
 
The United States claims that it has a free press. In fact, the American media has become a propaganda machine used by the authorities to manipulate public opinion.
 
According to a statistical and analytical study of CNN's reports on Kosovo, among all the CNN stories on the Kosovo crisis, 68.3 per cent were one-sided with the sources of information tightly in the hands of the US officials, while 50 per cent of the reports were based on sources from the US Government, 26.5 per cent from NATO and the Kosovo Liberation Army, and 14.7 per cent from Albanian refugees in Kosovo.
 
A recent nationwide survey in the United States indicated that only 2 per cent of Americans believe what journalists report, just 5 per cent trust the accuracy of local TV news programmes, and 1 per cent trust radio show hosts.

2000
 
By elevating itself to a model of democracy, the United States continuously hawks American-style democracy to other countries. Under the pretext of safeguarding this kind of democracy, the United States continues to make rash criticism of other countries and interferes in their internal affairs.
 
Nevertheless, well-informed people know that the so-called democracy has been a myth since the United States was founded@than 200 years ago. Political rights of the US citizens have long been infringed.
 
Although the US Constitution, adopted in 1787, stipulates the citizen's right to vote, the right to vote for every American, regardless of race, color or creed, was not implemented in law until 184 years later.
 
Owing to discrimination based on race, gender, property, education, age and residency, the African Americans, women and American Indians as well as roughly one-third of white American males were long deprived of their legal right to vote. The African Americans, women and American Indians gained voting rights in 1870, 1920 and 1948 respectively.
 
In addition, the voter eligibility limitations connected to property, poll tax and low education levels were removed in 1856, 1964 and 1970 respectively.
 
In 1971, nearly 200 years after the founding of the United States, the federal legislature approved the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, stipulating that age cannot be a legitimate reason for depriving any American of his or her right to vote, and setting the legal voting age at 18. This marked the beginning of universal voter's rights.
 
Although every American 18 or older is legally guaranteed the right to vote, voter turnout in America has remained at a comparatively low level. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the voter turnouts for elections for the House of Representatives have been ranged between 30 and 60 percent.
 
Meanwhile, the highest voter turnout rate in the history of presidential elections, which have been touted as major US political events, stands at 65 percent.
 
Under US law, any presidential candidate who wins the majority of votes wins the election. Over the years, President-elects only won 35 percent of all the electorate or less.
 
The voter turnout rate for the 1996 general election was only 49 percent, and only 25 percent of registered voters nationwide voted for president. Thus, the results of US general elections has not represented the will of the entire people or the majority.
 
The 2000 presidential election further exposed the inherent flaws of the US electoral system.
 
The two candidates, separately representing the Democratic and Republican parties, filed lawsuit after lawsuit on the counts and recounts of ballots in Florida and engaged in non-stop partisan bickering.
 
Some organizations even issued commemorative coins for the election turmoil. The 2000 general election was accompanied by civil demonstrations and protests.
 
In line with the electoral system in the election law which has been carried out for more than 200 years, electoral votes ultimately decide which candidate will win.
 
The 50 million voters who cast ballots for president represented less than one-fourth of the 205 million eligible voters nationwide, an all-time low in US election history.
 
Since the right to vote is evidently meaningless to the majority of eligible voters, the myth of American democracy was further exposed.
 
The Associated Press reported, "Some were shocked that a nation often held as a model of democracy could also stumble."
 
American democracy has always been a game for rich people. In the United States where politics is highly commercialized, any bidder for official post needs to spend a significant amount of money to win. No presidential or congressional candidate will go far without financial backing.
 
The general election in 2000 cost about US$3 billion, 50 percent more than that in 1996 and setting a record.
 
The congressional races in various states cost another US$1 billion. While not forbidding political donations, US law sets upper limits on donations from individuals to candidates, political commissions and parties, but allows any amount of "soft" donations from companies or trade unions to political parties.
 
The soft money collected by various parties and candidates in 2000 reached 648 million dollars, four times the amount of four years ago.
 
During the election campaign, at least 20 donors spent more than one million dollars each. Actress Jane Fonda gave a US$12 million check for supporting a new pro-abortion group.
 
Business circles also spent vast sums lobbying congressional members and powerful officials.
 
In the 18 months before June 30, 2000, 18 British companies spent roughly 30 million dollars, and the National Rifle Association, together with firearms manufacturers, funneled several billion dollars into Capitol Hill, lobbying congressional members to oppose to restrictions on gun sales and possession. As a result, gun control legislation did not pass.
 
The British newspaper Financial Times said in an article on October 25, 2000, that the political system in the United States is decaying to a point where even American voters can smell the stink of money. The election made it clear that American democracy could be sold to the highest bidders, the newspaper said.
 
The top spender in the congressional campaign in 2000, Jon Corzine in New Jersey, spent more than US$60 million to win his Senate seat. He set a new record for campaign spending and his race against Republican Bob Franks was the most expensive Senate election in history.
 
According to an Associate Press analysis of Federal Election Commission data which was released on November 9, 2000, 81 percent of year 2000 Senate winners and 96 percent of House winners outspent their opponents.
 
The AP analysis found 26 of 32 Senate races and 417 of 433 House races won by the candidate with the most money to spend as of October 18, the last date for which figures were available.
 
Larry Makinson, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that studies money and campaigns, said, "The depressing thing about American democracy is I can check the fund-raising balances at the Federal Election Commission and tell you what the election results will be before the election."
 
Thus, the key to American democracy is money, which directly impacts the election results. A Spanish daily, El Mundo, referred to money as the "cancer of American democracy." No other country has seen cancer as disastrous as that in the United States, the newspaper said.
 
Freedom of the press in the United States is also influenced by money. Wealthy people have the power to manipulate mass media, which can serve as their mouthpieces.
 
If it can gain financially, the American establishment will turn a deaf ear to international covenants. According to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, any dissemination on advocating war or ethnic and religious hatred among peoples must be prohibited by law in any country.
 
However, ignoring the international covenant and universal practice in many countries, the United States has sold or allowed sales of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" since 1933.
 
During World War II, the United States took in more than US$20,000 worth of tax from sales of the book. For the next 34 years, the US Department of Justice collected taxes from book sales amounting to US$139,000.
 
After buying the book's copyright in 1979, the US publisher Houghton Mifflin continued to sell the book. Experts estimated that the publishing house has sold at least 300,000 copies, netting profits worth between 300,000 and US$700,000.  
2002
 
Boasting itself to be the "model of democracy", the United States has been trying hard to sell to the world its mode of democracy.
 
In fact, American "democracy" has always been democracy of the rich, a small number of the population. Just as an article in the International Herald Tribute of the January 24, 2002 issue says, "The American problem is domination of politics by money."
 
The dominant role of money in American politics has been very obvious, and elections have in fact been turned into races of money.
 
During the midterm elections in 2002, spending on campaigning TV advertising amounted to 900 million US dollars, surpassing that for the presidential election in 2000.
 
According to an analysis made by the Associated Press based of data from the Federal Election Commission, in the 2002 midterm elections 95 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives and 75 percent of the seats in the Senate went to candidates who had spent the most in campaigning.
 
In a report filed on August 30, 2002, AP said President George W. Bush, in order to win control of the House and the Senate, cashed in on his cachet to raise donations for midterm elections of his Republicans, and collected 110 million US dollars for three GOP candidates in Oklahoma and Arkansas, setting records in campaign cash raising ("Bush raises nearly $110 million for Republicans, setting record", Aug. 30, 2002, Sun).
 
Election of judges in the United States is also like a race of money. In the year of 2000, judge candidates in only two states bought TV advertising, whereas during the midterm elections in 2002, chief justice candidates in nine states bought TV commercials.
 
"Money politics" has made more and more American people lose interest in political participation.
 
Statistics show the United States has experienced declining voter turnout in presidential election years for about four decades.
 
Measured against the voting age population, turnout in presidential election years fell from its high of 62.8 percent in 1960 to an estimated 51.2 percent in 2000.
 
In contrast, 60 percent of eligible voters shunned the midterm elections in 2002, leaving the voter turnout at 40 percent.
 
A survey of minority voters in three cities of California showed almost all the surveyed were fed up with the fact that money can buy over politics and were not interested in political participation.
 
Asian American voters reckon money had too much influence over politics, which is unfair; African Americans and Hispanics felt being shut out of the door of politics and had become its victims.
 
The United States has been flaunting its "freedom of the press," but it met with criticism from many sides in 2002 in this respect.
 
In an annual report published on Feb. 21, 2002, the International Press Institute accused the United States of violating freedom of the press and said it is the most astonishing event of 2001 that the way the Bush administration treated the work of the media during the Afghan war and the practices of the Bush administration attempting to suppress freedom of speech by independent media (Vienna, Feb. 21, 2002, AFP).
 
Two senior journalists with the Washington Post wrote in their book entitled "The News About The News: American Journalism In Peril" that practices of pursuing profits have destroyed the sense of mission of the journalistic community of the United States, and believed an overwhelming majority of media owners and publishing businessmen forced newspaper editors and TV news executives to concentrate on profits as opposed to quality of coverage (New York, March 29, 2002, AP).
 
In its annual report published on May 2, 2002, Reporters Without Borders exposed since September 11 attacks, the United States has exerted pressure on the journalistic community in the war against terrorism, which has restricted freedom of the press (Paris, May 2, 2002, EFE).
 
On August 6, 2002, a major news organ in the United States published a survey showing the public wanting the media to "shut up".
 
The survey found among the respondents, 69 percent believe the media is biased, and over two thirds of them read news reports with disbelief.
 
2003
 
The presidential election, often symbolized as US democracy, infact is the game and competition for the rich people. Presidential candidates have to raise money far and wide for their expensive campaign cost and most of the donors are big companies and millionaires. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had raised as high as 113 million US dollars in their 2000 presidential campaign, a record in US history, and the fund raising is expected to reach 200 million US dollars for this year's re-election campaign (see Britain's Independent newspaper on Jan.20, 2004).
 
Statistical figures from the Center for Responsive Politics showed that Lockheed Martin Corp., the country's biggest arms dealer, has been the biggest political donor. The company had donated 10.6 billion US dollars for political campaigns in the United States from 1999 to 2000 and has been the main donor to the Committee on Armed Services of the House of Representatives as well as one of the top ten donors to the Committee on Appropriations of the House.
 
The so-called "freedom of press" in the United States has also been brought under intensive criticism. According to an investigative report of the Sonoma State University in the United States, freedom of press, speech and expression of opinion in the United States is amid a crisis. An increasing number of US media organizations are getting involved in false reporting or cheating scandals. On June 5, 2003, two chief editors of the New York Times resigned after their role in a plagiarism scandal was exposed. John Barrie, head of Plagiarism.org in Oakland, California, claimed that "every newspaper in this country is not doing due diligence" and "everybody's got this problem".
 
Meanwhile, the US government has exercised an extremely tight control over news media, which went to the extreme during the 2003U.S.-led war against Iraq. During the war, the US government had tried every means to prevent the press from getting timely and true information and had wielded its hegemony to override the journalistic principle of "faithful and unbiased reporting". PeterArnett, a veteran reporter with the US National Broadcasting Company (NBC), was fired simply because he voiced some of his personal views on the Iraq war. News coverage by international media in Iraq also often fell prey to US restrictions and crackdown. Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has accused US troops in Iraq of frequent "obstruction of journalists trying to do their jobs in Iraq" and described the number of attacks on press freedom there as "alarming" (see Reuters story onOct. 20, 2003).
 
In January 2004, the U.S.-installed Iraqi Interim Governing Council issued an order to ban the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV station from covering any activity of the Council's members between January 28 and February 27. A book named "Black List", co-written by 15 American reporters, has warned that America's press freedom is facing danger. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, Kristina Borjesson, one of the book's authorsand a former reporter with the CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) and CNN (Cable News Network), said that US authorities had controlled all information to be spread by the media while journalists had degenerated into the government's stenographers (see French newspaper Le Figaro on May 8, 2003).
 
The U.S. has also time and again launched attacks on news media organizations and journalists in Iraq. In one of such attacks on April 8, 2003, the US troops bombed the Baghdad branch of an Arab TV station and killed one cameraman on the spot. 
 
2004
 
The United States claims to be "a paragon of democracy," but American democracy is manipulated by the rich and malpractices arecommon.
 
Elections in the United States are in fact a contest of money. The presidential and Congressional elections last year cost nearly4 billion US dollars, some 1 billion US dollars or one third more than that spent in the 2000 elections. The 2004 presidential election has been listed as the most expensive campaign in the country's history (see http://www.opensecrets.org/overview), with the cost jumping to 1.7 billion US dollars from 1 billion US dollars in 2000. To win the election, the Democratic Party and Republican Party had to try their utmost to raise funds.
 
The Washington Post reported on Dec. 3 last year that the Democratic Party collected 389.8 million US dollars in electoral funds and the Republican Party raised 385.3 million US dollars, both hitting a record high (see Fundraising Records Broken by BothMajor Political Parties, Washington Post on Dec. 3, 2004).
 
Data released by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Dec. 14, 2004 show the average spending for Senate races was 2,518,750 US dollars in 2004, with the highest reaching 31,488,821 US dollars; and the average spending for House races was 511,043 US dollars (see http://www.opensecrets.org/overview), with the highest reaching 9,043,293 US dollars (see http://www.opensecrets.org/overview/topraces.asp?cycle=2004).
 
The Republican Party, the Democratic Party and their periphery organizations spent a total of 1.2 billion US dollars on TV commercials, making this presidential election the most expensive in history. The TV commercials were broadcast 750,000 times, twiceof the airings in the general election in 2000. In the Oct. 1 - 13period in 2004, the Republican Party spent 14.5 million US dollarson advertising, and the Democratic Party's advertising spending amounted to 24 million US dollars in the first 20 days of October 2004.
 
In the elections, political parties and interest groups not only donated money for their favorite candidates, but also directly spent funds on maximizing their influence upon the elections. In Maryland, some corporate bosses donated as much as 130,000 US dollars. In return, the candidates after being elected would serve the interests of big political donators. The BaltimoreSun called this "Buying Power" (see "Buying Power", The Baltimore Sun, April 5, 2004). Due to the fact that local judges in 38 states need to be elected, quite a number of candidates began campaign advertising and looking for big donators. Some interest groups also got themselves involved in the judge election campaign.
 
The US election system has quite a few flaws. The newly adoptedHelp America Vote Act of 2004 requires voters to offer a series ofdocuments such as a stable residence or identification in registering, which in reality disenfranchises thousands of homeless people.
 
The United States is the only country in the world that rules out ex-inmates' right to vote, which disenfranchises 5 million ex-inmates and 13 percent male black people (see Milenio, Mexico, Oct.22 2004).
 
The 2004 US presidential election reported many problems, including counting errors, machine malfunctions, registration confusion, legal uncertainty, and lack of respect for voters. According to a report carried by the USA Today on Dec. 28, 2004, due to counting errors, a review of election results in 10 counties nationwide by the Scripps Howard News Service found more than 12,000 ballots that weren't counted in the presidential race,almost one in every 10 ballots cast in those counties. Due to machine malfunctions, 92,000 ballots failed to record a vote for president in Ohio alone. Registration confusion made four fifths of the states go into the election without computerized statewide voter databases (see "Election Day Leftovers", USA Today, Dec. 28,2004). The Democratic Party brought 35 lawsuits against the Republican Party in at least 17 states, charging the latter with threatening and blocking voters from registering or voting, especially minority ethnic groups. In Florida, the cases of black people being removed from voter registration list or their votes being denied were 10 times higher than people of other races. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported on Sept. 22, 2004 that during the period of election, someone often distributed handbills to black voters to bilk and intimidate them by saying that anyone who defaulted electricity bills, apartment bills or parking fines would be arrested outside the polling booths. Some others pretended to be plainclothes outside polling booths and demanded voters show their identifications. However, black people who were able to present photo identification were less than one fifth of white people, therefore, many of them were rejected.
 
In the meantime, fabrications of disputable pictures and statements were put in the agenda of political maneuvers. Campaignadvertisement and political debates were full of distorted facts, false information and lies. According to statistics of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of University of Pennsylvania, campaign advertisement for the 2004 US presidential election had alarge proportion of false information that was enough to mislead voters, far beyond 50 percent in 1996. In the Republican camp, at least 75 percent contained untrue information and personal attacks.The website of the center (http://www.FactCheck.org) listed at least 100 items of such information.
 
The US freedom of the press is filled with hypocrisy. Power andintimidation hang over the halo of press freedom. The New York Times published a commentary on March 30, 2004, saying that the USgovernment's reliance on slandering had reached an unprecedented level in contemporary American political history, and the government prepared to abuse power at any moment to threat potential critics.
 
A collected works, Zensor USA, revealed that whenever the faults of government dignitaries or big companies were touched, the strong American press censorship system would snap at the journalists who insisted on investigation and made them the last sacrificial lamb. (see Das Schweigen der Journalisten, Handelsblatt, Germany, March 17, 2004).
 
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) kept watch on a leader of freedom of speech movement in University of California at Berkeley for a decade long. Although no record showed he violated federal laws, the FBI hired someone to keep monitoring his daily activities and collect his personal information without permission from the court. (see SingTao Daily, Oct. 11, 2004).
 
On July 16, 2004 the US State Department made a regulation, in violation of the norms of most other countries, that foreign reporters should leave the country while waiting for the valid period of their visas to be extended. The annual report of Native American Journalists Association criticized the US administration for the move, which severely infringes upon press freedom. (see APstory, Antigua, Guatemala Oct. 24, 2004).
 
Someone with the American Society of Newspaper Editors said that the US administration's measures reflected its repulsion of foreign news media. (see Milenio, Mexico, June 20, 2004).
 
In Iraq, the United States on the one hand alleged that it had brought democracy to the Iraqi people, on the other hand it suppressed public opinion. On March 28, 2004 US troops closed downa Shiite newspaper in Baghdad, which triggered a protest demonstration by thousands of Iraqi people.
 
On Sept. 27, the Association of American University Presses, Association of American Publishers and other organizations jointlylodged a complaint to the district court of Manhattan, New York, charging the Office of Foreign Assets Control under the Departmentof the Treasury with deliberately preventing literary works of Iranian, Cuban and Sudanese writers from entering the United States and turning the economic sanctions against the three countries into a "censorship system" to stop free dissemination ofinformation and ideology. (see Xinhua story, Sept. 30, 2004).
 
In another case, eight reporters, including Jim Taricani of theTV station in Providence, Rhode Island with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Judith Miller of The New York Times, and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, were declared guilty for theydeclined to disclose the confidential sources of news. The New York Times pointed out on Nov. 10, 2004 that through these cases, it was found out that press freedom suffered rampant infringement.
 
In addition, in recent years, over a dozen foreign journalists have been detained in airports in the United States, including theone in Los Angeles. In March 2003, a Danish press-photographer wasexpelled out of the country after a DNA test. A Swiss journalist was rejected from entry of an airport in Washington D.C. The airport staffs by force took pictures and finger prints of the journalist. Meanwhile, he was not permitted to contact the Swiss embassy in the Unite States. In May, two groups of French journalists, altogether six members, were rejected of entry the USterritory. They simply came to the Unite States to cover an exposition. Two Dutch journalists fell into trouble when they werecovering a film award ceremony. In October and December, one British reporter and one Austrian journalist were held up at US airports respectively. In early May, 2004, a British female journalist, who was sent by The Guardian to Los Angeles to cover some events, was detained at the Los Angeles airport and faced interrogation and body search, and then was handcuffed and taken to the detention house in the downtown. There, she was detained for 26 hours before sent back to Britain. 

2005
 
The United States has always boasted itself as the "model of democracy" and hawked its mode of democracy to the rest of the world. In fact, American "democracy" is always one for the wealthy and a "game for the rich."
 
The democratic elections in the United States, to a great extent, are driven by money. During the mayoral election of New York City in November 2005, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent 77.89 million U.S. dollars of his fortune for re-election. That came to more than 100 U.S. dollars per vote. The election was termed by the Associated Press as the most expensive mayoral re-election in history. In the race for governor of New Jersey, the dueling multimillionaires spent 75 million U.S. dollars combined, with 40 million dollars by Jon S. Corzine, who won the election. Taking into account the 60 million U.S. dollars he spent on a Senate seat in 2000, Corzine had spent 100 million U.S. dollars in five years for elections. According to a survey, in Washington D.C. a U.S. senator needs about 20 million U.S. dollars to keep the seat in the Senate. The Washington Post criticized the U.S. political system in an editorial: "But a political system that turns elective office into a bauble for purchase is not a healthy one."
 
Decisions of the U.S. Congress and the Administration are deeply influenced by money. It is known to all that in the United States, various firms and interest groups hire public relations and consulting companies to lobby the Congress and the Administration, spending money to influence their decisions and win government contracts. On Jan. 4, 2006, mainstream U.S. media carried reports on super lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleading guilty to three felony charges including a conspiracy involving corruption of public officials and agreeing to cooperate with U.S. prosecutors in investigating members of Congress and aides suspected of corruption. The case is the largest power-for-money scandal in American politics for several decades. It was reported that 20 members of Congress and their aides have been involved in this unusual large-scale scandal. But the Abramoff case is just a tip of an iceberg. According to the Washington Post and the British Observer, lobbying has become a great growth industry with huge profits in Washington. Currently, the number of registered lobbyists has reached 34,750, that comes 60 to 1 compared with the total number of the U.S. federal officials elected. Meanwhile, the lobbyists handle more than two billion U.S. dollars of funds a year. Washington downtown's K Street with many lobbying firms is called "the road to riches" and "the fourth largest power" next to the President, the Congress and the Court. From 1998 to 2004, lobbyists spent 13 billion U.S. dollars to promote realization of their clients' wishes. In 2004, 2.1 billion U.S. dollars was spent on lobbying the federal government and the Congress, and 3 billion U.S. dollars for elections of the President and members of Congress in the United States. The USA Today revealed that since 2000, 5,410 trips of Congress members were financed by undisclosed sources and Congress members have taken 16 million U.S. dollars in privately financed trips. It's a "revolving door" for lobbyists to turn into politicians and retired politicians from government service to engage in influence peddling in the private sector. It was reported that since 1998 more than 2,200 former U.S. government employees have become lobbyists; among them are 273 former White House staff members and 250 former Congress members and department heads from the Executive branch.
 
On Oct. 24, 2005, a national public opinion survey released by the U.S. News and World Report revealed that 73 percent Americans believe their leaders are out of touch with the average person; 64percent of Americans feel that their leaders are corrupted by power; 62 percent think that leaders seek for increase in personal wealth. A joint Gallup Poll by the USA Today and CNN found job approval for Congress, which has a Republican majority, has fallen to 29 percent, the lowest level since 1994; 49 percent American adults say they believe "most members of Congress are corrupt." Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said it is an offense to democracy to describe the United States as a democracy.
 
The United States flaunts its press freedom but scandals about the U.S. government blocking and manipulating information came out continually. The New York Times reported on March 13, 2005 that the United States is in "a new age of prepackaged TV news." The federal government has aggressively distributed prepackaged news reports to TV stations. At least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years.
 
The U.S. military pays Iraqi newspapers and journalists for the so-called information operations campaign. The Los Angeles Times reported on Nov. 30, 2005 that the U.S. military troops have been writing articles burnishing the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq, sending them to a Washington-based firm, which translates them into Arabic and places them in Baghdad newspapers. It said the military also has purchased an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a radio station "to channel pro-American messages to the Iraqi public." Other reports said that U.S. army officers created an outfit called the Baghdad Press Club that pays members as much as 200 U.S. dollars a month to churn out positive pieces about American military operations. The Washington Post in an editorial called these activities against freedom of the press as "planted propaganda."
 
The U.S. government's ban on different voices through various means has been condemned by the international community. On Nov. 22, 2005, British newspaper the Daily Mirror, citing a "top secret" memo on April 16, 2004 from Downing Street, said the U.S. government wished to bomb the headquarters of Arabic TV station Al-Jazeera in Doha, Qatar, during the Iraqi War to block information about the real situation of the war and remove its negative influence on the U.S. side; the revelation resulted in protests by all the Al-Jazeera staff in more than 30 countries and criticism from the International Federation of Journalists. On Nov. 27, British Observer said Al-Jazeera offices in Baghdad and Kabul had all been bombed by the U.S. military and its journalists detained, threatened, abused and harassed by the U.S. military during the Iraqi war. In fact, U.S. crude intrusion into press freedom happened repeatedly. On April 8, 2003, cameraman Jose Couso of the Spanish Telecino television station was shot dead by U.S. soldiers. After Couso's death, the Spanish court issued warrants for the Spanish police and International Criminal Police Organization to arrest and extradite three suspected U.S. soldiers immediately. On Aug. 28, 2005, U.S. forces opened fire at a team of Reuters reporters; one Reuters soundman was shot several times in the face and chest, and he was killed on the spot. Two Iraqi reporters who rushed to the spot were also arrested and forced to exposure to the scorching sun. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the United States is holding four Iraqi journalists in detention centers in Iraq and one journalist of Al-Jazeera, at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo bay, Cuba. None of the five have been charged with a specific crime. In July 2005, the New York Times reporter Judith Miller was sentenced to jail for refusing to disclose her source. Covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a photographer for Canadian Toronto Star daily was hurled to the ground by New Orleans police. The police grabbed his two cameras and removed memory cards. When he asked for his pictures back, the police insulted him and threatened to hit him. A reporter for a local newspaper of New Orleans was also attacked while covering a shoot-out between police and local residents. The police detained him and smashed all of his equipment on the ground.

2006
 
In recent years, American citizens have suffered increasing civil rights infringements.
 
Since the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government has put average Americans under intense surveillance as part of terrorism investigations. According to a survey released in December 2006, two thirds of Americans believe that the FBI and other federal agencies are intruding on their privacy rights (The Washington Post, December 13, 2006). A report from the U.S. Justice Department, dated April 28, 2006, disclosed that its use of electronic surveillance and search warrants in national security investigations jumped 15 percent in 2005. According to the report, the FBI issued 9,254 national security letters in 2005, covering 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal foreign residents. The Justice Department said the data did not include what probably were thousands of additional letters issued to obtain more limited information about some individuals or letters that were issued about targets who were in the U.S. illegally (The Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2006). Reports show a Pentagon research team monitors more than 5,000 Jihadist web sites, focusing daily on the 25 to 100 most hostile and active (MSNBC News Service, May 4, 2006). An internal memo of the FBI shows that the agency has spent resources gathering information on antiwar and environmental protesters and on activists who feed vegetarian meals to the homeless. In the United States, the government has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. According to USA TODAY, more employers feel they have justifiable reason to pry, track workers' whereabouts through Global Positioning System (GPS). satellite, implant employees with microchips with their knowledge and hire private investigators to check up on what employees are really doing at work. According to a study by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute, 76 percent of companies monitor employees' website connections, 65 percent block access to specific sites, and 36 percent track the content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard. More than half of employers retain and review e-mail messages (USA TODAY, November 7, 2006).
 
As The Associated Press reported on January 4, 2007, a signing statement attached to postal legislation by U.S. administration may have opened the way for the government to open mail without a warrant. An internal review of the U.S. State Department has found that U.S. officials screened the public statements and writings of private citizens for criticism of the administration before deciding whether to select them for foreign speaking projects. The vetting practice, The Washington Post said, appears to have been part of the administration's pattern of controlling information, muffling dissenting views (The Washington Post, November 2, 2006). On May 23, 2006, Electronic Frontier Foundation, a U.S.-based organization committed to protecting citizens' privacy, accused the FBI for undercutting the intent of the privacy law, saying the agency has built a database with more than 659 million records culled from more than 50 FBI and other government agency sources (http://www.eff.org/press/, Aug. 30, 2006).
 
The United States touts itself as the "beacon of democracy," but the U.S. mode of democracy is in essence one in which money talks.
 
In 2004, candidates for the House of Representatives who raised less than $1 million had almost no chance of winning, USA TODAY quoted a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics as saying in a report on October 29, 2006. The average successful Senate campaign cost $7 million, it said. In 2006, all state campaigns in the United States were predicted to cost about $2.4 billion. In California, the oil and tobacco industries were the year's two biggest spenders with a total of $161.6 million, and they became the two biggest winners (The Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2006). In the House race in Pennsylvania, the National Republican Congressional Committee spent $3.9 million, mostly in ads against Democratic candidate Lois Murphy, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent $3 million against Republican candidate Jim Gerlach (The Baltimore Sun, November 6, 2006). Seventy-four percent of respondents to a new Opinion Research poll say the U.S. Congress is generally out of touch with average Americans, as CNN reported on October 18, 2006, and 79 percent of the surveyed say they feel big business does have too much influence over the administration's decisions.  

2007
 
The freedom and rights of individual citizens are being increasingly marginalized in the United States.
 
The House of Representatives and the Senate of the U.S. Congress passed the Protect America Act of 2007 on August 3, and August 4, 2007, respectively. The act enables the U.S. administration to eavesdrop terrorist suspects in the United States without court approval. It also permits intelligence services to conduct electronic surveillance on digital communications between terrorist suspects outside the United States if the communications are routed through the country (The so-called Protect America Act, http://public.findlaw.com, August 10, 2007). According to a report by the Washington Post on March 10, 2007, the FBI improperly obtained personal information on more than 52,000 people without court oversight through the use of national security letters (NSLs) from 2003 to 2005. Verizon Communications, the second largest telecom company in the United States, disclosed that the FBI sought information identifying not just a person making a call, but all the people that customer called, as well as the people those people called. From January 2005 to September 2007, Verizon provided data to federal authorities "on an emergency basis" 720 times. The records included Internet protocol addresses as well as phone data. In that period, Verizon turned over information a total of 94,000 times to federal authorities armed with a subpoena or court order. The information was mainly used for a range of criminal investigations including counter-terrorism investigations (The Washington Post, October 16, 2007). In August 2007, the United States' National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell revealed that fewer than 100 people inside the United States are monitored under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants. However, he said, thousands of people overseas are monitored (The Associated Press, August 23, 2007). The FBI is embarking on a 1 billion U.S. dollars effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, called Next Generation Identification, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad. The increasing use of biometrics for identification is raising questions about the ability of Americans to avoid unwanted scrutiny (FBI Prepares Vast Database Of Biometrics, The Washington Post, December 22, 2007). Statistics show that the government's illegal dragnet electronic surveillance has put sensitive personal information from millions of people at risk. 477 breaches into government databases were found in 2006 alone. More than 162 million records were reported lost or stolen in 2007, triple the 49.7 million that went missing in 2006 (USA Today website, December 10, 2007). In July 2007, the Homeland Security Department granted more than 4 million U.S. dollars to install 175 video cameras on the streets of cities including St. Paul, Madison (Wisconsin State) and Pittsburgh. The Boston Globe estimated that up to hundreds of millions of dollars were being spent by the department to install new surveillance systems around the country, accelerating the rise of a "surveillance society" (The Boston Globe, August 12, 2007).
 
Workers' right to unionize has been restricted in the United States. It was reported that union membership fell by 326,000 in 2006, bringing the percentage of employees in unions to 12 percent, down from 20 percent in 1983. Employer resistance stopped 53 percent of nonunion workers from joining a union (Sharp Decline in Union Members in '06, The New York Times, January 26, 2007). According to a report by the Human Rights Watch, when Wal-Mart stores faced unionization drives, the company often broke the law by, for example, eavesdropping on workers, training surveillance cameras on them and firing those who favored unions (Report Assails Wal-Mart Over Unions, The New York Times, May 1, 2007).
 
In the United States, money is "mother's milk" for politics while elections are "games" for the wealthy, highlighting the hypocrisy of the U.S. democracy, which has been fully borne out by the 2008 presidential election. The "financial threshold" for participating in the U.S. presidential election is becoming higher and higher. At least 10 of the 20-strong major party candidates who are seeking the U.S. presidency in general elections in 2008 are millionaires, according to a report by Spanish news agency EFE on May 18, 2007. The French news agency AFP reported on January 15,2007 that the 2008 presidential election will be the most expensive race in history. The cost of the last presidential campaign in 2004, considered a peak for its time, was 693 million U.S. dollars. Common estimates of this year's total outlay have tended to come in at around 1 billion U.S dollars, and Fortune magazine recently upped its overall cost projection to 3 billion U.S. dollars. An important presidential candidate of the Democratic Party raised a total of 115 million U.S. dollars in 2007, and another important candidate of the Party raised 103 million U.S. dollars. A Republican candidate said his campaign has 12.7 million U.S. dollars, and another Republican White House hopeful, a wealthy businessman, has already dished out 17 million U.S. dollars of his own. The New York Times said on November 26, 2007 that confronting an enormous fund-raising gap with Democrats, Republican Party officials were aggressively recruiting wealthy candidates who could spend large sums of their own money to finance their campaigns. Some wealthy Republicans had each already invested 100,000 to 1 million U.S. dollars of their own money to finance their campaigns. In New York's 20th Congressional District, it was estimated that each candidate would spend at least 3 million U.S. dollars.
 
The "cash race" has permeated various kinds of elections in the United States. According to figures from relevant institutions, from 2005 to 2006, candidates for state high courts collected more than 34 million U.S. dollars in campaign donations. In a contest in Pennsylvania to elect two new members of the state Supreme Court, judicial candidates have broken state fundraising records, pulling down 6.8 million U.S. dollars (USA Today, November 5, 2007). Having been elected, some Congress members sought to secure interests for their campaign donors. According to a report by the Washington Post on December 10, 2007, the amount of 10 biggest earmarks that House Majority Leader sponsored in 2008 congressional spending bills, either solo or in conjunction with other legislators, worth of 96 million U.S. dollars. One earmark alone cost 9.8 million U.S dollars. The earmarks included many that would benefit his campaign donors. When the 471 billion U.S. dollar Pentagon spending bill passed in November 2007, a legislator from Pennsylvania State said in a news release that he helped secure 8 million U.S dollars in funding for seven companies in his Pittsburgh-area district, including companies that contributed to his campaign. In addition, 20 freshman members of Congress secured earmarks for special-interest groups. The funding ranges from 8 million U.S. dollars to more than 18 million U.S. dollars ("Earmarks" Analysis Shows Money Follows Power, USA Today, December 12, 2007).
 
To seek more interests, some companies have paid for trips for some important political figures and other government employees. Records show lawmakers accepted free trips worth nearly 1.9 million U.S. dollars during the first eight months of 2007, more than in all of 2006 (Limits Don't Slow Trip Perks for U.S. Lawmakers, USA Today, October 24, 2007). According to a report by the USA Today on August 23, 2007, an examination of more than 600 travel reports on executive-branch officials over a 12-month period has found that more than 200 trips were funded by relevant companies or trade groups. The chief of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and her predecessor have taken nearly 30 trips since 2002 that were paid for in full or in part by trade associations or manufacturers of products. The expenses totaled nearly 60,000 U.S. dollars.
 
The U.S. administration manipulated the press. On October 23, 2007, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) staged a news conference on California wildfires. A half-dozen questions were asked within 15 minutes at the event by FEMA staff members posing as reporters. The news was aired by U.S-based television stations. After the Washington Post disclosed the farce, FEMA tried to defend itself for staging the fake briefing (FEMA Official Apologizes for Staged Briefing With Fake Reporters, The Washington Post, October 27, 2007). When Private Jessica Lynch and brother of late Army Ranger Pat Tillman were testifying to Congress on April 24, they decried the Pentagon's "deceit" in turning her and Tillman's disastrous experiences into false tales of heroism and lambasted the U.S. Administration for lying about the incident (The Times, April 25, 2007).

2008
 
In the United States, an increasing number of restrictions have been imposed on civil rights.
 
According to a report on the Washington Post website on April 4,2008, the deep-packet inspection, a brand new surveillance technology, which has been applied, is able to record every visited web page, every sent email and every online search. Statistics indicated that at least 100,000 U.S. Internet users had been tracked and the service providers had conducted tests on as many as 10 percent of the U.S. netizens (The Washington Post, April 4, 2008). The FBI has been engaged in illegal surveillance launched by the U.S. government nationwide, obtaining thousands of people's phone records, bank accounts and other personal information by unwarranted means.
 
The Seattle Times reported on July 15, 2008 that President Bush signed a bill on July 10 that overhauls government eavesdropping and called it "landmark legislation that is vital to the security of our people." The new law grants legal immunity to telecommunication companies that take part in wiretapping programs and authorizes the government to wiretap international communications betweens parties outside the U.S. for anti-terrorism purposes without court approval. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security disclosed in July 2008 that as part of border search policies, federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing (The Washington Post, August 1, 2008). The New York Times reported on December 8, 2008 that the National Security Agency illegally wiretapped a Muslim scholar named Ali al-Timimi in Northern Virginia and intentionally withheld materials gained through eavesdropping during a 2005 trial, in which the scholar was convicted on terrorism charges. These materials may provide evidences that the U.S. government's eavesdropping program has violated its citizens' civil rights.
 
Police abuse of force infringed on the civil rights of Americans. According to a report by the Chicago Tribune on June 25,2008, Chicago witnessed eight shootings by police officers in two weeks in June, causing five with fatalities. Shapell Terrell, a 39-year-old sanitation worker, was fatally shot by police officers on June 22 at the entrance of a two-story building, where all four apartments were filled with family members (The Chicago Tribune, June 23, 2008). Luis Colon, an 18-year-old man in Chicago, was shot and killed by a plainclothes police officer on June 24, when he was walking with his girlfriend to meet friends and eat at a restaurant (The Chicago Tribune, June 25, 2008). Daryl Battle, 20, was shot dead in his Brooklyn apartment in New York City on the morning of August 2, 2008. Michael Mineo was sodomized by a police officer's baton on October 15, on a busy Brooklyn subway platform (The New York Times, December 10, 2008). Gilberto Blanco was shot and killed when he was swinging a folding chair in front of a policewoman named Dawn Ortiz in a parking lot near the Coney Island church (The New York Times, December 1, 2008).
 
The proportion of U.S. prisoners to its population has hit a new high. The Washington Post reported on July 11, 2008 that the United States has 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation in the world. A report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice on December 11, 2008 said that over 7.3 million people were on probation, in jail or on parole at the end of 2007, equivalent to 3.2 percent of all U.S. adult residents or one in every 31 adults. (The United Press International, December 11, 2008). For black men aged between 20-34, one in nine was in jail. (The Guardian, March 1, 2008). The rate of prisoners, higher than any period in the U.S. history, was almost six times the world average (125 in every 100,000 people). According to statistics, the recidivism rate stayed high in the United States. Half the people of previous convictions were sentenced to prison again within three years.
 
There is no proper protection of prisoners' basic rights. Information released in August 2008 by the U.S. Department of Justice showed that the rate of conviction by U.S. courts has been on a rise since 1993. Convicts who committed violent crimes accounted for more than 50 percent of the total. California had 172,000 inmates in its 33 prisons, which were designed for just over half that number, leaving each inmate a space of only 6 square foot (Prison overcrowding blamed for health woes, http:// www. sfgate.com, November 19, 2008). In Prince George of Maryland, the Upper Marlboro jail held an estimated 1,500 prisoners while it was designed for about 1,330 (The Washington Post, July 25, 2008).There were frequent reports inmates dying from prison officers' violence. An Amnesty International report in 2008 said Taser was widely used to control inmates in the U.S. prisons and detention centers. It had tracked more than 300 cases since 2001 in which people died after being shocked by a Taser. Among them, 69 died in2008. According to a report by the Washington Post on July 25, more than 10 jail officers in Prince George of Maryland have arrest records. At least six officers were suspended in the past seven months and nine others still worked in the prison though they were accused of crimes or violence. Baron Pikes, arrested on a cocaine charge, died in January 2008 after a police officer had shocked him nine times with a Taser (The CNN website, on July 22, 2008). Ronnie L. White, 19, died of strangulation on June 29, 2008,when he was held in solitary confinement at a correction center in Prince George County, Maryland (The Washington Post, September 23,2008). According to the latest statistics released by the U.S. Department of Justice in June 2008, 1,154 inmates in the federal and state prisons died of AIDS between 2001 and 2006 (Ming Pao Daily, July 3, 2008). Some U.S. jails have become the "new asylums" for drug addicts and mental patients, with six out of 10 people in jail living with a mental illness (Jails bulging with people with mental illnesses, the homeless and people detained for immigration offenses; costing counties billions, http:// justicepolicy.org). The Economist reported on May 10, 2008 that the U.S. was one of the few countries where the felons were deprived of rights. Some U.S. states even forbid felons to vote.
 
2009
 
In the United States, civil and political rights of citizens are severely restricted and violated by the government.
 
The country's police frequently impose violence on the people. Chicago Defender reported on July 8, 2009 that a total of 315 police officers in New York were subject to internal supervision due to unrestrained use of violence during law enforcement. The figure was only 210 in 2007. Over the past two years, the number of New York police officers under review for garnering too many complaints was up 50 percent (http://www.chicagodefender.com). According to a New York Police Department firearms discharge report released on Nov. 17, 2009, the city' s police fired 588 bullets in 2007, killing 10 people, and 354 bullets in 2008, killing 13 people (http://gothamist.com, November 17, 2009). On September 3, 2009, a student of the San Jose State University was hit repeatedly by four San Jose police officers with batons and a Taser gun for more than ten times (http://www.mercurynews.com, October 27, 2009). On September 22, 2009, a Chinese student in Eugene, Oregon was beaten by a local police officer for no reason (The Oregonian, October 23, 2009, http://blog.oregonlive.com). According to the Amnesty International, in the first ten months of 2009, police officers in the U.S. killed 45 people due to unrestrained use of Taser guns. The youngest of the victims was only 15. From 2001 to October, 2009, 389 people died of Taser guns used by police officers (http://theduckshoot.com).
 
Abuse of power is common among U.S. law enforcers. In July 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation put four police officers in the Washington area under investigation for taking money to protect a gambling ring frequented by some of the region's most powerful drug dealers over the past two years (The Washington Post, July, 19, 2009). In September 2009, an off-duty police officer in Chicago attacked a bus driver for "cutting him off in traffic" as he rode a bicycle (Chicago Tribune, September 2009, http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com). In the same month, four former police officers in Chicago were charged with extorting close to 500,000 U.S. dollars from a Hispanic driving an expensive car with out-of-state plates and suspected drug dealers in the name of law enforcement, and offering bribes to their superiors (Chicago Tribune, September 19, 2009). In November 2009, a former police chief of the Prince George's County's town of Morningside was charged with selling a stolen gun to a civilian (The Washington Post, November 18, 2009). In major U.S. cities, police stop, question and frisk more than a million people each year - a sharply higher number than just a few years ago (http://huffingtonpost.com, October 8, 2009).
 
Prisons in the United State are packed with inmates. According to a report released by the U.S. Justice Department on Dec. 8, 2009, more than 7.3 million people were under the authority of the U.S. corrections system at the end of 2008. The correctional system population increased by 0.5 percent in 2008 compared with the previous year (http://www.wsws.org). About 2.3 million were held in custody of prisons and jails, the equivalent of about one in every 198 persons in the country. From 2000 to 2008, the U.S. prison population increased an average of 1.8 percent annually (http://mensnewsdaily.com, January 18, 2010). The California government even suggested sending tens of thousands of illegal immigrants held in the state to Mexico, in order to ease its overcrowded prison system (http://news.yahoo.com, January 26, 2010).
 
The basic rights of prisoners in the United States are not well-protected. Raping cases of inmates by prison staff members are widely reported. According to the U.S. Justice Department, reports of sexual misconduct by prison staff members with inmates in the country's 93 federal prison sites doubled over the past eight years. Of the 90 staff members prosecuted for sexual abuse of inmates, nearly 40 percent were also convicted of other crimes (The Washington Post, September11, 2009). The New York Times reported on June 24, 2009 that according to a federal survey of more than 63,000 federal and state inmates, 4.5 percent reported being sexually abused at least once during the previous 12 months. It was estimated that there were at least 60,000 rapes of prisoners across the United States during the same period (The New York Times, June 24, 2009).
 
Chaotic management of prisons in the United State also led to wide spread of diseases among the inmates. According to a report from the U.S. Justice Department, a total of 20,231 male inmates and 1,913 female inmates had been confirmed as HIV carriers in the U.S. federal and state prisons at yearend 2008. The percentage of male and female inmates with HIV/AIDS amounted to 1.5 and 1.9 percent respectively (http://www.news-medical.net, December 2, 2009). From 2007 to 2008, the number of HIV/AIDS cases in prisons in California, Missouri and Florida increased by 246, 169, and 166 respectively. More than 130 federal and state inmates in the U.S. died of AIDS-related causes in 2007 (http://thecrimereport.org, December 2, 2009). A report by the Human Rights Watch released in March 2009 said although the New York State prison registered the highest number of prisoners living with HIV in the country, it did not provide the inmates with adequate access to treatment, and even locked the inmates up separately, refusing to provide them with treatment of any kind. (www.hrw.org, March 24, 2009).
 
While advocating "freedom of speech," "freedom of the press" and "Internet freedom," the U.S. government unscrupulously monitors and restricts the citizens' rights to freedom when it comes to its own interests and needs.
 
The U.S. citizens' freedom to access and distribute information is under strict supervision. According to media reports, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) started installing specialized eavesdropping equipment around the country to wiretap calls, faxes, and emails and collect domestic communications as early as 2001. The wiretapping programs was originally targeted at Arab-Americans, but soon grew to include other Americans. The NSA installed over 25 eavesdropping facilities in San Jose, San Diego, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago among other cities. The NSA also announced recently it was building a huge one million square feet data warehouse at a cost of 1.5 billion U.S. dollars at Camp Williams in Utah, as well as another massive data warehouse in San Antonio, as part of the NSA's new Cyber Command responsibilities. The report said a man named Nacchio was convicted on 19 counts of insider trading and sentenced to six years in prison after he refused to participate in NSA's surveillance program (http://www.onelinejournal.com, November 23, 2009).
 
After the September 11 attack, the U.S. government, in the name of anti-terrorism, authorized its intelligence authorities to hack into its citizens' mail communications, and to monitor and erase any information that might threaten the U.S. national interests on the Internet through technical means. The country's Patriot Act allowed law enforcement agencies to search telephone, email communications, medical, financial and other records, and broadened the discretion of law enforcement and immigration authorities in detaining and deporting foreign persons suspected of terrorism-related acts. The Act expanded the definition of terrorism, thus enlarging the number of activities to which law enforcement powers could be applied. On July 9, 2008, the U.S. Senate passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act of 2008, granting legal immunity to telecommunication companies that take part in wiretapping programs and authorizing the government to wiretap international communications between the United States and people overseas for anti-terrorism purposes without court approval (The New York Times, July 10, 2008). Statistic showed that from 2002 to 2006, the FBI collected thousands of phones records of U.S. citizens through mails, notes and phone calls. In September 2009, the country set up an Internet security supervision body, further worrying U.S. citizens that the U.S. government might use Internet security as an excuse to monitor and interfere with personal systems. A U.S. government official told the New York Times in an interview in April 2009 that NSA had intercepted private email messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by U.S. Congress the year before. In addition, the NSA was also eavesdropping on phones of foreign political figures, officials of international organizations and renowned journalists (The New York Times, April, 15, 2009). The U.S. military also participated in the eavesdropping programs. According to CNN reports, a Virginia-based U.S. military Internet risk evaluation organization was in charge of monitoring official and unofficial private blogs, official documents, personal contact information, photos of weapons, entrances of military camps, as well as other websites that "might threaten its national security."
 
The so-called "freedom of the press" of the United States was in fact completely subordinate to its national interests, and was manipulated by the U.S. government. According to media reports, the U.S. government and the Pentagon had recruited a number of former military officers to become TV and radio news commentators to give "positive comments" and analysis as "military experts" for the U.S. war in Iraq and Afghanistan, in order to guide public opinions, glorify the wars, and gain public support of its anti-terrorism ideology (The New York Times, April 20, 2009). At yearend 2009, the U.S. Congress passed a bill which imposed sanctions on several Arab satellite channels for broadcasting contents hostile to the U.S. and instigating violence (http://blogs.rnw.nl). In September 2009, protesters using the social-networking site Twitter and text messages to coordinate demonstrations clashed with the police several times in Pittsburgh, where the Group of 20 summit was held. Elliot Madison, 41, was later charged with hindering apprehension of the protesters through the Internet. The police also searched his home (http://www.nytimes.com, October 5, 2009). Vic Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said the same conduct in other countries would be called human rights violations whereas in the United States it was called necessary crime control.
 
2010
 
In the United States, the violation of citizens' civil and political rights by the government is severe.
 
Citizen' s privacy has been undermined. According to figures released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in September 2010, more than 6,600 travelers had been subject to electronic device searches between October 1, 2008 and June 2, 2010, nearly half of them American citizens. A report on The Wall Street Journal on September 7, 2010, said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was sued over its policies that allegedly authorize the search and seizure of laptops, cellphones and other electronic devices without a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. The policies were claimed to leave no limit on how long the DHS can keep a traveler' s devices or on the scope of private information that can be searched, copied or detained. There is no provision for judicial approval or supervision. When Colombian journalist Hollman Morris sought a U.S. student visa so he could take a fellowship for journalists at Harvard University, his application was denied on July 17, 2010, as he was ineligible under the "terrorist activities" section of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. An Arab American named Yasir Afifi, living in California, found the FBI attached an electronic GPS tracking device near the right rear wheel of his car. In August, ACLU, joined by the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian weekly, had filed a lawsuit to expedite the release of FBI records on the investigation and surveillance of Muslim communities in the Bay Area. The San Francisco FBI office has declined to comment on the matter "because it' s still an ongoing investigation." (The Washington Post, October 13, 2010). In October 2010, the Transportation Security Administration raised the security level at U.S. airports requiring passengers to go through a full-body scanner machine or pat-downs. It also claimed that passengers can not refuse the security check based on their religious beliefs. Civil rights groups contended the more intensive screening violates civil liberties including freedom of religion, the right to privacy and the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches (AP, November 16, 2010). The ACLU and the U.S. Travel Association have been getting thousands of complaints about airport security measures (The Christian Science Monitor, November 20, 2010).
 
Abuse of violence and torturing suspects to get confession is serious in the U. S. law enforcement. According to a report of Associated Press on October 14, 2010, the New York Police Department (NYPD) paid about 964 million U.S. dollars to resolve claims against its officers over the past decade. Among them was a case that an unarmed man was killed in a 50-bullet police shooting on his wedding day. The three police officers were acquitted of manslaughter and the NYDP simply settled the case with money (China Press, October 15, 2010). In a country that boasts "judicial justice," what justice did the above-mentioned victims get? In June 2010, a federal jury found former Chicago police lieutenant Jon Burge guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice. Burge and officers under his command shocked, suffocated and burned suspects into giving confessions in the 1970s and 1980s (The Boston Globe, November 5, 2010). According to a report on Chicago Tribune on May 12, 2010, Chicago Police was charged with arresting people without warrants, shackling them to the wall or metal benches, feeding them infrequently and holding them without bathroom breaks and giving them no bedding, which were deemed consistent with tactics of "soft torture" used to extract involuntary confessions. On March 22, a distraught homeless man was shot dead in Potland, Oregon, by four shots from a police officer (China Press, April 1, 2010). An off-duty Westminster police officer was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and raping a woman on April 3 while a corrections officer was accused of being an accessory (Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2010). On April 17 in Seattle, Washington, a gang detective and patrol officer kicked a suspect and verbally assaulted him (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 10, 2010). On March 24, Chad Holley, 15, was brutally beaten by eight police officers in Houston. The teen claimed he was face down on the ground while officers punched him in the face and kneed him in the back. After a two-month-long investigation, four officers were indicted and fired (Houston Chronicle, May 4, June 23, 2010). On August 11, three people were injured by police shooting when police officers chased a stolen van in Prince George' s County. Family members of the three injured argued why the police fired into the van when nobody on the van fired at them (The Washington Post, August 14, 2010). On September 5, 2010, a Los Angeles police officer killed a Guatemalan immigrant by two shots and triggered a large scale protest. Police clashed with protesters and arrested 22 of them (The New York Times, September 8, 2010). On November 5, 2010, a large demonstration took place in Oakland against a Los Angeles court verdict which put Johannes Mehserle, a police officer, to two years in prison as he shot and killed unarmed African American Oscar Grant two years ago. Police arrested more than 150 people in the protest (San Francisco Chronicle, November 9, 2010).
 
The United States has always called itself "land of freedom," but the number of inmates in the country is the world' s largest. According to a report released by the Pew Center on the States' Public Safety Performance Project in 2008, one in every 100 adults in the U.S. are in jail and the figure was one in every 400 in 1970. By 2011, America will have more than 1.7 million men and women in prison, an increase of 13 percent over that of 2006. The sharp increase will lead to overcrowding prisons. California prisons now hold 164,000 inmates, double their intended capacity (The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2010). In a New Beginnings facility for the worst juvenile offenders in Washington DC, only 60 beds are for 550 youths who in 2009 were charged with the most violent crimes. Many of them would violate the laws again without proper care or be subject to violent crimes (The Washington Post, August 28, 2010). Due to poor management and conditions, unrest frequently occurred in prisons. According to a report on Chicago Tribune on July 18, 2010, more than 20 former Cook County inmates filed suit saying they were handcuffed or shackled during labor while in the custody, leaving serious physical and psychological damage. On October 19, 2010, at least 129 inmates took part in a riot at Calipatria State Prison, leaving two dead and a dozen injured (China Press, October 20, 2010). In November, AP released a video showing an inmate, being beaten by a fellow inmate in an Idaho prison, managed to plead for help through a prison guard station window but officers looked on and no one intervened until he was knocked unconscious. The prison was dubbed "gladiator school" (China Press, November 2, 2010).
 
Wrongful conviction occurred quite often in the United States. In the past two decades, a total of 266 people were exonerated through DNA tests, among them 17 were on death row (Chicago Tribune, July 11, 2010). A report from The Washington Post on April 23, 2010, said Washington DC Police admitted 41 charges they raised against a 14-year-old boy, including four first-degree murders, were false and the teen never confessed to any charge. Police of Will County, Illinois, had tortured Kevin Fox to confess the killing of his three-year-old daughter and he had served eight months in prison before a DNA test exonerated him. Similar case happened in Zion, Illinois, that Jerry Hobbs were forced by the police to confess the killing of his eight-year-old daughter and had been in prison for five years before DNA tests proved his innocence. Barry Gibbs had served 19 years in prison when his conviction of killing a prostitute in 1986 was overturned in 2005 and received 9.9 million U.S. dollars from New York City government in June 2010 (The New York Times, June 4, 2010).
 
The U.S. regards itself as "the beacon of democracy." However, its democracy is largely based on money. According to a report from The Washington Post on October 26, 2010, U.S. House and Senate candidates shattered fundraising records for a midterm election, taking in more than 1.5 billion U.S. dollars as of October 24. The midterm election, held in November 2010, finally cost 3.98 billion U.S. dollars, the most expensive in the U.S. history. Interest groups have actively spent on the election. As of October 6, 2010, the 80 million U.S. dollars spent by groups outside the Democratic and Republican parties dwarfed the 16 million U.S. dollars for the 2006 midterms. One of the biggest spenders nationwide was the American Future Fund from Iowa, which spent 7 million U.S. dollars on behalf of Republicans in more than two dozen House and Senate races. One major player the 60 Plus Association spent 7 million dollars on election related ads. The American Federation of States, County and Municipal Employees spent 103.9 million U.S. dollars on the campaigns from October 22 to 27 (The New York Times, November 1, 2010). U.S. citizens have expressed discontent at the huge cost in the elections. A New York Times/CBS poll showed nearly 8 in 10 U.S. citizens said it was important to limit the campaign expense (The New York Times, October 22, 2010).
 
While advocating Internet freedom, the U.S. in fact imposes fairly strict restriction on cyberspace. On June 24, 2010, the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs approved the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, which will give the federal government "absolute power" to shut down the Internet under a declared national emergency. Handing government the power to control the Internet will only be the first step towards a greatly restricted Internet system, whereby individual IDs and government permission would be required to operate a website (Prison Planet.com, June 25, 2010). The United States applies double standards on Internet freedom by requesting unrestricted "Internet freedom" in other countries, which becomes an important diplomatic tool for the United States to impose pressure and seek hegemony, and imposing strict restriction within its territory. An article on BBC on February 16, 2011 noted the U.S. government wants to boost Internet freedom to give voices to citizens living in societies regarded as "closed" and questions those governments' control over information flow, although within its borders the U.S. government tries to create a legal frame to fight the challenge posed by Wikileaks. The U.S. government might be sensitive to the impact of the free flow of electronic information on its territory for which it advocates, but it wants to practice diplomacy by other means, including the Internet, particularly the social networks.
 
An article on the U.S.-based Foreign Policy Magazine admitted that the U.S government's approach to the Internet remains "full of problems and contradictions" (Foreign Policy Magazine website, February 17, 2011).
 
2011
 
In the United States, the violation of citizens' civil and political rights is severe. It is lying to itself when the United States calls itself the land of the free (The Washington Post, January 14, 2012).
 
Claiming to defend 99 percent of the U.S. population against the wealthiest, the Occupy Wall Street protest movement tested the U.S. political, economic and social systems. Ignited by severe social and economic inequality, uneven distribution of wealth and high unemployment, the movement expanded to sweep the United States after its inception in September 2011. Whatever the deep reasons for the movement are, the single fact that thousands of protesters were treated in a rude and violent way, with many of them being arrested -- the act of willfully trampling on people' s freedom of assembly, demonstration and speech -- could provide a glimpse to the truth of the so-called U.S. freedom and democracy.
 
Almost 1,000 people were reportedly arrested in first two weeks of the movement, according to British and Australian media (The Guardian, October 2, 2011). The New York police arrested more than 700 protesters for alleged blocking traffic over Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, and some of them were handcuffed to the bridge before being shipped by police vehicles (uschinapress.com, October 3, 2011). On October 9, 92 people were arrested in New York (The New York Times, October 15, 2011). The Occupy Wall Street movement was forced out of its encampment at Zuccotti Park and more than 200 people were arrested on November 15 (The Guardian, November 25, 2011). Chicago police arrested around 300 members of the Occupy Chicago protest in two weeks (The Herald Sun, October 24, 2011). At least 85 people were arrested when police used teargas and baton rounds to break up an Occupy Wall Street camp in Oakland, California on October 25. An Iraq war veteran had a fractured skull and brain swelling after being allegedly hit in the head by a police projectile (The Guardian, October 26, 2011). A couple of hundred people were arrested when demonstrations were staged in different U.S. cities to mark the Occupy Wall Street movement' s two-month anniversary on November 17 (USA Today, November 18, 2011). Among them, at least 276 were arrested in New York only. Some protesters were bloodied as they were hauled away. Many protesters accused the police of treating them in a brutal way (The Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2011). As a U.S. opinion article put it, the United States could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. (The Washington Post, January 14, 2012).
 
While advocating press freedom, the United States in fact imposes fairly strict censoring and control over the press and "press freedom" is just a political tool used to beautify itself and attack other nations. The U.S. Congress failed to pass laws on protecting rights of reporters' news sources, according to media reports. An increasing number of American reporters lost jobs for "improper remarks on politics." U.S. reporter Helen Thomas resigned for critical remarks about Israel in June 2010 ( "Report: On the situation with human rights in a host of world states," the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia, December 28, 2011). While forcibly evacuating the Zuccotti Park, the original Occupy Wall Street encampment, the New York police blocked journalists from covering the police actions. They set cordon lines to prevent reporters from getting close to the park and closed airspace to make aerial photography impossible. In addition to using pepper spray against reporters, the police also arrested around 200 journalists, including reporters from NPR and the New York Times (uschinapress.com, November 15, 2011). By trampling on press freedom and public interests, these actions by the U.S. authorities caused a global uproar. U.S. mainstream media' s response to the Occupy Wall Street movement revealed the hypocrisy in handling issues of freedom and democracy. Poll by Pew Research Center indicated that in the second week of the movement, reports on the movement only accounted for 1.68 percent of the total media reports by nationwide media organizations. On October 15, 2011, when the Occupy Wall Street movement evolved to be a global action, CNN and Fox News gave no live reports on it, in a sharp contrast to the square protest in Cairo, for which both CNN and Fox News broadcast live 24 hours.
 
The U.S. imposes fairly strict restriction on the Internet, and its approach "remains full of problems and contradictions." (The website of the Foreign Policy magazine, February 17, 2011) "Internet freedom" is just an excuse for the United States to impose diplomatic pressure and seek hegemony.
 
The U.S. Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act both have clauses about monitoring the Internet, giving the government or law enforcement organizations power to monitor and block any Internet content "harmful to national security." Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 stipulates that the federal government has "absolute power" to shut down the Internet under a declared national emergency. According to a report by British newspaper the Guardian dated March 17, 2011, the U.S. military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas, and will allow the U.S. military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives. The project aims to control and restrict free speech on the Internet (The Guardian, March 17, 2011). According to a commentary by the Voice of Russia on February 2, 2012, a subsidiary under the U.S. government' s security agency employed several hundred analysts, who were tasked with monitoring private archives of foreign Internet users in a secret way, and were able to censor as many as five million microblogging posts. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security routinely searched key words like "illegal immigrants," "virus," "death," and "burst out" on Twitter with fake accounts and then secretly traced the Internet users who forwarded related content. According to a report by the Globe and Mail on January 30, 2012, Leigh Van Bryan, a British, prior to his flight to the U.S., wrote in a Twitter post, "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?" As a result, Bryan along with a friend were handcuffed and put in lockdown with suspected drug smugglers for 12 hours by armed guards after landing in Los Angeles International Airport, just like "terrorists" . Among many angered by the incident in Britain, an Internet user posted a comment, "What' s worse, being arrested for an innocent tweet, or the fact that the American Secret Service monitors every electronic message in the world?" (The Daily Mail, January 31, 2012)
 
The U.S. democracy is increasingly being influenced by capitalization and becoming a system for "master of money." Data issued by the U.S. Center for Responsive Politics in November 2011 show that 46 percent of the U.S. federal senators and members of the House of Representatives have personal assets of more than a million dollars. That well explains why U.S. administration' s plans to impose higher tax on the rich who earn more than one million dollars annually have been blocked in the Congress (www.finance-ol.com). As a commentary put it, money has emerged as the electoral trump card in the U.S. political system, and corporations have a Supreme Court-recognized right to use their considerable financial muscle to promote candidates and policies favorable to their business operations and to resist policies and shut out candidates deemed inimical to their business interests (Online edition of Time, January 20, 2011). According to a media report, nearly two thirds of all the contributions that the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee received during the 2010 election cycle came from industries regulated by his committee. A ranking Democrat Representative on the Agriculture Committee, who served as chairman between 2007 and 2010, saw a 711 percent increase in contributions from groups regulated by his committee and a 274 percent increase in contributions over all, in the same period (The New York Times, November 16, 2011). According to a Washington Post report on August 10, 2011, nearly eight in 10 of Americans polled were dissatisfied with the way the political system is working, with 45 percent saying they are very dissatisfied (The Washington Post, August 10, 2011).
 
The U.S. continued to violate the freedom of its citizens in the name of boosting security levels (The Washington Post, January 14, 2012). The Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2011 released a report, "Patterns of Misconduct: FBI intelligence violations from 2001-2008," which reveals that domestic political intelligence apparatus spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, continues to systematically violate the rights of American citizens and legal residents. The report shows that the actual number of violations that may have occurred from 2001 to 2008 could approach 40,000 possible violations of law, Executive Order, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations. The FBI issued some 200,000 requests and that almost 60 percent were for investigations of U.S. citizens and legal residents (www.pacificfreepress.com). The New York Times reported on October 20, 2011, that the FBI has collected information about religious, ethnic and national-origin characteristics of American communities (The New York Times, October 20, 2011). According to a Washington Post commentary dated January 14, 2012, the U.S. government can use "national security letters" to demand, without probable cause, that organizations turn over information on citizens' finances, communications and associations, and order searches of everything from business documents to library records. The U.S. government can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing any court order or review (The Washington Post, January 14, 2012).
 
Abuse of power, brutal enforcement of law and overuse of force by U.S. police have resulted in harassment and hurt to a large number of innocent citizens and have caused loss of freedom of some people or even deaths. According to a report carried by the World Journal on June 10, 2011, the past decade saw increasing stop-and-frisks by the New York police, which recorded an annual of 600,000 cases in 2010, almost double of that in 2004. In the first three months of 2011, some 180,000 people experienced stop-and-frisks, 88 percent of whom were innocent people (World Journal, June 10, 2011). In early July of 2011, two police officers beat a mentally ill homeless man to death in Orange County, Southern California (FoxNews.com, September 21, 2011). In August 2011, North Miami police shot and killed a man carrying realistic toy gun (The NY Daily News, September 1, 2011). On Jan. 8, 2011, a Central California man was shot and killed by the police, who thought of him as a gang member only because the jacket he was wearing was red, "the chosen color of a local street gang." (www.kolotv.com, January 19, 2011) In May 2011, Arizona' s police officers raided the home of Jose Guerena and shot him dead in what was described as an investigation into alleged marijuana trafficking. However, the police later found nothing illegal in his home (The Huffington Post, May 25, 2011). Misjudged and wrongly-handled cases continued to occur. According to media reports, Anthony Graves, a Texas man, was imprisoned for 18 years for crimes he did not commit (CBS News, June 22, 2011). Forty-six-year-old Thomas Haynesworth spent 27 years in prison after being arrested at the age of 18 for crimes he didn' t commit (Union Press International, December 7, 2011). Eric Caine, who was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment after being tortured by police into confessing to two murders, spent nearly 25 years behind bars.(Chicago Tribune, June 13, 2011).
 
The U.S. lacks basic due lawsuit process protections, and its government continues to claim the right to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion (The Washington Post, January 14, 2012). The National Defense Authorization Act, signed December 31, 2011, allows for the indefinite detention of citizens (The Washington Post, January 14, 2012). The Act will place domestic terror investigations and interrogations into the hands of the military and which would open the door for trial-free, indefinite detention of anyone, including American citizens, so long as the government calls them terrorists (www.forbes.com, December 5, 2011).
 
The U.S. remains the country with the largest "prison population" and the highest per capita level of imprisonment in the world, and the detention centers' conditions are terrible. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the number of prisoners amounted to 2.3 million in 2009 and one in every 132 American citizens is behind bars. Meanwhile, more than 140,000 are serving life sentences ("Report: On the situation with human rights in a host of world states," the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia, December 28, 2011). According to a Los Angeles Times report on May 24, 2011, in a California prison, as many as 54 inmates may share a single toilet and as many as 200 prisoners may live in a gymnasium (Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2011). According to data issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the estimated number of prison and jail inmates experiencing sexual victimization totaled 88,500 in the U.S. between October 2008 and December 2009 (www.bjs.gov). Since April 2011, officials stopped serving lunch on the weekend in some U.S. prisons as a way to cut food-service costs. About 23,000 inmates in 36 prisons are eating two meals a day on Saturdays and Sundays instead of three (The New York Times, October 20, 2011). Harsh conditions and treatment in prisons have caused recurring protests and suicides of inmates. There were two major hunger strikes in California prisons staged by a total of more than 6,000 and 12,000 prisoners in July and October 2011, respectively, to protest against what they call harsh treatment and detention conditions (CNN, October 4, 2011; The New York Times, July 7, 2011). According to a Chicago Tribune report on July 20, 2011, since 2000, at least 175 youths have attempted to kill themselves inside Department of Juvenile Justice lockup facilities in Chicago and seven youths committed suicide. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture in a 2011 report noted that in the Untied States an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 individuals are being held in isolation, and the U.S. government in 2011 for two times turned down the Special Rapporteur's request for a private and unmonitored meeting with detainees held in isolation.
 
2012
 
The recent years have seen closer surveillance of American citizens by the U.S. government. In the country, abuse of suspects and jail inmates is common occurrence, and equal suffrage enjoyable by citizens continues to be undermined.
 
The U.S. government continues to step up surveillance of ordinary Americans, restricting and reducing the free sphere of the American society to a considerable extent, and seriously violating the freedom of citizens. The U.S. congress approved a bill in 2012 that authorizes the government to conduct warrantless wiretapping and electronic communications monitoring, a move that violates people's rights to privacy. According to a report carried on May 4, 2012 by the CNET website, the FBI general counsel' s office has drafted a proposed law requiring that social-networking websites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail to alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly (news.cnet.com, May 4, 2012). Documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union on September 27, 2012, reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring American's electronic communications. Between 2009 and 2011, the Justice Department' s combined number of original orders for "pen registers" and "trap and trace devices" used to spy on phones increased by 60 percent, from 23,535 in 2009 to 37,616 in 2011. The number of authorizations the Justice Department received to use these devices on individuals' email and network data increased 361 percent between 2009 and 2011. The National Security Agency collects purely domestic communications of Americans in a "significant and systematic" way, intercepting and storing 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications every day. A Wired investigation published in March 2012 revealed the NSA is currently constructing a huge data center in Utah, meant to store and analyze "vast swaths of the world' s communications" from foreign and domestic networks (The Guardian, July 10, 2012). As the American Civil Liberties Union explained in its December 2011 report, the U.S. could potentially use military drones to spy on its citizens (Fars News Agency, June 26, 2012).
 
On September 17, 2012, or the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street's initial demonstration, confrontations between protesters and police around the Wall Street resulted in the arrests of more than 100 people (The New York Times, September 17, 2012). The U.S. journalist community is worried about the continued toughening up of legislation on mass media. It is frequent that journalists in the U.S. lose their jobs because of "politically incorrect" opinions (www.mid.ru, October 22, 2012).
 
Complaints and allegations of American police violating rights of suspects and jail inmates are going up. A litany of lawsuits was brought against the New York City Police Department, with police officers charged with violating civil rights in law enforcement. According to a report carried by the Chicago Tribune on March 6, 2012, jail inmate Eugene Gruber, 51, was paralyzed a day after he walked into a jail where he was believed to have been maltreated. He died of injury four months after the jail incident. Another report by the Chicago Tribune on March 21, 2012 showed that suspect Darrin Hanna suffered trauma from physical restraint and Taser shocks during a struggle with North Chicago police and died a week later. The CNN reported on May 17, 2012 that some 9.6 percent of the prisoners in state prisons are sexually victimized during confinement, more than double the rate cited in a report on the subject in 2008. In Texas state prisons, many inmates are housed in triple-digit temperatures in Fahrenheit. Four inmates -- Larry Gene McCollum, 58; Alexander Togonidze, 44; Michael David Martone, 57; and Kenneth Wayne James, 52 -- died in summer of 2011 from heat stroke, and at least five others were believed to have died from heat-related causes (www.texascivilrightsproject.org, July 7, 2012).
 
American citizens have never really enjoyed common and equal suffrage. Despite an increase of over eight million citizens in the eligible population in the U.S. presidential election of 2012, voter turnout registered a drop of five million from four years before, with only 57.5 percent of eligible citizens voting (bipartisanpolicy.org, November 8, 2012). A February 2012 report by the Pew Center said America's voter registration system is plagued with errors and inefficiencies that undermine voter confidence and fuel partisan disputes over the integrity of the country's elections (www.pewstates.org).
 
The U.S. election is like money wars, with trends of the country's policies deeply influenced by political donations. The 2012 election had an estimated cost totalling six billion U.S. dollars. The Obama campaign and the Democratic camp raised 1.06 billion dollars, and the Romney campaign and the Republican camp raised a total of 954 million dollars (www.standard.co.uk, November 6, 2012). Both groups have funding support from business giants. An opinion poll showed that nearly 90 percent of Americans believe the 2012 election is marked by too many political donations from business circles, which will mean the increased influence of the rich over the country's policy-making (The International Herald Leader [Chinese newspaper], November 16, 2012). A Harvard professor said America' s political system is sinking into serious crisis as it is under manipulation of interest groups and their sponsors. Election donations give a loose rein to all other defects. American politics are corroding the people, making them increasingly dependent on interest groups (Internationale Politik, November & December issue, 2012).
 
Citing a world-known analyst, the Christian Science Monitor website in a report on November 5, 2012 said America's trouble-prone voting machines, the risk of tampering in those machines, the lack of transparency in vote tabulation, and then the Electoral College system, combine to give the country an election system that leaves much to be desired.
 
2013
 
The U.S. government took liberty in monitoring its citizens, which shocked the world. Tortures in the U.S. prisons raised concerns. Elections and the checks-and-balances systems were plagued by malpractices and inefficiency, impairing civil interests.
 
The U.S. government exercises massive and unrestrained information tapping on its own citizens. Edward Snowden, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, revealed a tapping program carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA), code-named PRISM. Under the program, the U.S. intelligence, by virtue of data provided by nine Internet companies, including the Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Yahoo, and other major telecom providers, tracked citizens' private contacts and social activities recklessly (www.washingtonpost.com, June 7, 2013).
 
The website of The Washington Post revealed on June 7, 2013, that the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were tapping directly into the central servers of some Internet companies, and users' data, extracting their emails, chats, audio and video data, documents and photos in real time, and putting certain targets and their contacts under full surveillance. According to a government document disclosed by The New York Times on September 29, 2013, the NSA, since November 2010, had been exploiting its huge collections of U.S. citizens' data to identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions, and other personal information. The scrutiny program, which links U.S. citizens' phone numbers and e-mails in a "contact chain", exposed large amount of citizens' privacy to the government. The website of the Guardian, a British newspaper, revealed on June 6, 2013, that one of the largest U.S. telecommunications providers, the Verizon Business Network Services Inc, was required to provide to the NSA all the telephony metadata within its system, including telephone numbers, locations and call durations. Germany's Spiegel Online reported on September 7, 2013, that internal NSA documents showed that the U.S. intelligence has the capability of tapping user data from the iphone, devices using Android as well as BlackBerry, a system previously believed to be highly secure. The NSA developed cracking programs and tapped users' data held on the three major smart phone operating systems, including contact lists, SMS traffic, and location information about where a user has been. The NSA is able to infiltrate the computer a person uses to sync their iphone, and the script programs enable additional access to at least 38 iphone features.
 
The journal.ie reported on June 14, 2013, nine major international civil liberties groups issued joint declaration that the U.S. federal government's secretive scrutiny program, PRISM, is a breach of international conventions on human rights. The joint declaration said, "Such vast and pervasive state surveillance violates two of the most fundamental human rights: the right to privacy and to freedom of expression."
 
The U.S. federal narcotics officers and other agents, in cooperation with American Telephone & Telegraph, can not only gain access to all the clients' phone records, but also all the phone calls made through the company's telephone exchangers (The Huffington Post, December 20, 2013). The Los Angeles Times' website, www.latimes.com, reported on September 26, 2013, the FBI has long used drone aircraft in domestic investigations, exercising clandestine surveillance over the public. The website also reported, the U.S. federal prosecutors secretly obtained records of telephone calls from more than 20 telephone lines belonging to The Associated Press and its journalists in a two-month period in early 2012 (www.latimes.com, May 13, 2013).
 
Inmates treated inhumanely in prisons. The use of solitary confinement is prevalent. According to news reports, in U.S. prisons, inmates in solitary confinements are enclosed in cramped cells with poor ventilation and natural lights, isolated from other prisoners, a situation that will take tolls on inmates' physical and mental health (www.bbc.com, June 12, 2013). About 80,000 U.S. prisoners are in solitary confinement, including nearly 12,000 in California. The California's Pelican Bay prison has more than 400 prisoners who have been in isolation for over a decade. In many cases, the inmates are isolated for up to 23 hours per day in cells measuring 3.5 by 2.5 meters (www.reuters.com, August 23, 2013). Some have even been held in solitary confinement for over 40 years(www.cbc.ca, October 4, 2013). In the prison system of the New York state, about 3,800 prisoners are in solitary confinement every day (online.wsj.com, Feb. 19, 2014). The then 49-year-old prisoner, William Blake, had been held in solitary confinement for 26 years, locked in a cell furnished with only one iron bed (www.dailymail.com, March 15, 2013). In 2013, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture Juan Mendez repeatedly urged the U.S. government to abolish the use of solitary confinement. He argued, even short-term solitary confinement can be counted as torture (www.bayview.com, October 14, 2013). In California state prisons, 30,000 inmates began hunger strikes on July 8, 2013 in protest of the use of solitary confinement. The hunger strikes lasted two months (www.latimes.com. September 15, 2013).
 
On January 29, 2014, the British Daily Mail's web edition published New York photographer Scott Houston's photos featuring working and living conditions of inmates in Arizona State's prisons. The images show, inmates are shackled together while working and eating, five on one chain, with just nine feet between them. Houston said, he was left with the impression that the chain gangs working together were similar to the days of slavery. "You could go back 200 years."
 
Election becomes the game of a few. A great number of researches showed that the American's influence on policy is proportional to their wealth. About 70 percent of the population, who are on the lower wealth and income scale, have virtually no influence on policy whatsoever. They are effectively disenfranchised. Only a tenth of one percent essentially get what they want, i.e. they effectively influence policies (www.salon.com. August 17, 2013). The U.S. citizens get less and less enthusiastic about election. The mayoral election of Los Angeles in May 2013 only had 23.3 percent of the city's registered voters cast a ballot. And the winner got 222,300 votes, just 12.4 percent of the registered voters (www.latimes.com, June 11. 2013).
 
The checks-and-balances system has become an impediment to actions. On October 1, 2013, the U.S. federal government, except for its core functions, entered a shutdown, after Congress failed to pass the budget bill as the Democrats and Republicans failed to agree on the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, wrote in an article published on October 4, 2013, on The Washington Post's website, the American system of checks and balances gradually becomes a "vetocracy". "It empowers a wide variety of political players representing minority position to block action by the majority and prevent the government from doing anything." The U.S. government shutdown is the very result of such vicious checks and balances. A new poll found "Americans entered 2014 with a profoundly negative view of their government, expressing little hope that the government can or will solve the nation's biggest problems." According to the poll conducted by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, half respondents said American system of democracy needed either "a lot of changes" or a complete overhaul (www. huffingtonpost.com, January 2, 2014). The U.S. president, in his State of the Union Address in January 2014, also criticized the U.S. democratic system full of bickering and debates. "When that debate prevents us from carrying out even the most basic functions of our democracy -- when our differences shut down government or threaten the full faith and credit of the United States -- then we are not doing right by the American people."
 
2014
 
As a renowned political scientist pointed out, the U.S. political system has decayed over time, and in an environment of sharp political polarization, this decentralized system gives excessive representation to the views of interest groups and activist organizations (Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014). Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said that the world sees "a democracy that's not working" (www.usatoday.com, October 11, 2013). It revealed the institutional root for the fact that the political rights of U.S. citizens had not been effectively protected.
 
Money is still a deciding factor for the U.S. politics. Total spending in the 2014 midterm races was projected to top 4 billion U.S. dollars nationwide, making it the most expensive midterm election in history (www.latimes.com, October 28, 2014). Outside groups with political agendas picked up a larger share of the bill. More money than ever in the midterm came from secret sources. The influence of average Americans on the election results diminished (www.usatoday.com, November 2, 2014). "K Street" in Washington, D.C. -- located between Capitol Hill and the White House and known as a metonym for the country's lobbing industry -- became the fourth power center in the U.S. after administration, legislation and justice. Behind legalized lobbying was the political manipulation by money and capital. Unfettered corporate political donations became "legalized bribery" (www.usatoday.com, October 11, 2013). According to a USA Today report on September 10, 2014, "dark money" kept flowing into elections since a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2010 opened the floodgate on political donations. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case on January 21, 2010 that the rules to restrict election campaign expenditures by for-profit corporations was in violation of the Constitution. During the 2014 campaign season, dark money exceeded 53 million U.S. dollars, up from 16 million U.S. dollars in 2010 (www.usatoday.com, September 10, 2014). Everything wrong with campaigns for other offices - big money, special interest groups and TV attack ads - also infected judicial election. Spending by outside groups to elect judges increased eight-fold from before the 2002 elections to that leading up to 2012 (www.usatoday.com, October 28, 2014). A legal scholar points out that interest groups are able to influence members of Congress legally simply by making donations and waiting for unspecified return favors. The democratic process has been corrupted or hijacked. In the contemporary U.S., elites speak the language of liberty but are perfectly happy to settle for privilege (Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014).
 
The voting rights of racial minorities and other groups are under suppression. The voting rights in the U.S. are restricted by economic income, race and other factors, and many citizens were prevented from voting. Preliminary exit polls showed that voters of African origins accounted for 12 percent in the 2014 midterm election, down from 13 percent in the 2012 presidential election. Hispanic voters dropped from 10 percent in 2012 to 8 percent and the proportion of Asian voters also reduced to two percent from three percent (www.usatoday.com, November 5, 2014). In 2014, the Supreme Court said that Texas could use its controversial new voter identification law for the November election. Roughly 600,000 voters, many of them black or Latino, could be turned away at the polls because they lacked acceptable identification (www.dailymail.co.uk, October 18, 2014). Voting rights advocates were up in arms over the socioeconomic and racial factors of these new restrictions (www.upi.com, November 3, 2014). In addition, criminal disenfranchisement removed massive swaths of society from the democratic process as a collateral consequence of conviction. A striking 5.85 million Americans could not vote because of a criminal conviction before. Many disenfranchised citizens lived in Iowa, Kentucky, or Florida -- the three states with extreme policies of disenfranchising anyone with a felony conviction for life (www.aclu.org, November 17, 2014).
 
The American citizens have increasingly lost confidence in electoral politics. According to most polls, Americans approached the 2014 elections in a sour mood. Two-thirds said the nation had gotten off on the wrong track (www.usatoday.com, November 2, 2014). According to a report by the Huffington Post on December 2, 2014, only nine percent of Americans approved of Congress in the weeks leading up to the midterms elections (www.huffingtonpost.com, December 2, 2014). In contrast to the high costs, general election voter turnout for the 2014 midterms was the lowest in any election cycle since the World War II. As of November 3, 2014, only 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots. Indiana had the lowest turnout rate, with just 28 percent of eligible voters participating (www.washingtonpost.com, November 10, 2014). 
 
2015
 
In 2015, money politics and clan politics went from bad to worse in the nation where voters found it hard to express their real volition and there was discrimination against belief in political life. In addition, citizens' right to information was further suppressed. Unsurprisingly, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said that "the U.S. is no longer a democracy" (www.huffingtonpost.com, August 3, 2015).
 
Money politics revealed the hypocrisy in democracy. Although the laws of the United States put a lid on the size of individual donations to presidential candidates, there is no limit for such contributions to super PACs by individuals and corporations. The USA Today reported on April 10, 2015 that the allies of at least 11 White House hopefuls had launched committees to raise unlimited money to back their campaigns (www.usatoday.com, April 10, 2015). The presidential candidates and the super PACs raised about 380 million U.S. dollars in only half a year. More than 60 donations were worth more than 1 million U.S. dollars each, accounting for about one third of the total contributions. Half of the amount came from those who donated more than 100,000 U.S. dollars and the combined fund of the top 67 donors was more than three times that of 508,000 donors with least contributions (www.aol.com, August 1; www.politico.com, August 1). According to a report of the Zerohedge, between 2007 and 2012, 200 of America's most politically active corporations spent a combined 5.8 billion U.S. dollars on federal lobbying and campaign contributions. What they gave paled compared to what those same corporations got: 4.4 trillion U.S. dollars in federal business and support. Put that in context, the sum represented two thirds of what individual taxpayers paid into the federal treasury. For every dollar spent on influencing politics, the nation's most politically active corporations received 760 U.S. dollars from the government (www.zerohedge.com, March 16, 2015). Jimmy Carter said that with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president, the U.S. political system was subverted to be a payoff to major contributors (www.huffingtonpost.com, August 3, 2015). The role money played in politics was also indicated in the U.S. President's State of the Union Address for 2016, which said a handful of families and hidden interests were exercising influence on elections via their funds.
 
Clan politics was driving U.S. government elections. Among the candidates for the 2016 presidential election, more than one candidate was obviously related to clan politics. The New York Times concluded through big data analysis that advantages from father generation played a role in politics obviously. The chance for the son of a U.S. president to become president was 1.4 million times higher than his peers. Meanwhile the chance for a governor's son to be elected governor was 6,000 times higher than ordinary people. In addition, the chance for the son of a senator to be a senator like his father was also 8,500 times higher than ordinary U.S. men (www.nytimes.com, March 22, 2015). The Washington Post reported on January 16, 2015 that since the beginning of the Republic, 8.7 percent of its members of Congress were closely related to someone who had served in the body. The report continued to point out that a smell of heirship could be detected in the U.S. presidential election since the possible slate of candidates would include the son of a governor and presidential candidate, the son of a congressman and presidential candidate, the wife of a president and the brother of a president, son of a president and grandson of a senator (www.washingtonpost.com, January 16, 2015).
 
Discrimination against beliefs led to unfairness in political life. Not believing in God could be the biggest disadvantage while running for a post in public office. It was difficult for those who were not Christians to win elections and for those who did not have a religious belief, the chance to win elections was slimmer. In a May 2014 Pew Research survey, atheism was the most disqualifying factor for a potential presidential candidate, according to a report posted on the website of The Washington Post on September 22, 2015. More than half of those surveyed said they would be less likely to vote for someone who did not believe in God. And another Pew poll in July 2014 found that of all religion-related groups, atheists and Muslims were viewed the most negatively by Americans (www.washingtonpost.com, September 22, 2015).
 
Citizens' electoral rights were further limited. According to an article on the website of the U.S. News and World Report on August 4, 2015, since 2010, a total of 21 states had adopted new laws to limit the exercise of suffrage. Some states shortened the time for early voting, while others limited the number of documents identifying one as a lawful voter. A total of 14 states will carry out fresh measures to limit the exercise of suffrage for the first time in 2016 presidential election. The voting rights were hit by the vicious competition between the two parties. One Democratic candidate accused GOP presidential candidates of having "systematically and deliberately" tried to keep millions of Americans from voting so as to win the election (www.usnews.com, August 4, 2015). A USA Today report, which was published on its website on March 20, 2015, said the nation had its lowest midterm-election voter turnout in 2014 since the early 1940s. The average turnout across the United States was 37 percent, with a low of 28.8 percent recorded in Indiana (http://www.usatoday.com, March 20, 2015).
 
It was difficult for voters to express their real will. The Christian Science Monitor carried a report on its website on December 13, 2015 that the two-party system forced the voters to take side. Most voters cast ballots for a party not because they supported the party but out of fear and worry over the other one (www.csmonitor.com, December 13, 2015). It was said in the U.S. President's State of the Union Address for 2016 that the practice of drawing congressional districts led to the situation where "politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around." It went on to say that "the rancor and suspicion between parties has gotten worse instead of better."
 
Citizens' right to information was hampered by the government. According to a report by the Associated Press on March 13, 2015, authorities were undermining the laws that were supposed to guarantee citizens' right to information and the systems created to give citizens information about their government. In addition, it was getting harder to use public records to hold government officials accountable (www.ap.org, March 13, 2015). An article on the website of the CNN reported on February 13, 2015 that journalists and news supervision authorities had continually slammed the current U.S. administration as one of the least transparent. At least 15 journalists were arrested in Ferguson protests (edition.cnn.com, February 13, 2015).
 
2016
 
In 2016, money politics and power-for-money deals had controlled the presidential election, which was full of lies and farces. There were no guarantees of political rights, while the public responded with waves of boycott and protests, giving full exposure of the hypocritical nature of U.S. democracy.
 
Voter turnout and support rate reached new low. Only about 55 percent of voting age citizens cast ballots in the 2016 election, lowest in 20 years (edition.cnn.com, November 30, 2016). A growing number of Americans were disappointed or even angry about the election. Pew research conducted prior to the election showed that many of the voters who planned on coming to the polls were angry. Those who didn't vote this time went beyond alienation to antipathy -- a complete aversion and dislike for things political (www.huffingtonpost.com, December 6, 2016).

Most Expensive Election Ever. Americans who are running for federal elective offices spent more than ever -- about 6.8 billion U.S. dollars. That's more than what consumers spend on cereal (6 billion U.S. dollars). Candidates seeking House and Senate and the independent groups supporting them are expected to shell out 410 million U.S. dollars more than during the 2012 presidential election (www.cbsnews.com, November 8, 2016). According to the website of the Washington Post, Clinton's campaign had raised 1.4 billion U.S. dollars by the end of November 2016, while Trump's had raised 932 million U.S. dollars (www.washingtonpost.com, December 9, 2016). CNN reported that 2016 was "the year when money won nobody nothing," and "a golden age to be a man of means" (us.cnn.com, November 12, 2016). Money politics had triggered nationwide protests, in which many were arrested by the police.
 
Media failed to be objective and impartial. U.S. media published a lot of biased reports and commentaries during the 2016 election, fully demonstrating their failure in staying objective or impartial. The media clearly chose their side in covering the election. Among the top 100 newspapers based on daily circulation, 57 endorsed the Democratic nominee while 2 the Republican, according to data revealed by the media endorsements count conducted by University of California, Santa Barbara. A poll made by Quinnipiac University on October 19, 2016 also found that the news media was biased in its coverage of the presidential election, a feeling shared by 55 percent of American likely voters, including about 90 percent of Republicans and 61 percent of independent voters (poll.qu.edu, October 19, 2016).
 
2018

Money Politics Prevail in the United States
 
The U.S. 2018 midterm elections cost a huge quantity of money. Elections became the games of money, with much involvement of "dark money" and corruption. Cases of politicians involved in corruption were not rare and the government served as the spokesperson of the rich.
 
The "most expensive" midterm elections in history. The 2018 midterm elections were proved to be by far the most expensive ones on record. The final cost of 2018 midterm elections stood at 5.2 billion U.S. dollars, a 35 percent increase over 2014 in nominal dollars, the Center for Responsive Politics said on November 8, 2018 (www.opensecrets.org, November 8, 2018). The Texas Senate race was the most expensive House or Senate race in U.S. history, with Democrat candidate Beto O'Rourke alone setting a record by raising 69.1 million U.S. dollars (www.usatoday.com, November 16, 2018).
 
Secret money donations and "dark money" swept over the elections. According to an NBC report on July 21, 2018, U.S. Treasury Department announced that it would no longer require most non-profit organizations to report their donors, making elections much less transparent. During the 2018 midterms, a record high of 98 million U.S. dollars in dark money were spent by outside groups other than the candidates' campaign committees. More than 40 percent of television advertisements broadcast by outside groups to influence congressional elections were financed by secret donors and over one-fourth of the advertising funds for House and Senate elections came from groups that did not disclose their donors. Airings by "dark money" groups in federal races since the 2014 midterms jumped by 26 percent (www.usatoday.com, July 12 and November 16, 2018).
 
Electoral corruption became severer. The Guardian reported on August 7, 2018, that U.S. elections were widely seen to be corrupt by the public. Members of Congress were viewed to be captured by corporations, wealthy donors and special interests groups. The average cost of winning a Senate seat was 19.4 million U.S. dollars while winning a House of Representatives seat would cost at least 1.5 million U.S. dollars on average. Election fraud such as using money in exchange for votes was common. According to a report of The New York Times on its website on November 20, 2018, the Los Angeles district attorney announced that nine people had been charged with paying homeless people with one dollar bills and some cigarettes in exchange for signing names on voter registration forms.
 
U.S. Government served as the spokesperson of the rich. According to a report released by Philip G. Alston, special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights for the UN, the combined wealth of the United States cabinet reached about 4.3 billion U.S. dollars, turning the U.S. government into the spokesperson of the rich people. Former Arkansas State Senator and State Representative Henry Wilkins accepted bribes in exchange for voting in favor of the intentions of lobbyists, according to a statement on the website of U.S. Justice Department on April 30, 2018. Influenced by lobbyists, Florida governor Rick Scott cut 700 million U.S. dollars in funding for water management, Miami Herald reported on August 2, 2018. The reduction led to a severe red tide crisis, causing the death of marine life and endangering the health of coastal residents.
 
Politicians' corruption scandals were seen constantly. Former Tallahassee mayor Scott Maddox faced a 44-count indictment including bribery, extortion and fraud, Miami Herald reported on December 8, 2018. A prominent Texas senator was accused of using her influence to try to end an investigation into a bar she and her husband owned, according to the website of the Houston Chronicle on June 8, 2018. The Week published an article titled "Corruption is eroding American democracy" on its website on December 14, 2018, saying corporations captured U.S. politicians with campaign donations and promises of future bribes so that politicians would make legislations on behalf of their businesses.
 
The public had pessimistic attitudes towards U.S. politics. A Pew Research Center survey on American democracy and the political system released on April 26 2018, showed 53 percent of the surveyed said the United States did not respect "the rights and freedoms of all people." The Newsweek reported on June 26, 2018 that a poll showed 55 percent of Americans said democracy in the United States was "weak" currently, and 68 percent said they believed democracy in the United States was "getting weaker."

2019


2021