Yes, I use the sad trajectory of Youngstown - my birthplace - as an illustration of all the complex, enduring social costs of our economic system that never get figured into the calculations that justify what corporations do.

To answer your question, the only real option I see is a large, organized, unified movement of Americans finally fed up with what has been happening, not distracted by the hunt for scapegoats (e.g. tea parties), and able to mobilize to change a system that is not working except for a tiny few at the top of this system. In such a movement we can collectively overmatch the funds used by the corporations to control politics and the mass media and we would already have the momentum. A few months ago, no one thought the French President Sarkozy would have the slightest problem ramming through his program. Yet now he has poll numbers rivaling Bush at the end of 2008 and the vast mass of the French people are turning against him and questioning the system. I doubt Americans are all that different from the French.