A few major web site, noticeably (for me) Reddit, Google and Wikipedia publicly displayed their opposition to a set of bills that were on the verge to be passed into law in the United States. I won't go too much into the detail of those bills (Reddit did a good job here:
http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html ), but in short what were supposedly be bills against web sites that sold or give away counterfeit goods (including intellectual property) are simply a covert way to give to some large corporations the right to shut down any foreign web site they want without any court oversight.
Of course I'm against that monstrosity that didn't even do good job at hiding its true purpose (stifling competition and censorship), but that's not what's surprising me the most about it. Its original near universal support by both Democrats and Republicans made it quite clear that under the guise of naïveté and incompetence both the House and the Senate is completely corrupted by corporate interests. With their near control over media, the big news sources barely mentioned it before today, because they work hand in hand with large corporations to subvert whatever "representative democracy" remains. Since the few people left that are not completely disillusioned vote based on vicious advertisement campaigns on those controlled media, and since two years ago the supreme court ruled that since corporations are people, free speech is a right for all "people" and money is "speech", then at last corporations can spend unlimited resources bending public will and bribe the population as a whole, then now the democratic system is effectively subverted by money alone.
All of that, 15 years ago, would have been considered a crack-pot conspiracy theory with far-fetched ideas. Today, the largest Internet company in the world (Google) displayed on their home page an implicit agreement to the theory that at this point the United States is a form of corporotracy. Oh well, middle class, quality public education a good healthcare was fun while it lasted. Now I don't mind that -20C temperature in Montreal anymore...