Thanks to the Finest Minds on DU

for all the ideas. In payment, I'm including an excerpt here.

“Well, that’s the Reverend-President Folsom. He’s been in office a couple of years. I guess the last President died or something.”
“Reverend-President?”
“Don’t ask,” Jarvis growled from his bedroom doorway. “He’s the first jackass who’s actually used the term. He’s a big-time Evangelical preacher who ran for President and won.”
“How? I don’t understand—“
“Nobody votes anymore. Just the people who like things the way they are. It’s all a farce—the votes are meaningless, counted by machines that offer no way to trace the results of individual ballots. This system is what’s kept the neocons in power for twenty-two years.”
“How did the people allow—“
“—The people didn’t catch on for a long time. The media, bought and paid for by the power brokers, didn’t see fit to tell anyone there was a problem. The efforts over the internet helped some, but it just wasn’t enough. When the Child Protection Act of 09 passed, it pretty much spelled the end of the internet as we knew it.
“Free enterprise my ass. They consolidated all the servers on the ‘net under corporate giants. If they didn’t like what you had to say, they could stop you from saying it. AOL started it. It didn’t take long once they realized how much a danger the internet actually was to them.”
“So there’s no internet anymore?”
“Oh, there’s the ‘world-wide-web,’ which, primarily, is a consumer wonderland showing us all millions of images of things we can’t actually buy. More corporate disinformation, more of their ‘Loyalty to Employer is Loyalty to Country’ public service announcement bullshit.
“They didn’t have to make ‘free speech’ illegal. They just commercialized it to death.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t bio-chip everyone.”
“What would be the point? They can trace our activities easily enough through our credit—and, honestly, the mega-rich didn’t give enough of a shit to want to know what we’re doing. Some of the corporations regularly bio-chip their employees, but that’s because they practically own them anyway.”
“Huh?”
“Corporations hand-pick executives ahead of time—pay for their schooling and other needs while they’re in school. Then the employees work as indentured servants of the firm until the debt is paid. They also pick up laborers by giving debtors a choice of going to prison or entering a contract with a corporation. A percentage of their very low wage goes to pay off their debts. They work for the Corp until they die or until they pay their debt. Without incurring more, of course.”
“That sucks.”
“Doesn’t it? It’s the free-enterprise system, baby.”