Yesterday Tim Cook of Apple told a US Senate sub-committee that in order for Apple to bring it's profits back onshore the government would have to slash tax rates from 35% to single digits. In the UK parliament, Google and Amazon have both faced down committees of democratically elected representatives of the people.

We are witnessing the hard-won democratic rights of folk across the western world in their death-throes. Multinationals are now not simply lobbying quietly in the background to buy off our politicians, they sit in front of them, in the full glare of the media and dictate policy and deny their responsibilities as part of the society they are part of. From Westminster parliamentary committees to Senate subcommittees and beyond they cock a snoop at the democratic process they have exploited to earn their profits.

The tax burden is back where it has been throughout history; with us, the ordinary working folk. We subsidise these massive businesses with grants, whilst the goods they make are manufactured not here at home, but in the far east where wages, human and worker's rights are cheap, expendable or can be ignored.

We're loosing a way of life to unregulated capitalism, a system utterly incapable of meaningful self-regulation. Our democratic system is in tatters as multinationals run roughshod over our elected representatives and state institutions. Our elected representatives are in the thrall of these corporations, unable or unwilling to challenge their dominance over the political classes, themselves detached from the reality of everyday life as they snuffle in the trough for scraps and feather their own nests at the expense of the taxpayer.

We live in a post-democracy world. Ordinary folk are irrelevant; we don't count any more. We are a revenue stream, a statistic that economists can factor in to their calculations. 'The citizens' have become an abstract concept unfettered by the reality of everyday life for the source of those numbers.

What should we call this system now?