Yet, even with Obama in office, the misdeed was discovered and is being pursued.

Corporation? Murdoch playing with people's phones. Is that corporation investigating, or covering up?
If there was no government intervention we would never have known.

I would think your response is "NSA, Snowden". Good point.
Mine is, I wish we had a real functioning democracy.

Read your sig. Applies to corporations also. But corporate power is a bit more concentrated and easier to abuse.

Yes, you should have a career strategy. And it should be a good one.
But seriously, we need to

A, do our jobs
B, keep our skills up to date
C, manage this career, guessing properly about where things are going next and figuring out how to chase it without letting down the side on A and B.

And woe betide you if you dare add recreation and / or family to this.

And *everyone* needs to do this. I think most are going to do an average job on this.

And how do you know? The guys that get to choose what the twists and turns are going to be, they don't communicate reliably.

"company's best interests"

Does that company want to sell it's product at "American" prices? Then it needs people ( customers, you know ) that *earn* "American" wages.

"Not true. A factory is not built where the demand is, but where the labor is available. The goods can be shipped. When those factory workers spend their wages, plenty of secondary jobs are produced as well."

The factory will be built where the labor is cheap and available, true, but the demand must exist *somewhere* first.

"Despite high unemployment in the state, most Georgians don't want such back-breaking jobs"

    What are the rates of pay on this? It is truly that they don't want the job, or they don't want the job at the offered rate?
    The market works. Pay will draw people into a field. We saw that in the .com boom, everyone and his brother was trying to get into programming.
    Yes, the product will be more expensive. So what? Why is it that so many ( maybe not you ) are "let the market work" until it means pay rates will rise?

"nor do they have the necessary skills"

    Can I be hearing this correctly? I am sure there is a technique, and things to know, but the immigrants picked it all up.
    With a bit of time, so can even an American ( sarcasm, for those impaired, And this is not disparagement of the immigrants, there is no race that is intrinsically better or worse than any other )

"According to Dick Minor, president of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Grower's Association"

    He might have a bias...

"immigrants "are pretty much professional harvesters" with many specializing in particular crops""

    They were not born with this knowledge. Most anyone else on planet earth could pick ( pun intended ) up this skill set.

Where does that lead?

Little to no power does not last long. Someone will grab for it.
You are seeing it now.

Because they don't bother to think and to do the research.
Voters, in general, have "their team", and the believe whatever comes out of the politicians mouths.
Sheep is an apt description.
Plato had his philosopher king concept. A good one, IIRC. But we all need to be that in a functioning Democracy.

Why the jump from spending caps to censoring?

Can you see that no spending caps is much more "censoring", for a much larger group of people?

How can people help?

If the large pocketed donors are looking for influence and continue to donate they are either insane or effective.

Neither sounds like a good reason to continue a bad habit.
All people, wealthy and poor should have equal redress to their government.
Right now, the wealthy, effectively, are the only ones who have much say.

Yes, but sometimes, firemen, in a brush fire, will set fire to burnable things in the path of the fire in a controlled way as a fire break.

Get started.

Can you get 3/4's of the politicians from the states to enact such legislation?

They are also benefiting from this arrangement, so, I don't think it will fly.

Campaign finance laws demonstrably have not achieved nothing, or the monied persons would not have bothered to weaken these laws, and would not be seeking to weaken them further.

Politicians are patently not answerable at the ballot box, by and large, or so many unpopular bits of legislation would not be passing.

If you remove too much power from the government, you will create a power vacuum. Someone will step in and fill it. Warlord or (maybe even well meaning) revolutionary. The government needs to be answerable to us, and it never will be as long as it can be bought.

I was sysadmin on an AS/400 back in the 90's. I am pretty sure we had an E35 somewhere in the cycle of upgrades. I know we started off with something "lower", but still a 35. I think it was a B35. I would not say it was fast, but it was fast enough.

We had remote offices, SDLC lines CSU/DSUs and workstation controllers. I don't think we had 250 terminals, but we did have more than 100.
The last upgrade we did was to a PowerPC based CPU. Ran a tape, swapped a card, instantly faster. Field rep allowed me to do the card swap.

It was a good machine. The HAL was for everything, not just the OS. When we did the upgrade I spoke of, we didn't have to recompile user apps, the tape loaded the new HAL, I expect.