Are we a democracy, a plutocracy, or what?

Ever since the bankruptcy bill, I've been wondering if I live in an plutocracy. With all the stuff to fix about us, why bankruptcy? Duh, because the credit card companies wanted it. So how come their needs get solved before, say, our healthcare needs? Heck, we've got over 40m Americans who don't have health insurance, something all the other industrialized democracies have long ago fixed up nice and snug for all their people.

Which led me to ponder: how can we possibly be living in a democracy if our highest legislatory bodies, elected by the people, attend to the wishes of the credit card companies ahead of the needs of the people?

So, what do we live in? A plutocracy? Or an 'illiberal' democracy, in Fareed Zakaria's term? (See The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.)

Maybe a fascistic state, but not in the mean dictator control sense, in the original sense: the interests of the state are aligned with the interests of corporations. Before the invention of the Italian party, 'Fasci de Combattimento' in 1919, the term for their theories was 'corporativism.' The idea was to found a modern feudalism by merging the interests of the corporations and the state.

So maybe we live under an enlightened feudalism. The way Wal-Mart rules its employees.

Dr. Laurence Britt analyzed the seven 'successful' fascist regimes (Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Papadopoulos's Greece, Pinochet's Chile, and Suharto's Indonesia) and developed 14 common ideals that linked them (Britt also wrote a novel: June, 2004). Here they are:

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.
3. Identification of enemies & scapegoats as a unifying cause.
4. The supremacy of the military.
5. Rampant sexism.
6. A controlled mass media.
7. Obsession with national security.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.
9. Power of corporations protected.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.
14. Fraudulent elections.

At least half of these ideals characterize the U.S. at present (scary enough in itself), and some of the rest are evident in a kind of pre-birth pregnant form, not yet fully delivered into our laps. The spermatozoa of fascism still have a few good eggs to nail. As yet, our ship of state is no ways near the rocky shores of out-and-out fascism.

But where exactly are we? I wish there was a name for what we have. Democracy doesn't quite do it for me anymore. Neither does plutocracy, although it comes closer. Corpocracy might be a workable coinage. Any suggestions?