Is lobbying just legalized corruption?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is lobbying just legalized corruption?". Your opponent's style: Frederick Douglass

The often called 'woke' movement is important for our society's future

You've mistaken fashion for substance, and that mistake is precisely what makes this dangerous. The "woke" movement traffics in performative gestures—corporate diversity statements, toppled statues, cancelled comedians—while the actual machinery of oppression hums along untouched. You're rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and calling it navigation. Consider what's actually happened: We've spent a decade obsessing over pronouns and representation in Hollywood while real wages for working people have stagnated, housing has become a luxury good, and children in poor neighborhoods still attend schools that crumble. The movement preaches equity while corporations—the very institutions it claims to reform—weaponize its language to appear righteous without changing a single exploitative practice. They donate to racial justice causes on Monday and union-bust on Tuesday. They hire diversity officers and outsource jobs to countries with no labor protections. But here's the real problem: **The movement confuses symbolic victory with structural change.** When you celebrate that a Black woman now runs a company that grinds workers into dust, have you actually advanced justice, or merely decorated injustice? Frederick Douglass understood that **freedom without power is a mockery**—and the woke movement offers people moral validation while stripping them of the material conditions to actually live free lives. So tell me plainly: If this movement is so vital to our future, why do working people—the ones supposedly being championed—feel increasingly abandoned by it? Where's the beef, not the symbolism?