The Christian Science Monitor reports:

According to a new [Gallup] poll, Americans have become significantly “less satisfied with the freedom to choose what they want to do with their lives.”

Seventy-nine percent of US residents are satisfied with their level of freedom, down from 91 percent in 2006, according to the Gallup survey, released Tuesday.

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That 12-point drop pushes the United States from among the highest in the world in terms of perceived freedom to 36th place, outside the top quartile of the 120 countries sampled, trailing Paraguay, Rwanda, and the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh [part of Azerbaijan].

Only 10 nations experienced as sharp a drop as the US in terms of the satisfaction of citizens with their level of freedom: Egypt, Greece, Italy, Venezuela, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Romania, Yemen, Pakistan, and Spain.

(We highlighted countries not especially known for their freedom.)

At the same time, the percentage of Americans who believe their is “widespread corruption” in the U.S. has skyrocketed. As the Monitor notes:

According to another poll also released by Gallup on Tuesday, the portion of Americans who believe there to be “widespread corruption” in the US has jumped from 59 percentin 2006 to 79 percent in 2013.

And Americans trust in all 3 branches of government are plunging to historic lows. The Washington Times reports:

Americans’ confidence in all three branches of U.S. government is falling, hitting record lows for the Supreme Court, at 30 percent, and Congress, at 7 percent, while the presidency is at a six-year low of 29 percent.

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Since June 2013, confidence has fallen 7 points for the presidency, 4 points for theSupreme Court and 3 points for Congress.

A new poll finds that Obama is now more unpopular than Bush … and the least popular president since WWII.  The Washington Times notes:

A new Quinnipiac University survey found that voters rate Mr. Obamaas the country’s worst president since World War II.

Quinnipiac found 45 percent of voters say the country would have been better off if Mr. Romney had been elected, while just 38 percent say Mr. Obama remains a better choice. Even Democrats aren’t so sure — just 74 percent of them told the pollsters Mr. Obamawas clearly the better pick in the last election.

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A Zogby Analytics Poll released Wednesday also found Mr. Obama slipping — in that survey, to 44 percent approval, while his disapproval jumped 4 percentage points from last month to reach 54 percent.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that only 16% of Americans have any real confidence in the government, only 19% have confidence in the media, and only 13% have confidence in large corporations:

Of course, all of these poll results are related.  As Gallup points out:

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Perceived widespread corruption in the U.S. government could be on the rise for several reasons, including the significant media attention on issues such as the IRS targeting of conservative groups and National Security Agency leaks. Americans not only feel that the U.S. government is performing poorly, as demonstrated by record-low congressional approval ratings, but they also report that the U.S. government itself as one of thebiggest problem facing the country today.

Indeed, we’ve been reporting on these connections for years:

• Lack of Trust – Caused by Institutional Corruption – Is Killing the Economy

• Corruption At The Top Leads To Lawlessness By The People

• Americans Have Lost VIRTUALLY ALL of Our Constitutional Rights

• Americans Are The Most Spied On People In World History

• NSA Routinely Shares Raw Intelligence Data With Israel WITHOUT First Sifting It To Remove Information About US Citizens 

• Government Spying on Americans … and then Giving Info to Giant Corporations

• Top Legal Expert: “President Obama … Says That He Can Kill [Any American Citizen Without Any Charge and] On His Own Discretion. He Can Jail You Indefinitely On His Own Discretion”

• U.S. Relies On Law from Governments Which Don’t Even HAVE a Constitution to Justify Assassination of U.S. Citizens By Drone

• Americans Have Less Access to Justice than Botswanans … And Are More Abused By Police than Kazakhstanis

• America No Longer Has a Functioning Judicial System

• Newly-Released Memo by Donald Rumsfeld Proves Iraq War Started On False Pretenses

• Americans on Both Sides of the Aisle Oppose War In Syria (but America is providing heavy arms to Al Qaeda in Syria)

• American Public Turns Anti-War … Warmongers Desperately Reply, “But War Is GOOD for Us!”

• 3 Times As Many Americans Supported King George During the Revolutionary War as Support Our OWN Congress Today (Indeed, Congress is less popular than zombies, witches, dog poop, potholes, toenail fungus, hemorrhoids, cockroaches, lice, root canals, colonoscopies, traffic jams, used car salesmen, Genghis Khan, Communism, North Korea, BP during the Gulf Oil Spill, or Nixon during Watergate )

• Even Democratic Party Loyalists Starting to Wake Up to the Fact that Obama Is As Bad As Bush … Or Worse

•  Veteran New York Times Reporter: The Obama Administration Is “The Greatest Enemy Of Press Freedom That We Have Encountered In At Least a Generation”

• Obama has Prosecuted More Whistleblowers than All Other Presidents COMBINED

• Another Nobel Economist Says We Have to Prosecute Fraud Or Else the Economy Won’t Recover.  But 6 Years After the Financial Crisis Hit, The Big Banks Are Still Committing Massive Crimes. AndObama Prosecuting Fewer Financial Crimes Than Under Reagan or Either Bush

• The Government Lied When It Said It Only Bailed Out Healthy Banks … 12 of the 13 Big Banks Were Going Bust 

• Stunning List of Economists, Financial Experts and Bankers Say We Need to Break Up the Big Banks.  But Giant Banks Now 30% Bigger than When Dodd-Frank Financial “Reform” Law Was Passed

• Polls: Democratic and Republican Politicians Both Oppose Core American Values … Support Policies Which Help Fatcats While Hurting the Little Guy

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