We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, October 27, 2014

Oligarchy

Click here to access article by Paul Street from Uncommon Thought Journal. (Although this posting contains some minor errors, it is the best I could find on the web given restrictions from other websites.)

What I found most interesting were Street's views (under the section of "Not So Divided") of a study published in July about the contrast of public opinion of many major issues with how mainstream media reports political differences among Americans. It's clear that Americans are not as stupid as ruling class media reports; or in other words, their mainstream media is not as effective as they would like. Thus, they not only shape news and information to manage the minds of ordinary American to support their policies, but they also distort what Americans actually think about such policies and create artificial political divisions in order to hide the real reasons why so little is accomplished to benefit life within the US for ordinary people.

He then writes about two major problem related to this discovery which he expands on in the following two sections entitled "The Donor Class v. The Rest of US", and "U.S. 'No Longer an Actual Democracy'".