Here, one of my favorite authors argues that in a traditional democracy, the liberal class serves as a safety value for slowly releasing the tensions that build up from the pressures of maintaining the status quo of the power elite. In point of fact, as he rightly contends, it is liberals that actually give much needed legitimacy to the power elite. However today, the relentless assault by the corporate state on the democratic values of our democracy has all but rendered our democratic process irrelevant: We have all become pawns and serfs in a game of pseudo-democracy rigged by the corporate state: All due in part thanks to weak-kneed and limp-wristed liberals, who have now become the corporate class' most recent victim.
With their heads forever in the sand, liberals continue to live in the nether-nether world of passe democratic rhetoric and reveling in hollow acts of "democratic political theater, pretending that the "rigged game" does not exist. But more than this, all our political institutions are now being either overrun by, or co-opted by the dictates of the corporate and national security state.
As but one example, today we have begun to take globalization as an article of faith -- with only sporadic dissent, and only whimpering critiques. But more important even than this fact, is the fact that all U.S. values, liberal or otherwise, have begun to fall by the wayside when the time comes to stand up to mean-spirited, shallow and always greedy (and often anti-American) corporate dictates. Today it is this corporate narrative (and their lackeys in the liberal class that has usurped religious, patriotic as well as moral messages, values and language. We now live in a Corporatocracy, with only the liberals standing between complete corporate rule and an America awaking up to the living danger of an impending Fascist take over of the nation. And now the liberals have finally committed suicide and have been completely co-opted by corporate interests and the corporate message.
Recent democrats, such as both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are rightly taken to task by the author. Bill Clinton is lambasted, for instance, for having consciously sold out the working class for corporate money: He passed NAFTA, and destroyed welfare, both of which, arguably, betrayed the working and poorer classes. And even more importantly, he along with the help of key conservative Republicans, ripped down the firewalls between commercial and investment banks. An act that effectively turned the banking system over to Wall Street speculators and led to the financial mess that the U.S. has today, and from which the nation may never completely recover from.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Review-of-the-Book-The-De-by-Herbert-Calhoun-101128-661.html
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