clipped from www.truthdig.com

In decaying societies, politics become theater

The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation

They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled

We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty

Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification

our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.

unless we grasp the “societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms” we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society and instead wields power through naked repression.