By capitalizing on disenfranchisement, isolation, and civic
lethargy, unions and public interest groups have commoditized the public's ability
to participate in their democracy, reducing assembly and public discourse to a
pyramid scheme of money and influence. We may rightly point out that the labor
unions are corrupt, and that even consumer groups, environmental groups,
welfare advocates, and the myriad of other "public interest" groups have
transformed genuine causes into self-perpetuating fundraising fiefdoms. Public
interest groups have sold out to (corporate) foundations or fighting door to door
canvassing turf wars against their natural allies over the same demographic
membership base, from whose hearts they dispell all residual democratic
enthusiasm and offer false absolution for non-participation.
We can rightfully blame the news media for selling out to big
business, shortening the civic attention span, marginalizing everyone,
manufacturing fear of the neighbor, and monopolizing rather than filling the
vacuum of public discourse. Or its cousin the entertainment media community,
which we may correctly condemn for glorifying violence and supplying the couch
potato with low grade electronic opium. Journalists are proletarian language
mercenaries. Their owners are Westinghouse, Hearst, General Electric, Disney, and other
aristocratic philosopher herdsmen who keep the republic peaceful by projecting
desirable moral images onto the phosphrus walls of Plato's virtual cave. Editors are overpaid
symbolic foremen, publishers and producers are black drivers.
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