AFP quickly wraps up the latest from Syria:

Already weakened by political infighting, Syria’s opposition has been dealt another blow by the posting online of videos purporting to show rebel fighters committing atrocities, analysts say.

And on the back foot due to army advances on the ground, the opposition is also under international pressure to enter into dialogue with President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Videos posted online that showed a rebel mutilating a soldier’s corpse, and of a jihadist summarily executing 11 Assad supporters “will undermine the opposition’s narrative of an uprising against a dictator”, said Swedish expert on Syria, Aron Lund.

Oh yeah, our mainstream propaganda’s precious narrative. Don’t speak too soon Aron, the narrative lives, at least in the U.S., in ways like this courtesy of Angry Arab (links in original and I always modify AA’s crappy grammar):

Syria

Syrian rebels eating internal organs: Guardian versus the New York Times

Look how the Guardian reports it: “‘Anti-Assad fighter appears to eat internal organ of dead government soldier in horrific video’: “The figure in the video cuts the heart and liver out of the body and uses sectarian language to insult Alawites [Assad's minority sect]. At the end of the video [the man] is filmed putting the corpse’s heart into his mouth, as if he is taking a bite out of it.”

And now look at how Syrian “revolution” groupie Anne Barnard [of the New York Times] reports it, and notice the title is about Syrian regime crime: “One rebel commander recently filmed himself cutting out an organ of a dead pro-government fighter, biting it and promising the same fate to Alawites, members of Mr. Assad’s Shiite Muslim sect.”

AA doesn’t clarify that this first reference, to an atrocity recorded proudly by its perpetrator on video, is buried in the second sentence (the first sentence is propaganda accusing the Syrian army of being anti-Islamic) of the fourth paragraph of a ‘story’ whose first three paragraphs transcribe evidence-free atrocity accusations against the Syrian government. Angry Arab sums up Western ‘reporting’
on the incident:

That face of Syrian “revolutionaries”: munching on body organs
Did you notice how defensive Western media are about that video? I note these reactions:
1) The New York Times as usual buries the story under a different story about crimes of the regime.
2) Many news media reported that the guy is really upset because he saw crimes by the Syrian regime.
3) Some media actually quibbled with the facts: that he did not really eat the heart of the man but ate parts of the lung.
4) Many news media opted to totally ignore the story.
5) Many media put the story in the context of war crimes in Syria where the regime is solely responsible.
6) Some media focused on the man, saying that he really is not representative.

So, I disagree with the sense that imperial propaganda’s narrative no longer reigns supreme, though it is surely shaken in the _immediate_ aftermath of the grisly body parts eating video. The real hope, though, is for an ever-rapider decline in the credibility and viewership of that propaganda and that media. The imperial media takes hit after hit but its careerism requires that it not abandon its narrative no matter how foolish, so it suffers the consequences. And those are good consequences for anyone who wants a public better-informed, or at least less disinformed by capitalist and imperial greed.

The real news alternatives — more accurate and more fun — are out there just waiting to be better organized and delivered. Here are some very recent Syria accounts from what might be, in a sane and democratic media, a counter-narrative at least on an equal footing with the imperial one:

May 18: Vote Reflects Shift in Syrian Public Opinion (Franklin Lamb: “Opinion in Damascus and surrounding areas visited this past week, confirms this observer’s experience the past five months of a sharp and fairly rapid shift in opinion that now strongly favors letting the Syrian people themselves decide, without outside interference, whether the Assad regime will stay, and indeed, whether, the Baathist party will continue to represent majority opinion, not through wanton violence but rather via next June’s election.”)

May 17: The main opposition National Coalition now has to decide whether to take part in an international conference called by Moscow and Washington to push for a political solution … The [group], which insists that Assad’s departure is a key condition for a political solution, will decide in an Istanbul meeting on May 23 whether it will take part in the international conference.

May 17: Syria – FSA rebels under SAA heavy fire 17/05

May 15: Syria: Civilians Come Under Fire From Rebels (“The demonstrators were predominantly Syrian Palestinians, many from the Yarmouk district of Damascus who had fled when it was taken over by opposition forces eight months ago. Some screamed at us: ‘Please tell the world the truth! We don’t want the fighters here, we want the army to kill them!”)

May 14: Syrian Rebels Face Increasing Criticism For Human Rights Violations – Analysis (by IRIN, “the humanitarian news and analysis service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.”)

May 14: In Cairo, desperate Egyptian men search in vain for Syrian brides (“Men across the region are now seeking Syrian brides. In Turkey and Jordan, where refugee camps pepper the landscape, the desperation of the Syrians is far easier to spot as rich Persian Gulf men scour the camps to buy brides living in tents. Rape, child brides and temporary marriages are prevalent.”)
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CONFORMTOTHENARRATIVE CONFORMTOTHENARRATIVE CONFORMTOTHENARRATIVE

Sunday, April 21, 2013
Boston bomber and Syria

Notice that U.S. media are not reporting that the Boston bomber was an enthusiastic supporter of your Syrian “revolution”. He posted videos about it on his Youtube page.

Posted by As’ad AbuKhalil at 7:41 AM

Yup, let the self-censorship begin. Since April 20 (based on my Google search), the mainstream media has not mentioned the Tsarnaev brothers’ fundamentalist Syrian rebel sympathies. This even though there have been multiple mainstream articles in recent days on relations between Russia and the U.S. which mention the Syria rebellion. So, for example, in a USA Today column by Louise Branson we get this:

We’re fighting the same fight, has been [Putin's] refrain to U.S. presidents and officials. President Assad makes the same case in Syria. The Boston Marathon explosions have helped tip Putin’s argument. … Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the captured Boston marathon bomber will, over time, give answers about the brothers’ aims and ties.

Hey columnist Branson, haven’t you noticed that he’s already given ‘answers’ (that don’t fit the U.S. imperialist narrative)? … Take a look at his Youtube page.

Other very similar columns are in the Seattle Times and the Washington Post. Both discuss the bombings’ effect on Russia-U.S. relations, and they focus on Syria as a key conflict, but both also fail to mention the Tsarnaev brothers’ fundamentalist rebel sympathies. I understand the brothers’ sympathies are not the central focus of any of the three articles I’ve noted, but not mentioning those sympathies when you’re discussing Syria seems like self-censorship.

By the way, I was a little surprised by the negative reaction here at MyFDL to my Saturday article on the Tsarnaev brothers’ sympathies. (I thought it was obvious but) I hope the following comment I made there will help to clarify what the hell I’m about:

The mainstream media [back on April 19] says the Tsarnaev brothers were supporters of the Sunni fundamentalist side of the Syrian rebellion. Without apology I use those ‘facts’. If you’re opposed to U.S./EU/Saudi/Qatari imperialism in Syria, you post a post like mine.

Do you think the ‘conspiratorial’ theorizing about what ‘really’ happened will have any traction in the real world? We KNOW the majority of Americans, if they knew, would strongly oppose the U.S. de facto alliance with Al Qaeda and similar in Syria. You see that sentiment all the time on Yahoo discussion boards, for example. So I use the current newsworthy ‘facts’ to publicize (in tiny places like MyFDL) the realities that the imperialists want to keep quiet.

Nothing fancy or nuanced, I’m just one of those folks opposed to corporate globalist imperialism. And, I see a meme here that already resonates with regular America so I turn up the volume with these posts. Unfortunately I can’t turn it up much on tiny blogs, but every little bit helps. Frankly, as I’ve said before, the information war is in the mainstream media’s comment sections. Sadly it is not here at MyFDL.

P.S. — For the record, here are the two sources, the first mainstream (on the 19th), the second alternative (on the 20th), that noted the Tsarnaev brothers’ Syria sympathies:

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev … expresses sympathy for rebel fighters in Syria and elsewhere. One video bears the Russian title “For those who have a heart,” showing people being brutalized by uniformed men in a country the video identifies as Syria. “They are killing your brothers and sisters without any reason,” the Russian subtitles of the video read. “Simply because they say our Lord is Allah.”

There are signs that the brothers showed interest in the conflict in Syria, which has drawn al Qaida fighters and other militants from across the Muslim world and Europe, according to a U.S. counterterror official. …

The brothers had viewed videos about the plight of Syrian Muslims, the official said. Syria is the latest hotspot on the world map of jihad. Holy warriors a decade ago were inspired by videos about brutal combat between jihadis and Russian troops in the brothers’ family homeland …

P.S.2 — By the way 2, here is the U.S. and EU backed rebellion in action (hip tat to Angry Arab):

Islamist rebels are clashing with tribesmen in eastern Syria as struggles over the region’s oil facilities break out in the power vacuum left by civil war, activists said on Saturday. One dispute over a stolen oil truck in the town of Masrib in the province of Deir al-Zor, which borders Iraq, set off a battle between tribesmen and fighters from the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda linked rebel group, which left 37 killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. … Masrib tribesmen called for help from Assad’s forces against Nusra, according to the Observatory and a fighter with the Islamist group. Nusra responded by blowing up 30 houses after the battle, in which 17 rebels were killed, at least four of them foreigners, the fighter said on Skype.

Establishment writers, liberal and conservative, in careering or faith-based defiance of reality, continue to frame mainstream political processes as oppositional. The ‘huh?’ head scratching over Aditya Chakrabortty’s new Guardian article starts with the sub-head:

The economic abyss is a distortion peddled by the US right and Obama’s Democrats – just like Britain’s left – need to counter the myth

Wait … wh-at? You’re beseeching “Obama’s Democrats” to what? COUNTER the myth? But, aren’t they, I mean …

Obama demands fast action on fiscal cliff
Election behind him, Obama to talk “fiscal cliff”
Obama to Discuss ‘Fiscal Cliff’ with Labor Leaders

So can it be any more obvious who is leading the campaign to over-hype a fiscal slope into a cliff? Obama! Obama’s Democrats! I can’t believe you haven’t noticed this, so I ask why the perverse denial of reality? Are you just afraid of the career consequences of ditching the liberal/conservative oppositional frame? Have you looked at the main campaign contributors (Big Finance! Wall Street!) to Obama, the Obama Democrats, and to the Republicans, both this year and in 2008? Why hasn’t that blown up your oppositional fantasy world?

What agenda are you selling, Mr. Chakrabortty? The myth that we have two parties, one of which is ‘for us’ and the other ‘right wing’? Sorry, but a President-Obama-led ‘fiscal cliff’ scare campaign is not the place to push that. The evidence emphatically contradicts your thesis. (Helpful hint: peddle that stuff over abortion or gay marriage.)

If you want the details of what the Obama Democrats have planned regarding the slope, listen to former Senate Majority Leader and Obama Democrat Tom Daschle:

“I don’t think there’s any question that entitlement reform will be a part of whatever new agreement is reached,” former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said at an event here Thursday sponsored by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. “I do think cost containment for Medicare and Medicaid will be a very important part of the discussion.”

And when it gets to the final minutes, Obama’s Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will be ready to clang the debt limit alarm bells:

“Geithner’s role is going to be to ride shotgun on the debt limit and make sure that everybody is sufficiently alarmed about that,” said Robert Bixby, director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan advocate for responsible fiscal policy. “And that would help bring a negotiation to a conclusion.”

Or, just read Glenn Greenwald.

Like you say, we’ve all been here before, this cliff b.s. is the same as the preceding — and wildly successful for big finance and the right — bipartisan/multipartisan scare campaigns, the ones we saw in fall 2008 in the U.S. and in the spring 2010 in Britain, when

Democratic debate was railroaded; the wrong economic policy was followed – and it was all done to avert a wildly inflated threat.

Though in all three cases, a “wrong” economic policy for almost all of society was and is right, great, from the perspective of the rich, Big Finance, big banks, and the neoliberal ideologues who control the major parties in both Britain and the U.S.

Finally, Aditya, another example, your incoherent conclusion:

I can only hope that America’s Democrats learn their lesson from the British experience. Because the right here owned the language and framed the debate.

Again, uh, the opposition between the Democrats and “the right.” What agenda are you serving with that lie?

[Updated and more or less final Venezuelan election results are in Comment 49.]

Not saying Metamars wrote a great diary — What Would it Take for Stein/Honkala to Break Out of the 2% Ghetto? Hint: Go Nuclear — today (the whole deformed rat thing just wouldn’t work), but here he’s basically right and what he says is important:

Progressives and populists seem almost constitutionally unable to exploit the increasingly alarming and even absurd excesses of the corporate state to mount an effective counterattack. The Greens are just another clueless piece of flotsam and jetsam, thrashing about in a sea of befuddlement. They have lots of company from which to either take the wrong cues from, or else no cues, at all.

And then you have leftist Hugo Chavez reelected with 55% of the vote in Venezuela. Unlike ours, it was an election that mattered, and the left won resoundingly despite nearly all the media opposing Chavez. (One Western big lie is that Chavez dominates Venezuela media, when in fact state-controlled media has an only 5.4% market share.)

Jill Stein is not an American Hugo Chavez, and neither is Rocky Anderson. Neither was Ralph Nader.

And Hugo Chavez is not a knight in shining armor. He exists in a real and still precarious Venezuela where you can’t be pure and perfect and survive. George Ciccariello-Maher comments in Counterpunch that “the social welfare of the Venezuela people has been dramatically improved through the Mission system and the groundwork has been laid for a qualitative leap to a political system that breaks firmly with the past. But the present remains heavy with the residue of that past: in the corruption, the opportunism, and the multitude of halfhearted revolutionaries that surround Chávez and threaten to derail or reverse the process.”

From day one Chavez’s rule has been for and empowered by the working poor and the working class. Can Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson say that? Of course not. Can the Green Party say that? Of course not. Could Ralph Nader say that? Of course not. More specifically, when the class conflict is out in the open and both sides recognize an election as an instance of it, that election is won by the bottom 80% (that’s of course why class is taboo in the U.S. mainstream media). Pepe Escobar makes this point in RT, stating that Chavez’s overwhelming electoral strength is built on a class war that both sides are well aware of:

It is basically urban middle class, which would love to spend more – go to the malls all the time and sip Martinis in Miami like they always do, in fact in Venezuela, against the poor. Forty-three per cent of Chavez government’s budget goes to social policies. So he has been building in past years a more [egalitarian] society. If you compare this to other countries in the developing world, it is a great achievement.

… And this opposition between the poor and the middle class that aspire to live like the middle class in Europe or the US, you find the same in Venezuela, Argentina or Brazil. There is class struggle [that] is very hardcore all over these important countries in South America.

My comment over at Metamars, fwiw (emphasis added):

Definitely agree on the following: “Progressives and populists seem almost constitutionally unable to exploit the increasingly alarming and even absurd excesses of the corporate state to mount an effective counterattack. The Greens are just another clueless piece of flotsam and jetsam, thrashing about in a sea of befuddlement. They have lots of company from which to either take the wrong cues from, or else no cues, at all.”

But have some sympathy. The terminal loser-ism of the left and pretend populists is a product of the massive forces consciously fighting for the top class against a basically clueless bottom 80%. Some Green PR gal/guy’s great attention-getting strategy is not going to change this society. At best it increases Stein’s vote into the middle single digits instead of the low single digits. Stein herself is an imperfect candidate, very poorly suited for attracting working class or working poor votes or anything really other than hipster cool college student and professor votes. But even if you found the perfect candidate, some ethical combination of Huey Long and Ralph Nader, that candidate [would] have a helluva hard time getting 10% of the vote in this system.

No mainstream U.S. ‘news’ site has published the news below (as far as I can tell from Google News searching ‘china’ ‘generic’ and ‘drugs’), but good for the Chinese! How can its government pass this law, one our corporate masters are so afraid of they don’t want us to know about it? China has a responsive and populist government on health care, the opposite of what we get with our elections here in the U.S. So, if we adopted China’s dictatorship form of government would our health care be run in the public interest? ;->

China changes patent law in fight for cheaper drugs

Tan Ee Lyn, Reuters, June 9, 2012, 12:59 am

China’s drug-law revamp rattles Big Pharma

By Tan Ee Lyn, Reuters, June 9, 2012

China to license copies of patented medicines

New law allows companies to produce generic versions during emergencies, unusual circumstances, or in public interest.

Last Modified: 09 Jun 2012 05:22

UPDATE: I did an expanded re-run of that Google news search and found CNBC and MSN Money reprints of Tan Ee Lyn’s Reuters piece. As ThingsComeUndone notes below, this news should have a major impact on Big Pharma stock prices, and it’s the main duty of the financial press to keep its investor readers informed on such things.

Tavis Smiley and Cornel West attempted something very honorable this month, to take a big bus tour of the U.S. and try to put poverty and the poor into a national spotlight. It was an interesting and media-genic (if that’s a word) tour:

Having travelled to nine states and eighteen cities in just under two weeks, the Poverty Tour, like a communal “Love Train” (to quote the O’Jays), left its church-packed participants with the stories of families and young people struggling to find jobs. While facing homelessness, cuts (or coming cuts) in federal assistance, and a new social status (from middle-class to poor), these people shared a common story in the tearful frustration that their education and job experience had not saved them from social disaster.

They slept among the homeless, visited with white, black and native American families in provocative settings, but, hey, their tour was mostly ignored by the big, mainstream media. It failed.

The mainstream media is the corporate media, and their big corporate owners wanted August to be deficit hysteria month. And it was deficit hysteria month. They succeeded.

This is our media reality, and IT IS KILLING THIS COUNTRY. But something that never gets much discussion or play is a solution to the everlasting nightmare:

We need to free the mass media from capitalist control and disperse it among different democratically elected factions of popular opinion.

As I added in that comment, of course the solution is impossible. But it’s impossible in part because no one ever talks about it. To hell with TINA on this corporate-owned mass media.

Not that the corporate-owned politicians and electoral system isn’t an equal or even greater problem, but even with publicly financed elections the popular will would still contend with massive resistance by the corporate-controlled mainstream media. It would still ignore issues that matter to the great mass of us (i.e., poverty), and blast away at us with their huge megaphones, promoting the handing over of more of our wealth to the rich (i.e., deficit hysteria). 

Okay, technically, yeah, my solution violates our Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution’s First Amendment. But so does public financing of elections or any sort of control over campaign finances. What does that tell you about our established way of interpreting the Constitution?

Dean Baker pointed out on Saturday an important fact, perhaps the fact that allowed the maid to report Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged assault. Haven’t seen this in any mainstream publication (emphasis added):

Union Maid Reported Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s Sexual Assault
Saturday, 21 May 2011 07:39

This point should have been mentioned in a NYT article on the risk of sexual assault/harassment that housekeepers face in hotels. As the article notes, many housekeepers are reluctant to bring such attacks to the attention of their supervisors and/or law enforcement both out of embarrassment, but also out of fear of losing their jobs.

In this particular case, the housekeeper belonged to a union that has provisions in its contract that explicitly require the management to take cases of sexual assault or harassment seriously. This meant the housekeeper knew that she could make a complaint to management and not worry about being ridiculed or putting her job at risk. This fact would have been worth mentioning in the article.

“Worth mentioning”? C’mon Dean, you could use stronger language than that! (smile)

Anyway, a Saturday article in the Arizona Republic, also on the risks of sexual assault and harassment that hotel maids face, also fails to mention the fact that being in a union typically means there will be job contract provisions that protect workers who report sexual assault or harassment.

I’m seeing a pattern here, anyone else!? Union Member comments at the bottom of the Dean Baker article:

Chances are greater of seeing an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker and a Black Swan in the same tree than a journalist acknowledging the many, many, positive non-financial benefits of unions, even to … non-members and their families! …

Meanwhile, the litany of obvious union shortcomings is frequently recited in the media, but not in an effort to understand their role or improve their performance but to stigmatize and weaken them.

Anyway again, it’s not just a key, union-supportive fact being missing from the mainstream media, but the ‘why’ and the ‘what to do about the why’ that matter.

How to persuade the reader that the actual direction of contemporary politics is toward a political system the very opposite of what the political leadership, the mass media, and think tank oracles claim that it is, the world’s foremost exemplar of democracy?

– S.S. Wolin

I said: That [corporations are people] ruling was a nightmare in theory, but even if the SCt had ruled the other way, we’d just get more of what we have now, which is a completely corporation-dominated politics.

Donkeytale responded: That ruling was more than a nightmare in theory. It has huge practical implications. Watch and see.

And I elaborated: . . . corporations already more or less rule this country. The only thing they and theirs’re afraid of at this point is riots and shit like that, so they will occasionally throw the rabble a bone. This is the way it’s been for awhile; we’ve long been post-democracy in the U.S., the death knell was two or three decades ago.

BTW, I’m not saying we had anything more than a ragged, corrupt, semi-democracy from the 1930s to the 1970s, but it seems to me simply a fact that union members had more sway over the political system back then, and for awhile almost 50% of [working] U.S. adults were in unions. But it’s a minor point . . . At this point popular control through the normal electoral channels is close enough to nothing to be meaningless. That’s what matters and will matter going forward, and that all happened before the SCT’s big decision.

Only later did I stumble on Monday’s Chris Hedges essay, Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction, which is an extended rant/riff on Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Hedges’ essay is a fiery, intellectually intense deja vu of that little exchange with donk. He begins:

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

Here’s another great paragraph by Hedges derived from Wolin:

Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media’s censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.

Read it, it’s a fantabulous consciousness raising rant! I’m going out and getting the Wolin book, myself. Chalmers Johnson wrote an enlightening and enthusiastic essay of Wolin’s book back in May, 2008. (A minor point, btw, is that Wolin’s sense of the ‘real democracy-ness’ of the New Deal days matches my own) (emphasis added):

. . . Wolin introduces three new concepts to help analyze what we have lost as a nation. His master idea is "inverted totalitarianism," which is reinforced by two subordinate notions that accompany and promote it — "managed democracy" and "Superpower," the latter always capitalized and used without a direct article. . . .

Wolin writes, "Our thesis is this: it is possible for a form of totalitarianism, different from the classical one, to evolve from a putatively ‘strong democracy’ instead of a ‘failed’ one." His understanding of democracy is classical but also populist, anti-elitist and only slightly represented in the Constitution of the United States. "Democracy," he writes, "is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs." It depends on the existence of a demos — "a politically engaged and empowered citizenry, one that voted, deliberated, and occupied all branches of public office." Wolin argues that to the extent the United States on occasion came close to genuine democracy, it was because its citizens struggled against and momentarily defeated the elitism that was written into the Constitution.

"No working man or ordinary farmer or shopkeeper," Wolin points out, "helped to write the Constitution." He argues, "The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete. . . ." Wolin can easily control his enthusiasm for James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, and he sees the New Deal as perhaps the only period of American history in which rule by a true demos prevailed. . . .

On inverted totalitarianism’s "self-pacifying" university campuses compared with the usual intellectual turmoil surrounding independent centers of learning, Wolin writes, "Through a combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation funds, joint projects involving university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system. No books burned, no refugee Einsteins. . . ."

The main social sectors promoting and reinforcing this modern Shangri-La are corporate power, which is in charge of managed democracy, and the military-industrial complex, which is in charge of Superpower. The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its primary tool is privatization. Managed democracy aims at the "selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry" under cover of improving "efficiency" and cost-cutting.

Johnson describes Wolin’s surprisingly optimistic conclusions and his own, far less so:

Toward the end of his study he produces a wish list of things that should be done to ward off the disaster of inverted totalitarianism: "rolling back the empire, rolling back the practices of managed democracy; returning to the idea and practices of international cooperation rather than the dogmas of globalization and preemptive strikes; restoring and strengthening environmental protections; reinvigorating populist politics [yada yada] and rolling back the distortions of a tax code that toadies to the wealthy and corporate power."

Unfortunately, this is more a guide to what has gone wrong than a statement of how to fix it, particularly since Wolin believes that our political system is "shot through with corruption and awash in contributions primarily from wealthy and corporate donors." It is extremely unlikely that our party apparatus will work to bring the military-industrial complex and the 16 secret intelligence agencies under democratic control. Nonetheless, once the United States has followed the classical totalitarianisms into the dustbin of history, Wolin’s analysis will stand as one of the best discourses on where we went wrong.

Consider reading both essays and maybe buying the book. I think Wolin’s perspective (along with his new vocabulary) may be the first satisfyingly complete grok of the deep, systemic ‘democracy problem’ we’ve all seen most clearly since 2000 in the U.S.