Click here to access article by Yves Smith from her blog Naked Capitalism.
This politically liberal blogger often has insights on how the ruling class manages their "democracy", although she would never put it that way. In this piece she describes their use of front groups such as media outlets and non-profit political groups such as RATE to circumscribe and limit the influence of people in government who would like to curb the excesses of corporations and financial interests.
I applaud Smith for doing this, but as a liberal she seems totally unaware of how the same methods apply to the shaping of the thoughts of 99% plus of Americans to support an economic system that is robbing them daily and turning them and their children into indentured servants of the ruling class of capitalists. She stays safely within acceptable limits of capitalist discourse by criticizing bankers instead of a whole class of capitalists who have rigged their system to serve themselves. Not only do the latter use front groups in media, non-profits, they also use front groups like the Tea Party, legislators sponsored by the ruling class, the privately owned Fed which controls our money, and an educational system used to indoctrinate us, to cull out political dissidents, and to promote those who, like herself, stay safely within acceptable limits of political-economic discourse.
But, of course, that is the nature of ruling class societies, and we humans have been plagued with them for the last 10,000 of the more than 150,000 years of human existence. It is only now that as a human race we face intolerable consequences if we continue to tolerate such social-economic arrangements: the destruction of our habitat, ever increasing wars, poverty, police states, exhaustion of energy, etc.
