How the Corporate Takeover of Society Is Leaving Us Feeling Empty Inside

From the Guardian via AlterNet:

How do you engineer a bland, depoliticised world, a consensus built around consumption and endless growth, a dream world of materialism and debt and atomisation, in which all relations can be prefixed with a dollar sign, in which we cease to fight for change? You delegate your powers to companies whose profits depend on this model.

Power is shifting: to places in which we have no voice or vote. Domestic policies are forged by special advisers and spin doctors, by panels and advisory committees stuffed with lobbyists. The self-hating state withdraws its own authority to regulate and direct. Simultaneously, the democratic vacuum at the heart of global governance is being filled, without anything resembling consent, by international bureaucrats and corporate executives. The NGOs permitted – often as an afterthought – to join them intelligibly represent neither civil society nor electorates. (And please spare me that guff about consumer democracy or shareholder democracy: in both cases some people have more votes than others, and those with the most votes are the least inclined to press for change.)

More here.

As if it's not bad enough when we rent ourselves out for half the day, a.k.a. "go to work," and submit ourselves to their soft-touch bland authoritarianism.  No, they want to have it all.  Their mass media products have colonized our minds, continually feeding us concepts and ideas which serve ultimately to benefit them and only them, and it doesn't matter how twisted and warped our thoughts become as a result.  As long as they're making more and more and more money.  In addition to polluting our minds, they also ravage our precious ecology, treating the world as both an infinite resource, which it is not, as well as an infinite garbage can.  The planet's getting hotter, and there will be hell to pay for it, but we're the ones who will pay, who are already paying, not them, never them--they create carefully manged realities for themselves, gated communities with security guards who weed out undesirables like you and me.  They sell us dangerous chemicals and call it food and drink.  They squeeze our wages and make us beg for scraps from their corporate feasts.  Collectively, they are the Devil, but with really good PR.

And, of course, they've almost completely undermined any sense of democratic rule we once had.  That is, they've bought, and now own and operate, the government.  But that's old news.  The new news is that they continue to tighten their grip on the public sector: in recent years corporate forces have gone a long way towards crowding out what public discussion remains about how to best promote the general welfare through an artificially created social conceptualization of what constitutes good and bad for the people.

This shit's getting downright Orwellian.

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