This is a must read. It's about real democracy.

Deepening Democracy

Our system of food security is being destroyed in the name of economic growth and economic liberalization, and people don't have enough food to eat. Our farmers are being ravished by seed companies, being pushed into debt, and committing suicide. This system is going to cost lives even in the US, where people don't know how they'll pay for their health or retirement.

The way out of this violent cycle is to deepen democracy – to bring decisions that directly affect people's lives as close as possible to where people are and to where they can take responsibility. If a river is flowing through some communities, those communities should have the power and the responsibility to decide how the water is used and whether it is to be polluted. The state has no business giving to Coca-Cola the groundwater of a valley in Kerala, resulting in rich farmland going totally dry. Communities need to take back sovereignty and delegate trusteeship to the state only as appropriate.

What we have now is a regime of absolute rights in the hands of corporations with zero responsibility for the environmental and social devastation and the political instabilities they are creating. If we want to reactivate and rejuvenate democracy, we have to bring back the economic content.
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Another must read on how democracy is being reduced to a sophisticated marketing campaign.

Inventing "W, The Presidential Brand"
The Rise of QVC Politics

Postmodern consumer culture only insists upon the [commodity] form through which meanings must be channeled to have [perceived] value. It is quite sincere in its incitements to consume as a cultural producer. [This] form [is now] the preeminent site through which people experience and express the social world [including their politics].

The designers of the Bush store clearly recognize this. And, they raise the ante by closely mimicking, not the disorganized Kmart-like selection of goods found at the Democratic National Committee Web site (www.dnc.org), but the branded and stylized shopping experience of a Macy's or a Dillard's. Comparing the DNC site with the www.georgewbushstore.com site is akin to comparing the presentation and quality of goods at an open-air urban flea market with those available on QVC. With its friendly and chatty patina, careful selection of quality branded goods, combined with good customer service and frequent electronic and interactive audience testimonials, QVC is a prototype of "relationship marketing." It is also the prototype for Ted Jackson's version of political life under a Republican market society. The way to win "brand loyalty," for the long-term, with carefully targeted populations, is to practice politics the QVC way, and fuse the identity of the organization (the Republican party) and icons of its leader ("W") with that of its appropriately chosen and high quality commodities. It's a building block to "stage six," where the high-quality branded commodity (and the services connected to that commodity) are a synecdoche for the Republican Party, and ultimately, for the government of the United States. This is what I believe that Ted Jackson meant by titling his article for PPB Online, "Riding the Coattails of Brand Loyalty."

Of course, this is not a vision of democracy. It is a form of consumer-based fascism, or, as Douglas Rushkoff trenchantly put it, "market fascism." Walter Benjamin's comments that Fascism is about the introduction of aesthetics into political life finds an early 21st Century echo in the www.georgewbushstore.com e-commerce site.

Benjamin warns us that all versions of fascism set the table for war. The rise of QVC politics is a somber harbinger of that looming possibility.

<  thanks to wood s lot