[lit-ideas] Re: Fukuyama, Sen and Democracy

Here's Naomi Klein on her book The Shock Doctrine and the Rise of Disaster 
Capitalism.  Citizens would exercise rights if there were citizens.  Today 
there are consumers who relinquish their rights for the privilege to consume 
more and more of shrinking resources that they have no clue are shrinking.  In 
the end, all political systems (democracy, communism, everybody)boil down to an 
elite and everyone else.  We are very much an autocratic system, only our 
autocracy is the corporations.  We do everything in service of corporations, to 
whom we pay taxes via the government.  We eat what they say, drink what they 
say, think what they say, drive what they say, and on and on.  Soon, as Chomsky 
says, perhaps we'll breathe the air they would love to own.  The part about the 
air is, I hope, an overstatement, but for the rest, Naomi Klein is a must 
listen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNzcJImX4Ew&feature=related

 
 
--- On Sun, 8/24/08, Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

....Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize winner in economics, that democracies
are best suited for responding to economic as well as other kinds of
disasters.

Sen argues that a political system where citizens are able to exercise
political rights, is more open to pressure to respond to suffering.
 

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