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.