Brave New America: On Corporate Totalitarianism, Electoralist Passivity, and Inauthentic Opposition
By Paul Street

In a truly participatory democracy elections would constitute but one element in a process of popular discussion, consultation, and involvement. Today, elections have replaced participation...Elections enact a kind of primal myth in which "the people" designate who is to rule them...an election, at one and the same time, empowers a Few and causes the Many to submit, to consent to be obedient.

- Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 147-148.

This news overdose on the elections has bred a kind of passivity among millions, as they wait in front of TV screens and computers, like deer caught in headlights.
- Mumia Abu Jamal, ZNet (August 10, 2008)

My forthcoming book "Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics" (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, August 2008) exposes Barack Obama as a conservative, corporate, militarist Democrat posing as a democratic progressive. It provides a detailed empirical case for this judgment and an analysis of how true progressives (those who advocate actual left, radical, social-democratic policies in the United States) can most effectively respond to the Obama phenomenon - and to the broader corporate-controlled political system and culture it reflects - whether Obama wins or loses. Key to any such response is answering a number of questions: To what extent are U.S. government and political culture meaningfully democratic in the 21st century? What if Obama's deeply deceptive promise of "change" is part of an effort by dominant U.S. political and economic elites to preserve and expand the American System's antidemocratic characteristics and nature? How should (true) progressives think about the meaning of Obamaism as they struggle for democratic transformation in the U.S.?

LINK TO CON.