Yes, we have to come awake and view our manipulated world with brand new eyes!

Worth a read.

John Andrews at DissidentVoice
The Merchant of Menace

About fifteen years ago I was a normal person. I had an average job, to help pay my average mortgage and average living costs. I was of average intelligence and had received an average education. I thought I pretty much understood how the world worked, because I followed the news every day on the BBC and frequently read The Times newspaper which, as everyone knew, was the best newspaper in the whole world. If anyone had suggested otherwise I would have been slightly offended, as if I’d been called stupid. But the fact was, like most normal people I knew next to nothing about how the world really works.......

.............But still the nagging question remained: how exactly did such an obviously flawed belief system come to exert so much real power over our supposedly fool-proof democracy, with its much-vaunted system of “checks and balances”?

Nancy MacLean’s recent publication Democracy in Chains pretty much answers that question. It’s a superbly researched account of how one man, the economist James Buchanan, helped the super-rich to seize control of our system of government. As I was reading her book, I was continually reminded of Bakan’s work, in The Corporation, where he showed that the “personality” of corporations is almost indistinguishable from that of psychopaths. Much of Buchanan’s work, too, could be seen as psychopathic – in my view.

The basic reasons for this, I think, are two-fold. Firstly he appeared to not only have no concern about the effects of his theories on the vast majority of ordinary human beings or the planet in general, but he appears to have shown contempt and disdain for anyone other than the super-rich or those he deemed his intellectual equals. ......