Glenn, thank you for another excellent examination of the internals of the MSM. Seminal work my friend. I've been advocating for a long while that dissembling the rotting media machine and doing it loudly until the sounds reach the avg citizen is vitally important. No one is doing the quality of work in this area that you are. Sorry to fawn, but IMO it is richly deserved. The continued exposure of who really runs the media, for what purposes, and the methods used is incredibly useful in successfully discrediting the stranglehold and the information that the MSM presents. It is what avg citizens need to see and hear, so that, eventually, they will turn away from the MSM and get more accurate information from other, more accurate sources more representative of what a free press was always supposed to be.

As usual, Pow Wow makes another valuable contribution:

We need to recognize and publicly expose, as Glenn has done so clearly here, the actual opposition that the public faces, which is in fact opposition to our American form of government itself: democracy-hostile control of (and by) those who hold power in our democratic institutions and media outlets. And now with a Supreme Court that, as Glenn put it recently, "rul[es] in favor of the state over defendants, the executive over the legislature, and the corporation over the individual" we're seeing fundamentally anti-American jurisprudence in action, and we shouldn't be afraid to call it what it is, if we want to fight for and save what's left of our founding ideals and our system of self-government.

I natter on about this topic often, and will continue to do so because, IMO, only strong, massive action by an aware, concerned citizenry will ever have a hope of breaking the iron grip that money and corporate interests have on OUR government.

As Glenn continues to show how, in nearly every corner of politics, government, and media, the deck is obscenely stacked against the will of the people (from war to healthcare and everything in between), it becomes increasingly clear how small efforts by largely un-unified organizations have almost no chance of getting the gov't back in the hands of the citizenry.

We simply need to consolidate all of these efforts into a massive array of civil actions which cannot be stopped. How that would go down is not exactly clear to me, but things like mass work stoppages, mass financial protests, etc are all we have that will be understood by the power-mongering oligarchs who just don't seem to give a shit about the good of this country, its citizens, or its future.

I mention it again because someone earlier in comments asked Glenn to write about electing more and better democrats, but given the vastness, depth, and totality of the rot we see, putting more people into the system who we think are good for us, only to see them slowly turn into cogs of the machine, is not going to bring about the change that WE can believe in. Something more is needed. Something bigger.

There are simply tons of smart people here and elsewhere who think something needs to be done, and fast. The questions are: 1) What can we do to unify these people and put something truly massive and meaningful together, and 2) Can we do it before it is too late to save the America we have known and loved?

When I look at things and "get real" about the situation, it is very grim. The existing power structure owns almost everything, and they continue to consolidate their power at an exponential rate. Soon, average citizens will have no influence over ANYthing (and it truly feels like we are already there on some days). We are, IMO, only a generation way from a completely fascist state.

Glad you have seen the light. Notice you have received exactly one response? And it was from the *gasp* dreaded LondonLad. And now I am the second crazy(!)to respond. Notice a trend? Two responses to such a completely logical and indisputably true post by you.

If you have really made the paradigm shift and aren't going to let them draw you back into their fantasies, you are going to want to prepare yourself. Perpare to become very frustrated with your "peers" here.

I've felt like this for some time, and have spoken on these pages about it on several occasions. The more Glenn writes, the more I learn it is likely the only real answer that has any chance of effecting any flavor of "real change." The fact that it hasn't caused instant massing of troops at the border doesn't frustrate me to the extent it does you. While I certainly feel the urgency that you do, I look at this as more of a planting of a seed in hopes that its merits will take root and eventually gain a wider acceptance, a flourishing of ideas and support, and then ultimately turning into an organization, followed by mass action. You can make fun of my analogies if you want, but how much success has your chosen method of motivation had?

I think what Glenn does here is absolutely invaluable, and the more exposure he gets on a national basis, the better the chances that his ideas will gain widespread acceptance, and the better the chances masses of people will come to be educated about what's being done to them. The comments section is a learning tool for me. And perhaps some day it will be a breeding ground of action on a scale like we've never seen.

Rome wasn't built in a day. Waking up near 300 million zombies and taking back what is rightfully ours won't happen in that timeframe either. We are looking at a hundred-headed monster here, and decapitating them all is going to take some real doing.