There is no democracy in America. We barely resemble a republic these days. We've become a fascist state, with the neat American twist that we change our fascist leader every 4-8 years. (Maybe.) Said elections are bereft of actual choices: Republicans had McCain thrust upon them, while Democrats argued between the six of Hillary and the half-dozen of Obama. Compute the turnout of voters, which was admittedly high in 2008 but still nowhere near what you'd expect in an actual free, open, democratic society.

It's time Americans faced facts about where America is, what place our nation has carved for itself in this world. This is a fascist military state; our liberties fade slowly away, our military budget exceeds that of the ten nations closest to us in military spending, we export violence on a daily basis, and are responsible for more deaths in the last 8 years than *AN* other nation on earth in that time. Were it not for the fact that our rise to fascism includes a great deal of global economic dominance (and that our economic partners are also, by and large, fascistic or totalitarian nations), an alliance of nations would already be rising against us. However, our fascist conglomerate of banks holds the purse-strings, and you can't go to war against the guy who holds the note on your loans.

Most Americans are fooled by the increasingly limited freedoms they enjoy: but a simple mental exercise can demonstrate exactly how much liberty Americans have surrendered to their corporate, government, and military masters. If you're old enough, just remember how simple and easy it was to fly cross-country in, say, 1987. You could walk into an airport with 2-3 carry on bags, determine the next available flight to anywhere, buy a one-way ticket with cash, and then hop on the plane for a weekend adventure. Not one of these activities is even possible with today's air travel; most of these actions would cause you to be flagged and questioned by FAA security.

Sirota he fails to realize, as do so many mired in the "old ways," that it was this imperial attitude that journalists are a "fourth estate," an unofficial branch of government which led to a system where citizens had no choice but to trust those guardians to be perfectly ethical and true. They were not, and here is where we find ourselves today: a class of people who feel they are entitled to be guardians of the Truth, who yet fail to perform their duties responsibly. Instead they become defenders of the system; Nazi Germany had newspapers and journalists, after all.

What Sirota has misidentified as a need for journalism is in fact a need for the free flow of information. That is what democracy cannot live without: whether the free flow happens through journalists and other media, as it did in the past, or whether it is citizens passing data amongst themselves (hello, bloggers!), without that flow of information democracy will suffocate. That flow of information has been stymied by the old-school journalists who feel they have a right to control that information: they decide what we will and will not know about their friends and cocktail companions in Washington DC. And when the citizens start doing it themselves via blogs and the internet? These old guardians resist, refuse to cooperate, and even try to tear down the new system which provides a flow of information that is more free and available than ever in the past.

Our educational system is in a pit of despair, and we're digging the pit deeper. We spend ten to twenty times more on warfare than we do educating our future youth, and most public high schools (especially those in impoverished, minority districts) have military recruitment personnel in the guide of "educators." Each year we teach fewer subjects in order to prep students for federally-mandated tests that were put in place to judge teacher performance and not student development. David Sirota, head buried so deep in self-interest that the daylight of reality trickles in only one photon at a time, is way off in thinking that newspapers are the key element of democracy: no, literacy and education are far more important, and this is quite obvious even to the dull-witted: if you can't read, then what the hell good is a newspaper going to do you? If you can't think critically (the cornerstone of education is critical thinking), then how can you separate the wheat from the bullshit?

You can't, and our leadership at both federal and state levels knows this. Our citizenry has been dumbed-down for over a generation now, and we are at the point where teens can't locate their own home city or state on a blank map of the US. (Many adults have trouble with it as well.)

So you've got a government that spends vast sums on warfare and destruction while reducing and eliminating programs which support or create national infrastructure. This same government completely destroyed our national education system, created impediments to both teaching and learning, and now proposes to turn the minds of our children over to "private sector" educational companies.

BTW, none of this stems from my own self-interest: I am not a teacher, and I have no children. I am, in fact, a former journalist who agrees with Sirota's thesis. But he's fired early and gone wide of the target: even the dearth of journalism can be attributed to failure in education. My generation of j-school had reporters who had covered Vietnam, who had grown up with the ideal of Edward Murrow or Walter Cronkite. Today's journalistic heroes? Wolf Blitzer? Gimme a break.

We don't need more journalists and newspapers; we more teachers and better schools. Period. Once we get that, everything else - good journalists, brilliant scientists, able engineers - will follow.