In the long-form documentary "Requiem for the American Dream" (73 minutes, now available on DVD) Noam Chomsky "exposes with searing clarity the forces and policies behind the coordinated campaign to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a select few" [from package blurb].
He defines and dissects democracy, especially as it has become wholly perverted within the American context (with the same only slightly differing and lagging in the Canadian context). The outrageous and dispiriting demise of the once and future dream in Chomsky's soliloquies is countered in his succinct, hopeful coda.
The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power
1. Reduce democracy
2. Shape ideology
3. Redesign the economy
4. Shift the burden
5. Attack solidarity
6. Run the regulators
7. Engineer elections
8. Keep the rabble in line
9. Manufacture consent
10. Marginalize the population
The majority (70%) of the population has no way of influencing public policy and it knows it.
"What it's led to is a population that's angry, frustrated, hates institutions. It's not acting constructively to try to respond to this. There is popular mobilization and activism, but in very self-destructive directions. It's taking the form of unfocused anger, attacks on one another, and on vulnerable targets. That's what happens in cases like this. It is corrosive of social relations, but that's the point. The point is to make people hate and fear each other, and look out only for themselves, and don't do anything for anyone else."
