"What remains of democracy is largely the right to choose among commodities. Business leaders have..."

“What remains of democracy is largely the right to choose among commodities. Business leaders have long explained the need to impose on the population a “philosophy of futility” and “lack of purpose in life,” to “concentrate human attention on the more superficial things that compromise much of fashionable consumption.” Deluged by such propaganda from infancy, people may then accept their meaningless and subordinate lives and forget ridiculous ideas about managing their own affairs. They may abandon their fate to corporate managers and the PR industry and, in the political realm, to the self described “intelligent minorities” who serve and administer power.”

- Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003)