dulled, pummeled, and badgered -- oh my

A guy named Carne Ross wrote in the Huffington Post the following:

----------------------- [quote from article] -- [The last line is the most important]: The political methods of the 20th century are, it appears, less and less effective for the world of the 21st.

The nature of globalization is without precedent: accelerating interconnectedness, with billions of people interacting constantly in a massive, dynamic, and barely comprehensible process.

Yet the assumption persists that the political processes and institutions designed in the 20th century, or earlier, remain appropriate and effective in this profoundly different state of affairs. In fact it appears that the ability of national governments and international authorities to manage the severe problems arising from this new dispensation are declining, despite their claims to the contrary.

...Effects in the real world should be the test...
Experts say that the internationally-agreed Basel III rules to reduce risky banking practice are insufficient, and they are already being watered down by banks’ lobbying. …

At home, democracy has been subverted. Corporations donate copiously to both parties to insure their influence. Politicians initiate legislation in order to extract rents from big business. Private prison owners lobby for longer sentences. There are now lobbying organizations representing the interests of lobbyists.

There is a more pernicious consequence of the repetitive but tenuous claims to effectiveness made by the practitioners of conventional politics and government: everyone else is dulled into stupefied inaction. If “the authorities” claim to be on top of these problems, what does it matter what we do? …
We have been pummeled into a kind of dazed apathy, endlessly badgered by politicians that they can fix it, when in fact we are the most potent agents of change.----------------------- [end excerpt, Huffington Post, Dec. 12, 2011]

And -- the last line is the most important.

-------------------------------------
He followed that up with an article telling the reader how he can be a "potent agent of change" -- a list of nine or ten things, and Voting was not even in the list.

There goes my whole world view...
(More music -- fudge -- eeehhgh...)

-30-