BTW I want to post an apology to rdf who also flagged this story and actually beat me to posting a diary.  I'm afraid my lazy long excerpt and poll seen to have stolen  the readership for the other diary...

rdf said

As I have stated many times before, without a realistic plan on how to overcome the power of the vested interests there is little chance of any of this happening. Expecting the people to demand reform is wishful thinking. It is nice for someone to put the whole argument in one place, however.

and I think this goes to the heart of the matter -- a troubling question that should be engaged seriously: how can the power of vested interests be overcome -- aside from the very expensive and destructive well-known ways like armed revolution, civilisational crash, etc?

any examples from history of a ruling class being deposed peacefully?

one way to overcome the vested interests is to withdraw from their official, command/control economy and divert more and more of the nation's labour, intelligence and wealth into the informal sector, until the institutions of the informal sector simply replace the atrophied, sclerotic institutions of the old elite.  this building of parallel institutions and withdrawal from official structures is a very old technique:  Gandhi and his charka and salt-gathering, for example, or various local currency efforts.

all it would take to bring down Coca Cola or Mickey D's is for everyone to stop buying their stuff.  this vulnerability to the customer is imho what drives their obsession with creating captive markets and monopolies, so that the customer will not have that option.  right now f'rexample Big Chemical Ag is mobilising to try to exterminate organic agriculture -- or utterly co-opt it -- because more and more consumers are voting with their pocketbooks for organic food.  so Big Ag mobilises via "health" scares, HSA "food security" laws, more and more restrictive legislation to strangle small farmers and producers, rewriting organic standards into semantic nullity, stuffing FDA upper echelons with their myrmidons, etc.  meanwhile the gene vandals are doing their damnedest to contaminate every form of plant life on the planet with GMO pollen, so that there will be no non-GMO option for consumers to choose.  just like the auto/rubber/oil barons made sure that LA residents no longer had the option of rail transit.  and so on.  capitalists may preach about choice and swashbuckling entrepreneurial risk-taking all day long, but their actions are all about eliminating choice (for the customer) and risk (for themselves).

eventually their control mania -- be it Big Ag or the MPAA/RIAA or the Fibbies or whoever wants to be the boss of us -- gets so intense that they leave so small a space of "legitimate" activity for the citizenry that most everyone is outside it -- the majority of the population becomes by official definition insurgent or outlaw or scofflaw.  this I think is the tipping point where a majority of the people have no confidence/trust in or respect for the regime, and exist in sullen covert, or enraged overt, resistance to it...

so what happens when everyone gets sick of Windoze and uses Linux, when everyone gets sick of copyrighted music and video and just makes and trades their own, when everyone gets sick of being id'd and xrayed and interrogated and stop-n-searched and just stops travelling except by foot, bike, and hitchhiking?  what happens if local currencies spring up everywhere and the finance feudalists can't get their mitts on local transactions to skim the cream?

I know I'm dreaming here.  these examples are far too simplistic.  but it's the only (mostly) nonviolent way I see to muzzle the power of the corporate overlords.  most of what they sell us, we don't need;  they spend billions per annum trying to make us believe we do, which tells us everything we need to know, right there... :-)

anyway, I think rdf's practical question -- how do we even get near CJ's sensible proposals, with so much powerful vested interest poised to crush any such programme by any means necessary [don't forget rootless' list of murdered 3w leaders]? -- is terribly important.  I gnaw on this question daily.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...