Gag rule : on the suppression of dissent and the stifling of democracy

"Dissent is democracy. Democracy is in trouble. Never before, Lewis Lapham argues, have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream conversation, so marginalized and muted by a government that recklessly disregards civil liberties, and by an ever more concentrated and profit-driven media in which the safe and the salable sweep all uncomfortable truths from view." "In the midst of the "war on terror"--Which makes the hunt for Communists in the 1950s look, in its clarity of aim and purpose, like the Normandy landings on D-Day - we face a crisis a democracy as serious as any in our history. The Bush administration makes no secret of its contempt for a cowed and largely silenced electorate, and without bothering to conceal its purpose the government coordinates "not the defense of the American citizenry against a foreign enemy but the protection of the American plutocracy from the American democracy."" "Gag Rule is a call to action in defense of one of our most important liberties, the right to raise our voices in dissent and have those voices heard."--Jacket.… (more)