Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" is illustrated in this short video. The idea is that political leaders often take advantage of natural and manufactured crises--which cause many folks to become infantilized in response to the trauma--to ram through unpopular policies, quite often "free market" initiatives. Klein's idea has intrigued many, but also received mixed reviews from economists.
Glenn Greenwald points out that Americans are commonly persuaded and controlled through the use of vague terms. One example is the word "terrorism," which tends to be applied only where the person committing violence is a Muslim and not when non-Muslims commit comparable acts. A "militant" has come to mean any person who dies when an American weapon explodes. "Class warfare" and "Civil liberties" are other commonly used vague terms that are actually used as "tools for misleading political arguments." Another such vague term is "rule of law," which originally referred to the idea that "we are all equally bound to a common set of rules, regardless of power position, or prestige." It originally meant that "nobody is above the law or below the law." Citing the work of Thomas Carruthers, Greenwald noted that the biggest challenge is to prevent elites from living above the rule of law. The founding fathers, who personally "loved inequality," agreed that a central requirement for the new country is that everyone would comport with the law; without this requirement, they agreed that the country would not be "legitimate and just." Greenwald explained that with regard to "rule of law," things aren't working out so well in modern day America. The biggest problem is that "we no longer believe in the principle itself." With regard to journalists (see below), they now tend to be situated as insiders rather than outsider watchdogs who, in less dysfunctional times, embraced the motto: "Afflict the powerful, comfort the powerless." Greenwald has been out and about, promoting his new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some. For many additional videos of his talks, see here.
Matt Taibbi dissects a proposed deal between the SEC and Citigoup, after Judge Jed Rakoff harpoons it:
In the deal, Citi made a $160 million profit, while its customers lost $700 million. . . . So to recap: a unit of Citigroup, having repeatedly violated the same laws and having repeatedly violated the SEC’s own cease-and-desist orders and injunctions, is dragged into court one more time for committing a massive fraud. And what does the SEC do? It doesn’t even bring up Citi’s history of ignoring the SEC’s own order, slaps the bank with a fractional fine, refuses to target any individuals, allows the bank to walk away without an admission of wrongdoing, and puts a cherry on the top by describing the $160 million heist not as a crime, but as unintentional negligence.
At Common Dreams, Matt Taibbi reports on Mitt Romney's insulting and and inequitable plan to address past financial abuses with new financial abuses:
Your typical Medicare/Social Security recipient might already have been ripped off three different ways in this era. He might have been sold a crappy mortgage or a refi by a Countrywide-type firm (which often targeted the elderly). He might then also have unwittingly become an investor in such mortgages and seen the value of his retirement holdings devastated (many of the banks sold their crappy mortgage-backed securities to state pension funds). Lastly, if he paid taxes, he saw part of his tax money go to pay off the bets the banks made against these same mortgages. So now that Wall Street has ripped off this segment of society three times, it makes all the sense in the world that Mitt Romney – a former Wall Street superstar who was a chief architect of the modern executive-compensation-driven corporation – is coming back and telling us that we need to cut their Medicare and Social Security benefits in order to defray the cost of the previous three scams.
Consider the joy shown by Americans celebrating the Fourth of July. 
If the Fourth is such a happy time, shouldn’t we now be equally furious that the government has been rigged to ignore the needs and wants of the People? Over the past few years, I've heard dozens of educated middle class Americans admit that Congress has ben bought―federal corruption at the highest levels is now accepted as unquestionable truth.
More recently, I’ve run into more than a few people who have become frustrated with the Occupy movement. For instance, last week I heard this from an acquaintance, who was speaking of the protesters:
Acquaintance: “They should get a job. What the hell are they expecting to accomplish out there?”
Me: Isn’t it a huge problem that all three branches of our federal government make decisions to accommodate large corporations, often ignoring the needs of ordinary citizens? Isn’t that worth protesting.
Acquaintance: “Still, the protesters are stupid.”
Me: What is your solution? Ordinary people are barred from participating in a government that is supposedly to be run by ordinary people. Further, the news media is largely under the control of these same interests―they are too often serving as stenographers for the corporations that pull the strings of the federal Government. [Fourth of July flag photo]
Acquaintance: [Silence].
Along the same lines, here’s an excerpt from an email I recently received from a DI reader:About your note regarding ways to support the Occupy movement... yes, you are right to encourage people to talk about what is going on, but don't you think that it is time for those who are actually doing the "occupying" to go home and do their homework. It seems pretty apparent that it is mostly the late teen to early 20 year olds that are involved and that they don't seem to have any really intelligent, well thought out ideas or goals. The media and general public are already bored with the story, and the whole thing will have been an exercise in futility unless they move on in a dignified way. Their goal should be to have an effect on the 2012 election which is a full year away. They should go home and get organized and become better informed in order to form a voting block that will further their agenda (that is if they can come to a consensus as to what that agenda is).
In short, this reader wants the Occupiers to return home to do the same thing that millions of people have been doing for the past decade, i.e., doing nothing likely to invoke change. [More . . . ]