Battling evil, cruelty, and injustice allows us to retain our identity, a sense of meaning, and ultimately our freedom.

I'm not saying we're going to win. I am saying rebellion becomes a way to protect your own dignity. Corporations are, theologically speaking, institutions of death. They commodify everything - the natural world, human beings - that they exploit until exhaustion or collapse. They know no limits.

War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.

Turn off your televisions. Ignore the Newt-Mitt-Rick- Barack reality show. It is as relevant to your life as the gossip on “Jersey Shore.” The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality, corporate malfeasance, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillance state, is the only debate that matters.

The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.

I will step outside the system. Voting for the “lesser evil”-or failing to vote at all-is part of the corporate agenda to crush what is left of our anemic democracy. And those who continue to participate in the vaudeville of a two-party process, who refuse to confront in every way possible the structures of corporate power, assure our mutual destruction.

I do believe that the collapse of the traditional media is catastrophic for our democracy, but I wasn't about to mythologize it. I understand its structural flaws, and the lies it tells, which are primarily, but not always, the lies of omission, and I wasn't going to leave that out. Knopf offered to publish the book but they said that an editor was going to "take out all the negativity," which, of course, I wasn't going to accept. I had been paid half my advance, and I had Nation Books buy the manuscript for that half.