Little Hawk,
"How do we ordinary people build a genuine democracy when all the sizeable political parties AND the mass media have been bought out by corporate lobbyists, thereby depriving us of meaningful choices at the polls?"

Heck, as long as the MEDIA are owned by a handful of huge corporations, there's basically no chance of any political party having any power or much support unless they are also in bed with those big corporations.

As for revolution? Get real.   No popular revolution would stand a chance against the kind of weaponry -- not to mention the kind of "intelligence" apparatus -- that the military-industrial-prison complex has today.

And as for that "sort of thing" that happened in Russia in 1917, how'd that work out for the Russian people?