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America a Democracy? Really?
By Dave Lindorff
This article was originally written forPressTV
We Americans are taught it in school. The propaganda put out by Voice of America repeats the idea ad nauseum around the globe. Politicians refer to it in every campaign speech with the same fervor that they claim to be running for office in response to God’s call: America is a model of democracy for the whole world.
But what kind of democracy is it really that we have here?
Forget that only half of eligible voters typically vote in quadrennial presidential elections (less than 30% in so-called “off-year” elections for members of the House and a third of the Senate, and less than 25% in municipal and state elections). Forget that the government is increasingly trampling on the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, with a burgeoning surveillance program and a growing militarization of the police.
The US government doesn’t even do what the majority of the citizens want. In fact, these days it flat out ignores what we the people want.
Consider the polls, and what they show public sentiment to be on key issues, and then look at what the government, composed of supposedly elected representatives and an elected president, actually does:
1. Military spending
Most polls show that Americans, tired of the endless wars that have been raging almost without pause since the end of World War II, and the huge amount of taxes devoted to the military (currently over $1 trillion per year!), favor cutting the military. Just recently, the Center for Public Integrity conducted a poll and found that when asked whether they wanted to cut funding for education, veterans’ benefits, homeland security and other areas, or military spending, 65% of people said they wanted military spending to get the axe. Overall, people favored an 18% cut in the military budget. Democrats wanted a 22% cut, while even Republicans, usually perceived as pro-military, wanted a 12% cut. Of those wanting military spending cut, the largest group, 27%, favored cutting nuclear weapons funding, followed by 23% who wanted ground forces spending cut. Yet both President Barack Obama and his likely opponent in November’s election, Republican Mitt Romney, are both calling for increased military spending next year, and Congress can’t even bring itself to cut spending on a new fighter program that is both way over budget at half a billion dollars per plane, and a failure (the F-22 cannot fly safely).
- Health Care
Even with the passage of a sort of health care reform, the ludicrously and optimistically named Affordable Care Act, most Americans still tell pollsters that they would prefer a Canadian-style plan in which the government provides health insurance coverage for all, paid for by taxation...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF, please go to eitherThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, or to the website of PressTV, where this article was originally published.
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As it was in Plato's time, grafting democratic experiments into a class system, then Patriarchy, did not reproduce social control over civil society , instead, it re-produced another new class form, alongside their other nomenklature, terminologies, for class deformed civil societies, namely crippled, class republics, class democracies, which became part of the degenerating class cycle morphing into oligarchies, plutocracies, class tyranny and class Empire. So long as the social masses vote for any class politician, any class party and fail to promote an international social agency, the social agenda promoted by the Social Enlightenment, for indivisible, independent, global middle classes, free from class corruption, class hierarchies, dissolved by critical social forces that kicks starts the social historical mechanism, that was in place in the Social Matriarchy, THERE IS NO CHANCE THAT REAL DEMOCRACY, SOCIAL CONTROL OF CIVIL SOCIETY BECOMES A REALITY, OR OF ENDING THE SLAVERY, MILITARISM, TOTALITARIANISM OF ANY AND ALL CLASS SYSTEMS. THEY PRODUCE MASS PSYCHOSIS, MASS CLASS DELUSIONS, FOR WAR AND SLAVERY.
Failure to have any real control over ANY AND ALL major issues in civil society is proof that class hierarchies and their class-"professionals" shock troops, class elites, exist only to betray, prevent real social control by social classes. Here is another serious issue.........ignored by the rotten corporate media, class politicians, and a PSYCHOTIC OBAMA, PROTO FASCIST DEMOCRATS, along with their fascist republicans, and all class parties around the world ignoring social majorities opposed to NUCLEAR POWER, that is NOW THREATENING 2.8 BILLION PEOPLE INTO DEATH:
MSM: Obama, Romney, Jobs Report / Meanwhile 2.89+ Billion May Die from Fukushima
http://www.opednews.com/articles/MSM-Obama-Romney-Jobs-R-by-Tracy-Turner-120804-463.html
EXCERPT:
"While Obama and the mainstream news media focus on the jobs report and Romney's taxes, 2.89 billion lives hang in the balance and most of these lives do not even know that they are in mortal danger. It is not the opening line from Chicken Little; the subject is MOX fuel from nuclear reactors. The trouble with this subject is most people go to Rense.com for "the answer" as if there is one easy answer. Rense pontificates as if he is a real scientist; as of 3 August 2012, there is no mention of Plutonium's LD50 on Rense's pages about Fukushima. If you want to truly understand Fukushima Reactors 3 and 4, first understand what MOX fuel and Plutonium LD50 are. This article is not an attack against Rense, it is more an indictment of the nuke industry, and whose main product are weapons like depleted uranium munitions an indictment of Washington and the MSM.
The other truly huge source of confusion is General Electric who designed the Mark I, II and III Nuclear Reactors co-owns MSNBC. There are many msnbc.com WebPages telling people, don't worry, Plutonium really is not that toxic. You don't see these General Electric/msnbc.com people volunteering at Fukushima Number Four, do you? Telling someone not to worry about Plutonium is propaganda.
Obama's 2007 campaign was a promise of Change You Cannot Believe In. Obama 2012 is Forward -- MOX Nuke Fuel, more nuclear energy. Does Obama think there are any baby boomers that don't remember the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 Eisenhower Atoms for Peace?
Watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-_DgAxi_SQ video, not the initial pep talk in Japanese, but the actual close-up inspection of Fukushima Daiichi Number 4. Notice the rope and plywood boards holding the cooling water around the nuclear MOX fuel, the temporary metal clamps and scaffolding. The only thing keeping you alive, keeping your entire family from dying a horrible, painful death is plywood, rope, metal clamps and temporary scaffolding. MOX-fuel Plutonium" powerful and in sufficient quantity to wipe out 25-75% of the Earth's population is being cooled in a swimming pool sized pond, held together with rope, plywood, clamps and scaffolding" The way of the future? We need more of this kind of irrationality and psychopathy?...."
TO SAVE YOUR LIVES FROM WAR AND CORPORATE FASCISM, END ALL SUPPORT FOR CLASS PARTIES, CLASS POLITICIANS, FOR SOCIAL AGENDAS THAT END CLASS HISTORY
The first social theorists in Ancient Greece observed and provided empirical evidence that their civil societies were not only class deformed civil societies, bereft of social control, but that they degenerated over time through class cycles. Social control by civil society was last seen before Patriarchy and class history usurped, co opted, deformed the social historical mechanism into the Patriarchal class mechanism and also degenerated experiments in democracy, partial social reforms into crippled, class outcomes, class republics and class-city states devolving into totalitarian forms and class empires. The same class deformed process, with its degenerating class cycles, could not overcome the parasitical ruling classes and their servile, blackmailing class hierarchies through partial social reforms, to achieve social control and overturn the Patriarchal class mechanism. Partial social reforms are always class outcomes, which over time, degenerate as the crippled class republics, class democracies, where class laws selecively enforce justice and in times of class crisis are themselves rejected for totalitarian class states and class empire. So long as the social classes make no effort to reclaim the social agency that was lost in both the Social Matriarchy, and the Social Enlightenment, and invest in class delusions, illusions, class myths, that class systems produce social control over civil society, they will see their class politicians morph from sociopaths, betrayers of social demands, anti social behavior, into psychopathic, war mongering, class tyrants, which we clearly see in Glenn Greenwald's piece on Obama.
Glenn Greenwald, similarlily, provides empirical proof and evidence that the democratic party and Obama are in some ways even worse than Bush officials, degenerating into totalitarian class forms, making the case that Obama has become a class/empire tyrant, slipping into pyschopathic justifications for murder, negation of legal processes, but more importantly, observing that this class degeneration, holds true for all class parties around the world, as the social theorists of ancient Greece observed. When the democratic party and all class parties devolve through class compromises, shifting class centers, center right regression, falsely claimed as social centers, they slowly move towards fascist extremism, which becomes normalized, as Glenn Greenwald made in one of his other blogs. Partial social reforms are only temporary, defensive, and can be dismantle completely as the Glass-Steagal act, FDR social reforms. The public must realize that any vote for any class politician, any class party is a vote for enslavement, for War and Fascism. It must reject Obama, democrats, republicans, all Western class parties, whose class hierarches and class shills, empire thugs has produced today's global Fascism through NATO and support for Fascist Zionism, not to mention the opportunistic fascist allances with religious class thugs, like the Sunni, Al Qaida alliance to do regime change and war with Iran. Obama is dangerous, corrupt and criminal, like the democratic party, republican party, all Western powers, and Glenn Greenwald proves the class degeneration of the West through Obama, as the early Greek social thinkers did:
Obama the Pioneer
The accusation that the President has failed to deliver Change is, in certain key respects, unfair
http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald//
excerpt:
"Earlier this week, The New Yorker‘s Steve Coll wrote an excellent column on President Obama’s kill list and assassination powers. Regarding the lawsuit brought by the ACLU and CCR on behalf of three American victims of Obama’s assassinations — a legal challenge which CBS News‘ Andrew Cohen called ”the most important lawsuit filed so far this year” and “the most important lawsuit filed in the war on terror since President Barack Obama took office” – Coll argued that it “is to the due-process clause what the proposed march of neo-Nazis through a community that included many Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, was to the First Amendment”: “an instance where the most onerous facts imaginable should lead to the durable affirmation of constitutional principle, as Skokie did.”
Coll also pointed to “evidence [] suggesting that the Obama Administration leans toward killing terrorism suspects because it does not believe it has a politically attractive way to put them on trial,” which tracks Noam Chomsky’s pithy observation earlier this year: “If the Bush administration didn’t like somebody, they’d kidnap them and send them to torture chambers. If the Obama administration decides they don’t like somebody, they murder them.” Coll also dissects the standard excuses offered by Obama defenders for the seizure of this power, including the moral and factual defects of the excuse that it’s acceptable to kill an accused Terrorist suspect if it’s difficult to apprehend and try him (in the Awlaki case, the Obama administraiton never even charged or indicted him before executing him).
But what really stood out was Coll’s recounting of the events leading up to Awlaki’s assassination:
Please re-read that bolded part to appreciate the magnitude of Obama’s trail blazing. When The New York Times, back in April, 2010, first confirmed the inclusion of an American citizen on Obama’s hit list, it, too, noted: “It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said.” But it was only recently known what a personal role Obama himself played in ordering the historically unprecedented hit. As a result, writes Coll, “President Obama and his advisers have opened the door to violent action against American citizens by future Presidents when the facts may be much less compelling.” In fairness to Obama, he did campaign on a promise of change, and vesting the President with the power to order the execution of citizens in secret and with no oversight certainly qualifies as that...."
THE CASE FOR A DEGENERATING, PROTO FASCIST OBAMA, DEMOCRATS, WESTERN CLASS PARTIES HAS BEEN MADE. BOYCOTT ALL CLASS POLITICIANS, CLASS PARTIES AND VOTE FOR SOCIAL PARTIES AND ALLIANCES THAT ENDS CLASS HISTORY, TODAY'S GLOBAL FASCISM AND ITS PSYCHOPATHIC WESTERN ELITES.