General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLook. I know it's a Phony Democracy, you know it's a Phony Democracy...
Last edited Fri Apr 18, 2014, 08:43 AM - Edit history (1)
we ALL know it's a Phony Democracy.
THAT elephant has been eating and shitting in our living room for more than 10 years. We bought it a collar. We call it Spot.
NightWatcher
(39,343 posts)Keep doing what you were doing. Hey, how's the fishing this time of year?
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)Last edited Thu Apr 17, 2014, 12:12 PM - Edit history (1)
what with the weather changing so quickly and (GOD DAMN IT. DOWN SPOT, I MEAN IT!).
Excuse me....
Brigid
(17,621 posts)Corruption Inc
(1,568 posts)Calling the US a pseudo-something, or an oligarchy or a fascist state may indeed be somewhat accurate but all those terms do is sell emotional responses, they don't describe the people who firmly hold all those beliefs as what they are: criminals.
The elephant in the room is our culture of corruption and how our government is not only allowing it but is fully engaged in it.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)It's something many walked into machine-gun fire to defend.
But times change, I guess.
Criminals? Couldn't agree more:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=4828005
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)Sometimes I wonder about me...
Fixed.
1000words
(7,051 posts)Let's abandon the notion that those presently in power are even remotely interested in doing something about it.
Good Cop/Bad Cop
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)is wishful thinking.
Our job: Build that movement one person at a time locally.
And I've been as guilty as anyone looking for White Knights:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=4819636
MohRokTah
(15,429 posts)Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)The US was never a democracy. The US has always been a Republic. Republics are, historically, oligarchical.
So why does the article surprise you?
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)Go on...
MohRokTah
(15,429 posts)Rich white men wrote the constitution and created a Republic where, originally, only rich white men could vote for representation (e.g. "landowners" . That's how it worked in Greece and Rome, which is what they modeled it all after.
Face it, this nation started off because a bunch of rich slave owners didn't want to pay their taxes.
Why does it shock you that the rich white men still control everything? They've never STOPPED being in control, they've merely raised a veil of illusion that everybody could ahve a say.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)is a HORRIBLE place to get a PolySci education.
When I'm bored, I tune in from time to time and that Democracy/Republic non-distinction seems to be a staple.
It's bad for you. Rots your teeth too.
MohRokTah
(15,429 posts)And I merely pointed out the facts. This nation is, and always has been, an oligarchy.
Why the hell do you think the oligarchs scream "class warfare" any time anybody gets too close to pointing out that fact.
The oligarchs know that the proles, when pissed off, can take it all away from them.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)MohRokTah
(15,429 posts)Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)There's a chance I'd be wrong. But....
TBF
(32,088 posts)The founding (or as I like to call it "the European Land Grab" resulted in the indigenous folks slaughtered and then the "power" in europe cut off. Then they really set to work - declaring their "independence" and setting up the land that they wanted. Land owners were king. Women did not rate. Slaves were 3/5 of a person at best (and why were there slaves at all - free labor for those land owners of course). It goes on and on.
They were assholes then and they still are.
Jesus Malverde
(10,274 posts)it stings, "spot" just pissed all over the narrative.
brooklynite
(94,719 posts)I've never liked "We All Know" posts; if "we all know", there's no need to post it. Especially if you're not going to suggest what to do about it.
Now personally, I DON'T know that our Democracy is "phony". It's the Democracy we've cobbled together over the years. There's certainly room for improvement and that's where I focus my attention, rather that wringing my hands.
MohRokTah
(15,429 posts)Make sure everybody knows how much control the rich have over the country.
When mobilized, we dirty proles can actually take it all away from the oligarchs, and that terrifies them.
brooklynite
(94,719 posts)And honestly, no. It's not as simple as rich vs poor. There are social and cultural divisions that are equally wide.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)brooklynite
(94,719 posts)Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)Note which of the two threads I keep kicking....
The Second Stone
(2,900 posts)Congress is up for sale to the highest bidder. And we aren't the highest bidder.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Always. How else can we explain people who vote for change always get more of the same old, same old?
One case in point: Despite the greatest accumulation of wealth in human history, it's austerity for the People and tax breaks for the wealthy.
I am a Democrat. I have no use for Democrats who say they're Democratic, yet side with the wealthy. The rich already have a party, it's called Republican.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)They told me what it was like to live in a gated community with it's own shopping mall and movie theater. Kidnappings for ransom. One of the brothers went through the ordeal.
A prison is a prison, no matter how fancy the trappings. Said everyone they knew spent most of the time they could in the States where they could travel freely.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)An appendix to 1984
Written by : George Orwell in 1948
EXCERPT...
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.
CONTINUED...
http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-prin.html
A prison is a prison. And, thus, we see US citizens getting locked behind the bars in their own heads -- except the 1-percent who can afford to travel, no matter the price of a barrel of oil.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)In 1981 Columbia, the wealthy were the literal prisoners of their own greed.
In America, they travel freely because WE are the psychological prisoners of their abuse of the language, as witnessed above.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)It was a short time after the generals, with the tacit approval of Poppy Bush, overthrew the first democratically elected leader in 70 years of the poorest nation in the hemisphere. I wrote about it 13 years or so later on DU:
Aristide told me the Generals ran Dope, Inc. on Haiti. Personally.
Posted by Octafish in General Discussion (Through 2005)
Sat Mar 20th 2004, 06:49 PM
Sorry if the following is an old read. The thing held true then and holds true still
I met Jean Bertrand-Aristide after he was deposed by the generals in the early 90s. He came to metro Detroit and spoke before the Cranbrook Peace Foundation.
The newspaper I then worked for didnt see any reason for sending me to cover Aristides speech. The editors werent BFEE, but the events on a Caribbean island just werent local enough for their budget. So, I went on my own time.
The Cranbrook people were happy to see me. They wanted, of course, as much coverage as possible. So, they invited me and the other interested reporter types to have at him for an hour before his address.
Im ashamed to report, at an important event in two nations larger media market, only a couple of CBC radio reporters out of Windsor and one local Detroit TV crew bothered to show. I was the lone print guy. Anyway
Aristide answered every question asked in English or French. He also told us about life in Haiti, where there were four doctors to care for 4 million people. Another interesting stat: One percent of the population own 99-percent of the property.
I asked Aristide what the United States could do to help him restore democracy to Haiti? Aristide said all Poppy Doc Bush had to do was pick up the phone, call the generals and say, Get out, and they would quit their coup and the first democratically elected leader of Haiti in 75 years would be returned to power. Bush didn't and Aristide wasn't until Clinton sent the US Marines, many years and many Haitian lives later.
The reason for Bush Senior's inaction? Aristide said he didnt know the answer, but he suspected Bushs politics favored the landowners over the masses. (Sounds familiar, I then thought and still think today.)
Aristide said that the generals were deep into the wholesale cocaine importation business. Now who would be their partner in all that? Besides the wealthy landowners, for whom the Generals worked, I mean.
Original OP from 2004: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=1257891&mesg_id=1259743
The Bushes and the people they front for are doing to the United States of America what the landowners of Haiti -- and those in Columbia and the other nations of the world where the small minority control the majority of wealth, land and resources. These undemocratic tools only work to enhance their own privileged positions and holdings. The rest of humanity could be cattle or piss-ants, for all they care.
You know I am a broken record when it comes to Nov. 22, 1963: The problems our nation and world face today -- from war without end to inequality and welfare for the wealthy to pollution and overpopulation to those who think "There's nothing we can do..." stem from that moment when the forces of totalitarianism took control of the US government from democracy.
Junkdrawer
(27,993 posts)Hard to find it online anymore, but Google had this:
... top-down class warfare by the ruling elites against the middle and lower classes is what we already have as an everyday occurrence. It is only when the many begin to fight back against the few that class warfare is condemned by political and media elites.
Witness the case of Haiti, a country with generations of brutal class oppression, where the military and the rich have lived off the impoverished people and regularly made war upon them. Yet U.S. media and U.S. political leaders started using the term "class warfare" only when the people elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president, a populist reformer who attacked the crimes and privileges of the rich. So in other countries and in this one too: the moment the common populace begin to fight back, even peaceably and democratically, the moment democracy infringes upon powerful class interests, ruling-class leaders and their media mouthpieces denounce "class warfare." In the early 1990s in the United States, when some liberal Democrats started talking about taxing the rich, they were accused of class warfare. But when the rich advance their interests at our expense in ways too numerous to delineate here, it is called "national policy."
In his last State of the Union message, George Bush said that people who challenge the prerogatives of the rich are driven by envy and jealousy. I suspect it is not envy that most of us feel when we see somebody ride by in a Rolls Royce-and someone else sleeping in a doorway. We feel outrage. We just do not want to live in a society where millions must suffer acute privation and insecurity so that the very rich can maintain their lavish lifestyle. We do not want to change places with the opulent; we just want to get them off our backs. We want to stop the ruination of our society and environment by the conglomerates of wealth, those who engineer and finance national elections, who manage national policy and use crimes of state to eviscerate and trivialize democratic governance at home and abroad. If challenging and stopping such class power is class warfare, then let us have more of it.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Parenti/DemocraticGovernance_AE.html
Wonderful chatting. Gotta run.
rock
(13,218 posts)Never mind.