Democracy ?

Post Reply
chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Democracy ?

Post by chlamor » Wed Jan 08, 2020 2:06 am

Democracy ?

There are "special circumstances" in the United States, both from historical and systemic standpoints. Among the earliest and most primitive of the revolutionary democracies, American democratic evolution was stillborn for one hundred years because of the perpetuation of slavery and then for another hundred years through the agencies of an aborted Reconstruction and the perpetuation of Jim Crow. As a result, as Democracies go, this one has every anti-democratic institution conceivable incorporated within it:

A Senate modeled on the House of Lords, a largely independent executive, an independent judiciary with significant electoral powers, 50 major administrative units with important independent electoral powers of their own, an electoral college of cardinals, 15000 independent voting jurisdictions with none sharing common practices or procedures, institutionalized voter suppression, institutionalized class-based voter registration, legal voter disqualification with no common system of oversight, an artificial monopoly created by a quasi-official "two-party system", an open system of political bribery, corruption and deceit which legalizes virtually all conceivable interventions of capital into electoral politics but which, nevertheless, includes an unofficial tolerance of that very little which is not legal - this mess amalgamates everything including the kitchen sink, with all of it intended from the outset to frustrate the popular will.

It would be difficult to maintain even one or two of these in any other "Democracy".

And more, with unique arrogance, they lead with this weakness. They promote their system as the highest expression of democracy and include it first in their civil religion: their Constitutional pinnacle guaranteed to "check and balance" every popular expression stands shoulder to shoulder alongside inviolate rights which are violated EVERY SINGLE time (with an apology three decades later) and their system of Liberty which extends to property and only to property.

It is all quite a racket.

Hell, I love to vote. Let's vote for something with impact, though.

I have lots of ideas...

The Liberals all hate the Koch brothers. Well, then let's vote to take away all their money. I don't mean "tax them". I mean take away all of it. I bet we get a big majority for that... with or without "Citizens United".

While we are at it, let's take away Jamie Dimon's money, too... and Gates... and those fuckers who say stupid shit on TV... and Mitt's ..and, and. The longer the list, the bigger the majority we'll get. I guarantee it.

Also, let's vote on disbanding the CIA and the NSA... and all garrisons on foreign soil.

Let's vote to have capital punishment only for political corruption... or white collar crime. I could make a case for that... might even canvas for it.

Why can't we ever vote for good shit like that ?

My mail tells me that you can't do that. I just don't get "Democracy".

You can't just vote for shit. You have to vote for some guy... who then tells you why you can't vote for shit like that.

Say WHAT???

Alrighty then. Let's vote to be able to do any damn thing we want. And let's vote not to have some clown tell us what we can't do.

"Oh, but he's better than the other guy... quack, quack"

And in any case, neither one of them will let you vote for any shit like that. To do that, you have to get two thirds of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to go along with it... and you have to stick your foot in your mouth and pull it out of your ass... in 39 states.

...and you still can't vote to take rich peoples property away from them ...even if you jump through every hoop... because you just can't. It's not allowed.

Say what ?

Who doesn't understand Democracy again ?


~~Anaxarchos

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Democracy ?

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 14, 2021 2:52 pm

Image

US Shouldn’t Be Invited to Summit for Democracy, Let Alone Be its Host
December 13, 2021
By Alexander Rubinstein – Dec 8, 2021

In every one of the countries the United States has intervened in over the past decades, anti-democratic means are almost always used towards anti-democratic ends, all in the name of promoting democracy.

This week, the United States is convening a virtual “Summit for Democracy,” the first of its kind in what the State Department hopes to make an annual event.

“The summit will focus on challenges and opportunities facing democracies and will provide a platform for leaders to announce both individual and collective commitments, reforms, and initiatives to defend democracy and human rights at home and abroad,” the State Department says. Representatives from 110 governments have been invited.

Aiming to spark a “global democratic renewal” and “counter authoritarianism, combat corruption, and promote respect for human rights,” the summit’s billing includes all the usual buzzwords typically invoked by Washington to ratchet up pressure against its official enemies.


It’s no surprise that Washington has declined to invite its two biggest geopolitical foes, Russia and China. The two countries banded together to publish an opinion article in The National Interest, correctly characterizing the circus of a summit as a “product of [Washington’s] Cold-War mentality” aimed at stoking “ideological confrontation and a rift in the world.”

Anatoly Antonov and Qin Gang, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors to the U.S., jointly wrote:

Interfering in other countries’ internal affairs – under the pretext of fighting corruption, promoting democratic values, or protecting human rights – hindering their development, wielding the big stick of sanctions, and even infringing on their sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity go against the UN Charter and other basic norms of international law and are obviously anti-democratic.

That article, published on November 26, proved prescient. The United States, it turns out, has no intention of laying down its big stick. To mark the occasion of the summit, the U.S. Treasury Department revealed just days later that it would be imposing sanctions against those “who are engaged in malign activities that undermine democracy and democratic institutions around the world, including corruption, repression, organized crime, and serious human-rights abuse,” as a Treasury Department official told the Wall Street Journal.

It cannot be overstated how hypocritical it is that the United States is promoting its Summit for Democracy by taking actions that are illegal under international law. According to the United Nations Charter, Chapter VII, Article 41, only the United Nations Security Council may enact economic sanctions against United Nations members.

Nonetheless, Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres will deliver opening remarks at the summit on Friday.

But this is just the beginning of provocations by the U.S. While opting to snub Russia and China from the summit, both Taiwan and Ukraine have been invited as a clear signal that the United States will leverage them to undermine its rivals, regardless of whether or not these confrontations are to the detriment of the people of Taiwan or Ukraine.

Spanning the globe, many other countries invited can hardly be classified as democratic: from apartheid Israel, where millions of Palestinians live as second-class citizens; to Brazil, whose leader Jair Bolsonaro this summer declared that “only God can oust me.”

Also invited is Venezuelan opposition activist Juan Guaido, who was declared by the United States to be the “interim president” of Venezuela. Nearly three years later, Guaido is still considered the “interim” leader of the country by the U.S. and its allies in the region – despite a failed attempt at a military coup, his coalition falling apart, and having never participated in a presidential election.


Guaido’s de facto Belarussian counterpart, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, an opposition figure who lost in the country’s 2020 presidential election, will also be speaking. Tsikhanouskaya may be favored to lead the country by around only four percent of Belarussians, but maintains a solid one hundred percent rate of support from Washington-based think tank fellows.

Other anti-democratic actors slated to speak include Nathan Law, a Chinese fugitive and former leading figure in the Hong Kong separatist movement, who has openly collaboratedwith the National Endowment for Democracy, a prominent tool in the U.S.’ destabilization arsenal and an offshoot of the CIA.

Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones

Rather than using its Summit for Democracy as a means of furthering its information warfare campaign against China and Russia, the American public would be better served if the government of the United States focused instead on cleaning up the mess in its own house.

Since the State Department has chosen to highlight the topic of democracy, it’s worth examining the state of democracy at home. Surprising no one, it’s not looking good.

Take, for example, a peer-reviewed Princeton University study from 2014 entitled “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” Professor of Public Policy Martin Gilens, alongside Professor of “Decision Making” Benjamin Page and a “small army of research assistants, gathered data on a large, diverse set of policy cases: 1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the general public asked a favor/oppose question about a proposed policy change.”

“For each case, Gilens used the original survey data to assess responses by income level,” the study states.

What the researchers found may be shocking to many people around the world, but to U.S. citizens it is probably not all that surprising. “When one holds constant net interest-group alignments and the preferences of affluent Americans, it makes very little difference what the general public thinks,” the study found. “The probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change.”

In layman’s terms, the policy preferences of average citizens have almost no bearing on the likelihood of a policy being adopted by the government. By contrast, the preferences of economic elites is highly correlated with the likelihood of a policy being adopted.

Image

The study states:

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.

There is a word for the kind of political system revealed by this study, and it is not “democracy,” nor is it flattering. That word is “oligarchy.”

Consider the results of this study in light of comments made by Chinese businessman Eric Li, who in 2017, years after the study’s release, commented that “in America you can change political parties, but you can’t change policies. In China, you cannot change the party, but you can change policies.”

While the United States has deemed China unworthy of being invited to its Summit for Democracy, these issues raise an important question: is the U.S. itself actually a democracy if its citizens get little to no say in governmental policy?

In assessing just how truly democratic the United States really is, there are other metrics to consider besides how much of a voice its citizens have.

In the United States, the people are supposedly represented in Congress, where the laws are made. So how are those guys doing? Well, as of October of this year, the most recent resultsavailable from Gallup, 75 percent of Americans disapprove of their performance. Considering figures from the past decade or so, these numbers are not all that shabby; congressional disapproval has peaked at 86 percent four times since 2011. Moreover, with partisan gerrymandering the norm and electoral districts looking more like Etch-A-Sketch drawings than cohesive or meaningful population groups, competitiveness in House of Representative races has dramatically declined in many districts, with just 43 of the seats up for grabs in 2020 being considered “competitive,” or about 10% of the House.’

Public perception of electoral integrity is also low: according to Harvard University’s Electoral Integrity Project, the U.S. ranks 57th out of 165 countries under this metric in elections between 2012 and 2018, and it’s worse in the U.S. than in “most liberal democracies in affluent post-industrial societies.”

“Structuctural problems undermining American democracy” include electoral laws and gerrymandering favoring incumbents (which may explain the consistently low approval ratings), a lack of transparency in campaign finance, and “communities of color experiencing difficulties in registering and voting.”

There are more metrics to consider, such as participation in the electoral process.

Because there is no official count of how many U.S. citizens in total are eligible to vote, the best figures we can get are from independent analysts. The most authoritative of them is Dr. Michael McDonald, professor of political science at the University of Florida who runs the United States Election Project. According to his research, 239.2 million people in the U.S. were eligible to vote in the 2020 presidential election. Yet according to the United States Election Project, only 66.2 percent of the “voting eligible public” voted in the presidential race, meaning that slightly more than a third of eligible voters stayed at home.

These dismal figures are despite the fact that “the percentage of nonvoters narrowed to the smallest proportion in 120 years,” according to a survey by the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, and National Public Radio.

With so little impact on policy and such disdain for the politicians running the show, it comes as no surprise that in the 2020 presidential election, 80.8 million eligible voters didn’t vote at all.

To put this in perspective, we can say that President Joe Biden managed to narrowly beat the couch in terms of the popular vote, but only by about 443,000 votes.

The aforementioned survey of 1,103 nonvoters found that while 29 percent said they didn’t vote because they were not registered, “the others cited reasons for abstaining such as a lack of interest in the election, the feeling that their vote wouldn’t make a difference or a general dislike for the candidates.”

Yet, despite President Biden’s triumphant victory over the couch, according to FiveThirtyEight, which aggregates polling data from various sources, his disapproval rating currently stands at 51.3 percent, with a measly 42.8 percent approving, worse than nearly every recent president at this stage in their term with the exception of Donald Trump.

Moving on from purely electoral democratic deficiencies, there’s also the major issue of economic injustice. According to United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Philip Alston, following his visit to the United States in 2017, “more than one in every eight Americans were living in poverty.” That’s equal to 12.7 percent of the population, with “almost half” of them living in extreme poverty.

At the same time, child poverty rates are even higher, with 18 percent of children living in poverty. While most poor people are white, owing to the overall demographics of the United States, poverty rates by race reflect a racist dynamic, wherein 42 percent of Black children live in poverty.

“At the end of the day, particularly in a rich country like the USA, the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power. With political will, it could readily be eliminated,” Alston wrote.

Once again, it is worth comparing this reality to the recent developments in China, where the Communist Party this year announced the complete eradication of extreme poverty.

While many of the metrics considered here may seem basic, or obvious, they are worth raising in light of the United States’ decision to anoint itself an unelected arbiter of what countries are and what countries are not democracies.

Democracy Summit puts its worst foot forward
In an apparent attempt to make the entire affair even more absurd, the very first event at the Summit for Democracy speaks to what a sham the summit will be.

Entitled “Media Freedom and Sustainability,” the panel discussion featured opening remarks from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Dutch and Canadian counterparts, Foreign Ministers Ben Knapen and Mélanie Joly.

The bitter irony of the United States hosting a panel on media freedom is not lost on many in the international community who have expressed alarm over the U.S. prosecution of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange for the crime of journalism that has exposed the war crimes of the American empire.

A slap in the face to press freedom advocates, the panel focused on “how the international community can do more to protect journalists as well as how to reduce the vulnerability of independent media to closure or economic and political capture.”

Blinken cynically co-opted the language of racial justice in his opening remarks, decrying “journalism deserts” and rallying in defense of “at-risk journalists.”


Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnes Callamard, moderated the panel.

As I noted on Twitter prior to the event, Amnesty International has called the U.S. prosecution of Assange “nothing short of a full-scale assault on the right to freedom of expression.” Callamard did not respond to my question whether she planned to raise Assange’s case during the event, despite my question being viewed on Twitter more than 25,000 times before it took place.

Amnesty’s Callamard likewise declined to bring up the case of Assange, as did all of the others involved with the panel.

Given the background of the panelists and other speakers associated with the press freedom event, it’s not surprising that Assange’s name was not dropped even once.

For example, Maria Ressa, winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize and CEO of the news website Rappler, went from tweeting such headlines in 2010 as “If Assange is charged with espionage, what about news orgs?” to “Security reports reveal how Assange turned an embassy into a command post for election meddling” in 2019. Refusing to condemn Assange’s arrest, Ressa has also said that WikiLeaks’ publishing model “actually isn’t journalism.”

Ressa’s Rappler has been given $284,000 from the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy.

Also at the event: Bay Fang, the president of Radio Free Asia, an anti-Chinese propaganda outlet originally founded by the CIA; and Sana Safi, a journalist with the BBC – founded by the British government.

Bay Fang opted to ignore the true history of the organization she leads, telling the audience that it was “created by Congress.”

Another little-known panelist is Jennifer Avila Reyes, editor-in-chief of the Honduran news outlet ContraCorriente, which has received about $75,000 from the National Endowment for Democracy. During the panel, she called her outlet’s business model “revolutionary.”

These are the voices selected by the State Department to tell the world the burning answer to the question “How can we strengthen efforts to ensure independent media can safely report around the world?”

You can’t make this stuff up.

The most feared phrase in the world

Perhaps the scariest part of the U.S.-hosted Summit for Democracy is none other than the U.S.’ legacy in terms of “democracy promotion,” which is, more often than not, conducted at the barrel of a gun.

This legacy was perfectly characterized by the spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, Lijian Zhao, who tweeted a meme simply showing before-and-after photos of foreign cities since the U.S. sought to impose democracy on other countries.


Whether it be Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Belarus, Ukraine, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras or any of the countries the United States has intervened in over the past decades, anti-democratic means are almost always used towards anti-democratic ends, all in the name of promoting democracy.

Libya is a good example, as the chief advocate for “humanitarian intervention” in that country, Samantha Power, is getting two speaking slots during the Summit for Democracy.

Back in 2011, the United States and NATO-backed anti-government jihadists with weapons and air support, allowing them to publicly lynch Libya’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi. What ensued was Libya’s decline from being the most prosperous nation in Africa to having open-air slave markets.

Ten years later, the humanitarian situation there is devastating, but there is finally some hope on the horizon, as the country will hold a presidential election later this month. It’s worth noting that the two frontrunners in the election are widely considered to be Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of Muammar Gaddafi, and warlord Khalifa Haftar, a former CIA asset.

When the majority of the world hears that the United States is seeking to “promote democracy,” it is this style of regime-change operation that is immediately called to mind.

Let’s all hope the Summit for Democracy has more bark than bite.


Featured image: President Joe Biden listens as he meets virtually with Chinese President Xi Jinping from the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, Nov. 15, 2021. Susan Walsh | AP

(MintPress News)

https://orinocotribune.com/us-shouldnt- ... -its-host/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Democracy ?

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 15, 2021 2:52 pm

'Democracy' talkfest fails as vote winner
By ZHAO HUANXIN in Washington | China Daily Global | Updated: 2021-12-13 09:46


Image
Photo taken on Jan 25, 2021 shows the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, the United States. [Photo/Xinhua]

With problems at home, US advised to do less preaching and more work

The United States should focus on getting its own house in order before promoting its model of governance, observers said in response to the country's Summit for Democracy that ended on Friday.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in a tweet hours before the two-day virtual gathering started, gave three reasons for why the summit was "ill advised".

First, the US needs to work with "non-democracies" on regional and global challenges, and the summit's invitation list was filled with "inconsistencies".

"Most important, US not in a position to preach or provide model. We should be focusing on getting our own broken house in order," he wrote on the social media site.

"In the spirit of don't just criticize but offer up an alternative, what about the White House convening a domestic democracy summit with politicians, educators, civil society leaders, business and labor, clergy, etc, to discuss an agenda for repairing American democracy?"

Carlos Santamaria, a senior writer with GZERO Media in New York, said in an analysis that "having a single country arbitrarily decide who's democratic is hardly democratic at all".

The stated goal of the summit is to help strengthen democracy in like-minded countries, and the US wants to draw an ideological line between governments that share or once shared common values with the US and the rest, Santamaria said on Saturday.

"But Biden has too many domestic political problems to pay more than lip service to his stated goal of promoting democracy worldwide," he said of the challenges facing President Joe Biden.

While US allies are now a "hodgepodge" of values-based ones and realpolitik, even US citizens themselves can't agree on what democracy means for them.

A poll by the Pew Research Center published last month showed that people in the US largely share the view that their democracy is no longer a model, while few believe US democracy, at least in its current state, serves as a good model for other countries.

A median of just 17 percent of those surveyed expressed confidence in the US as a role model for democracy, according to the polling company's Spring 2021 Global Attitudes Survey.

Wei Nanzhi, a researcher in the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the US government should further rethink whether its hegemonism and power politics in the name of democracy "are popular and welcomed".

"When even its own people doubt the authenticity and effectiveness of American democracy, when the long-term export of American democracy brings only disasters rather than wellbeing to the people of many countries in the world, the behavior and actual effect of holding a democracy summit remains questionable."

The fact that some countries regard one form of democracy as the only political criterion "is merely an expression of civilizational superiority and has a strong racist undertone", she said.

Jon Taylor, of the University of Texas, said the US may want to get its own house in order first, "given that the last year in the US saw an insurrection led by a former president who appeared to not only encourage it but use it as a pretext to overturn an election and abrogate over two centuries of constitutional law in order to stay in office".

Taylor, a professor of political science and chair of the Department of Political Science and Geography, said the risk to US democracy is not from China, but from "from ourselves".

"I'd like to see a foreign policy more devoted and centered on the challenges posed by climate change, income inequality… and migration, and enhancing international trade," he said in an email interview with China Daily on Saturday.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20211 ... 7aeae.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Democracy ?

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 16, 2021 2:11 pm

On the Fundamental Differences Between Capitalist “Democracy” and Socialist Democracy
Danny Haiphong, BAR contributor 14 Dec 2021

Image
On the Fundamental Differences Between Capitalist “Democracy” and Socialist Democracy

The United States recent democracy summit would have been laughable if its implications were not so serious. True democracy is found far away and often in those countries which were stricken from Joe Biden's list.

What follows are amended remarks that were given by the author at the Summit for Socialist Democracy, a response to the U.S.’s Summit for Democracy. The Summit for Socialist Democracy was organized by Friends of Socialist China and the International Manifesto Group on December 11th and can be watched in full here.

The United States hosted a “Summit for Democracy” on December 9th and 10th in an obvious attempt to legitimize its unipolar and hegemonic claim of leadership over the so-called “rules-based international order.” While on the surface this appeared to be an unproductive move on the part of the world hegemon, it aligned well with the U.S. strategy of cloaking its aggressive and exploitative policies under the guise of “democracy.” Joe Biden’s administration has repeatedly hyped the differences between “autocracy” and U.S.-led “democracy.” So-called allies were summoned to give the U.S.’s vision for democracy credibility on the international stage.

Friends of Socialist China saw the Biden administration’s public relations stunt as an opportunity to discuss the distinctions between capitalist democracy and socialist democracy. There is no higher form of capitalist democracy than in the United States. The United States has been the wealthiest capitalist country in the world since the end of World War II. Since then, U.S. elites across the political spectrum have employed the word “democracy” as a key justification for its domestic and foreign policies. This has involved a diligent avoidance of any scrutiny of the claim that capitalist democracy represents a universal system for all peoples and nations.

Scrutiny, of course, runs the risk of exposing the class character of capitalist “democracy,” the most glaring contradiction of the system. Capitalist democracy is a democracy of, by, and for the rich and the powerful owners and managers of capital. Democracy in such a context serves a minority of the population at the expense of the vast majority. As Vladimir Lenin put it in State and Revolution, “Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich — that is the democracy of capitalist society.”

Ample evidence of this contradiction exists in all spheres of U.S. political and economic life. Nearly half of the U.S. cannot afford a $400 emergency as wages stagnate and jobs fail to meet the cost of living. A half million people sleep on the streets or in homeless shelters at any given moment. The situation worsens when race is factored into the analysis. The median Black family has just $1700 to its name. Meanwhile, capitalists such as Jeff Bezos have enjoyed record profits amid a global pandemic that has plunged the U.S. into its second economic crisis in thirteen years.

While voting is held in the highest regard under capitalist democracy, none of the aforementioned material conditions were voted in by the people. Matters of policy are decided well before the exercise of voting is complete. Representatives elected to govern over capitalist democracy are almost entirely bound to the dictates of capital. In the United States, influential politicians such as President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Kyrsten Sinema receive enormous donations from Wall Street financial institutions, weapons manufacturers, and for-profit health insurance and pharmaceutical corporations. As Lenin again surmised, the people essentially vote for whichever representative of the ruling class will oppress them every two to four years.

A common error for Western and American observers, even the most progressive ones, is to confuse socialist democracy with social democracy. The age of austerity in the West has led to a relative comeback of a politics of social welfare which is often confused with socialism proper. However, there is a marked difference between Western social democracies like that which exists in Sweden and socialist democracies such as that which exists in China. In Sweden, private capital dominates the governance system. In China, the state plays a leading role in economic development under the leadership of the Communist Party.

The historic crisis precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic has placed a spotlight on how the fundamental differences between capitalist and socialist democracies are a matter of life and death. Socialist democracies all over the world have fared far better in addressing the pandemic than so-called capitalist democracies. China’s efficient and government-led effort to curb transmission has saved more than a million lives from premature death from COVID-19. Sweden’s privatized elder care system and the government’s decision to keep the economy fully operable from the outset has led to a death rate per million in the population of nearly 1,500. For comparison, China has just three deaths per million in the population.

Despite their near singular success in protecting human life from a deadly pandemic, it is fashionable for the U.S. and its Western allies to depict China and other socialist democracies as devoid of popular participation in the governance of society. The term “authoritarian” is repeated ad nauseam to confuse the Western psyche into thinking that their narrow capitalist democracies represent the apex of popular power. Yet China’s successful pandemic response would have been impossible without robust and democratic popular participation. In Wuhan alone, party organs and mass organizations mobilized more than a million volunteers to assist residents with their basic needs during a months-long city-wide lockdown. The central government indeed directed rapid attention to the employment of pandemic control measures but it was ultimately the people, under the leadership of the communist party, that had to carry them out.

Socialist democracy is different from capitalist democracy in both character and form. Socialist democracy doesn’t privilege the political freedoms of the individual above all else. Rather, socialist democracies set out to secure the right to housing, healthcare, education, employment, and life itself as key priorities of governance. This makes historic sense. Socialist revolutions have occurred in the context of colonized and underdeveloped nations, thus making the development of the productive forces and the economic wellbeing of the people paramount to stability and survival within a hostile global situation. Existing socialist democracies include China, Vietnam, Cuba, the DPRK, and Laos—all of which emerged from the devastation of war and colonial domination in the 20th century.

Socialist democracy is a model of substance. While different in form depending on the national and economic context of the society in question, socialist democracies have key features in common. These include the leadership of the communist party, a common history of struggle against foreign imperialism and colonialism, and the successful transfer of the means of production from the oppressor to the oppressed classes. Socialist democracy has allowed Cuba, for example, to ensure that more than 90 percent of its population own their home and 100 percent have access to free, quality healthcare. It has also allowed Vietnam and Laos to survive the devastation wrought by destructive U.S. wars and make significant headway in eliminating extreme poverty. And it’s allowed the DPRK to defend itself from ongoing military provocations and sanctions enforced by the United States.

Perhaps there is no better area of study than geopolitics to observe the superiority of socialist democracy for humanity. Capitalist democracies have histories riddled with centuries of colonial adventurism and imperialist war. From 1945-2011, an estimated 20-30 million people have been killed around the world as the result of U.S. military interventions. Capitalist democracies from the U.S. to the U.K. continue to violate international law on a regular basis in order to satisfy their own economic and political ends. Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and dozens of other countries find themselves mired in poverty and instability as a result of direct interference from so-called capitalist democracies.

In other words, the United States and its so-called democratic allies engage in a wholly undemocratic framework of unipolarity in world affairs. Capitalist democracies routinely place their own interests above those of humanity and use force to resolve disputes or satisfy their political and economic agendas. On the other hand, socialist democracies adhere to international law and champion a multipolar orientation to global governance. None of the existing socialist democracies have waged a war of aggression in the modern era. In fact, all of them have been at the forefront of demonstrating the true benefits of international cooperation and solidarity.

The examples are numerous. They include China and Cuba’s joint ventures in biotechnology which helped produce antivirals that provided immense help in China’s early fight with COVID-19. China’s Belt and Road Initiative must also be noted since the massive infrastructure plan has already brought enormous benefits to underdeveloped countries around the world—the Sino-Laos high-speed rail line being just one recent breakthrough. The provision of nearly 2 billion COVID-19 vaccines from China has offered hope to poor countries around the world unable to access expensive vaccines produced by Western manufacturers. In March 2021, socialist democracies led the way in forming the Groups of Friends in Defense of the UN Charter, a significant development in forging a future of world peace.

In sum, Biden’s Summit for Democracy was nothing more than a projection of the narrow form of democracy championed by the world’s foremost imperial hegemon. The Summit for Socialist Democracy, however, emphasizes the promises and prospects of the democratic governance models offered in the struggle for socialism. A greater understanding of the development trajectories of all peoples and nations around the world is of critical importance toward collectively resolving the pressing problems facing the human race in the 21st century and beyond. From this vantage point, socialist democracies set an example worthy of attention and defense from the incessant propaganda leveled against them by the declining Western world order led by the United States.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/funda ... -democracy
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Democracy ?

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 17, 2021 2:09 pm

Image

A Litmus Test for Democracy? Democratic Deficits at the Summit for Democracy
December 15, 2021
By Alfred de Zayas – Dec 6, 2021

The so-called “Summit for Democracy” should first agree on a definition of what democracy means. Whereas etymologically we know that the definition of democracy means rule by the people, instinctively we feel that people power must be more than a slogan, that it must be concretized by genuine public participation in the conduct of public affairs.

There are, of course, many manifestations or “models” of democracy, exercised nationally as well as locally in provinces and communities. The spectrum of democratic governance goes from direct democracy by way of citizen power of initiative and the possibility to challenge legislation by way of referenda, to participatory democracy through public meetings and voting on specific issues by ballot (or even show of hands!), to representative democracy through the election of parliamentarians with specific mandates, to presidential democracy by electing a president with wide-ranging powers.

As a Swiss citizen, I recognize the benefits of the semi-direct democracy practised in Switzerland. Indeed, I vote in every single election and referendum, and actively participate in the public debate that precedes them, and in this way I feel that my opinion counts. As an American citizen I vote in every congressional and presidential election every two years. However, on the important issues I feel that there is no genuine choice given to the electorate, because the two parties converge precisely on those issues where there must be change. Because there is hardly a possibility to influence domestic or international policy, I and many other Americans feel disenfranchised. We suffer from endemic democratic deficits.

What criteria can be used to assess the level of democratic governance in any given country? What measuring stick can we use? Surely the correlation between the will of the people and the governmental policies that affect their lives is crucial. To what extent can citizens genuinely influence governmental policies?

What are some preliminary conditions that should be met? As a Litmus test we should ask:

1) whether the political establishment consisting of local and central governments pro-actively informs citizens about proposed legislation and options

2) whether citizens are asked what their priorities are, what they want to change

3) whether citizens are regularly consulted on their needs and preferences

4) whether citizens have access to all necessary information, access to evidence, access to truth, so that they can judiciously exercise democratic rights

5) whether government practices censorship or suppresses key information, whether government indoctrinates in order to “manufacture consent”

6) whether there is a pluralistic media that separates reporting of facts from editorial opinion

7) whether the private-sector media engages in censorship or suppression of key information whether the citizens have realistic opportunity to choose between policy options

8) whether the citizens have realistic opportunity to designate the candidates for election whether the citizens can vote freely without fearing reprisals

Once these preliminary questions have been sorted out, we can formulate specific issues of importance to the daily lives of citizens and explore to what extent citizens have some control over decisions taken by the authorities. What is the level of government secrecy? How often are political scandals covered-up? Do transparency and accountability actually exist? We can then rate democratic governance by addressing a number of concrete questions that would reveal whether governments are in tune with their populations or whether there is some kind of “disconnect”. Let us review the world we live in and how certain political decisions were made, the consequences of which we bear and which we feel impotent to reverse.

For instance

1) was the citizenry informed and consulted whether to spend 40% of the budget on military?

2) did the citizenry give informed consent to the establishment of the National Security Agency and its world-wide surveillance of persons and companies?

3) does the citizenry approve of the continued persecution of whistleblowers?

4) did the citizenry approve the “bailouts” given to the banks after the financial melt-down of 2007/8?

5) did the population consent to the establishment of tax havens and the protection given to them by law?

6) did the population consent to CIA practices of targeted assassination?

7) did the population consent to torture practices in Guantanamo?

8) did the population consent to the “extraordinary rendition” program?

9) did the population consent to the imposition of killer sanctions on Cuba, Nicaragua, Syria, Venezuela?

10) did the population consent to the Vietnam war? NATO’s assault on Yugoslavia in 1999? NATO’s assault on Libya 2011? NATO’s assault on Syria?

11) did the population consent to the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders in violation of the agreements made 1990 with Soviet President Gorbachev?

12) did the population consent to fracking, large-scale mining, oil prospecting and logging in indigenous lands, e.g. in Alaska?

13) did the population consent to subsidies given to oil and gas industries?

14) did the population consent to subsidies given to nuclear industries?

15) did the population consent to the practice of vaccine hoarding?

16) did the population consent to the opening hours of shops and supermarkets on Sundays and holidays?

To the extent that the populations of many countries would have to answer all of the above questions in the negative, because they were never properly informed and consulted, because they were never asked “do you want peace or war?”, it would appear that there is a serious disconnect between people and governments.

Bearing in mind that many Western countries are advocates of “competition”, it would be interesting to see how these countries actually compete in terms of democratic governance. One could anticipate that some participants in the “Summit for democracy” would probably end up with rather low scores. We would have to conclude that many “democratic” governments actually practice fake democracy based on fake news and fake law.

Bottom line: a democratic government must inform, consult, and give real options to the citizens. The way in which the Western model of “democracy” is practiced does not take the human being and his/her dignity seriously. Thus, in many countries democracy is more of a façade than reality. Alas, most countries attending the “Summit for democracy” will fail the litmus test.



Featured image: Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

(Counter Punch)

https://orinocotribune.com/a-litmus-tes ... democracy/

Please refer to opening post.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Democracy ?

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 20, 2021 3:46 pm

US 'democracy summit' a master class in hypocrisy
By Ian Goodrum | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2021-12-09 09:07

Image
Luo Jie/China Daily

If you thought discourse in the United States couldn't get more childish, think again: This week, the White House is convening the geopolitical equivalent of the He-Man Woman-Haters' Club from Our Gang.

The club has an official name, of course; the Summit for Democracy, wherein US President Joe Biden and 110 of his closest friends have a super-secret special meeting in their treehouse to talk about how great they are. But however hard they try to gussy it up, this affair is no different from what Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat got up to in those Hal Roach short films decades ago.

As per usual, the US has appointed itself supreme authority — this time of the dictionary. Just like "freedom" and "human rights", we can count "democracy" as another term that's lost all meaning after years of being trotted out by the country that cares about it the least. Because aren't all the best democratic processes the ones where the guy with the most money and guns tells everyone what to do?

That's only half a joke. Of the 110 supposedly willing participants in this "democracy summit", many are host to US military bases and troops. Indigenous resistance to US military presence — some might say occupation — is frequently suppressed by comprador governments, who depend on American largesse to fill their coffers. This inconvenient fact, among many others, makes it hard to take this week's charade seriously.

We might, for instance, ask Salvador Allende of Chile or Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo how the US treats elected leaders who dare to espouse an alternate path for their people — if the CIA hadn't masterminded their assassinations. Even when countries follow the US model, if the results don't favor US interests those who get elected tend to find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun. Or lately, fleeing their homes as color revolutions facilitate the installment of new, more amenable leadership.

Some may complain these examples are old, from the height of the Cold War. But removal of inconvenient leaders, most of them socialists, by the American military-intelligence complex didn't stop after the Soviet Union ended in 1991 — and it's naïve to believe otherwise. Notably absent from the hallowed list of this week's "democratic" participants are Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. These three Latin American countries have regularly scheduled multiparty elections, but because those elections put left-wing governments into power that oppose US hegemony they are decried as illegitimate, and their leaders as dictators.

It should come as no surprise these countries' poor treatment in the press comes with protracted efforts to overthrow their leadership; to cite only two examples, former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez survived an ouster in 2002 and Bolivia's Evo Morales was deposed in a fascist coup in 2019 before returning the following year when his party won back the presidency. These anti-democratic moves, just like their Cold War antecedents, were cheered on by the same media that now purports to be defenders of freedom, democracy and human rights.

So it's not even about US-style democracy in the abstract. It's about whether a given "democracy" benefits the US economically and politically. We see this in the summit invitations extended to Israel, a country presiding over a regime of brutal apartheid against Palestinians; Brazil, where judicial shenanigans remove leftist leaders or block their candidacies; and India, where state-supported pogroms on Muslims go unnoticed to ensure participation in US-led military alliances. As with so many things where America is concerned, geopolitical expediency trumps any imaginary commitment to principle.

How popular can the US' brand of "democracy" be if its existence requires enforcement at gunpoint or, at the very least, the toeing of a particular line? How many countries in the world would, if given the choice, willingly submit to a "rules-based order" that has kept them under colonial and neocolonial domination for decades? Since a global majority names the US as the greatest threat to world peace, the answer isn't hard to imagine.

But these run-of-the-mill hypocrisies only scratch the surface. There's a much deeper issue underpinning US "democracy" and all its contradictions, and it's one Marxists have known about for some time. As Vladimir Lenin said in State and Revolution, "The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them." He was paraphrasing Karl Marx and writing over 100 years ago, but those words are as true as they've ever been.

Whatever form it takes, under capitalism democracy is little more than a pantomime show. It's an instrument of class rule, one which provides a vehicle for more efficient exploitation. But all the smoke and mirrors in the world can't obscure this fundamental fact, and the American people know it on some level — even if they don't articulate it in those terms.

Is it, after all, a democratic right to live in poverty? To work multiple jobs and barely keep your head above water? To worry over being one of the millions evicted amid a still-raging pandemic? Is it a democratic choice to decide between risking one's life at work or one's livelihood in unemployment or debt peonage?

Nearly 800,000 people in the US have had even those meager "rights" stripped from them, as their democratic government elected to let them die. This is what critics of countries like China don't understand: You could hold an election every day of the year, but they wouldn't mean squat if things didn't improve for the working majority.

This is entirely by design. To quote Lenin again: "Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich…that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see restrictions [that] exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy." In the US, these restrictions most obviously manifest through voter suppression targeting minority groups, but the political system itself is built on a rotten foundation. It is not a government "of the people, by the people, for the people," as Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, but one of the capitalists, by the capitalists, for the capitalists. The people don't enter into it — except as sources of wealth extraction.

China, however, turns this relationship on its head. The Communist Party, the country's leading political organ, is a body with membership from the whole of Chinese society, but its base of support was forged in an alliance of workers and peasants. That alliance continues to predominate, ensuring the working majority remains the primary focus when crafting policy and allocating resources.

In countries like the US, the affluent form interest groups to protect and expand their profits; communists' only interest group is the people. If action is taken in China or other countries governed by communist parties, social benefits and costs are factored in long before anyone considers what the bourgeoisie will think. Because why should we? They aren't the majority, and if their ideas were put to a vote they'd lose every time. "More money for us", sad to say, remains quite unpopular.

There are other aspects of what China terms its whole-process democracy that could, and should, be addressed in greater detail. Whole-of-society participation in the political process through oversight, consultation, public review, grassroots governance and many other avenues make China a far more democratic society than the US and its hangers-on will ever give it credit for.

But that's a topic for another time. For now, I'll leave you with one last quote:

"If the people are awakened only for voting but enter a dormant period soon after, if they are given a song and dance during campaigning but have no say after the election, or if they are favored during canvassing but are left out in the cold after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy."

That's not Marx or Lenin. That's Chinese President Xi Jinping, and he's saying exactly what they would if they were alive today.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20211 ... 7a3a9.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Democracy ?

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 23, 2021 12:56 pm

BIDEN’S ‘SUMMIT’ IS AN INSULT TO DEMOCRACY
Posted by MLToday | Dec 21, 2021
BY MARC VANDEPITTE
December 13, 2021 Morning Star


Biden’s ‘Summit’ is an insult to democracy With the Summit for Democracy, the US President reverts to cold war rhetoric and bloc building — whoever thought that world peace would be better served with Biden than with Trump might be disappointed.

On DECEMBER 9 and 10, Joe Biden organised a virtual “summit for democracy.” Representatives of 110 countries were invited to this summit. Among them were many Western heads of government.

The purpose is, so to speak, promoting “democracy” and “universal human rights” around the world. But if you zoom in on some of the invited countries, you will quickly see that a completely different agenda is at play here.


STRANGE DEMOCRACIES

Colombia is the second most dangerous country in the world for defenders of human rights or the environment. In 2020, more than 250 indigenous leaders, rights activists, environmentalists or former Farc members were assassinated. In the first half of this year, that number already exceeded 350. In street protests that began in April 2021, at least 44 people have been killed and another 500 “disappeared.”

Another country invited is India, the so-called “largest democracy in the world.” Some 29 per cent of parliamentarians have been indicted for crimes or offences serious enough to merit five years in prison. Camps have been built in the north of the country to intern two million illegal immigrants. By the way, you may have to wonder why you haven’t heard about that yet — the contrast with the coverage of the Uyghurs in China is quite striking.

Human rights organisations are facing more and more opposition in India. That is why Amnesty International left the country last year.

And what about Brazil? Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s president, is a fan of Chilean dictator Pinochet, who “did what had to be done.” It does not bother Bolsonaro that 3,000 political opponents were killed and tens of thousands were tortured. His government includes more than 100 active or retired military personnel, including several ministers and a vice-president. When his position was threatened in 2020, Bolsonaro raised the prospect of military intervention.

His culture minister had to resign because he had quoted Goebbels. More than 60,000 Brazilians are killed by firearms every year. “A cop who doesn’t kill is not a cop,” the president said.



NO AUTHORITY

We could also refer to the Philippines, Israel, Poland, Georgia, etc. — or to the US itself. The US is the largest arms supplier to a whole series of brutal dictatorships. In Guantanamo, it has kept a concentration camp open for nearly 20 years, where 780 people have been detained and tortured without trial so far.

Almost a year ago a mob stormed the parliament building on Capitol Hill, yet there is a substantial chance that the instigator of this failed raid will be president again within three years.

US attempts to install democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Libya have turned into humanitarian catastrophes. In any case, Washington has no authority to give lessons on democracy or human rights.



NEW COLD WAR?

This summit is clearly not about democracy. It is about power and about bloc formation. After the second world war, the US strived for absolute dominance. “Preponderant power must be the objective of US policy,” it said in 1952 — this has been the official doctrine ever since.

For the US, the issue is not whether the country or world peace is under threat, it is about being able to impose its will on others. Due to China’s rapid economic and technological development, the US is now in danger of losing its supremacy. Biden wants to avoid that at all costs.

To continue to impose this unipolar world led by the US, the White House needs more and more support from other countries. That is why it is trying to form a bloc. The countries invited to the summit are not chosen because of their democratic credentials but because of their obedience to the US.

Bloc formation was characteristic of the cold war, as was the rhetoric of “human rights” and “democracy.” Precisely at a time when the world needs unity and a joint approach to the climate crisis or to combat a pandemic, Biden is pushing for bloc formation.

Instead of uniting the world, he is pushing for division, for a new cold war. It is up to us to unmask this and not to allow ourselves and our countries to be dragged into it.

https://mltoday.com/bidens-summit-is-an ... democracy/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Democracy ?

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 10, 2022 4:02 pm

Ain't no fan of Glen Greenwald but these few paragraphs do sum up the over-the-top posturing last week on the anniversary of the Jan6 Capitol riot.
Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today—the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot—there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.

The orgy of psychodrama today was so much worse and more pathetic than I expected—and I expected it to be extremely bad and pathetic. “House Democrats [waited] their turn on the House floor to talk to Dick Cheney as a beacon for American democracy,” reported CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere; “One by one, Democrats are coming over to introduce themselves to former VP Dick Cheney and shake his hand,” added ABC News’ Ben Siegel. Nancy Pelosi gravely introduced Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton to sermonize and sing about the importance of American democracy. The Huffington Post’s senior politics reporter Igor Bobic unironically expressed gratitude for “the four legged emotional support professionals roaming the Capitol this week, helping officers, staffers, and reporters alike”—meaning therapy dogs. Yesterday, CNN’s Kaise Hunt announced: “Tomorrow is going to be a tough one for those of us who were there or had loved ones in the building. Thinking of all of you and finding strength knowing I’m not alone in this.” Unsurprisingly but still repellently: Kamala Harris today compared 1/6 to 9/11.

That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or “coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic—three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress—posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-histrion ... -purposes/
Besides the evident self-interest of the Democratic Party in promoting this hogwash and the demographics of the rioters(2/3 over 35, 2/3 business owners or white collar employees. See 'Middle Class' thread) a historical materialist analysis of current conditions pretty much rule out a fascist 'coup'(which historically are really compromises). The bourgeoisie like their bogus democracy just fine, it has proven the most 'economical' way for them to rule and they won't give it up until they feel existentially threatened.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Democracy ?

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 19, 2022 3:34 pm

Democracy: The US Hot Potato
January 18, 2022
By Kahlil Martin Wall-Johnson – Jan 17, 2022

Perhaps the most valuable task performed by journalists critical of US interventionism is that of deconstructing the corporate media’s account of unrest in foreign countries. To their credit, this consists in an almost endless mapping of the patterns, tactics and templates of US power, soft and hard, and is played out in dialectical opposition to the mainstream media. The documentation of the cycles of regime change and their trajectory has required its own terminology and necessarily connects with fields such as economics, geopolitics, but especially with historiography (the journalist being, in a sense, “the historian of the present” and the historian “the journalist of the past”). For a US-based audience, this body of work allows one to interpret foreign unrest through the lense of US imperialism, reducing matters to the formula of: what interests does the US have there? And remaining at the periphery of local debates and allegiances, often emotionally and politically charged, of those countries.

However, when US commentators are concerned with domestic unrest, and in this case I have in mind the period spanning the killing of George Floyd to the January 6 protest, attempts to apply this framework must immediately answer to a handful of heated controversies (the role of race, allegiances to the democratic party and concern for the stability of US society). This makes asking questions such as: how were these events influenced and portrayed in order to legitimize the US leadership? much more troublesome. In this regard, where local commentators get tangled in opposing “leftist” narratives, it may be easier for audiences outside of US borders to recognize the empire’s soft power games at home (i.e. casting Biden as an antifascist keen on restoring normality).

This debate will presumably flare up every January for some years to come, as US democrats revive the spectre of a right-wing coup. This year, however, reflections on the “first anniversary” were wed with novel predictions of a potential schism in the US military apparatus. Predictions which, pointing to the fault lines in US military, political and civil life, have been read as glitches in the facade of liberal democratic constitutionality and seem to loom heavily on those watching eyes still fixated on Trump’s previous term and the convoluted details of his departure. Meanwhile the prospect, or even suggestion, of an internal conflict capable of shaking the foundation of the US establishment has stoked a range of somewhat dormant contradictions amongst self-described leftist journalists and commentators based in the US. To what extent these debates resonate with the rest of the world remains to be seen.

One of the clearest lines of cleavage to emerge in anti-imperialist circles is that which exists between those who, on the one hand, feel threatened by the notion of a political fracture coalescing around the figure of Trump and, on the other hand, those who have identified a democrat-based trend of fear mongering and conspiracy (revolving around Russiagate, January 6 and now the impending civil war), which ultimately serves the purpose of justifying domestic militarization, foreign sanctions and reinforcing Biden’s image. This fissure could equally be traced in terms of those who see past the superficial differences that distinguish the two parties, and those who retain traces of allegiances to the democratic party and faith in liberal constitutional democracy. Or similarly, we could speak of the friction between those who view a civil rupture as a process capable of weakening the yoke of US imperialism, both domestic and foreign, and those who cling to the security of the American life or to a sacred sense of US “democracy,” supposedly threatened by mass popular unrest or Trump’s reelection. Again, these discussions present geographical dimensions as well, as cheering on the internal disintegration of the US machine from outside of its borders is clearly a more detached mental exercise than pondering the potential implications of such a process for the US resident.

Equally polemic have been the range of attempts to understand the phenomenology of the supposed estrangement of the Trump voter from the democratic process, as those who wish to contextualize the angst of conservative populism rub up against those who are mired in their sectarian revulsion or who cling to cheap notions of cult of personality, which do nothing but degrade our comprehension of the dynamics in play.

The suspicions of the observer, watching from afar, must undoubtedly be raised upon noting that the catchword “democracy” is the distorted ideal through which all sides stake their claim, despite their referencing vastly different things. This can be seen when those who perceived the capitol protest as an attempt to overthrow democracy clash with those who see there being no democracy to overthrow. While the latter argument has its own problems (i.e. fixing a pure idea of democracy, yet to be realized or perhaps glimpsed in distant lands), it is the former which is the most frustrating and surely raises a red flag for the foreign observer.

These warnings about US “democracy’s” recent fragility are ambiguous at best and complete nonsense from a historical perspective, only serve to obscure the situation; it is not the country’s “democracy” which has recently come under question but the material basis of US society (imperialist exploitation). One could only refer to a crisis of democracy insofar as it is the legitimating ideology of the US, in this sense perhaps it is beginning to quiver. Or perhaps they concieve of democracy as inseparable from concrete historical reality in which the idea has been molded (liberalism, capitalism, constitutional legality, opposition to socialism, etc), which is highly unlikely.

In any case, we must assume that they are convinced that the quantity of democracy has declined, an assertion which immediately flops in the face of history. Furthermore, this notion that US democracy is diminishing because there are a series of factors external to US democracy (capitalism, neoliberalism, imperialism, fascism, wokeism, polarization, propaganda, etc) which could be ultimately overcome or minimized through more constitutional democracy, is an absurd idea which must be thrown out the window like a toaster fire. All of the aforementioned factors are inherent aspects of the dynamics of US democratic institutions, and instead of grappling for the higher ground of democracy we should be asking ourselves if the ambiguous recipe of “the will of the people” has any significance within the confines of a coordinated multibillion dollar industry of propaganda, censorship, miseducation and historical revisionism. US democracy is void of meaning when abstracted from all of the structural processes which supposedly “hinder it.” For this reason, those who interpret January 6 or other predicted events as a threat to democracy are implicitly defending the perpetuation of the US and its democratic institutions through their naive belief that the system could potentially extricate itself from its defining characteristics (euphemistically labeled flaws or deficiencies), “we just need more democracy.”

In this sense, when people contribute to these conversations by painting a picture of a crossroads between the US slipping into a QAnon dictatorship, and putting more faith in democracy, the umbrella term “accelerationist” is equally as mystifying as the label “conspiracy theorist.” Both notions serve to portray a black and white picture with no space between blind faith in the US establishment and complete anarchy. Rejecting liberal constitutional democracy cannot be conflated with cheering on a civil war (this amounts to echoing the lesser evil argument). If there is an erosion of faith in democratic institutions, it must not be cast as a shift towards authoritarianism or tyranny as both sides are more saturated than ever in democratic ideology. Rather, it would be more indicative of a growing consciousness that the empire’s democratic institutions do not serve the people, even if the majority of those people understand the “people” to mean white Americans.

Once again, for those living in the crosshairs of US sanctions and “regime” change, the empire’s internal demise is certainly more welcome than it is to those who must contemplate how it would unfold, and for those subject to US “regime” change and/or warfare, the fear that US-based commentators exhibit of any rupture occurring in their constitutional democratic processes is undoubtedly comical. This separation anxiety manifested by self-styled leftists with regards to the stability provided to them by the US establishment is clearly a reflection of their class composition and the limited radius of their political thought. Yet, there must be a consensus, especially within the critique of US imperialism, that these institutions cannot rectify themselves and that their legal continuity must be desacralized.

https://orinocotribune.com/democracy-the-us-hot-potato/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10586
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Democracy ?

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 20, 2022 2:44 pm

Image

Seven Myths about the January 6th Capitol Building Incident
January 19, 2022
By Roger D. Harris – Jan 18, 2022

After over a year of incessant publicity, the Capitol building incident of January 6, 2021, has taken on mythic proportions. While all myths are prone to hyperbole, not all are entirely false as the following accounting relates.

• January 6 was an attempted coup

According to Noam Chomsky: “That it was an attempted coup is not in question,” likening the incident to Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. However, after storming the Capitol building and taking selfies, the demonstrators simply left after a few hours. Their attempt to influence the electoral process by disruption did not and could not have led to the seizure of state power.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald points out, “after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ [Department of Justice] conducting what is heralded as ‘the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history’ [no rioters] have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government.”

Then on January 13, eleven were charged with “seditious conspiracy,” which according to the New York Times is difficult to prove. This raises the embarrassing question for the government of how could some two thousand people conspire in broad daylight to stage an insurrection and the FBI and other agencies didn’t know about it until after the fact.

Greenwald continues, “the Department of Homeland Security issued at least six separate ‘heightened threat’ warnings last year, not a single one of which materialized. There were no violent protests in Washington, D.C. or in state capitols on Inauguration Day; no violent protests materialized the week after Biden’s inauguration…Each time such a warning was issued, cable outlets and liberal newspapers breathlessly reported them, ensuring fear levels remained high.”

What did happen is that a sitting president unprecedently called for a march on the Capitol to contest an election, signifying a breakdown of bourgeois political norms. Quite unlike Al Gore, who took a hit for elite political stability rather than contest the 2000 presidential election, Trump flagrantly broke the rules of orderly succession.

• January 6 ranks with Pearl Harbor and the terrorist attacks of 9/11

Vice President Kamala Harris (no relation to this author) solemnly proclaimed: “Certain dates echo throughout history…when our democracy came under assault…December 7th, 1941. September 11th, 2001. And January 6th, 2021.”

According to the US Senate report, seven fatalities are attributed to 1/6: one person was fatally shot by police, one succumbed to an overdose of amphetamine, and two others died of natural causes; all were Trump supporters. In the days that followed, Officer Brian Sicknick “died of natural causes” according to the coroner’s report, contrary to false news that his passing was due to injuries on 1/6. Two other police officers died of suicide.

In contrast, 2,390 perished in Pearl Harbor; 2,977 in 9/11. The former marked the beginning of active US military engagement in World War II, which took an estimated 70–85 million people. The latter sparked the “War on Terror,” claiming an estimated 1.3 to 2 million casualties.

• Trump and his supporters are ignorant

Some suppose Trump and his supporters get by on crude cunning and animal instinct. An unfortunately pervasive left-liberal trope is that people who see the world differently from them must be “militantly ignorant,” otherwise they too would be Democrats. The self-faltering conceit is that if some half of the voting public, the “basket of deplorables,” were better educated, they would have better politics. Little wonder that Trump can play to the justified resentment to this class chauvinism.

• Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history and the world has never seen an organization more profoundly committed to destroying planet earth

Noam Chomsky, citing 1/6, made the above claim, which is partially true. The Republican Party is part of the bad cop/good cop dyad, which is the political leadership of the US empire. And that empire is the greatest threat ever to humanity. But focusing all the animus of one component of the ruling duopoly tends to render the duopoly itself – that is, the two-party system of capitalist rule – invisible. Demonizing the bad cop does not eliminate the system, but only renders the presumptive “lesser evil” more cosmetically acceptable.

How different are the Republicans from the Democrats? Perceptions of reality are mediated by perspective. For instance, very small and near objects such as a house fly appear to be moving very fast. Very large and distant objects like the stars appear to be moving not all. The physical reality is the opposite. Likewise, the differences between the Republicans and the Democrats appear great or not much at all depending on one’s class and historical perspective.

From an historical perspective, the affinities between Obama and Reagan are greater than between, say, the neoliberal Obama and New Deal LBJ. For a true-blue Democratic Party partisan, the chasm separating the parties is huge. For the Venezuelan whose cancer medications are blocked by the bipartisan US sanctions, the differences are imperceptible.

After the Democrats lost the presidency in 2016 to as repugnant a figure as Donald Trump, they conjured up the alibi of Russian interference in the election and milked that for four years. Now the Democrats can no longer plausibly claim that Vladimir Putin is the pulling strings in the White House. So, the January 6th incident has become the ruse of convenience for retaining the presidency and congressional majorities without offending their donors by doing anything significant for their voter base. As candidate Joe Biden assured his wealthy supporters, “nothing would fundamentally change” if he’s elected.

• White supremacy is on the rise

Part of the perception of growing white supremacy is a commendable increased awareness and reporting of this national blight and a growing movement in opposition. A KKK bombing in the late 1960s of an Historically Black College in Mississippi where I was a junior faculty did not even get into the news. Earlier this month, seven Historically Black Colleges received bomb threats and that made national headlines. The successes of anti-racist efforts like the Black Lives Matter movement, which mounted the largest mass demonstrations in US history, should be recognized.

It also should be recognized that white supremacy didn’t originate with Trump, nor will it end with his departure, but is deeply embedded in the national DNA. Ask a Native American, whose ancestral lands were expropriated by the European settlers as part of a brutal process of displacement and extermination. Ask an African American, whose forebearers were brought here as chattel slaves and upon whose labor much of the wealth of the nation was accumulated. Ask a Japanese American about the internment of the West Coast Japanese, which was the project of the arguably most liberal president in US history.

As Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace comments: “fascism is nothing new for us, a colonized people, people who have been enslaved. It has typically been called fascism only when white people do certain things to other white people.”

Listen carefully to “our” national anthem, which celebrates: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave, from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave, and the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

• What is happening today is the same as Germany in the 1930s with Trump as the new Hitler

Analogies of Trump to Hitler can be misleading. While material conditions for many Americans are distressing, they are not as dire as Weimar Germany, following its economic collapse. Nor do the Proud Boys and company approximate the hundreds of thousands of trained and armed paramilitaries under Hitler’s direct command. Most important, the mass working class Communist and Socialist parties in Weimar Germany were positioned to contend for state power, while trade unions and third parties challenging bourgeoise rule are in decline in the US today.

Under fascism, the capitalist class voluntarily cedes a degree of economic decision making to a dictatorial state in exchange for guarantees of public order and promises to keep their profits. As long as any serious challenge to their power is absent, the US ruling elites have little incentive to resort to such measures.

The charges that Trump is “power hungry” are likely true, though that does not necessarily distinguish him from other politicians. But the force of even his big ego is insufficient to win over a sufficient faction of the bourgeoisie to support a fascist dictatorship when the theatrics of the two-party system are working so well for their interests and billionaire fortunes are skyrocketing.

But that does not mean that they need not prepare for the contingency of fascist rule, which is where the present danger resides. January 6 is being used to justify further expansion of the security state, which has and will continue to be used against the left.

• January 6 is symptomatic of a body politic polarized as never before

Polarization is the meta myth that overarches all others. According to a Pew poll, “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades.” This dysfunctional disintegration takes place in the context of a body politic lurching to the right. One side of the political duopoly blocks progressive change; the other uses the excuse of the blockage for failing to make progressive change.

The palpable polarization of the Republican-Democratic hostilities serves as a distraction from the bedrock elite consensus on matters of state (i.e., which class rules) and economics (i.e., which class benefits).

The smoke of the wrangling over the minutia of Build Back Better obfuscates the fact that a world record “defense” budget, greater than even the Pentagon requested, passed in a heartbeat. The squabble over masking distracts from the failure of the world’s richest nation to provide universal health care in a time of pandemic. The issues that truly affect the future of humanity – militarization and global warming – are obscured in the fog of cultural wars that divide working people. Meanwhile state security and surveillance measures become more pervasive, with the nominally more liberal party of the ruling class championing the FBI, CIA, and NSA.

There are fault lines of class and fault lines of partisan politics. For now, those fault lines do not coincide. The narrow positing of the threat of the right around what happened on January 6 omits the larger issues of militarism, the surveillance state, welfare for the corporations, and austerity for working people. On these fundamental issues and despite sharp contention on other issues, there is a fundamental consensus between the ruling Republican and Democratic leadership.

https://orinocotribune.com/seven-myths- ... -incident/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply