OPINION: #Concentrated #Wealth + #Widespread #Stupidity = #End of #Democracy

Eric Zuesse

Today’s America is not a democracy:

“Dark Money Groups Are Funded By Dark Money Groups That Fund Dark Money Groups That Fund…”

That terrific investigative news report by Paul Blumenthal at Huffington Post, on 9 November 2013, penetrated beyond what the U.S. oligarchy — or more traditionally called aristocracy — requires its dark-money groups to disclose to the Federal Election Commission; and so Blumenthal researched also into what dark-money groups are required to report to the IRS (America’s tax-authorities). 

This way, Blumenthal was able to discover, for example, that a “dark-money shell game allowed the

Wisconsin Club for Growth to influence the elections with both its own ads and those of seemingly unrelated conservative groups with different public agendas. … The trail of cash moving from dark money nonprofit to dark money nonprofit can be traced, in part, through public records of the groups contributing it,” but only by accessing both FEC and IRS public records. And, even then, the picture was incomplete, because the 5-Republican bare majority, on the infamous pro-aristocracy 2010 U.S. Supreme Court Citizens United decision, by five traitors to the U.S. Constitution (which all judges are sworn to protect), prohibits public access to a complete picture of how (like in that Wisconsin election) a few psychopathic billionaires, plus millions of faith-driven fools they sucker with myth-affirming lies, can destroy government of the people, by the people, for the people, and turn it instead into government of the people, by the aristocracy, for the aristocracy. Blumenthal also showed the same billionaires+suckers system replacing democracy in other states. (Today’s Greece is a more extreme case of the same thing. Perhaps what’s today in Greece will be tomorrow in America.)

On 27 August 2012, the Republican commentator, Mike Lofgren, headlined in The American Conservative, “The Revolt of the Rich,” and he dumped upon his fellow conservatives for being now traitors to democracy in America. Anyone who thinks that America is still a democracy, and that the U.S. hasn’t descended into being ruled by the money of billionaire psychopaths in both Parties, needs to see that testimony by this passionate (lower-case “d”) democrat, who “served 16 years on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget Committees.” That same month, his stellar book was published: The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. As one Amazon reader-review of that work accurately describes it: “Throughout the book he tells of some of his interactions with unnamed elected officials, but primarily he focuses on specific people in government … — Republicans like Bush, Cheney, Abramoff, Gingrich, Bachmann, the Koch Brothers; and Democrats like Obama, Rubin and Geithner. (Hint — you don’t want to be mentioned in this book.)” Lofgren is refreshingly, sometimes shockingly, honest.

Lofgren had first gone public earlier, on 3 September 2010, about his abandonment of the Republican Party. He headlined then at truthout, “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult.” This is how he explained why he had left the Party:

I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans … to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country’s future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and “shareholder value,” the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP’s decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren’t after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté.[5] They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be “forced” to make “hard choices” – and that doesn’t mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked. …

They prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious. Undermining Americans’ belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. …

As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America’s plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. …

2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. …

3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country, and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. 

He lambastes today’s Democratic Party for its constant me-tooism. Just consider that the most Republican, pro-aristocratic, international-trade bills ever, are the three, TPP, TTIP, and TISA, that the ‘Democrat,’ Barack Obama, is ramming through into U.S. law, with almost solid Republican support in both the House and the Senate, and with only a minority but just enough Democrats to get them over the line. They will be the worst legislative acts in world history, and they are profoundly anti-democratic and pro-aristocratic (and are being rammed through under an unConstitutional Republican-pushed and aristocratic Democrat-passed 1974 law. But there is no new American Revolution, to throw out those traitors, to end the American Counter-Revolution that started with Richard Nixon (his Trade Act of 1974) and that’s being culminated by the Clintons and now Obama. None of this would happen if millions of Americans weren’t very stupid, very full of faith, not science — they’re accepting a Government that will actually produce hell for their own children, and for all future generations. All of this being done to enrich billionaires today. And, to lock in rule by billionaires in the future. Forget equal opportunity — that’s not what an aristocracy wants; that’s what it blocks.

Not only billionaires are behind this, however. They couldn’t do it if there weren’t many millions of suckers who vote for their corrupt candidates, in both Parties — candidates on the take, such as Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and all Republican politicians — candidates who speak truth only in private to their sponsors, like Obama did on 27 March 2009 when he told Wall Streeters cloistered in the White House, “I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you. … I’m going to shield you from public and congressional anger. … My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” He said this to the top financial executives who had overseen frauds that had collapsed America’s and many of the world’s economies. And he fulfilled on that promise to America’s all-time-biggest crooks. But the overt Republican, McCain, was just as much in the aristocracy’s pocket as Obama was. This is what it means to live in an aristocracy, no democracy at all: it’s a type of dictatorship, a dictatorship not only by the richest, but by deception. In that Presidential contest (2008), there was no anti-aristocracy candidate in the general election, and almost all intelligent people voted for Obama because of his lies to the public; they couldn’t be blamed for believing his lies, because (unlike Hillary Clinton) he didn’t have enough of a public record for even intelligent people to know that he’s actually a fascist. And, so, virtually all of the fools voted in that election instead for the man who said, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran.” (They’re dangerous fools; but, in a democracy, even dangerous fools have the right to vote.)

This is how democracy has died in America. The formula is simple: billionaires + their (and their many clergy’s) suckers = aristocracy. The ‘Kingdom of God on Earth’ is just a front for the billionaires behind the screen, who receive their moral acceptability from preachers of some crackpot Scripture, regardless whether it’s the Bible or Ayn Rand, but preachers bought-and-paid-for all the same, who say “It’s God’s will,” or “They earned it.” The result is, in any case, an aristocratic dictatorship, no sort of authentic democracy whatsoever. And, when even the Democratic candidate has gotten there by a string of lies and no substantive record on which voters can know that his assertions don’t match his real beliefs or commitments, the voters are trapped by the aristocracy: they’ve got nothing else to go on but the aristocracy’s lies, and the aristocratically owned ‘news’ media’s stenographic transmissions of their politicians’ lies to the public.

That’s how the American Counter-revolution (since 1974) was done. It’s how democracy ended in America.

The American Revolution (1765-83) overthrew Britain’s aristocracy here. But now, the American people need to overthrow America’s own aristocracy, or else simply accept fascism (rule by an aristocracy). If America, under that condition, will be peaceful, then it can only be the peace of the graveyard — democracy’s graveyard.

Same thing in Europe.

The aristocracy is aiming to lock it in. The situation for democrats is now desperate.

Fools think that because aristocrats compete with each other, they’re not essentially united against the public. The propaganda by aristocrats is believed, as if looking behind the curtain were some type of no-no.

Anybody intentionally bringing children into a world like this has to be either an aristocrat, or a fool — or callous. (After all, an aristocrat’s child might be able to be largely insulated from the hell that’s now virtually inevitable to come.)