Does anyone actually believe this is a Democracy?

[BayCityProgressive]

run by the people? The curtains have been pulled back, we have a right wing dictator that was installe din 2000 (literally) against the will of the people. We have two corporate parties who back our foreign adventures to different degrees, and the most concentration of wealth of any industrial nation. Our media is a complete corporate owned joke. We have really become quite a mess.

[Norquist Nemesis]

1. Even us being a 'democratic republic' is debatable

when all of the gerrymandering is taken into consideration.

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

2. Ummmmmmm, We Are A Democracy.

We may be a mess, but we're still a democracy.

[screembloodymurder]

13. You're in denial.

We aren't even trusted with the facts, let alone the decisions.

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

28. No, I'm In The Factually Accurate Reality Based Community. We Are A Democracy, PERIOD.

Argue about it all the want. Your opinion still doesn't alter the clear fabric of reality, despite your passion in wanting it to.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

30. to mirror your tone

Argue about it all you want. Your opinion still doesn't alter the fabric of reality, despite your passion in wanting it to. We are a Constitutional Republic. We are NOT a democracy and god help us if we were. Direct rule by the people was seen as dangerous then as it is now. NEVER should we be at the whim of a majority. We should be under the protect of the law (not that we ARE...but we should be).

sP

OnEdit : just razzing you... :-)

[ProdigalJunkMail]

25. Sorry, OMC, we are not

nor have we ever been...

sP

[demnan]

3. You are right

It's time to hit the streets.

[Selatius]

4. It's not really a dictatorship at all.

It operates more like an oligarchy. The oligarchs are individuals with vast amounts of money to buy influence. Those (politicians) who sell-out to these individuals, many on Wall Street, are necessarily their servants. When these servants propose change or progress, they propose falsehoods, window dressing solutions, and bandaids on sucking chest wounds.

Because monied interests control the biggest news outlets, there is a temptation to simply not inform the public about relevant facts with respect to how politicians behave or major issues affecting the nation such as global warming. If it threatens their dominance, then there will always be a temptation to apply pressure on news editors to keep the citizenry ignorant and distracted with something irrelevant or sensationalistic as opposed to being truly informative and enriching.

[Mandate My Ass]

7. That about sums it up for me

:thumbsup:

[Selatius]

9. I updated the message a little bit, but I think it's still spot on about oligarchy. n/t

[Mandate My Ass]

14. Yes, what we see is theater

It's not a functioning democracy as the founders intended. Bush is a dictator for all intents and purposes and the media props up the fiction that the government is working in the people's best interests.

I hope the new Congress reins him in because I'd like to lose my :tinfoilhat:

[pampango]

32. If the newly elected Congress is able to rein Bush in, does that become a

case of art (theater) imitating life? I lived under a dictator in the Philippines many years ago and true dictators are not restrained by elected congresses.

In any country it is a constant battle to fight the tendency of those who control the means of production to also want to control the media that sets the stage for their continued political control. We need to always fight the battle, though.

[Selatius]

33. This is why I disagreed with the assertion the US is a dictatorship.

If this were a hard dictatorship, we would be dead or in prison. What we have is bad, an oligarchy, but it is nowhere near as terrifying as living under the likes of Pinochet, Suharto, the Shah of Iran, or Kim Jong-Il. Our oppression is more subtle than that.

[Uncle Joe]

21. I totally agree Selatius,

thanks for the post:thumbsup:

[blm]

5. Secrecy and privilege is killing what's left of our democracy.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/111106.html

Do WE Democrats have the strength of character to weaken the power of the coverup wing of the party while strengthening the anti-corruption, open government wing of the party?

[Selatius]

12. Harry Reid seems to have fucked over the anti-corruption Dems here.

He should be ashamed of himself for opposing Nancy Pelosi's language in the Senate draft version of the ethics reform bill.

[slackmaster]

6. It was never supposed to be a true Democracy

It's a representative republic consisting of semi-autonomous states with a central federal government.

...we have a right wing dictator that was installe din 2000 (literally) against the will of the people...

Chill out, BCP. True dictators don't have term limits. GWB will be gone on January 20, 2009.

[eauclaireliberal]

8. No, it is an oligarchy

The Bush family is our prime example.

[Virginia Dare]

20. Don't you mean oiligarchy?...n/t

[eauclaireliberal]

23. Oops, my bad

You are absolutely correct.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

10. It's run by TV news. That makes it a mediocracy.

... the so-called dictator is sinking his own party.

Almost amusing, if it wasn't so damn costly.

[blm]

17. I think your point is DEAD ON ACCURATE.

.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

11. 51 out of the top 100 economies in the world are corporations.

Pretty much sums up who the real bosses are in our "democracy".

Or, to put it another way, "He who has the gold makes the rules."

[NotGivingUp]

15. nope....not a democracy. the elite lead us to believe it's a democracy so we won't revolt.

[NotGivingUp]

16. no democracy here...and the ones ruling us are making sure democracies do not start anywhere else.

[TahitiNut]

18. Our democracy could only be surrendered, not taken.

Likewise, a people can only have a democracy when they TAKE it. It cannot be given. If, as you say, we have become a plutocracy then the solution is clear. TAKE IT BACK - using whatever means are necessary.

A failure to do so is capitulation. Cowardice. We have the kind of government we deserve ... maybe better than we deserve.

[bobbie]

19. Thanks for saying this BayCityProgressive, I'll add a followup

Does anyone believe that it's been a democracy since 1963, when there was a gov't/CIA coup against President Kennedy?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

22. Nope, we're living in a corporate republic

The corps buy/back their candidates for office and then have them vote by proxy on legislation for the respective corporations that they represent.

It's a republic -- but the representatives are no longer beholden to the people; they're only beholden to the money.

[Virginia Dare]

27. You are 100 percent correct...n/t

[ProdigalJunkMail]

24. this is a real thorn in my side...

no, we are not nor have we ever been a democracy. That word is not in The Constitution nor The Declaration of Independence. I agree that things seem worse now than at other times based on the current state of our government, but no, we are NOT a democracy.

sP

[Amonester]

26. Never Forget

[jobycom]

29. It's a Republic, just about the way our Founders set it up to be

A Democracy is run directly by the people. In a Republic, the people choose leaders who run the nation as the leaders see fit. Back in 1789, only landed, educated white males could vote--about ten percent of the population. That's the way the government was envisioned to run.

It's still a Republic, though our method of choosing our leaders had, until 2000, become increasingly Democratic, in that the ideal was to have as many people as possible vote. On December 12th, 2000, the Supreme Court ruled by a five to four vote that an election could be decided without counting all the votes (the justices agreed unanimously that many votes had been cast and not counted).

That December 12th ruling killed the march to a Democratic Republic, and weakened our right to be called a Republic, even, since it supported the idea that the government (in the form of the SCOTUS) could decide who would take office despite the expressed will of the majority of legal votes.

So I don't know what we have anymore. At many local and state levels, elections still function properly. Then again, many local and state elections have always been corrupt to the point of not being true elections. This may stun some people here, but elections were more easily stolen, and have frequently been stolen, before electronic voting emerged. They can corrupt any system when no one has oversight authority.

Money and power have always decided elections, that's nothing new. And it won't change--money has always determined leadership, and always will, no matter how many obstacles are thrown up. That doesn't bother me as much as the fact that the laws are just flat ignored. No one watches the people who count the votes. THAT's our biggest threat.

We need an independent authority over elections, we need full transparency in vote casting and counting. Barring that, elections will always be suspect, no matter how the votes are cast.

As for having "two corporate parties" and all that, I don't agree, and even if it's true, that doesn't preclude a democratic government. If the people could overthrow these parties through an election and be sure that their votes were counted, I'd say we still had a Republic, but that the people were using it poorly. An elected official who acts like a dictator is still an elected official, as long as the people have the power to vote him out, and as long as he isn't flagrantly violating the Constitution. Sadly, both of those conditions are being violated now.

The critical, telling point comes soon. When the people vote such a tyrannical regime out of office, and give oversight to another party, that new party has an obligation to force the tyrant to follow the laws. If the tyrant still won't, or the new party doesn't even try, then we have almost completely failed as a Republic.

Complete failure comes when we follow the laws and cast them all out of power, and they refuse to go. So far they are cheating to pretend they are following the law. When they no longer have to cheat or pretend, then we are lost.

Just my thoughts. Probably wrong, as always.

[Spider Jerusalem]

31. It never has been. Nor was it intended to be.

The US has always been a democratic republic in theory, and something closer to an oligarchy in practice. The leading figures of the American revolution were either wealthy northeastern merchants or members of the South's slave-owning plantation gentry class, and those two groups continued to hold the reins of political power until the Civil War, and the northeastern moneyed elite for a good while after.

And Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, et al were quite leery of democracy; they viewed it as little better than mob rule, a mere 'tyranny of the majority'.

[Stevepol]

34. Biggest factor of all: the use of privatized vote counting.

When the vote is counted in total secrecy (using trade secret, proprietary software) without verification (without required, robust audits), IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE A DEMOCRACY AT ALL.

[baldguy]

35. ...of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations.

[Nye Bevan]

36. I do

We just won an election. Because we won the minimum wage is going up and several extremist judicial nominees will no longer be judges.

And my main news sources are DU LBN and Buzzflash so I can't really agree that our media is a *complete* corporate owned joke.

[Conan_The_Barbarian]

37. I don't know if America as we knew it can come back

You will never get America back as you once knew of it, it is dieing because the way we conceptualize political organization is becoming outdated. Most protests are a waste of effort because elected politicians are becoming less and less able to confront the issues that we're concerned with because the line between domestic and foriegn policy seems to be disolving. The west-phalian order of the nation state is based on the principles of soverignty, autonomy, and territoriality, is becoming less and less meaningful as their own core principles of organization become less applicable. In order for the state to function as we currently imagine it must it must be the highest political authority internationally but there are a vast array of non-state actors in the realm of international politics which may not currently be challenging state supremecy but significantly reducing state authority the NGO, IGO, MNC, and various other transnational organizations are in a way able to transcend the borders in which state authority must be confined. The modern communications network has caused the development of an extensive transnational civil society and conversly resulted in the rise of the MNC. This and a variety of many other both identified and unidentified factors is resulting in a deterritorialization process if you will, or a time space compression process destroying now outdated concepts as national economic space.

So if there are forces which are now eroding the power of the state which is the way which we organize democracy than the will of the people is second to the will of the organazations that are beyond the control of state. Now of course the state still does maintain a lot of power, for the most part it maintains its monooply on the legitimate force of violence. However it is increasingly facing pressure which prevent it from utilizing this supreme power freely upon its own will.

Pretty much think about all those forces that influence government decision making besides the pure will of the people and the constitution. They're all recent developments and at this point the state really doesn't have the power to legislate them out of existence as government legislation really is becoming less and less meaningful. I have no idea have the earth will be organized in 30, 40, or 50 years from now but I certainly wouldn't put my money on the state. Democracy will not be able to survive on the national level, it will likely be dead by the 22nd century.