WOW! ME ANGRY!
The president just signed a deal with Afghanistan to keep our troops there until 2024. The troops in Iraq never went home, they were repositioned to Kuwait to prepare for the coming war with Iran and/or Syria. Obama wrote up an assassination hitlist with American citizens on it, and personally ordered their deaths. He has abused the Espionage Act to prosecute more whistleblowers than any other president in history, while rewarding the "good" journalists with "leaked" scoops that benefit him and his campaign. The media is being censored and free speech is being stifled -- by this president -- and the only thing you can fucking say is that some corporation Romney was involved with are acting like capitalists.
The story we should be talking about (and in fairness I think 'we' are? I don't watch cable news so I'm uncertain) is the Fast and Furious catastrophe. Obama just claimed executive privilege to prevent the release of documents about the ATF's "Fast and Furious" program. This program allowed at least 2,000 American guns to be sold to Mexican arms traffickers, which were then sold to drug cartels. The plan was to trace the guns to big people they could take down, but they fucked things up like they always do, and lost track of them. The guns we gave to those people have since been linked to around 200 deaths.
Democrats were quick to look past Obama's blatant abuse of power, and went back to blaming Bush some more. The program started under Bush, after all. They're completely oblivious to the fact that Obama's decision to prevent the facts from getting out means he entirely supports Bush's decision to do this (if it was in fact his decision at all, which is unlikely). The level of superficiality in which these dumbfucks function is almost beyond belief. That's assuming they actually believe the nonsense spewing from their mouths, and they're not just mindless partisan hacks defending the alpha.
Bush. And his Vice President, He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. These people are such boogeymen to American "liberals," but they're too fucking stupid to understand why. If they did, then they would start hating Obama, because he's doing the exact same fucking things. Americans need to make a choice. We can either keep pretending that some binary either/or farce is a condition for electoral democracy, or we can come to the realization that we're being played, and the U.S. is, for all intents and purposes, a one-party state.
The United States is not a democracy. Historian and revolutionary activist C.L.R. James writes in his pamphlet Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece:
Modern parliamentary democracy elects representatives and these representatives constitute the government. Before the democracy came into power, the Greeks had been governed by various forms of government, including government by representatives. The democracy knew representative government and rejected it. It refused to believe that the ordinary citizen was not able to perform practically all the business of government. Not only did the public assembly of all the citizens keep all the important decisions in its own hands. For the Greek, the word isonomia, which meant equality, was used interchangeably for democracy. For the Greek, the two meant the same thing. For the Greek, a man who did not take part in politics was an idiotes, an idiot, from which we get our modern word idiot, whose meaning, however, we have limited. Not only did the Greeks choose all officials by lot, they limited their time of service. When a man had served once, as a general rule, he was excluded from serving again because the Greeks believed in rotation, everybody taking his turn to administer the state.
Mumia Abu-Jamal comments on Greek democracy:
The very fact that such an idea surprises us, tells us how far this era has drifted from fundamental notions of 'democracy.' In ancient Greece, the citizen was seen as an able, trusted element of the state. In the present era, the citizen is virtually superfluous. He is a tax source. She is one who obeys her leaders. He is a dispensable cog in the wheel, whose only real duty is to do what one is told.
Consider the mass demonstrations of Spring 2003, when millions took to the streets of Washington, London and San Francisco, demanding that there be "No War in Iraq." Here, in the alleged 'democracies' of England and the U.S., governments ignored the people, and engaged in imperial war, on a lie. In ancient Greece, some 2,500 years ago, this wouldn't have been allowed.
We don't live in a democracy. We live under the rule of a few. We live in an empire.
Ah, but how to distract the American people from the realities of imperialism? Limit the elections to only two parties, both right wing and capitalist. Limit the people who can run in those parties to a small minority of elite. Rig the elections so that you can only win them if you suck corporate dick. Rig the system so that you can only accomplish anything by appeasing the corporate masters. This is all veiled in the illusion of choice. As long as the parties are rotated every eight years, it keeps people pissed off and distracted enough to blame everything on the last guy. Keep fanning the flames of minor, irrelevant issues to keep the plebs distracted, and they'll actually believe there's a difference between the corporatists. All politicians, from no matter which party, must answer to America's corporations. America's corporations speak as one voice. America is thus a one-party state. It's participatory fascism.
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