Democracy. Is it Dead in the U.S.?

I've lifted much of this comment from a blog site. I've left out the specific references to a column written for the Washington Post. The Blog can be found at "Comments From Left Field" consistently ranked in the top 10 most influential blogs in Pennsylvania.

Moon.
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The Concert of Democracies? What Democracies?

The core of the current sales strategy for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to be that wars of intervention will be perfectly fine with everyone - “legitimate” - if Western democracies agree they’re fine.

A key element missing from all discussions about US military imperialism in the pursuit of oil, is Democracy. The world, indeed the U.S., is in need of democracy now more than ever: Exactly which countries can be considered democratic at this point in time?

An almost untalked-about trend toward fascism is taking place in a number of the usual suspects. The US is arguably in the final stage of transforming American society into outright fascism, Australia is coming up to being about half-way through the process, France is on the cusp right now, having recently elected a fascist as President who has installed an overtly fascist Cabinet, and even the usually reliable Canada has a Prime Minister who’s flirting with corporatizing his government, restraining civil liberties, and spying on Canadian citizens without their knowledge or permission.

So far, of the old “major Western democracies” only two, Britain and Germany, seem not to have been infected by this contagion of movement to the far right. Britain waves at it and smiles a friendly, toothy smile but does nothing substantial despite Thatcher’s hot-handed love affair with it 20 years ago, and while Germany is suffering yet another rise of fascist influence in the hinterlands, the German govt has managed to keep it at a safe (?) distance. For now.

But this recent paucity of full-fledged democracies in the West raises an important question no one is addressing: what happens to the very concept of democracy - rule by the people rather than by aristocrats and oligarchs - if its sturdiest historical champions are busily dumping it for autocracies run by corporate managers and heavily authoritarian demagogues ruling through stolen elections?

In fact, if the US can
o shred its Constitution,
o allow rigged elections to be certified by the highest legal authority,
o use mercenaries to fight its wars,
o turn govt agencies over to corporate executives who run them as if they were branch offices,
o allow laws to be written by corporate lobbyists to serve corporate interests,
o design foreign policies, economic policies, domestic policies and all other policies based on corporate agendas,
o give law enforcement and intelligence agencies virtually the same unchecked powers to spy on American citizens as the KGB or Stasi used to have,
o strip habeus corpus from military prisoners,
o arrest people for wearing t-shirts critical of the current leader,
o and allow high govt officials to escape any accountability whatever for blatantly illegal acts

- if the US can do all this and still call itself a “democracy”, does the word have any meaning any more? Or has it become the equivalent of the word “Fresh” on a box of laundry soap?

Can fascist western pseudo-democracies be allowed to conference with each other to decide which theft of national resources is acceptable? Is the only issue how they’re going to divvy up the spoils - without bothering to acknowledge, let alone obey, the wishes of the citizens who “elected” them. You know, like the dictators and emperors of the Axis Powers got together in the 30’s and divvied up the planet between them.

At that point, can “democracy” even be said to exist?