I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.

Socrates
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/socrates_122700

The first time it became clear to me that I live in a dictatorship was in 2014 when reading, prior to its publication, the landmark (and still the only) scientific empirical study to address the question as to whether or not the United States federal Government is, authentically, a democracy — or, whether, alternatively, it’s instead more of a dictatorship, than a democracy. This study documented conclusively that America’s Government is the latter.

So, on 14 April 2014, I headlined “U.S. Is an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy, Says Scientific Study”. Subsequently, my editor linked it to the published article in Perspectives on Politics, from the American Political Science Association (the full study can be read there).

On 30 April 2014, was posted at youtube the video that remains, to this day, the best and clearest ordinary-language summary of what that badly-written academic study proved. See its explanation here:

That summary’s title is also better than the title of my article. Every American citizen should know what this 6-minute video says and shows from the academic study, because it explains how the super-rich, as a class, steal from everyone else (everyone who isn’t super-rich): They do it through corruption. 

Then, that same person who created the video did another presentation of it, but this time with text accompanying the video. This article was titled “One graph shows how the rich control American politics”, and it indeed showed how. 

The super-rich carry out their control via corruption, which is legal in America and which can be done vastly more by rich people than by poor people — poor people simply can’t buy the Government, and any who would even attempt to do so would be using only the illegal means, which the U.S. Supreme Court says constitutes the only illegal means, and that’s blatant bribery, which is lower-class corruption, not the far more lucrative type of corruption that super-wealthy individuals have access to. Only the forms of corruption which are available only to the super-rich are legal in America. That’s the reason why the super-rich keep getting still-richer, while the rest of the population are lucky if they don’t become poorer. The super-rich control the legal system (and the rest of the U.S. Government). They control appointments to the Supreme Court and even to lower courts. They control Congress. And they control the Presidency.

On 28 July 2015, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was frank about this situation; as a caller at a progressive radio show, he said this about America’s soaring top-level corruption:

It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we’ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. … At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.”

Three days later, Huffington Post published my article about that statement, which was headlined “Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy“. It had over 60,000 likes on Facebook (here the article is shown a bit earlier, when it had 56,000) but HuffPo reduced that number down to its currently shown number, 18,000.

This article turned out to have been the last submission of the 100+ that they accepted from me. They’ve rejected all of my submissions after it. No explanation was ever given, and I never heard anything from them again.

read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/01/02/americans-are-only-now-beginning-to-learn-that-we-live-in-a-dictatorship/

We've been on the case for a long time...  For Gus, this has been evident soon after WWII...Some of our ramblings can be seen at "The age of deceit".

The first time it became clear to me that I live in a dictatorship was in 2014 when reading, prior to its publication, the landmark (and still the only) scientific empirical study to address the question as to whether or not the United States federal Government is, authentically, a democracy — or, whether, alternatively, it’s instead more of a dictatorship, than a democracy. This study documented conclusively that America’s Government is the latter.

So, on 14 April 2014, I headlined “U.S. Is an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy, Says Scientific Study”. Subsequently, my editor linked it to the published article in Perspectives on Politics, from the American Political Science Association (the full study can be read there).

On 30 April 2014, was posted at youtube the video that remains, to this day, the best and clearest ordinary-language summary of what that badly-written academic study proved. See its explanation here:

That summary’s title is also better than the title of my article. Every American citizen should know what this 6-minute video says and shows from the academic study, because it explains how the super-rich, as a class, steal from everyone else (everyone who isn’t super-rich): They do it through corruption. 

Then, that same person who created the video did another presentation of it, but this time with text accompanying the video. This article was titled “One graph shows how the rich control American politics”, and it indeed showed how. 

The super-rich carry out their control via corruption, which is legal in America and which can be done vastly more by rich people than by poor people — poor people simply can’t buy the Government, and any who would even attempt to do so would be using only the illegal means, which the U.S. Supreme Court says constitutes the only illegal means, and that’s blatant bribery, which is lower-class corruption, not the far more lucrative type of corruption that super-wealthy individuals have access to. Only the forms of corruption which are available only to the super-rich are legal in America. That’s the reason why the super-rich keep getting still-richer, while the rest of the population are lucky if they don’t become poorer. The super-rich control the legal system (and the rest of the U.S. Government). They control appointments to the Supreme Court and even to lower courts. They control Congress. And they control the Presidency.

On 28 July 2015, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was frank about this situation; as a caller at a progressive radio show, he said this about America’s soaring top-level corruption:

It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we’ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. … At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.”

Three days later, Huffington Post published my article about that statement, which was headlined “Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy“. It had over 60,000 likes on Facebook (here the article is shown a bit earlier, when it had 56,000) but HuffPo reduced that number down to its currently shown number, 18,000.

This article turned out to have been the last submission of the 100+ that they accepted from me. They’ve rejected all of my submissions after it. No explanation was ever given, and I never heard anything from them again.

read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/01/02/americans-are-only-now-beginning-to-learn-that-we-live-in-a-dictatorship/

We've been on the case for a long time...  For Gus, this has been evident soon after WWII...Some of our ramblings on this subject can be seen at "The Age of Deceit"

See also: Age of deceit- chapter one part one

Political corruption is rife within modern day democracy, but the destructive relationship between the two is somewhat symbiotic, writes Barry Hindess.

AT FIRST SIGHT, it seems pretty obvious that corruption damages democracy. When corrupt politicians and public servants make decisions on the basis, in part, of personal advantage, it disrupts their focus on the public interest. And the case for something like an ICAC at the Commonwealth level seems no less obvious.

The story gets complicated and analysis risks becoming dry and academic when we recognise, first, that different ideas of  both "democracy" and "corruption" are normally in play and, second, that concerns over corruption at this level have covered a vast range of issues; for example, in no particular order:

• the ATO's focus on workers fiddling their tax returns rather than tax evasion by big corporations;
• the impact of political donations and the broader influence of vested interests;
• massive electricity price hikes following privatisation;
• the collapse of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan;
• the banks' influence over the terms of reference of the banking Royal Commission;
• the apparent influence of mining companies over several areas of government policy;
• the Coalition Government twice finding a job in other parliamentarians' offices for Barnaby Joyce's girlfriend;
• pollies using official travel to go to important sporting events;
• pollies looking after their own — for example, Joyce's own party finding a salary for him while he was out of parliament following the High Court finding that he was a dual citizen;
• pollies getting private benefit out of official business, such as Bronwyn Bishop's use of a helicopter on the last leg of a journey to a political engagement in Geelong; and
• relatively minor or inexpensive rorting of parliamentary travel and accommodation allowances; regular application of double standards over who counts as a partner and payments to members of parliament compared to welfare recipients, Indigenous people and other members of the public.

Overall, as Alan Austin has recently pointed out on IA, there is no shortage of incidents in the history of the current government that might be labelled corrupt. Furthermore, if we regard the Fourth Estate – the mainstream media – as an integral part of our political system, there is more than enough evidence of corruption within it.

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/corruption-is...

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