Wanderer brought this up in a thread called"The American" : "Is this a real Democracy or a plutocracy pretending to be one?" With less and less daylight in evidence between or within the D and R parties are effectively the same War Party. And all they want to do is Party Down and Trash The Place. We may be forced to bring our own government to a halt at some ridiculous point.
If a democrat beats Bush this time, and if the democrats manage to take control of one of the houses of Congress, I'd really like to see if the country changes at all. After their four years are up, I'll get back to you on the whole plutocracy thing. Also, I'm starting to agree with you on the Iraq civil war. As soon as the U.S leaves they're all going to start killing each other. The Kurds want their own country. The shiites, or the sunis, I forget, well, they want to kill each other two because one was in power under Hussein and oppressed the other...christ...
What Democracy? It's a Plutocracy based on wealth and dependant on keeping the masses ignorant and dumb. In the US most vote according to aesthetic ideals where image is more important than content. Then they have the audacity to pretend that they will teach others about Democracy. The first and last Democracy began and ended over 2000 years ago. I’m more interested in a Timocracy.
There are more forces contributing to civil war in Iraq today than there were in Lebanon in 1973. There are also many current parallels with Guatemala, Vietnam, the Arab Revolt and with the Balkans. All of these are of course not under discussion in the US media, and most Americans, some of them in government, do not see the writing on the wall. Iraq will certainly descend into civil war, and an Arabian revolt is going to be ignited by the instability in Iraq and Kuwait. Don't forget that the Al-Sabah family is in the same straits as al-Saud. On the way back to discussing to plutocracy, consider the implications of OPEC not surviving an imminent course of events: Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan and(believe it or not) India are going to begin a re-alignment that will be looking East to Asia as their more lucrative market than the United States. First they will convert to Euros and then theaten to convert to Yuan. Weapons are available to back this move up. Japan is becoming a power again, and because they fear the US is becoming overextended, are forced to begin scary new posture: Short-range suborbit tac nuke defence. NK has several interesting cards to play depending on Kim chi-i tomorrow. This translates into hard times in America, considering the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, which occured under the weight of unprofitable military-industrial infatuations. Presently the US is converting its best-funded economy into arming itself sufficiently to deter the entire world. The more reactionary and natioinalistic the USA can be induced to become, the more centralized US power becomes. The more centralized US power becomes, the more bound up in unprofitable debt it becomes, until collapse. The more isolated the US economy becomes, the closer to an unseen but forecasted tripwire it gets. A sharp recession plunge along with a credit crisis, and Americans get edgy. A lot of brown people die. Plutocracy shoots out and flexes new tentacles. This brings me to examinimg plutocracy, or whatever term we want to use for Centralized Perma-War Inc. What are the indicators? We are discovering that the character of government under the right conditions can influence Constitutional interpretations sufficiently so as to allow unprecedented concentration of power. Where she stops, nobody knows. This is why I personally turn occasionally to consider an emergency emigration plan.
I thought we were suppose to be a representative Republic that protected the rights of the individual from mob rule.
Ah, but that's a tough nut to crack. I'm settling for EU citizenship first, hoping that will get me to Auckland if I want.
I just think New Zealand's a good candidate for residence because it seems to be out of the way of all the fallout that's going to be in the air after the next big war. It's small, out of the way, nothing really strategically viable for anyone, no big resources. You do have to watch out for Balrogs, though. They can get nasty during the winter I hear.
Hype: I think you're on to something when you remarked on the Soviet collapse. Their might was based on a different sort of credit than the U.S.'s - theirs was a credit of fear and oppression that was built up by Stalin's ruthlessness in the 1930s and 1940s. The might of the U.S. is built on a credit base of industry production and technological innovation. The Soviet hegemony collpased when their fear-based credit line ran out and a new generation of people born after Stalin called the government's bluff. The U.S. has just about lost all of its edge in terms of industrial production and is rapidly losing ground in innovation. If you are a young thinker with a hot idea, the last place you want to develop it into a product is the U.S.. There's too much bureaucracy and too much entrenched interest to permit any upstarts from getting a foothold. The vast majority of the things we buy come from outside our country. I daresay that a significant proportion of our production capacity is not American-owned. Much of what is American-owned is fatally dependent on foreign sources of raw materials, parts and labor. If we continue to increase our deficit spending without generating any new sources of wealth, then a Soviet-style collapse feels inevitable. What warning signs will we see? Hard to say. One thing that makes the U.S. vulnerable is not so much the total federal debt but who owns it. According to http://www.fms.treas.gov/bulletin/b43ofs.doc, the amount of federal debt owned by "foreign interests" (whatever that means) increased from 13.8% to 21.0% over the last ten years. What if those chips get cashed in suddenly? Or what if foreign investors are no longer interested in buying our debt? The U.S. has been an incubator for capitalism for well over a hundred and fifty years. I don't consider the biggest corporations as "U.S. corporations" anymore. They are transnational (their word) and have no need for or dependency on any nation. If the U.S. becomes a drag for them, they will have no hesitation to instantly cut us loose. As a result, our current "prosperity" is completely hollow. All it will take is a pandemic, maybe a few more brushfire wars in the right places, or perhaps just the realization that the U.S. is no longer a sexy market and that profits are better in Asia. I think we will start to see an increase in expatriation as our best minds go where they can prosper intellectually and economically. We will also see repatriation for immigrants who came here to find a better life but who have decided that on the whole they were better off in their homeland. We will also see companies moving their entire operations to Asia lock, stock and barrel. They will skip the moving of manufacturing to places like Mexico to better compete in the U.S. market - instead they will go to where the new markets are because there really isn't much of a market here any more. Eventually some of the worse-off U.S. states will either declare bankruptcy or else will simply tell the federal government to piss off. A tremendous amount of revenue flows out of states to the federal govt., and all it will take is one or two cases of economic secession to start the dominos falling. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner the better.
The US in general functions as a plutocracy. The fact is that most people simply do not have the time or inclination to study the issues relevant in elections sufficiently to undestand them. Thus the elections are shaped and the outcome ultimately decided by those who have the money to saturate these people with information(true or false) about various candidates. In general, the more money, the more saturation, the better a candidate does.
There have been times that the bureaucracy has been manipulated to deprive some of the full value of their ideas to the benefit of others. The delaying of alloting of frequencies for TV until the patent was expiring is a well known example. This seems to reflect a plutocracy.
