FALSE DEMOCRACY

LAURA TIERNAN—Emerging from the maximum-security prison, visibly shocked and angered, Anderson and Hrafnsson addressed the media. Their statements were a searing indictment of state criminality and lawlessness on the part of the British and US governments.Hrafnsson said, “It is for me, shocking to see my friend—an intellectual, a publisher, a journalist, a man that has transformed the world of journalism with his work—sitting in a high security prison, spending 23 hours a day in a cell, having half an hour outdoors if weather allows and half an hour to do everything else. This is not justice. This is an abomination.”

PAUL STREET—Speaking of those absurdly revered Founders and their holy Constitution, who told Krugman that the United States is a democracy even on paper? Democracy, it is worth recalling, was the Constitution’s aristo-republican slave-owner and merchant capitalist framers’ ultimate nightmare. They viewed it as a threat to property and equated liberty with the protection of property (that is, those who owned large amounts of it) from the dreaded egalitarian sentiments of the popular majority. They constructed a constitutional republic crafted to shield the propertied elite against what it dreaded most: popular sovereignty.

This battle that the French people will win – we do not yet know when, but sure it will – is the vanguard battle of a Western world in full decline because their elites, no longer able to plunder the rest of the world as they did before, are beginning to plunder their own country in order to continue to accumulate a capital that has no other objective than accumulation, always accumulation, by pure Pavlovian reflex. The shape and outcome of this battle therefore does not concern only France but all the other people of the “West”, especially the United States, where the 1% show the same greediness.

Note how all the media sing the same tune, acting like a huge echo chamber to impose their official narrative on the public’s mind.  It works almost every time. That’s why, as reported yesterday by historian Eric Zuesse, 3-to-1 Americans favor Assange’s rendition and punishment. You can also bet that 99% of these people hardly understand what is eally going on, nor how Assange’s victimisation is their own.