FALSE DEMOCRACY

PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—Let’s not single out Mr. Holder please. He is just a ‘ raindrop in the ocean of empire’s servants’. What about those (so called) news talk shows that many working stiffs rely on for their up to date info. Well, right wing ‘ bulldog ‘ Sean Hannity of Fox  earns $ 36 million a year to represent all those  ‘ Make America Great Again ‘ viewers who frequent his show. In the ( so called) middle of political news talk, CNN, nice guy Anderson Cooper earns $ 12 million. (His net worth is also close to $130MM, as heir to the Vanderbilt fortune).

ANN GARRISON—We need a bipartisan Muellergate investigation to determine who cooked up the Russiagate conspiracy that has taken over US foreign policy and driven American political discourse from idiotic to imbecilic. However, in the schreechfest that our domestic politics has become, we’re no more likely to get a bipartisan Muellergate investigation than we are to get bipartisan agreement on anything but war, austerity, and the “socialist” aspersions now hurled at Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Tulsi Gabbard, and Ilhan Omar. Following Trump’s lead, Democrats have begun attacking their own left flank. 

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.