US fake democracy

5 March 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

The biggest lie — which this article will discuss — IS the biggest lie mainly because almost everyone who hears it or sees it being stated or implied, thinks it to be true. This is the way that propaganda is in ANY regime (the lie is so routinely asserted there, as for it to be unquestioned and thus publicly ASSUMED to BE unquestionable); and, so, quite naturally, the biggest lie is, then, that the regime itself is NOT a regime, but is, instead, a democracy. If you think you live in a democracy, how can you tell whether you actually are in a democracy?

Political scientists generally define a democracy as being a Government whose laws are written and become passed as BEING laws, by people who authentically DO represent the intents and priorities of the public — all of the citizenry — regardless of how that is being done (such as by a legislature that is MONO-CAMERAL, such as in Iran, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, Denmark, Finland, Israel, and New Zealand; or instead BI-CAMERAL, such as in India, Canada, Japan, Spain, UK, and U.S.).

The ONLY country that has, thus far, been scientifically analyzed so as to determine whether or not its laws DO conform to the intents and priorities of its scientifically polled public is the United States, and all of those scientific studies have shown that it is NOT a democracy — that it IS a dictatorship (by its super-rich). As the first-ever of these studies summarized their findings “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near zero, statistically non-significant, impact, upon public policy.” A terrifically clear 6-minute-long summary-video of that study explained its findings by using graphs. In the article’s Conclusions (which it instead titled “American Democracy?” though the article had actually provided the answer to that question, “No,” but refused to be so comprehensible to the general public so as to be so clear), it stated that “the preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of “affluent” citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do.” That was as clear as they were willing to be. All subsequent scientific studies of the question confirmed and added further specificity to that one’s findings.

The fact that America is a dictatorship is resoundingly confirmed not ONLY by those scientific studies, which are directed to this question, but ALSO by international statistics. For example, on 3 July 2023, I headlined “How the Billionaires Control U.S.-and-Allied Governments”, and opened:

In virtually every country that’s allied with the U.S. Government against Russia and against China, there is a low public job-approval-rating for its head-of-state and for its Government, and a rating that is far lower than is the public job-approval for the leaders of the countries that the U.S. gang are trying to regime-change. If a given nation’s leader’s net public job-approval rating (% who approve, minus the % who disapprove) is above 0%, or positive, then that is an indication the nation’s Government is a democracy, because then that leader is satisfying his public (including his political opposition — not merely his own voters) more than dissatisfying it — that leader actually DOES represent his nation. However, if the net job-approval rating is below 0%, or negative, it’s likelier a dictatorship than a democracy (and then the question is: whom does that leader actually serve?).

And then I documented that this is so. What strikes me with particular force from all those data is that if a nation’s head-of-state is overwhelmingly approved-of by that country’s residents, that country is held by the U.S. Government and by its ‘news’-media to be ‘autocratic’, ‘a dictatorship’, or otherwise in need of being regime-changed — conquered by coup, invasion, or otherwise — and if a nation whose head-of-state is overwhelmingly disapproved-of by that country’s residents, that country is almost certainly a U.S. colony (‘ally’).

On 4 March 2024, I headlined “Statistical Comparisons U.S. v. Russia (etc.)”, and documented that during the 25 years 1998-2022 (inclusive), the three countries Russia, China, and India, had much higher rates of economic growth than did ANY of America’s colonies or the U.S. itself did; so, there exists at least a rough but definitely positive correlation between a head-of-state’s public-approval rating by that nation’s citizenry and that nation’s rate of economic growth. Furthermore, the U.S. itself has much higher percentages of its people being homeless, and also a much higher percentage of its people being in prisons, than does either Russia or China. So: which of these countries is a police-state?

On 17 March 2024, I headlined “The World’s 9 Biggest Economies” and reported data which suggest that the U.S. Government’s top priority is NOT to increase the country’s rate of economic growth, but instead to increase its corporations’ stock-market valuations — i.e, to maximally enrich U.S. corporations’ investors — enrich the OWNERS of those corporations. That article closed with:

As one would expect, given that America is #1 on Governmental policy favoring the owners of corporations at the expense of consumers (everyone else), the latest figures indicate that 93% of America’s corporate stocks are owned by the richest 10% of the population, and 54% of America’s corporate stocks are owned by the richest 1% of the population. So: only 46% are owned by the poorer 99% of Americans. And, of course, the vast majority of political donations come from the super-rich. In fact, the wealthiest 1% of the wealthiest 1% of Americans — the wealthiest ten-thousandth of Americans — donate 57.16% of all the money that funds U.S. political campaigns. The “Top 400 Donors” (all of whom are multi-billionaires, not merely billionaires) donate 29.86%, or virtually 30%, of all political money, in the U.S. So: the U.S. Government is put up for auction during each and every ‘election’ cycle. It’s the dollars that really count, not the mere votes (because long before a winning candidate won at the polls, that person won at the campaign funding).

On 3 July 2024, I headlined “World Bank Finally Reclassifies Russia to Top Category: ‘High Income Country’”, and reported:

The World Bank’s chart showing yearly “GNI per capita, Atlas method (current US$) - Russian Federation” indicates that from the time when Putin began his leadership of Russia on 1 January 2000, till 2013, right before the U.S.-and-allied war against Russia started with Obama’s coup that in February 2014 overthrew Ukraine’s neutralist democratically elected Government and installed a rabidly anti-Russian one and so started also the civil war within Ukraine, and the break-aways of both Crimea and Donbass, which rejected the new rulers — during that 13-year period — Russia’s “GNI per capita, Atlas method (current US$) - Russian Federation” or Gross National Income per capita, rose from what in today’s U.S. dollars is $1,710,000, to $15,160,000 per person in 2013, but then plunged down to $9,160,000, or minus 40%, by 2017, in order for Russia to deal with the U.S. gang’s war against Russia, including economic sanctions that started being imposed in 2012 (even before the coup). That rise from $1,710,000, to $15,160,000 was an increase of 8.87 times over the span of those 13 years till 2013.

Then, from 2017 to 2023, it rose from $9,160,000 to $14,250,000; so, it still hasn’t reached the $15,160,000 it was in 2013. However, in Purchasing Power Parity terms (which is what the workers and consumers actually experience), it has gone way beyond that, and is the highest ever in Russia:

The World Bank’s “GNI per capita, PPP (constant 2021 international $) - Russian Federation” shows that in real terms, the 2013 peak was $36,631; it declined to $34,371 in 2016, then rose to $39,222 in 2023. So: Russians really are better off now than they had been before Obama lowered the boom on them with his coup in Ukraine and economic sanctions against Russia. Those figures are in 2021 dollars, but up to 2021, the World Bank was calculating in 2017 dollars, and their chart then showed that between 1990 (the end of the Soviet Union) and 1998, Russians’ PPP incomes declined 45% (which was because American economists virtually ran things under Yeltsin and were interested in cutting Americans in on Russian assets), and the economy rose 20% by 2000 when Putin became the leader; and then by 2013 Russians’ incomes rose 79% so as to become 211% of what they had been back in 1998, at the pit of America’s transforming Russia’s economy into a kleptocracy. And so from the standpoint of the Russian public, Putin’s performance over the 24 years he has been in office has been terrific, and is continuing to be terrific, so that his average approve/disapprove rating throughout his 24 years in power has been 75%/15%, and is now 85%/12%. This — Putin — is the national leader whom the U.S. empire (where those numbers are normally around 30%/60%) craves to replace by whatever the U.S. Government will install in his place. The U.S. empire leaders say that theirs is a ‘democracy’ and Putin’s is an ‘autocracy’, but whatever those terms might mean to them, Russians almost universally reject if not despise that viewpoint. Yet the U.S. empire keeps demanding this “regime change” there. Maybe they are simply jealous.

On 29 July 2023, I headlined “HOW THE U.S. IS COLLAPSING” and opened:

The U.S. has the most unequal, or aristocratic and anti-democratic, distribution of wealth, of all of the major economies — and this is now set (on account of tax-law changes that started in 1986) to become vastly worse and what one leading legal scholar is already predicting to create “the New Feudalism” in which America will be competing with the worst of the old forms of feudalism: permanent institutionalized and legalized castes, at the top of which, it will be practically indistinguishable from that of the titled “Nobility,” which the American Revolution had been revolting against and overthrew.

Polling shows that today’s Americans place very low priority upon reversing this trend, which is now becoming a flood that drowns-out any real hope of a restoration of some degree of democracy in this country. Whereas Democrats care somewhat about this matter, Republicans care very little about it. In any case, the U.S. is already the most economically unequal of the world’s leading economies.

On 9 January 2020, Pew Research Center headlined “Most Americans Say There Is Too Much Economic Inequality in the U.S., but Fewer Than Half Call It a Top Priority: Democrats and Republicans differ on whether addressing economic inequality requires major changes to the economic system”. …

So, though the U.S. Government is controlled only by the super-rich, and serves only the priorities of that tiny minority, the American public answered as follows when given the following 6 options:

% saying each of the following should be a top priority for the federal government to address:

• Making health care more affordable 72%
• Dealing with terrorism 65%
• Reducing gun violence 58%
• Addressing climate change 49%
• Reducing economic inequality 42%
• Reducing illegal immigration 39%

Though 58% of Americans did NOT believe that “Reducing economic inequality” “should be a top priority for the federal government to address,” ALL of those listed six problems have been caused by ONLY the perhaps thousand or so super-super-rich Americans, who, almost entirely behind the scenes, control the people who control the U.S. Government. So: how is “Reducing economic inequality” NOT at least “a top priority for the federal government to address”?

On the other hand, if you were among those perhaps thousand individuals who control the people who control the U.S. Government, and if you were as obsessively focused on growing your wealth at an enormously higher rate than the entire nation is growing its wealth, then would you be wanting your public to KNOW that the top of all problems is the only one problem that is largely causing each of the other ones? So, what types of people would you want your media-companies and think tanks etc. to hire, and what types would you want them to fire? Might this be the core reason why “Reducing economic inequality” was NOT the top priority of America’s public? And might it ALSO be the reason why those people invariably do NOT publicly refer to the U.S. Government as being a “dictatorship,” or a “regime,” or an “aristocracy of wealth,” but, instead, as being a “democracy”? If so, it explains the near-universality of the biggest lie in America (and throughout all of its empire).

(And as far as America’s colonies are concerned, they likewise are dictatorships, and even after they might break away from the U.S. regime, they too are profoundly corrupt, controlled by their own super-rich, which is the reason why none of their heads-of-state has a high approval-rating. Many of these nations don’t even have democratic Constitutions.)

Certainly in political matters, individuals ought to think outside the box, because the box is loaded with lies.

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding — what the ‘news’-media ignore if they can, and deny if they must. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.