US elections. Everything must change so that it remains the same, JOHN SARGIS, The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol.4, No. 4 (October 2008)

The essence of American elections is to “vote” into office, from National to local governments those political, economic and militaristic operatives who will enhance the capitalist growth economy by enacting laws that minimize social controls over corporations in order to help them maximize their growth and economic efficiency and in the process acquiring good sums of money and the good life for themselves, while driving many others into financial ruin. In order for these values to permeate American life every voter has to believe they are participating in this great gimmick called elections: thus the economic and political elite gave “we the people” elections. However, the ballot gives us a silent death. In order to place in Congress those political hacks, who together with their opposite aisle counterparts create the best possible benefits to the military/industrial state, providing them with loopholes, tax havens, subsidies, and creative financing to increase profits but leave the American citizen poorer and without recourse from draconian bankruptcy laws, insurance discrimination, discrepancies in pay for women and minorities who make much less for equal work. In actuality there is only one capitalist Party with two wings, between which there are hardly any discernible differences. Congress’s real job is to pass laws that consolidate economic and political power in the hands of the elite whereas the aim of a real democracy can only be to institutionalise the equal distribution of economic and political power.

The way in which the political elites dealt with the recent credit crisis is a striking example illustrating how US “democracy” actually works. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 aims to defraud of the American public over $700 billion to the companies that caused the crisis by buying their bad debt which is greater than its worth. It was initially presented by, Bush, chairman Ben Bernanke of the private Federal Reserve, Chris Cox, chairman of the Federal SEC, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who is also a member of the IMF and a former Goldman Sachs CEO from 1999-2006 with obvious conflict of interest whose net worth is some $700million. This plan will give the President and Treasury Secretary unlimited power who will issue billions of dollars to financial institutions and markets further enhancing the economic and political power the unitary President of the US will assume by determining which financial institution will receive public funding. So it does not matter that Presidents are changed every four or eight years.

Their pals in Congress gave Bush and his criminal partners what they wanted with little oversight to the $700 billion, but with $125 billion in pork to sweeten the theft. The suffering citizen is left out of this pact and will not be helped —about 2 million more people will lose their homes in the coming year. In September 159,000 people lost jobs bringing the total so far this year to 750,000 vanishing jobs. So, the finance marketeers who created this crisis are enabled by their elitist friends in Congress to continue the thievery of the public treasury. This means that this is a double burglary. First, people were deceived into purchasing credit they could not afford, and therefore were robbed, and, second, with the passage of the Act, which Bush glowingly signed before the ink could dry, the doors to the US Treasury are opened to the very criminals who created the financial mess. What a deal! Remember the elites’ response to hurricane Katrina?

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 is transitory and ineffectual, because the principle of economic growth (‘grow-or-die’), which expresses the dynamic of the market system as well as the inner core of market values, is part of the effort to straighten out the financial crisis; however, economic growth itself (through deceptive lending practices) that created the financial bubble is neither questioned nor addressed. The “rationale” behind the Act is to free up money so that credit can again begin flowing in order to promote economic growth. As a matter of fact, new accounting rules are a feature of the Act that allow for deficits to be treated as credits, called mark to market, which will set in motion another crisis. Furthermore, despite the fact that the state transfers hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ money to corporations, the Treasury Secretary can only “suggest”, “give incentives” and “encourage” corporations to act—not force them to change. The Act expands the unitary power of the President to the economic sphere, who along with the Treasury Secretary will control all economic issues relating to the crisis. The US dictatorship is now complete. The Patriot Act is to political repression what the bailout Act is to economic repression. The people have lost their political and economic rights. The fear that gripped an accomodating Congress in its dash endorsing the Patriot Act was used, again, by the Bush administration to push through the bailout Act, but it was a harder sell, as it was shown by the fact that Congress initially rebuffed Bush. Nevertheless, the alleged immediacy of the financial chaos threatened by Bush and his banker friends inevitably led Congress to pass the Act, however, sprinkled with pork palatability. Thus, we have the System and its squad that created the crisis now in charge of monitoring and cashing out billions of dollars to their Wall Street bankers. With the President and Congress at their lowest approval ratings 22% and 28% respectively it is high time to begin building a new society by rejecting social relations and institutions organized and based on hierarchical values and oligarchic principles, abolishing the market economy

and its political complement representative “democracy” and replacing that System with institutions and values based upon Inclusive Democracy principles. This implies the use of strategies[1] which involve the creation of new political, economic, and social spheres that ensure direct democracy.

Accordingly, political and economic power has been transferred by Congress to the unitary President strengthening the grip of totalitarian despotism. A coup has, effectively, taken place under everyone’s noses. When a government has become destructive of the general welfare of the people, the time to build a movement to replace the System with Inclusive Democracy is now. In order for Systemic change to happen, people must begin thinking differently, jettison the market values that spin in their heads, pockets and purses and begin creating a new society. The dictatorial order that is sought in a unitary presidency destroys liberty. This is the exact goal we are incessantly bombarded with everyday: the goal to get rid of the terrorists. What government agents do not want us to know is that the US is a state sponsor of terror with its illegal invasions and occupations abroad and at home. All points lead to a totalitarian destination for America. The political and economic dictatorship implanted in the unitary President solidifies the grip on economic and political decision taking for the elite. The President and his cohorts in the financial markets brought those markets to their knees, and now they are continuing their plunder by raiding the public treasury.

While the country and the world are on the brink of economic catastrophe, Treasury Secretary Paulson has been handed the keys to the Treasury and is hiring his friends in the financial sector called experts (read conflict of interest), who are expanding the transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector, the job begun by Bush which will be taken up by the next President. The people are waking up to the rhetoric, extremely coded with fear and irrationality, of barbarism that deceives us, robs us, detains us, tortures us, spies on us. We cannot express ourselves without fear of repression as was experienced by those who protested at the Democratic and Republican conventions.

Now is the time to abolish this unjust government, since it has not derived its powers with our consent. The government is destructive of the rights it has been given to uphold. We are under a despotic government right now and we have the right to change it and replace it with the equal distribution of political, economic, and social power—a genuine democracy. With the completion of the consolidation of political and economic power in the president and a handful of political and economic elites, the Bill of Rights is not worth the paper it is written on, and, as such, guarantee nothing. Bush and his operatives have attacked and reversed liberties that are in the Bill of Rights. Bush, Congress and the racketeers of the international political and economic elite are enemies of democracy. It is our responsibility to remove Congress and the President as they are unreliable in providing the rights and liberties in the Bill of Rights. Totalitarian decrees deny democracy, which they pretend to guard, and democratic capitalism is a contradiction. Self-government is impossible, when elites control economic and political decision taking.

Both candidates say they are agents of change, but changing the systemic causes of the multidimensional crisis —i.e. the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of elites, as expressed by neoliberal globalization and representative “democracy”— is out of the question, not even acknowledged. Swapping the Bush doctrine[2] (even though Sarah Palin does not know what it is, even with her extensive “that’s Russia over there” foreign policy experience now being tutored by international arch criminal Kissinger, and who claims it does not matter if humans effected climate change, who is against a woman’s right to choose, who supports creationism being taught in public schools, and thinks she is living out God’s plan for all of us) for McCain’s rigidly familiar Bush foreign policy for a hundred year war, or for Obama’s plan for the “long” war, will change nothing —apart perhaps from ensuring a greater formal sharing of decisions among the transnational elite. The Bush doctrine of enmity, antagonism, violence and preventive war will be sustained in either an Obama or McCain presidency. In other words both Obama and McCain will continue the unrelenting barbarism of the Bush doctrine.

Americans are in a political blackout, and thus must be led by “leaders”, who have already pledged their allegiance to the political and economic elite, into believing they are sovereign individuals in a sovereign nation, that is, free. Americans believe it, because they can go shopping anytime they want to and no one can tell them otherwise. It is not a matter of political parties or political philosophies, but of control. Controlling information and controlling money expands economic, social and political power. With a growing dysfunctional public school system, which deliberately mis-educates students who do not know how to think critically and have no idea what freedom or liberty mean, no wonder Americans are easily led Both parties want to continue the fundamental principles of the market economy (the criminals are bailing out their criminal friends) and representative “democracy” without even pondering on whether these two institutions are the cause of the multidimensional crisis we face, as this is the easiest way to hold on to power. Elections for these parties have become extravagant propaganda productions. Even though they are an inconvenience and nuisance, and a waste of community resources, elections are used for fundraising, outreach and recruiting. Besides, there has never been an honest election in recent memory. So elections subsequently keep those in power to continually stay in power, because it is not about different parties, and, since there is not any genuine opposition, power stays right where it is—in the hands of the political and economic elite.

There are no real programmatic differences between the Democratic and Republican parties. The differences are in some details and strategies, but when it comes to writing laws it is the K Street lobbyists who have a hand in writing the bills that Congress votes into law. Voting is a fraud perpetuated by the myth that the voter is choosing the President of the United States or any other elected official. Both Obama and McCain say they want to save Social Security , create jobs, save homes from foreclosure, make public schools accountable (by funding private charter schools —Obama wants to pump $400 million in to charter schools), provide health care, lower taxes, ensure happiness, safety, and freedom. These are perennial promises of politicians. Meanwhile, they have not spoken about immigration, and the reality is that it is people who are really suffering the effects of the credit crisis with lost jobs, inflation, high gas prices, home foreclosures, rising taxes, bankruptcies, failing public schools and communities, lack of health care, etc. On the other hand, the smart people in Wall street, who accumulated billions of dollars in bonuses all these years, are not going to lose a single dollar from their fortunes. It is the people who will pay for their “mistakes” since it is the very system of the market economy which is a huge social mistake!

The point of having “open and free” elections is to prevent the US from being called a dictatorship. The old saying “it’s not the votes that count, it’s who counts the votes” is instructive. Those in power stay in power, and the fact there is effectively one party rule in America ensures it. Not only that, but also there is no genuine opposition, no enlightened public opinion, no anti-systemic challenge to the market economy and representative “democracy”, all this renders elections superfluous. because no one will be elected to do anything different. McCain and Obama are free marketers. McCain was for de-regulation, now he is for financial regulation of markets —with the sole aim of course to stabilize the system of market economy and make it more profitable.. Obama does not want any wilding going on in financial markets. No amount of voting is going to change the causes of the multidimensional crisis. American society and its hierarchical institutions cannot be reformed. Society is increasingly becoming unjust, fragmented, cruel with individuals becoming more isolated from each other, and, as such, cannot remain a stable society.

Bush tried to frighten the American people by proclaiming on national television that our economy is in serious trouble because frozen credit markets are unable to fund economic growth, so he wants to extort the money from people’s taxes and got this bill passed through, like the good racketeer he is. He wants to panic people so they will rubberstamp his historic robbery. This bailout heist is as wide sweeping in it’s powers as the Patriot Act with no oversight or regulations that will raise the public debt limit to $11.3 trillion from $10.6 trillion. When Bush took office the public debt was $5.8 trillion. So Bush has doubled the size of the public debt with his wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and against “terrorism” playing a big role in this. He and his cabal should be arrested, because early on in his administration this credit problem was known to become a crisis. Obama has offered his support for the bailout plan, but wants the Fed to restore prosperity to Wall Street as well as Main Street. But Obama wants to send ten thousand or more additional soldiers to Afghanistan to fight the good war. In a market society everyone lives by swindling everybody else. So what is the difference?

There is no sense in identifying American society a democracy, when there is not any critical scrutiny, anti-systemic analysis, or oppositional politics anywhere in the public discourse. The “mainstream” corporate-controlled media by which people obtain and exchange information is bogus, because the mass media propagandizes market values throughout its programming. These hindrances to democratic dialogue render elections a meaningless annoyance. Whatever the outcome of this Presidential election, all points lead to a fascist destination for the US. The political and economic dictatorship of the one party corporate state and the corporate bailout will lead to further class divisions[3] with more power handed over to the unitary President and the Treasury Secretary who will be authorized to write checks without Congressional approval. This election will congeal and strengthen the grip the elite have over political and economic decision-taking by relegating the American people as onlookers to a spectacle out of their control.

The fraudulent US government exists in the interest of the market economy. Corporate America carried out a terrorist attack on America by looting consumers (recall Paulson, who should be arrested, was CEO of Goldman Sachs from 1999-2006) and now Bush and Paulson and the economic and political elite are opening the doors of the US treasury to these criminals. Americans need to wake up, kick out all elected representatives starting with Congress, White House all the way to city hall and start working towards the development of a new society based on the equal distribution of economic and political, and social power like Inclusive Democracy maintains.

[1] Takis Fotopoulos, “Transitional strategies and the Inclusive Democracy project”, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 8, No. 1 (March 2002).

[2] Bush secretly approved orders in July 2008 that allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground and air assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government. The Bush doctrine will be followed by either McCain and Obama.

[3] Takis Fotopoulos, “Class Divisions Today: The Inclusive Democracy approach”, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2 (July 2000).