American Democracy: A Dead Man Walking
American Democracy: A Dead Man
Walking
Paul Craig Roberts
Trump’s “sell-out,” as it is called,
coming on top of Obama’s eight-year “sell-out,” is instructive. We have now had
a Democratic president who sold out the people who elected him and a Republican
president who has done the same thing. This is a very interesting point, the
meaning of which most people miss.
But not Russia’s president, Vladimir
Putin. At the Valdai discussion club, Putin summed up Western democracy:
In the West,
voters cannot change policies through elections, because the ruling elites
control whoever is elected. Elections give the appearance of democracy, but
voting does not change the policies that favor war and the elites. Therefore,
the will of the people is impotent.
People are
experiencing that they and their votes have no influence on the conduct of
affairs of the country. This makes them afraid, frusrated, and angry, a
combination of emotions that is dangerous to the ruling elite, who in response
organize the powers of the state against the people, while urging them with
propaganda to support more wars.
Obama promised to get out of
Afghanistan or Iraq or perhaps it was both. He promised to reverse the police
state created by the George W. Bush regime. He promised to focus American
resources on American domestic problems, such as health care.
But what did he do? He expanded the
wars and launched new ones, destroyed Libya and attempted to destroy Syria, but
was stopped by British non-participation and Russian objection. Obama overthrew
democratic governments in Honduras and Ukraine. He expanded the police state.
He began the demonization of Russia and Putin. He betrayed the American people
again by allowing the private insurance industry to write his health care plan
known as Obamacare. The private interests wrote a plan that diverts public
monies from health care to their profits.
All of this is forgotten when the
ruling elites and the presstitutes that serve only them refocused the
demonization on Trump. Suddenly, it was the president-elect of the United
States who was the main danger to the US and the American people. Trump was a
Russian agent. He had conspired with Putin to steal the US election from
Hillary Clinton and make the White House a partner of Putin’s alleged
reconsruction of the Soviet Empire.
The nonsense was hot and furious, and
it was effective. Trump succumbed to pressure and sacrificed his National
Secuity Advisior, who was supportive of Trump’s promise to normalize relations
with Russia. Trump replaced him with a Russophobic idiot who apparantly cannot
wait to see mushroom clouds over cities all over the Western world.
Why did two presidents in succession
completely sell out the people who voted for them?
The answer is that presidents are not
as powerful as the interest groups who make the decisions.
Trump was going to get us out of
Syria, so he committed an unambigious war crime by gratuitously attacking Syria
with Tomahawk missiles.
Trump was going to normalize
relations with Russia, so his Secretary of State announces that US economic
sanctions will stay on Russia until Russia hands over to Ukraine the Russian
Crimean naval base on the Black Sea.
It is impossible to normalize
relations when the cost to the other party of the normalization is national
suicide.
Despite Trump’s complete surrender to
the powers that be, today (May 2) on NPR I heard raw propaganda dressed up as
“expert opinion” that Trump is biased against the media, when what all of us
have seen is massive media bias against Trump, including the program to which I
was listening.
For example, NPR had accumulated
“experts” who said that Trump had slandered Obama by accusing him of
intercepting his comunications. NPR said nothing about the Obama regime’s
charge that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the election from Hillary
Clinton.
If anything was slander, this was,
but all the talk was about how Obama could sue Trump.
But, of course, both are public
figures, and neither can sue the other.
I wonder why NPR’s “expert” didn’t
get around to this point.
Why is the ruling oligarchy still
using its presstitutes to campaign against a president who has surrendered to
them?
Perhaps the answer is that the real
powers that be are going to make an example out of Trump so that never again
does a person running for elected office make a populist appeal to the
electorate.
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