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What’s this American democracy crap?

Written by: Humphrey McQueen on 28 January 2021

 

When was the U.S. of A. ever more than a covert dictatorship of the bourgeoisie?

For the past 130 years it has been a Plutocracy. Obama, ‘the whispering assassin,’ appointed one of his Wolf Street backers to be Treasury Secretary. They poured trillions into Wolf Street and refused to save mortgagees from homelessness.

During 2020, the richest 1,000 billionaires increased their wealth by a third.

 

Biden is the ‘proud, proud, proud son‘ of and Senator for the State of Dow-du Pont, those Merchants of Death, – aka Delaware - an on-shore tax haven for the likes of Mass Murdoch.

From the genocidal dispossession of the Amerindians and arrival of chattel-slaves across the 1600s, the North American colonies were rarely better than games among the ruling race - Herrenvolk democracies, as under Apartheid.

The radical Reconstructionists thought that their Thirteenth, then the Fourteenth Amendment and finally the Fifteenth by 1870 had guaranteed the suffrage for the freed male slaves. The Klan judged otherwise.

At once, railroad corporations went before the racist Supreme Court demanding equal rights for property. To get its way, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil did everything to the Legislature of Pennsylvania – except refine it.

By 1890, the corporations had won. Also by then, almost no Black dared to vote.

To the extent that there has been anything like a democratic impulse in the U.S. of A. it has come through social movements that the apologists for the monopolizers denounce as anti-democratic.

The Civil Rights movement pushed back from 1954 and the struggles were taken further by Black Power in the late Sixties. Their leaders were assassinated or framed.

The other force against class dictatorship, covert or overt, was the organised working-class from the mid-1800s. At several points in time and various places, the unions allied with progressive farmers to challenge the Trusts and their legislative lackeys.

Bosses paid Pinkertons and the National Guard to destroy organised labour, notoriously in the shooting of Joe Hill

The women’s movement has woven in and out and around Civil Rights and labour – the Lady Garment Workers Union. The first place in the world where women could vote was New Jersey from 1776 to 1807 and then Wyoming from 1870.

Those three streams of popular expression are our brightest and best hopes for getting out from under the iron heel of a covert bourgeois dictatorship.

The alarms over Trumpery voiced by the New York Times (which has never seen a war it did not like) are that he and his crew have weakened the image of America as the shining City on the Hill.

That soft power is necessary if the agents of the corporate warfare state are to pose as the bringers of peace, freedom and apple pie. Woodrow Wilson had shown the way by making the world safe for hypocrisy.

Much of the world had to be taught a different lesson. For instance, FDR’s middle name was Delano – and that branch of the family did a roaring trade pushing opium into China. A few years later, Commodore Perry bombarded the U.S. into Japan. In the 1890s, its agents had murdered the Queen of Hawaii and gabbed the islands as its own.

Closer to home, the Monroe Doctrine switched from being a rule to keep European colonizers out of Latin America into a law that the continent was a U.S. colony in all but name.

Between 1898 and 1910, the banana and sugar corporations snatched national independence from the Cubans, Puerto Ricans and away from the Philippines.

Since then, its Marines and spies have swept around the globe making democracy safe for Big Oil. They overthrow popularly elected governments and assassinate their leaders. They would have murdered Castro and killed Chavez earlier than they did had not the Cuban and Venezuelan peoples formed rings of steel around them.

The C.I.A. got their sleeper John Kerr to sack Whitlam to protect their base at Pine Gap.

Trump has done a better job at serving the people of the world by weakening the U.S. imperium than one would have expected out of a burst arsehole.

Of course, his achievements on that front are as nothing when compared with how the peoples of Indo-China had driven the U.S. imperialists into the sea by 1975.

Billary did her bit by blowing another whole in the power grid with her overthrow of the vile Gadhafi, to go with Bush-era self-inflicted wounds in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Trump has not divided America but ridden the wave of socioeconomic divisions sown by a succession of Democratic administrations ever since 1979 when Carter appointed Volker to the Federal Reserve to shut down the rust-bucket industries by driving up the Greenback.

Do not despair. Biden will continue the good work of dividing America by serving the interests of his patrons in Wolf St.

He has a minor problem after scoring a paper-thin majority in the Senate which cost him the excuse of not being able to get his bills passed. Now he will have to rely on that succession of Democrat Senators who abstain or cross the floor to repay which corporates stuffed their electoral coffers, as Big Pharma did for Billary.

January 6 was a sideshow compared to the assaults on electoral ‘democracy’ from the Supreme Court at promoting corporate power and State Legislatures in depriving the poor of their ability to vote at all, and - just to be on the safe side - to gerrymander the boundaries of electoral districts.

Among the results is that the world’s greatest democracy boasts the worst records for disease, mis-education and injustice in the self-styled developed world.

Get over Congressional Cretinism!

Doing good is not in the job description for the Commander-in-Chief.

Face up to the uncomfortable truth that we face a hundred-year long fight to rid the planet of all the imperia of monopolizing capitals whether the hangovers in Britain and France, the staggering U.S. of A. or its Chinese rival, by establishing people power here, there and everywhere.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. Thomas Jefferson, 1787.

 

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