{"id":245240,"date":"2016-05-22T17:52:29","date_gmt":"2016-05-22T17:52:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=245240"},"modified":"2016-06-04T10:20:15","modified_gmt":"2016-06-04T10:20:15","slug":"u-s-uk-eu-now-dictatorships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/u-s-uk-eu-now-dictatorships\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S., UK, and EU, Are Now Dictatorships"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Eric Zuesse, originally posted at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.strategic-culture.org\/news\/2016\/05\/22\/us-uk-and-eu-are-now-dictatorships.html\"><span class=\"s2\">strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">How can it be that\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonsblog.com\/2016\/02\/polls-show-sanders-strongest-candidate-win-presidency-democrats-likely-select-clinton-nominee-anyway-kasich-strongest-republican-trump-likelier-win-nomina.html\"><span class=\"s3\">in virtually all of the U.S. Presidential-candidate head-to-head Democratic versus Republican polling that was done of both Democratic and Republican candidates during the primaries<\/span><\/a>, the preferred Democratic candidate against any one of the Republican candidates was Bernie Sanders, but <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=uEdKn0D76OA&amp;feature=youtu.be\"><span class=\"s2\">he almost certainly won\u2019t be that Party\u2019s nominee<\/span><\/a> (and there\u2019s more on that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2016\/05\/16\/what_the_hell_just_happened_in_nevada_sanders_supporters_are_fed_up_and_rightfully_so\/\"><span class=\"s2\">here<\/span><\/a>); and the preferred Republican candidate against either one of the Democratic candidates was John Kasich, but he certainly won\u2019t be the Republican nominee? Sanders and Kasich also scored the highest in his respective Party for net favorability rating, but almost certainly neither candidate will even be on the ballot for voters on November 8th.\u00a0What kind of \u2018democracy\u2019 is this?<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">How can it be that in UK, the \u2018Labour\u2019 Prime Minister Tony Blair served as George W. Bush\u2019s lap-dog on the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to eliminate \u201cSaddam\u2019s WMD\u201d (which didn\u2019t even exist) \u2014 it wasn\u2019t a Conservative Prime Minister who did that extremely conservative (i.e., aggressive, invasion, especially on the basis of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/americas-news-is-heavily-censored\/\"><span class=\"s4\"><i>lies<\/i><\/span><\/a>) thing? What kind of \u2018democracy\u2019 is that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">And how can it be that throughout the EU, the public are against GMOs, toxic chemicals such as Roundup or glyphosate, and toxic \u2018trade\u2019 treaties such as TTIP, but the political leaders are pushing as hard as they can for all of those things? That\u2019s the way to stay in public office? Not in a democracy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">A dictatorship is a national government that rules the public, instead of being ruled <i>by<\/i> the public. There are various types of this, such as communist (\u2018workers\u2019 dictatorship), fascist (corporate dictatorship), etc., but those are merely terminological fine points on basically the same terrible beast, and all variants of the beast have two classes of people: the aristocracy, who rule, and the public, who are ruled. No dictatorship has equality-of-rights before the law, because any type of dictatorship treats the aristocracy as being <i>above<\/i> the law, and legally unaccountable to the public when violating the law, and it treats the public as being arbitrarily (depending upon whether cooperative with the aristocrats, or not) fully accountable <i>to<\/i> the government (the aristocracy), for any violation of the law. (E.g.: the homeless go to jail, while banksters get bailed out.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">The rulers are unseen in many dictatorships; those rulers are behind-the-scenes, unofficial, but the nominal rulers then are representatives of the aristocracy, they\u2019re not <i>actually<\/i> representing the public. Unseen rulers (actually mainly the personal representatives of unseen rulers) meet in international conclaves like the <a href=\"https:\/\/wikispooks.com\/wiki\/Bilderberg\/2014\"><span class=\"s2\">Bilderberg<\/span><\/a> conferences, and <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20150421065534\/http:\/\/trilateral.org\/download\/file\/TC_list_4-15(3).pdf\"><span class=\"s2\">Trilateralist<\/span><\/a> conferences, instead of in national legislatures. Unseen rulers tend to be very discreet, the opposite of ostentatious \u2014 hardly the \u201cpolitical\u201d type \u2014 not braggarts at all. They don\u2019t need to impress anybody. They want only to be <i>obeyed<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">On May 17th, Craig Murray, British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010, who is that rare thing a fully committed democrat who also happens to have been a member of his country\u2019s foreign-affairs establishment, headlined at his terrific blog,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.craigmurray.org.uk\/archives\/2016\/05\/conservatives-will-protected-election-fraud\/\"><span class=\"s3\">&#8220;The Conservatives Will Be Protected From\u00a0Their Election Fraud\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and he documented that there is \u201cblatant state propaganda manipulation\u201d and that &#8220;in this country, electoral law is not enforced against those in power.\u201d Power-holders in UK can violate the law with impunity, even where the violation is clearly documented \u2014 he showed that. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">In the United States,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20150805164144\/http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/eric-zuesse\/jimmy-carter-is-correct-t_b_7922788.html\"><span class=\"s3\">the only scientific study of whether the U.S. is a democracy found it\u2019s not<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0It examined 1,779 separate pieces of proposed national legislation since the year 1980, and found that only the concerns of rich people (\u201coligarchs\u201d) affected a bill\u2019s fate; the concerns of the public (as had been reflected in public-opinion polls regarding the given matter) did not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Consequently, though the democratic nations (plus importantly the communist dictatorship USSR) defeated fascism in 1945, the democratic nations are no longer democracies; they\u2019re all \u201coligarchies&#8221; ruled by some sort of aristocracy or another.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s5\">The capstone to this development would be the passage-into-law of U.S. President Barack Obama\u2019s proposed international \u2018trade\u2019 treaties,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonsblog.com\/2015\/04\/whats-obama-up-to-with-his-tpp-ttip.html\"><span class=\"s6\">TTIP, TPP, and\/or TISA, to transfer national sovereignty (regardless of whether or not of a democratic kind) to an international corporate dictatorship, which will prohibit increases in regulations of food-safety, product-safety, workers\u2019 rights, and of global warming and other environmental matters, and will transfer the power over those to the top stockholders in international corporations.<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">The question at the present time is whether democracies have already been so severely compromised, so that treaties such as these that Obama is pushing, can be approved by \u2018democratic\u2019 governments. If the answer to that question is yes, then we\u2019re already in the Brave New World of fascist international victory \u2014 though it\u2019s <i>post<\/i>-WW-II, the fascists will finally have won, not just maybe, but clearly, and decisively, throughout all of the foreseeable future \u2014 perhaps even permanently, because international treaties, especially ones that entail many nations, are virtually impossible to end. (A good example of that permanency is NATO: its very <i>raison d\u2019etre<\/i>\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/how-america-double-crossed-russia-and-shamed-the-west\/\"><span class=\"s2\">terminated when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance ended in 1991<\/span><\/a>; but, yet, it continues even today, and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonsblog.com\/2016\/05\/obama-aims-conquer-crimea.html\"><span class=\"s2\">threatens now to bring about WW III<\/span><\/a>, which would be its culmination.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">If the idea that we live in a dictatorship seems far-fetched because we\u2019re surrounded by propaganda to the contrary, then there is still the inspiration of the central character Winston Smith in the allegorical novel about fascism,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nineteen_Eighty-Four\"><span class=\"s4\"><i>1984<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 he soured on the propaganda that he was editing, but finally switched back, and saw the light: Big Brother was his savior, after all. The former U.S. Senator Gary Hart\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/time.com\/3937860\/gary-hart-america-corruption\/\"><span class=\"s4\">wrote recently from the standpoint of the earlier, disillusioned, Winston Smith<\/span><\/a>, but, perhaps, even people such as he will also see the light, and stop saying such things as, \u201cMeasured against the standards established for republics from ancient times, the American Republic is massively corrupt.\u201d Perhaps everyone has his price, and, once it\u2019s paid, he&#8217;ll see the light, too. But, even if he won\u2019t, he has provided there a remarkably accurate description of the reality that Orwell\u2019s book had merely allegorized \u2014 way back in 1948. Winston Smith would have been shocked at such a kindred spirit, writing not in 1984 but 2015. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Orwell, in his own time, struggled over what year his novel should be set in. Likely, we\u2019re still not yet quite there. After all, it was set after the nuclear war. The international agreements \u2014 the alliances \u2014 seem to have been already in place, for some time. Maybe Orwell&#8217;s novel should have been instead called something like \u201c<i>2025\u201d<\/i>. Just a few more years; we can hardly wait (if we\u2019ll be among the survivors).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s2\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/jimdobson\/2015\/06\/12\/billionaire-bunkers-exclusive-look-inside-the-worlds-largest-planned-doomsday-escape\/#674d1cf65afb\">Such are the ways of the international aristocracy.<\/a><\/span><span class=\"s1\"> If we\u2019ll tolerate them. But if we won\u2019t, what then? Nothing is more powerful than they. But is that the end of the story? Are they a terminal plague? Can NATO be ended without its culminating? Or, is there some other way?<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\"><span class=\"s7\">Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Theyre-Not-Even-Close-Democratic\/dp\/1880026090\/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1339027537&amp;sr=8-9\"><span class=\"s8\"><i>They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a><i>,<\/i> and of<\/span><span class=\"s9\"> <i>\u00a0<\/i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B007Q1H4EG\"><span class=\"s4\"><i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org How can it be that\u00a0in virtually all of the U.S. Presidential-candidate head-to-head Democratic versus Republican polling that was done of both Democratic and Republican candidates during the primaries, the preferred Democratic candidate against any one of the Republican candidates was Bernie Sanders, but he almost certainly won\u2019t be that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":245247,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[115,30,32,96,535,698,753,524,754,523,49,76,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-245240","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"tag-barack-obama","9":"tag-big-brother","10":"tag-cia","11":"tag-cover-up","12":"tag-global-news","13":"tag-hillary-clinton","14":"tag-police-state","15":"tag-russia","16":"tag-syria","17":"tag-ukraine","18":"tag-usa-news","19":"tag-warfare","20":"tag-white-house","21":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}