Our Anemic Democracy

by Dedre Atsey

People have generally similar aspirations. Out of instinct for self-preservation, individuals innately strive to achieve their potential and to fruitfully reproduce. In a social structure that facilitates the recognition of how similar people are to one another—and how closely their goals and aspirations align—people would be in general agreement with one another about how to achieve their aims and whom to vote for to represent their interests.

This society of mutual recognition of interests and mutual aid requires a structure where people are allowed and encouraged to communicate their grievances and concerns with each other. However our social structure is such where those in power prefer to maintain their power by having the people divided and set against one another. Whether people are divided over Democrat versus Republican, rap culture versus rock ‘n’ roll culture, or one football team versus another—any imaginable topic is used to keep the population distracted from the wool being pulling over our collective eyes. Those in power would prefer to have people not recognize their common interests.

Becoming Anemic Democracy

This strategy for population control has been in use ever since humans had documented societies but especially over the last forty years have we had the technological and scientific means to really segregate people from one another. More recently, power has the means available to earnestly prevent people from attaining and sustaining meaningful relationships and communication with one another, thereby forsaking their own individual and collective interests.

Those in power with the use of short-sighted, immoral, and ignorant scientists and other lackeys have developed scientific approaches to social control. The general population is not taught in school or from television the various fields of science dedicated to the social control of a population. The means of manipulating public perception and controlling attitudes has been developed into a science. A wide spectrum of tactics for distracting, dividing, and controlling the population is employed, ranging from simple and transparent tactics, to complex psychological manipulation, meant to cover for and pacify edge cases, free-thinkers, and resisters.

This election—when Obama faced off against Romney—the perception of one human candidate being different from and up against another human candidate, is not an actual election between two human candidates with their own agendas and ideas and images for America. Instead of an election, what we have is a cynical branch of science with controlled—and truly catastrophic—results. 
Why is it that neither candidate from the two acceptable parties poses any questions about our objectively fundamentally wrong approaches to foreign wars and our major domestic policies regarding finance, healthcare, housing, drug-war, energy, etc.? We have spent trillions of dollars on war and our veterans are coming home with higher rates of mental illness than in any previous wars. Murdering civilians for the benefit of robber barons is detrimental to one’s mental well-being.

The type of nationalized health care available in any other first world country is smeared as a public option. We virtually do not have any publicly funded media—we now only have privatized media that is out for their own short-term financial interests. We are currently on a dire and despotic trajectory as a country, so much that in my observation, third-party presidential debates are actually gaining a little bit of steam this year because of the sheer number of people affected by our absurd political situation. By watching the third-party debates, one thing that will stand out is the seriousness with which these actual human candidates approach the pressing issues that we have at hand in comparison with how tragically comically these same topics are discussed in our so-called mainstream debates.

Why is it that both candidates from the two acceptable parties agree on absolutely everything? Why is it that the trivial disagreements that they do have and that take the shape merely in style and wording are what the major media organizations report on and relentlessly amplify as though they are fundamental disagreements? The media uses various primitive—as well as advanced—trickery techniques to shape the acceptable scope and spectrum of debate.

The differences between the two candidates are so asinine and trivial it is simply embarrassing to witness the electorate allow the media to convince them that there is any meaningful difference between the two candidates. 
To anybody with the courage, moral fortitude, and context of history enough to look outside of the so-called mainstream sources for information have the answers to the questions posed above. The questions posed above and the answers to them should be taught in elementary school in order to stop repeating these missteps in history.

The two major and acceptable parties are actually one party: It is the party of money and insatiable power. There is a lot of money and there are many people involved in the perpetuation of our charade of a political process. This major effort of having the two candidates debate one another and release commercials about one another, and of having these extravagant political campaigns, exists to provide a side-show meant to distract the casual observer from what is really going on and this major effort of staging these elections and the associated commentary is meant to convince the casual observer to remain casual and to become invested—and to then themselves perpetuate a dishonest, information-suppressing, relentlessly brutal system.

The casual and historically illiterate observer is vested into a system and narrative that is conjured up to make enough sense to be believable. We are told embarrassingly vapid stories about something called a free market and how there is something called trickle-down economics, and that there are these job creators that we absolutely need to devote all our money and time to. We are presented with tales of all these terrorists whom we have to fight against because they hate our freedom.

The casual observer is convinced to believe that what is available as a choice in our elections is actually a choice and not a charade. The casual observer and voter allows him or herself to believe that being a responsible citizen is comprised of getting up in the morning to go to work, collect their paycheck and raise their family, and that their participation in the democratic process of the most powerful, violent, and feared empire the world has ever seen consists of soaking up every four years some Koch/Coke/Exxon/Goldman Sachs/Americans For Prosperity/etc. sponsored infomercials and then vote for one or another representative of power and money.

The casual observer and voter is molded to believe that they have nothing more important to talk about with their friends, coworkers, and relatives than the local football game. The casual observer is not taught in school or by television that sports has been used as an explicit tool for political and social control since before Roman times. The casual observer does not dare to look outside of the mainstream even on issues that they feel the mainstream misinforms them on. The lie is repeated to the casual observer intensely enough to convince them to invalidate their own concerns about social security being cut and privatized, about endless war in a half dozen countries to fight terrorists we ourselves train and fund, etc.

Even if the casual observer knows what is happening is problematic, the media has such a stranglehold on acceptable analysis and acceptable spectrum for our policies that the casual observer does not dare to make known their disagreement with what they see in the mainstream. The casual observer is loaded with perceived and real intimidations to voice and act on their opinion. The casual observer is loaded with obligations to family and work. “Alternatives” to the casual observer is a dirty word. The casual observer votes for one of the two major parties.

Why the media is so involved in dictating our policies and has such control over our political system should be old-hat knowledge to anyone that pays any more than only casual attention. Anyone who goes beyond obediently observing casually knows that our media companies, our CNNs, our FOXs, our MSNBCs are precisely the same companies or subsidiaries of companies that donate to and control our political process.

Any citizen has a moral obligation to ask themselves some specific questions. Why is it that we are engaged in these insane wars to catch terrorists in all of these Middle Eastern countries? These are one-sided wars of aggression deemed illegal by the United Nations. We are slaughtering entire families with experimental high-tech gadgetry. This is costing us trillions of dollars and, far more importantly, every moment these wars and occupations are allowed to continue, they costing us our very own morality as individuals.

The media companies that issue ridiculous purple terrorist alerts are the very same companies or subsidiaries of companies that built and sold the weapons used to annihilate Iraq. The casual observer has a moral obligation to question whether it is in our best interest as a society to allow for our media companies to be the very same entities that arm our military. The detachment from the reality of our current political situation in the mainstream commentary really is astounding.

Astounding also should be the amount of unimaginable damage and suffering we allow our political leaders to inflict on the world and ourselves. The fact that the people in these Middle Eastern countries show enough restraint to not retaliate against our completely immoral, illegal provocative wars of absurd aggression is a testament to the patience and tolerance of these people. We can ask ourselves just how pleased and welcoming we would be should a country more rich and dangerous than our own invaded us, bombed our cities, raped our mothers and sisters, and installed a puppet government by holding elections even more farcical than our current ones.

Why is it that in response to our ridiculous predictable manufactured economic crisis of 2008—in which dishonest speculators personally made billions a year directly off of the suffering of others—instead of correcting the problem by trying and jailing dishonest and immoral speculators (such as those involved in the sub-prime mortgage shenanigans), we instead penalized some companies with million-dollar slaps on the wrist? An individual named John Paulson pocketed $5 billion in 2010 from the direct result of people losing their homes—that’s an average of $2.5 million per hour in a 40-hour work-week. We need to review our values and question what makes for a decent society. To not be in a state of persistent rage over such permitted injustices is to be woefully uninformed. People need to seriously discuss what virtues ought to be valued and what qualities and actions ought to be penalized.

We need to ask why we are allowing all of these conglomerated corporations to race everyone to the bottom by shipping our jobs overseas, and making our goods in China instead of making our goods here. Where is the leadership to recognize that shipping raw materials to China to make products to be exported back to be sold here a very bad idea and in many ways illogical?

Our mainstream has no tolerance for anything or anyone advocating for people to realize their capability to identify with anything beyond vacuous fashion. From infancy we are trained by any number of entities—toy companies to our misinformed and ignorant teachers—to not dig beyond the surface.

George W. Bush famously quipped that Americans should “go out and shop” as a resolution to our major economic problems. The leadership required to reverse our pervasive and perverse regression is not be found within the two major parties. The two parties have by now discredited themselves enough that scarcely anyone that identifies with them in any way should be taken at all seriously.
To escape from further catastrophe, ideally, Obama and Romney would be tried for treason by a jury. With anything resembling an informed jury, the two would surely be found guilty of treason and condemned to the harsh penalties reserved for those guilty of treason. Next would be charged the Supreme Court Justices, past presidents, and most of the House and Senate for the same.

An honest resolution to our political and moral crises would include a process by which the lackeys in current leadership positions, those most responsible for the perpetuation of our broken and regressive mainstream system of disinformation, exploitation, and short-term profit maximization, would lose their wealth and privileges. These lackeys with no skills outside of lying and brown-nosing will find rewarding work in the difficult labor involved in repairing our debilitated cities, infrastructure, and people.

This article is meant to be a very broad and general overview of our current political situation. I am not in any way an expert on any of these topics, but I am fortunate enough to have reading comprehension and I have not vested myself into the current political system enough to believe the obvious omnipresent lies present in our mainstream discussion. I did not cite specific sources for my claims, but nothing written here should be at all controversial.

Below is a selection of authors for further reading on topics that have been touched upon in this article. Each of the broadly categorized authors listed below have extraordinary and impeccable credentials and arguments against various aspects of our current power structure, which is precisely why they are almost without exception shut out of our mainstream discussion. My primary interests are our most immoral acts that our country is involved in, our wars, and the social control required to sustain them.

Sources

• Media: Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Amy Goodman, Robert McChesney, Laura Flanders, David Barsamian, André Schiffrin, Jeff Cohen.

• Foreign Policy: Tariq Ali, Robert Fisk, Chalmers Johnson, Jeremy Scahill, Chris Hedges, Alexander Cockburn, Patrick Cockburn, Norman Finkelstein, John Pilger, Andrew Bacevich.

• Our Economy: Matt Taibbi, Michael Perelman, Michael Hudson, Joseph Stiglitz, Dean Baker.

• Social Control: Bill Moyers, Juliet Schor, Dave Zirin, Michael Parenti, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Adam Curtis, Joseph Turow, Susan Linn.

• Miscellaneous: Glenn Greenwald, Gore Vidal, Ralph Nader, Howard Zinn, Michael Pollan, Greg Palast, Seymour Hersh, Barbara Ehrenreich, John Taylor Gatto, John Nichols.