The Myth Of A Democracy(Republic)

        The two longest continual running democracies are, at present, the Icelandic Republic and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
        The United States has never been in the game.  All the dictionaries that have been quoted to argue the question of whether it is a republic or a democracy simply prove one thing--neither has ever existed in this country.
         A democracy and a republic require that "the People" be represented in some way, either directly or through representatives.  But in neither case does it say "part of the people" or "one group" of the people.  The Founding Fathers "self-evident truths" did not apply to race.  The 55 members of the constitutional convention were all elite white land owners.  For 32 years after its ratification, the US Constitution prohibited the abolition of slavery.  It was the contention of James Madison that the Constitution made it illegal to pass any law abolishing slavery.  The defense of white privelege has primarily been carried out at the state level.  Even more than half century later the original Emancipation Proclamation was crafted to contain a provision that required all freed Blacks to return to Africa or live in totally segregated geographical areas of the Country.  The provision was eventually dropped for lack of support but even Honest Abe Lincoln expressed the belief that free blacks could never live harmoniously with whites.  He remarked that his first impulse was to free all the slaves and send them back to Liberia.
       It was, and still is, an exclusive club, convinced of its racial and social superiority and of the manifest destiny of its experiment. In these modern times a hand is occasionally extended to those outside the mainstream club, mostly to present a veneer of equality to fulfill the mythical promise of high school history and government texts.  But in the larger issues, the clubs are exclusive unless one assimilates in every way.  And at the inner core, the pristine racial and social characteristics of the descendants of empire builders are alone. Special protections are offered for those types of ownership that are crucial to the American economic class system. In fact, most of the framers of the Constitution intended it to be so.  As James Madison said, "to insure that the rights of the opulent minority are privileged, they must hold the reins of government."  He rationalized the fairness of this doctrine because property "chiefly bears the burden of government...(and) in a certain sense the Country may be said to belong" to the propertied elite.  But Jefferson and Franklin saw it differently.  Jefferson's writings made it evident that he, like Franklin, saw accumulation of property beyond that needed to satisfy one's natural requirements as an impediment to liberty. To place "property" in the same trilogy with life and liberty, against the backdrop of Jefferson's views regarding the social nature of property, would have been a contradiction, Jefferson composed some of his most trenchant rhetoric in opposition to the erection of a European-like aristocracy on American soil.
        The basic institutions of Congress were usurped long ago by the corporate and big business lobbying machines.  Occasionally we see our representatives and senators stand up for something, but most of the time we get only speech making and rhetoric followed by special interest legislation.   The integrity of government has been in question for more than 100 years.  The public pacification machine can be seen operating at its best when one asks a normal citizen what he/she think of politicians and then ask them if they trust their government to tell them the truth about important issues. Contradictory beliefs and opinions will emerge.  If the common citizen feels un-empowered, democracy does not exist.  Patrick Colm Hogan wrote this about democracy in America:   "One of the sacred cows of capitalist democracy is that the views of its citizens are heard, considered, and lent power through the election process.  Most Americans realize that elections have very little to do with major decision-making and policy-making, but the illusion of participation and effect is a crucial part of the continued ratification and consent which the American people authorize in the implementation of policies.  The election “voice” of the American public is limited to a narrow set of options.  Though high school textbooks and political rhetoric extol the virtues of the power of the individual in government, the system allows virtually no room for consideration of those opinions except where it allows the acceptance and consent for predominant mainstream views.
         Indigenous Americans know what democracy means.  It has nothing to do with freedom.  It has only to do with responsibility and responsiveness to  the interests of the People.  My Greek interprets 'res publica', not as 'law of the people' but as 'interests of the people'.  We think that in order for a democracy to survive for more than a few generations the people need to have blood and filial ties.  If they don't, the most powerful cliques and special interest groups will  attempt to control the systems and the result will become exclusive, manipulative, overbearing, and not in concert with the interests of the entire people.   Jefferson wrote:  " A tractable people may be governed in large bodies but, in proportion as they depart from this character, the extent of their government must be less. We see into what small divisions the Indians are obliged to reduce their societies."
 
          Native societies, developing organically through birth and marriage, utilize the relationships of being related by blood or bond to become an almost sentient social organism.  Organized societies, trying to create a similar organism from an unrelated, disconnected, and uncommitted citizenry, can only hope to distract or confuse its citizens to keep them from noticing the insidious institutions of organization and centralization that become necessary to keep order and provide necessities--a power that leads inevitably to abrogations of individual freedom--and often, tyranny.
        Paraphrasing Aldous Huxley:   Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being concentrated and centralized.  The machinery of mass production and global consumerism demands mass distribution, something that cannot be accomplished without expensive centralization.  As production is made more efficient it becomes more complex and costly. Local capitalism, without adequate working capital, loses the competition with corporate capitalism as it attempts to increase production and is gobbled up by larger companies.  Economic power falls into the hands of the few, accomplishing the goal of fulfilling global progress.  Whether controlled by the dictatorship's "state" or democratic "power elite", the result is the same.  True democratic principles are subverted to centralized corporate interests that invariably control the mass media--influencing the thoughts, feelings and actions of virtually everybody. Modern political power, exercised ruthlessly in dictatorships, and inconspicuously in democracies, is inexorably tied to economic growth and technological progress.

        When a government, which pretends to be responsible to its People, undermines or opposes those best interests, then that government has abrogated its responsibilities and no longer fits the dictionary definitions of democracy or republic.
        Today, the interests of business are so entrenched in our
government, and the economy of that government, that the interests of government and business are identical.  John Sulston writes: " ...the strength of the industrial lobby in Washington means that no public servant can make statements that imply criticism of a commercial company."  "The big transnational corporations are now more powerful than many governments.  Their strength is apparent everywhere we turn, and especially in their collective lobbying in the capitals of rich nations.  Maybe we're moving towards a world where national governments, elected or otherwise, no longer count.  The warning signs are there."

        Many of the visible conflicts of interest have been transferred to other Nations with the new "global economy" so that mainstream America is unaware of the complicity between government, the military, and corporate interests.  But the defining legislation is accomplished here, and the democratic process, which supposedly requires the participation and approval of the American People for these corporate raids on world resources, has been bypassed.  The American public, through deliberate misinformation and omission, are not aware of what is being done in their name.  They are no longer part of the process.  Democracy does not exist.  Thomas Jefferson said,  "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be... The people cannot be safe without information.  Where the press is free, and every 'man' able to read, all is safe."  Of course Jefferson himself recognized that the media was capable of being dishonest when he uttered the phrase, applicable to every media in our own time-- "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper."
        The modern press, radio, televison, and cinema are an indifferent power, serving as often as a weapon for dictators as it does an indispensable tool in the survival of democracy.  In our business priority system, media outlets for the free expression of opinion must also bear the costs of competition and profitability in democratic environments, thereby coming under an economic censorship that is, in effect, as limiting as the political censorship endured under totalitarian regimes.
        Big Tobacco and Big Chemical are further examples of how a lack of information at the popular level has allowed corporations to act in total opposition, with legislative support, to the best interests of the public.  As in the case with Big Tobacco, as soon as the enough of the citizenry became enraged at the consequences, the corporate powers backed off and sought new areas to exploit in other parts of the world.  But make no mistake, this was not democracy at work, this was a bottom-line business decision at the highest corporate levels.
       Now, even our Supreme Court appointed President has replaced the former byword of manifest destiny, "Progress", with a politically correct, fuzzy-warm call to the siren song of global "democracy".  But as Aldous Huxley said in 1958, "No people that pass abruptly from a state of subservience under the power of a despot to the completely unfamiliar state of political independence can be said to have a fair chance of making democratic institutions work. No people in a precarious economic condition has a fair chance of being able to govern itself democratically."
         So never mind that the rest of the world does not have the cultural, political, or economic tools to accomplish it, jour leaders seem to imagine that just the aura of the word by itself should be enough to achieve our every melodramatic, big screen, technicolor, white hat, good guy, God's on our side, Colonialistic desire!
        As Seig Heil Adolf said, "All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities, and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas."  "...Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd."
        How many times in the last months have you heard the repetition of simple and similar phrases, faithfully reprinted in the press, one of which is-- democracy?
        Democracy in the non-Indigenous U.S has always been a distant promise, idolized, idealized, and unrealized.  During the original days of the Union, it was less a republic of representation than it was an absence of government in the lives of citizens.  The government in rural or wilderness America existed pretty much solely to register land claims, titles, mining claims and other resource related record keeping.  As cities grew, government regulated and aided businesses by defining the stratas of society and small pockets of democracy were allowed to exist to provide services to white american families.  The government also maintained the military and made treaties with Native Nations as well as foreign ones.  Since fully more than half of all the early U.S. budgets were about funding military conflicts with Indigenous Nations, that was important--but hardly democratic.  Those circumstances continued until the early 1800's push for eastern industrialization, at which time economic interests got hot and the "representation" of the people took on new significance--notably the enlistment of the populace in the continual identification and pursuit of resources for the enrichment of industrial society and its supporting institutions.   Progress and democracy have been consistently used as unifying symbols to build a nationalistic fervor and give unrelated peoples--with uncommon pasts, dis-similar values, and separate individual and collective goals--an idealistic assurance of their imaginary power.  At the same time, the peoples are encouraged to escalate their efforts to gather the resources and provide the services necessary to enhance business and corporate institutions.
        Our Indigenous Peoples have experienced, over and over, how the rule of law, even the Constitution, is interpreted and altered as needed...
       We need to forget the semantics of political debate and settle down to the question of responsibilities.  If we wish our elected representatives to be responsible first to our best interests, then we need to recognize the difference between responsible local capitalism and the uncontrolled menace of the national and global large business and corporate elite.  Their obvious ability to manipulate the decision-making processes of our elected representatives makes them the enemy of any attempt at democracy.  These are the most dangerous terrorists we face today. Erich From's statement about the mental health of today's civilization also speaks to democractic freedoms:  These millions of abnormally normal people still cherish "the illusion of individuality but their conformity is developing into uniformity.  Uniformity and freedom are incompatible, as are uniformity and mental health.  The difficulty with ordering large civilizations is that there are no strict guidelines as to how much organization is necessary.  Too little and unrelated citizens, lacking powerful unifying ethics and purpose, become lawless and anarchistic.  Too much and individual creativity is suppressed or inhibited, leading to stagnation or despotism.  Liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely co-operating individuals but the demands of economics and order in large populations often co-opt the values of the people so that they settle for comfort and distractions instead of freedom."
       We need to separate business from government and realize that the two longest living democracies in recorded history have as their core priorities, the real interests of families and the common good of the people at large.humans need to be safe from invaders, have clean healthy food and water, live in an unpolluted environment, have access to shelter, health care, and protection from environmental extremes, provide aide to the needy and weak, and provide a voice to all who would speak.  These are the first and only priorities of government and democracy.
       The examples of un-militaristic democracies have existed on the backs of tribal and familial matriarchal societies.  Most of the non-tribal republics
or representative experiments have ultimately failed in short periods of time because they could only foster economic success through patriarchal militaristic campaigns of conquest.
       The meaning of the word democracy does not contain an endorsement of only one brand of economics, or religion, or political system--its meaning is simple and direct.  It describes a People, or their representatives, acting in concert to make decisions in the best interests of the whole People.  If it does not mean that, we don't need it.