The future of human governance begins with direct democracy - Part 2

Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkreig

War is not a foregone conclusion or a national necessity. Each successive occupant of the White House only needs you to believe that in order to centralize the power of an increasingly imperial presidency, stifle dissent, and chip away at what remains of civil liberties.

- Danny Sjursen, retired US Army officer, The Pence Prophecy: VP Predicts Perpetual War at the West Point Graduation

Whenever I mention direct democracy, a certain segment of the population always comes back with a very negative knee-jerk reaction. Since this response tends to center around several concerns, today's post will dig into them and explain how such pitfalls can be structurally addressed.

Minority Protection

The first thing that worries people is a fear there will be no protections for minority populations within such a system. Take the U.S. for example, where approximately 80% of the population lives in urban areas and only 20% in rural. If we moved to a system where direct popular vote played a meaningful role in deciding the majority of issues, rural populations would lose out every single time. It would end up being an oppressive system for people who live in less populated areas and would tear up the U.S. even faster than is happening now.

I definitely think this sort of thing is a problem, but people misunderstand what I mean when I discuss direct democracy. Fundamentally, I'm a firm believer that governance should be radically decentralized compared to what it is today. America is a great example of a good idea gone completely off the tracks.

Localism

While the founders envisioned a decentralized structure in which core politically entities known as states would decide most issues, we're now stuck with a centralized imperial system in which virtually all major decisions are made in Washington D.C. by gangs of hopelessly corrupt and compromised politicians. But it's even worse than that. Power hasn't merely been concentrated in D.C., but it's also become increasing concentrated within the capital itself in the hands of a reckless imperial presidency.

For example, the separations of powers outlined in the Constitution when it comes to war has been all but obliterated. Congress is supposed to declare war, yet the U.S. military is involved in conflicts all over the planet, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger without any such declaration.

To illustrate how insane all of this is, read the following from a Vice article published last year:

The U.S. is officially fighting wars in seven countries, including Libya and Niger, according to an unclassified White House report sent to Congress this week and obtained by the New York Times.

Known officially as the "Report on the Legal and Policy Frameworks Guiding the United States' Military Force and Related National Security Operations," the document is part of a new requirement outlined in the 2018 defense spending bill. The White House is already required to update Congress every six months on where the U.S. is using military force.

We've somehow gone from Congress must declare war, to the White House will update Congress every six months on how all the undeclared wars are going. This is madness.

The U.S. is currently drowning in an overly centralized and corrupt imperial government based in D.C. For direct democracy to truly function well, it should be based in local governance. I don't think it's a coincidence that the places currently using these tools most successfully, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, focus on localism.
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 Direct Democracy Is the Future of Human Governance – Part 1

Direct Democracy Is the Future of Human Governance – Part 1

Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means.

– Lord Acton

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

– Buckminster Fuller

If you’ve read anything I’ve written over the past several years, you’ll be acutely aware of my belief that human civilization is currently in a major transition period between two great paradigms of world history. The old world we all grew up in no longer works for most people, yet is being relentlessly propped up by the powerful and their minions who benefit from its parasitic and destructive nature. Despite their best efforts, a system so poisonous, decrepit and corrupt cannot and will not last. At this stage, it’s little more than a Potemkin village fraud barely kept standing courtesy of increasingly intense deception, manipulation and the sheer will of those who profit handsomely from it.

By stating we’re in the transition period, I want to make it clear I believe things are very much already being disrupted and altered beneath the hood of a world which appears indistinguishable from what it was a decade ago on a superficial level. Specifically, I think there are two core aspects of human existence that will be completely transformed in the years to come. First, within the monetary and financial systems that define how commerce, savings and entrepreneurship function. The emergence and continued momentum of Bitcoin offers evidence that disruption in this realm is already very much underway, albeit still in its infancy. The second realm I expect will experience massive transformational change relates to forms of human governance. We’ve barely scratched the surface on this one, but nascent signs have started to appear, and I suspect a push towards political systems more defined by direct democracy will become increasingly common in the years ahead. I’ve spent many hours writing about the financial and monetary system, so today’s piece will focus on what appears to be coming with regard to human political evolution.

Direct democracy is something that’s been tried before, so there’s some history to it. Once you start exploring the concept you’ll be immediately confronted with a plethora of terms such as eDemocracy, liquid democracy, referendum, initiative, and recall to name just a few. The purpose of this post isn’t to dig into all of that, although it’s certainly a useful exercise and I’ll provide some helpful links at the end. The purpose of this post is to distinguish direct democracy from the most common form of democratic government functioning on earth today, representative democracy.

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Why Social Democracy Is Failing Europe

Alasdair Macleod 
The Mises Institute

There is a certain tension in the phrase, “social democracy,” and the description of someone as a social democrat. Social in this context is socialism by the state. A democrat supports the freedom for individual electors to express and defend personal interests in regular plebiscites. The two positions are incompatible.

At this point we should note that in economic terms there is little philosophical difference between European socialism and communism. Both seek to relieve capitalists of the means of production in favor of the state, either by ownership or control. Marx himself saw socialism as a temporary phase on the way to full communism. However, we all know from experience that communism fails by impoverishing everyone except a coterie of leaders. The same problem of the state’s inability to calculate prices, other than with reference to labor costs, and to foresee what consumers require on the morrow bedevils both socialism and communism. The principal difference between the two is the speed at which economic disintegration takes place, tied to the rate at which the socializing state removes personal freedoms and destroys wealth.

Social democrats assume that moderate socialism does not lead to those outcomes, which is a mistake1. They are deceived.

With social democracy we observe committed socialists and communists using democracy as the pathway towards increasing socialism and eventual communism. But there’s a problem, which in time becomes increasingly obvious to the electorate. Electors become poorer over time, and the more progressive among them seek to escape in order to participate in more capitalistic economies. Lenin and Mao Zedong dealt with this tendency by suppressing all freedom of expression and they redefined democracy to permit only the election of communist officials. Intellectuals, always the first to express discontent, were liquidated or sent to the Soviet gulags and China’s penal labor camps. 

In Western Europe a different, more patient approach was needed for the communist revolution. And this is where the concept of the social democrat springs from. 

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"Our Very Democracy Is At Stake" - Joe Biden Launches Campaign For President

Comment: (A long belly laugh) Old Paedophile Biden is a Ghost runner. I wonder who the real manchurian candidate will be this time? Or will Trump manage to do it again?
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Zero Hedge 

Following months of anticipatory leaks and the 'gropegate' scandal that nearly derailed the former VP's ambitions, Joe Biden, who has consistently polled at the top of the ever-expanding Democratic field, has finally announced his plans to seek the 2020 nomination.

In a video published via his twitter feed Thursday morning, the former vice president and Senator from Delaware declared his intention to run, declaring "the core values of this nation… our standing in the world… our very democracy...everything that has made America -- America - is at stake."

In the video, Biden framed his video with the infamous 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va., - a "defining moment for our nation in the last few years" - where a counter-protester was killed after a member of a white supremacist group plowed into a crowd with his car. He contrasted the march with the writing of the 'Declaration of Independence,' which was penned by Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville more than 240 years earlier.

Biden will follow his announcement with a fundraiser on Thursday, then a rally Monday in Pittsburgh, Bloomberg reported, citing an announcement from his campaign. Over the next ten days, he plans to make stops in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, the earliest primary and caucus states.

Though Biden's eight-year stint as Obama's VP gives him unrivaled name and brand recognition in a field of 20 candidates, Obama has said he won't make an endorsement until a nominee has been chosen. Online betting odds still favor Biden, 76, as the front-runner for the nomination, though "Democratic Socialist" Bernie Sanders is a close second, followed by the ascendant South Bend, Ind. mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Of course, Biden's well-documented history of inappropriate touching isn't his only major liability going into the Democratic primary (the Iowa caucuses are just 10 months away). The appearance of a quid-pro-quo involving Biden, his son, taxpayer money and a 'sweetheart' deal in Ukraine could very well become the scandal that finally proves his undoing.

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Extinction Rebellion: the new millenarian cult

Austin Williams
spiked.com

Over the past week, large groups of protesters have brought traffic to a standstill in central London. They have glued themselves to bus stops, pavements and Jeremy Corbyn’s fence. They have stood on top of trains, barricaded bridges, painted slogans on corporate headquarters and planted trees in the streets. Meanwhile, politicians have remained on holiday or cowered in Westminster. The police appear to have no idea what to do when confronted by a mass of people who don’t care if they are arrested. This is Extinction Rebellion (XR) – a new environmental protest movement that is spreading across the country.

I’d argue that three things have influenced the rise of this movement. The first is Brexit. Indeed, the politics of anger, disillusion and frustration unleashed by Brexit are possibly the most significant. There are no statistics on the Leave / Remain make-up of the environmental protesters, but one suspects Remain is overrepresented. That said, to her credit, Dr Gail Bradbrook, self-styled co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, told the Today programme that similar disruptive tactics would be ‘perfectly reasonable’ from Brexiteers ‘if democracy is not being honoured’.

The XR protesters – as Jon Snow might say – are mostly white, middle-class and often elderly. They are demonstrating their frustration that environmentalism isn’t getting enough coverage in the press and that, as XR puts it, ‘conventional approaches of voting, lobbying, petitions and protest have failed because powerful political and economic interests prevent change’. The first claim might seem to fly in the face of reality for the rest of us, who see climate campaigns, global-warming paranoia and environmental journalism at every turn. But the second point is the most contentious.

The conclusion drawn by XR activists is that democratic change is impossible and disruption is the only way to force change. Rather than pledging to improve the democratic process, to hold people more firmly to account, they are campaigning to work around it. It is the democratic process that they seek to overturn, not capitalism. Forget the old-fashioned arrogance of the Occupy movement’s slogan, ‘We are the 99 per cent’. Forget the stubborn Remainers’ assertion that 48 per cent takes precedence over the 52 per cent. XR types say that they only need ‘the involvement of 3.5 per cent of the population to succeed’.

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Four Kinds of Dystopia

Darren Allen

The twentieth century saw four basic visions of hell on earth, or dystopia. These were:
Orwellian. Rule by autocratic totalitarian people, party or elite group. Limitation of choice, repression of speech and repression of minorities. Belief in order, routine and rational-morality. Erotic physicality and sexual freedom suppressed through violent control of sexual impulse. Constant surveillance and constant censorship. Control of bodies by enclosure, fear, explicit, violent, repression of dissent and forced obedience to ‘the party line’ (orwellian fanaticism: All must submit). Control of minds by explicitly policing, limiting and punishing subversive language (orwellian newspeak: state-controlled reduction of vocabulary to limit range of thought). Truth cannot be known (aka hyper-relativism or postmodernism); and therefore we need an external authority to decide what the truth is (kings and priests) and to protect society from chaos and madness (the orwellian them: commies, anarchists, extremists, radicals, infidels, plebs, proles, freaks, criminals, etc.).

Huxleyan Rule by democratic, totalitarian, capitalist, technocratic systems. Super-excess of choice. Limitation of access to speech platforms. Assimilation of minorities (via tokenism), foundational belief in emotional-morality, ‘imagination’ and ‘flexibility’. Control by desire, debt, narcotic, technical necessity and implicit threat of violence. No overt control of dissent (system selects for system-friendly voices and unconscious self-censorship). Erotic physicality and sexual freedom suppressed via promotion of pornographic sensuality, promiscuity and dissolution. Control of bodies through pleasure and addiction to pleasure. Control of minds by proliferating information and enclosing language within professional boundaries (Illichian Newspeak, or Uniquack). Truth can be intellectually known (the religion of scientism) and is obvious when understood (huxleyan fanaticism: only the wicked can refuse it) and learnt in the process of setting up an internal authority (aka morality or conscience) called ‘education’. 
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What DON'T they want you to know? Eurocrats now making record numbers of EU laws in SECRET

Express UK 

 

Brussels is shutting up shop and deliberating on an ever greater number of intrusive regulations away from the harsh light of public scrutiny, minimising opportunities for criticism and opposition. 

 

Dynamite figures uncovered by an EU observer investigation show that secret lawmaking is now at its joint highest level ever in the history of the bloc, raising serious questions over the health of European democracy. 

 

Campaigners and politicians today described the development as "astonishing" and said they were "alarmed" by the number of sweeping regulations being cooked up behind closed doors. 

 

The issue revolves around the numbers of Brussels bills, originating from the unelected EU Commission, which are being rushed through without lengthy debates in the EU Parliament.

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American Democracy Is a Shitshow

Arun Gupta
Information Clearing House

American democracy is a shitshow that is insightful only unintentionally and captivating only in its grotesqueries.

In the late afternoon of day three of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, media workers and RNC attendees were blocked from exiting the security zone around the convention center. Past the concrete barriers, lines of police, and double layers of 10-foot tall steel-link fence, a protest was swirling. It was the American flag–burning hyped all day by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a tiny Maoist-style group known for provocative but ultimately harmless political stunts.

From the security tunnel, apparently modeled on checkpoints dotting Israeli-occupied Palestine, it was difficult to distinguish protesters from media in the crowd of hundreds. Heated yelling drifted above the tightly packed throngs, but there was no smoke to be seen.

The mere threat of a piece of colored fabric being set alight was enough to trigger a lockdown. Rent-a-cops started herding bewildered media out of the tunnel. When two columns of beefy riot cops in full body armor began filing out to take up position near the protest, security swooped in to clear media out of a parking lot where the tumult could be observed.

On the scene was dozens of Bikers for Trump, loudly lecturing how the flag-burners would be killed in any other country. The imminence of violence is a refrain on a right that glorifies its weapons as instruments of peace. The previous day when I took a photo on the street near the convention of a knot of muscleheads all wearing the same 2nd Amendment t-shirts, one told me, with approving nods from his compatriot, “If it wasn’t for the First Amendment, I would have smashed your camera.”

These gun-clingers hadn’t figured out the Constitution is not an a la carte menu they can pick and choose from, and eliminating the First Amendment would usher in the tyranny they rant about as imminent. 

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"Russia and China are hated because they are protecting humanity from Western terror"

Alessandro Bianchi
Dissident Voice

The AntiDiplomatico (Italy) interviews philosopher, Andre Vltchek: "Russia and China are forming an incredible defensive wall to protect humanity from Western terrorism."
 

Andre Vltchek has become renowned in Italy for being the co-author, along with Noam Chomsky, of the famous book Western Terrorism (Ponte alle Grazie).  

Alessandro Bianchi: I start from a brutal question: What has become of a country that it is offering Donald Trump as its 'best candidate'?

Andre Vltchek: It is not much different from the country that it used to be for decades, even centuries. Since the beginning, the US presidents (all of European stock, of course), had been promoting slavery, extermination campaigns against the native population of North America, barbaric wars of aggression against Mexico, and other Latin American countries, the Philippines, etc. Has anything changed now? I highly doubt it. Donald Trump is horrendous, but he is also honest. Both Presidents Clinton and Obama were great speakers, but unrepentant mass murderers.  

AB: In a recent survey over 53% of Americans were against both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. How long will we continue to consider the United States a democracy? And why, in your opinion, is abstention the only form of "rebellion" by a population completely excluded from the decision-making stage?  

AV: "Democracy" means nothing else other than, "rule of the people", in Greek. There is nothing democratic about the political concepts of the United States and Europe. And there is absolutely nothing democratic about the "global arrangement" through which the West has been ruling over the rest of the world for decades and centuries. The second part is, I'm convinced, much more important, much more devastating; in the West, people have been tolerating their insane political system, in exchange for the countless privileges they are getting from their countries' plundering of the planet, and violating entire nations and continents. But in Africa, Asia and elsewhere, those "un-people" have no choice at all.  

AB: Is Bernie Sanders really the change that many in Europe have described?  

AV: Bernie Sanders is like those liberal members of the German National Socialist Party during the WWII, or of the Italian Fascist movement during Mussolini. They'd do much for their own workers and peasants, socially... as long as funds were flowing in from the countries plundered by their imperialism. Under Bernie Sanders, Western workers would definitely do much better, but the rest of the world, the "wretched of the Earth" would still have to pay the bill.

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53 Years To The Day That Eisenhower Warned Of The Military-Industrial Complex, Obama Will Further Its Cause

Tech Dirt

Fifty three years ago today, President Dwight Eisenhower gave his famous speech warning of the military-industrial complex. It's quite a speech, and well worth reading, listening to or watching. But, the famous lines are the ones that still rings true today:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

The White House claims that it's a mere coincidence that President Obama has chosen the anniversary of that speech to give his speech, outlining what are expected to be merely cosmetic reforms to the NSA's surveillance efforts, still convinced that even if the programs are incredibly broad and powerful, that it's okay since he won't abuse them.

The folks over at EFF have put together scorecard of NSA reforms that the President should announce. You can play along at home and check off which ones the president actually supports, but I wouldn't rush to sharpen your pencils. You're not going to see too many checked boxes on this chart.


Eisenhower noted that a true leader is focused on the goals of a free society, understanding technological change, and the influence of corporate interests, but keeping focused on the larger goal of protecting freedom:

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

The current president would do well to reread and to think about Eisenhower's words, but it appears that is not likely to happen.

Europe is Slowly Strangling the Life out of National Democracy

Telegraph

Decisions affecting the lives of voters are being taken by bureaucrats and unelected 'experts'

Every so often one comes across a book, a poem or a work of art that is so original, perfectly crafted, accurate and true that you can’t get it out of your head. You have to read or look at it many times to place it in context and understand what it means.

In the course of two decades as a political reporter my most powerful experience of this kind came when a friend drew my attention to a 20-page article in an obscure academic journal.

Written by the political scientists Richard Katz and Peter Mair, and called “The Emergence of a Cartel Party”, it immediately explained almost everything that had perplexed me as a lobby correspondent: the unhealthy similarity between supposedly rival parties; the corruption and graft that has become endemic in modern politics; the emergence of a political elite filled with scorn and hostility towards ordinary voters. My book, The Triumph of the Political Class, was in certain respects an attempt to popularise that Katz and Mair essay.

Several months ago I was shocked and saddened to learn that Peter Mair (whom I never met) had died suddenly, while on holiday with his family in his native Ireland, aged just 60. However, his friend Francis Mulhern has skilfully piloted into print the book he was working on at the time of his death. It is called Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, and published by Verso. In my view it is every bit as brilliant as the earlier essay.

The opening paragraph is bold, powerful, and sets out the thesis beautifully: “The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.

The first half of Mair’s new book concentrates on this crisis in party democracy. He tracks the sharp fall in turn-out at elections, the collapse of party membership (the Tories down from three million in the Fifties to scarcely 100,000 today, a drop of 97 per cent) and the decay of civic participation. Mair shows that this is a European trend. All over the continent parties have turned against their members. Political leaders no longer represent ordinary people, but are becoming, in effect, emissaries from central government.

All of this is of exceptional importance, and central to the urgent contemporary debate about voter disenchantment. However, I want to concentrate on the second half of Mair’s book, because here the professor turns to the role played by the European Union in undermining and bypassing national democracy.

He starts with a historical paradox. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 was in theory the finest moment for Western democracy. But it was also the moment when it started to fail. Mair argues that political elites have turned Europe into “a protected sphere, safe from the demands of voters and their representatives”.

This European political directorate has taken decision-making away from national parliaments. On virtually everything that matters, from the economy to immigration, decisions are made elsewhere. Professor Mair argues that many politicians encouraged this tendency because they wanted to “divest themselves of responsibility for potentially unpopular policy decisions and so cushion themselves against possible voter discontent”. This means that decisions which viscerally affect the lives of voters are now taken by anonymous, unaccountable bureaucrats rather than politicians responsible to their voters.

Though the motive has been understandable, the effect has been malign, making politicians look impotent or cowardly, and bringing politics itself into contempt. In Britain, for example, David Cameron can do virtually nothing to head off Bulgarian or Romanian immigration. The prime ministers of Greece, Portugal and Spain are now effectively branch managers for the European Central Bank and Goldman Sachs. By a hideous paradox the European Union, set up as a way of avoiding a return to fascism in the post-war epoch, has since mutated into a way of avoiding democracy itself.

In a devastating analogy, Mair conjures up Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French thinker who is often regarded as the greatest modern theorist about democracy. Tocqueville noted that the pre-revolutionary French aristocracy fell into contempt because they claimed privileges on the basis of functions that they could no longer fulfil. The 21st-century European political class, says Mair, is in the identical position.

To sum up, the European elites have come very close to the abolition of what we have been brought up to regard as politics, and have replaced it with rule by bureaucrats, bankers, and various kinds of unelected expert. So far they have got away with this. This May’s elections for the European Parliament will provide a fascinating test of whether they can continue to do so.

The European Union claims to be untroubled by these elections. A report last month from two members of the Jacques Delors Institute concluded that “the numerical increase of populist forces will not notably affect the functioning of the [European Parliament], which will remain largely based on the compromises built between the dominant political groups. This reflects the position of the overwhelming majority of EU citizens”.

I wonder. In France, polls suggest that the anti-semitic Front National, which equates illegal immigrants with “organised gangs of criminals”, will gain more votes than the mainstream parties. The Front National has joined forces with the virulently anti-Islamic Geert Wilders in Holland, who promises to claim back “how we control our borders, our money, our economy, our currency”. In Britain it is likely that Ukip will win in May. Anti-European parties are on the rise in Denmark, Austria, Greece and Poland.

These anti-EU parties tend to be on the Right, and often the far-Right. For reasons that are hard to understand, the Left continues enthusiastically to back the EU, even though it is pursuing policies that drive down living standards and destroy employment, businesses and indeed (in the case of Greece and Spain) entire economies. In Britain, for example, Ed Miliband is an ardent supporter of the European project and refuses even to countenance the idea of a referendum.

Like Miliband, Peter Mair comes from the Left. He was an Irishman who spent the majority of his professional life working in European universities in Italy, the Netherlands or Ireland. And yet he has written what is by far and away the most powerful, learned and persuasive anti-EU treatise I have come across. It proves that it is impossible to be a democrat and support the continued existence of the European Union.

His posthumous masterpiece deserves to become a foundation text for Eurosceptics not just in Britain, but right across the continent. It is important that it should do so. The battle to reclaim parliamentary democracy should not just belong to the Right-wing (and sometimes fascist) political parties. The Left and Right can disagree – honourably so – on many great issues. But surely both sides of the ideological divide can accept that democracy is still worth fighting for, and that the common enemy has become the European Union.

Will the World Grow More Authoritarian in 2014?

The Atlantic

Judging by 2014's crowded election calendar, this will be a landmark year for democracy. The Economist estimates that an unprecedented 40 percent of the world’s population will have a chance to vote in national polls in 2014. We'll see races in populous countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, the United States, and, most notably, India, where 700 million people are expected to cast ballots in what Fareed Zakaria has called the “largest democratic process in human history.”

But here’s the catch: The “biggest year for democracy ever,” as The Economist is billing it, follows a year that in many ways was characterized by the ascent of authoritarianism. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad, with the help of Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah, gained the upper hand in the country’s devastating civil war. In Egypt, the crucible of the Arab Spring, the Egyptian military overthrew the democratically elected Mohammed Morsi and launched a heavy-handed crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and other pockets of opposition. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan silenced political opponents and stifled freedom of expression—at least, that is, until a corruption scandal and plans to redevelop a park sparked a backlash against his increasingly authoritarian governing style.

The phenomenon extended beyond the Middle East. Russian President Vladimir Putin consolidated his control at home and abroad, playing an essential role in Syrian diplomacy, purchasing Ukraine’s loyalty for $15 billion, and detaining and releasing adversaries on a whim. In China, Xi Jinping emerged as the country’s most powerful leader in decades. Freedom House reported a worldwide decline in Internet freedom, noting, amid Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. spying, that “an uptick in surveillance was the year’s most significant trend.” On several occasions—Russia granting asylum to Snowden, China establishing an Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea—authoritarian governments deliberately taunted their democratic rivals … and got away with it.
These trends may have accelerated in 2013, but they’ve been apparent for some time now. In its 2013 “Freedom in the World” report, Freedom House noted that more countries registered declines in freedom than gains in 2012—for the seventh year in a row (this despite the fact that the number of electoral democracies in the world increased slightly in 2012). Two years earlier, the organization asserted that “freedom’s forward march” had actually peaked at the turn of the 21st century.

Below is the percentage of countries that Freedom House has labeled as “free,” “partly free,” and “not free” in its reports from 1989 to 2012. You can see how the breakdown between the three categories begins to flatline around the year 2000. The world settles into stasis at roughly 45 percent free, 25 percent not free.

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Why Is America in Decline? Chris Hedges on the U.S. Empire & Death of the Liberal Class (2012)

"We have undergone a slow-motion corporate coup-d'etat."

9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed

Table of Contents

Introduction: 9/11 Ten Years Later

1. Did 9/11 Justify the War in Afghanistan?
2. The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why Have Otherwise Rational Journalists Endorsed Miracles?
3. Why Have Bill Moyers and Robert Parry in Particular Endorsed Miracles?
4. Building What? How State Crimes Against Democracy Can Be Hidden in Plain Sight
5. Phone Calls from the 9/11 Planes: How They Fooled America
6. Cheney's Meet the Press Interview: Why the 9/11 Commission Contradicted It
7. A Consensus Approach to the Pentagon
8. Nationalist Faith: How It Blinds America to the Truth about 9/11
9. When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed

From the Introduction: 9/11 Ten Years Later

The words in the title of this book - "9/11 Ten Years Later" - are often followed with an exclamation point. The exclamation point may be a way of expressing, by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement, amazement that the truth has not already been publicly revealed. The exclamation point might be used by detractors of this movement -- perhaps along with an expletive -- to express their feeling that it is time for these people to "get a life." The exclamation point might reflect a position somewhat in the middle -- of spouses of members hoping that no more years of their family life will be oriented around the work of trying to get the truth revealed.

In any case, for reasons discussed in this book (especially the final two chapters), there is nothing surprising about the fact that the 9/11 crime has not been revealed. Those who have gained control of a state in an ostensible democracy have many means not only for orchestrating major crimes, but also for preventing those crimes (including their crimes against democracy itself) from being publicized. 

What is somewhat surprising, perhaps to the perpetrators themselves, is the fact that the 9/11 Truth Movement is still alive and, in fact, continues to grow. The first professional 9/11 organization, Scholars for 9/11 Truth, was formed in 2005, and since then a dozen professional organizations have been created. It was not until 2006 that architect Richard Gage started Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth with one member -- himself -- but now over 1,500 architects and engineers have signed its petition. Some of the organizations, such as Scientists for 9/11 Truth and Actors and Artists for 9/11 Truth, have started up only in the past two years.

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As America’s Economy Collapses, “New Normal” Police State Takes Shape

 
Global Research

Forget your rights.

As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of a tattered social net (adieu Medicare and Medicaid! Social Security? Au revoir!), the Obama administration is moving at break-neck speed to expand police state programs first stood-up by the Bush government.

After all, with world share prices gyrating wildly, employment and wages in a death spiral, and retirement funds and publicly-owned assets swallowed whole by speculators and rentier scum, the state better dust-off contingency plans lest the Greek, Spanish or British “contagion” spread beyond the fabled shores of “old Europe” and infect God-fearin’ folk here in the heimat.

Fear not, they have and the lyrically-titled Civil Disturbances: Emergency Employment of Army and Other Resources, otherwise known as Army Regulation 500-50, spells out the “responsibilities, policy, and guidance for the Department of the Army in planning and operations involving the use of Army resources in the control of actual or anticipated civil disturbances.” (emphasis added)

With British politicians demanding a clampdown on social media in the wake of London riots, and with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency having done so last week in San Francisco, switching off underground cell phone service to help squelch a protest against police violence, authoritarian control tactics, aping those deployed in Egypt and Tunisia (that worked out well!) are becoming the norm in so-called “Western democracies.”

Economic crisis will lead to loss of democracy

Why world leaders are losing hearts and minds

...Because they are a bunch of lying psychopaths on the whole...

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Independent

 

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. But not as far as Western politics are concerned, apparently. All through Europe and America, as Japan, Western democracies are suffering a collapse of leadership and a catastrophic decline in popular confidence in them. It's not as though the need for leadership is not there. On most accounts, Europe and the US are now facing the greatest crises in their economies cohesion since the end of the Second World War. Yet everywhere the ratings of democratic leaders have gone into virtual freefall. [...]