Look. I know it's a Phony Democracy, you know it's a Phony Democracy...

[Junkdrawer]

32. My favorite Michael Parenti speech is "Democratic Government vs the State"....

Hard to find it online anymore, but Google had this:

p207
... top-down class warfare by the ruling elites against the middle and lower classes is what we already have as an everyday occurrence. It is only when the many begin to fight back against the few that class warfare is condemned by political and media elites.

Witness the case of Haiti, a country with generations of brutal class oppression, where the military and the rich have lived off the impoverished people and regularly made war upon them. Yet U.S. media and U.S. political leaders started using the term "class warfare" only when the people elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president, a populist reformer who attacked the crimes and privileges of the rich. So in other countries and in this one too: the moment the common populace begin to fight back, even peaceably and democratically, the moment democracy infringes upon powerful class interests, ruling-class leaders and their media mouthpieces denounce "class warfare." In the early 1990s in the United States, when some liberal Democrats started talking about taxing the rich, they were accused of class warfare. But when the rich advance their interests at our expense in ways too numerous to delineate here, it is called "national policy."

In his last State of the Union message, George Bush said that people who challenge the prerogatives of the rich are driven by envy and jealousy. I suspect it is not envy that most of us feel when we see somebody ride by in a Rolls Royce-and someone else sleeping in a doorway. We feel outrage. We just do not want to live in a society where millions must suffer acute privation and insecurity so that the very rich can maintain their lavish lifestyle. We do not want to change places with the opulent; we just want to get them off our backs. We want to stop the ruination of our society and environment by the conglomerates of wealth, those who engineer and finance national elections, who manage national policy and use crimes of state to eviscerate and trivialize democratic governance at home and abroad. If challenging and stopping such class power is class warfare, then let us have more of it.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Parenti/DemocraticGovernance_AE.html

Wonderful chatting. Gotta run.