Does today's Democratic Party speak for you?

[woo me with science]

86. No, what is being done to this country is not

Last edited Mon Sep 15, 2014, 06:46 AM - Edit history (1)

just another flavor of capitalism within an essentially functioning democratic government.

It's not.

As a former president of the United States put it, we don't have a functioning democracy anymore.

We are witnessing an ongoing process of merger of state and corporation (one definition of fascism) that is truly frightening. The very foundations of our democratic system are being actively dismantled by the corporate politicians you defend.

We have lost much of the Bill of Rights. There is a secret, unaccountable government operating alongside the one we are taught about at school, and it has the power of mass surveillance and dossiers on citizens, secret laws and secret courts, the power to smear and lie and disinform, to suppress protest and political dissent, and to indefinitely imprison and even murder American citizens without transparency and without due process.

Our intelligence and security agencies have been co-opted and are being used to surveil peaceful domestic protest and to engage in corporate espionage. Our purchased government actors are using every means possible - the courts, "trade" agreements, legislation, executive actions - to restructure and rig the system to pass power to corporations that used to belong to the people of this nation.

Journalism has been hobbled through intimidation/abuse of espionage laws and by active consolidation and purchase by corporate entities that parrot the party lines....and our precious internet is being handed over to those same corporations as we speak. Whistleblowers and potential government whistleblowers are under unprecedented surveillance and assault. Our police departments have been militarized, and peaceful protests federally surveilled *in cooperation* with Wall Street and brutally suppressed.

Legislation coming out of our corrupt, purchased government bears no resemblance whatsoever to the popular will and hasn't for a long time. And the wealth of ordinary Americans is being looted, and our commons are being looted, to fill the pockets of the billionaires, bankers, and corporations who are building this new corporatocracy hurtling into fascism.

We hear a lot of lies and propaganda and Newspeak, most likely funded through our own tax dollars. We are told that our system is functioning, that we need only vote harder next time. We are told that the politicians perpetrating these assaults on our nation are "centrists" or "moderates," with the safe, warm connotations of those words. How could anything "moderate" or in the "center" be dangerous? But these are extreme, even fascistic policies, and it is time we called them out for what they are.

They are assaults on democracy itself. They are assaults on our Constitution. They are assaults on every one of us.

And it needs to stop now.