DownWithTyranny!: Senator Bernie Sanders: "This Is Not What Democracy Is Supposed To Be About"

In the video above, Bernie Sanders was addressing the Culinary Workers Union at their convention in Las Vegas yesterday. He made a powerful speech about how the right wing oligarchs and plutocrats divide working people up so that they can dominate American politics. “We are not living in a democracy when 60 percent of Americans are not voting, while billionaires like the Koch brothers are spending hundreds of millions to buy the United States Senate. That's called oligarchy, not democracy… The Koch Brothers are trying to buy the Senate. This is not what democracy is supposed to be about. Billionaires should not be allowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars electing candidates who represent the wealthy and the powerful.”

Yesterday, Truthout published an essay by Canadian author and educator Henry Giroux, Beyond Orwellian Nightmares and Neoliberal Auhoritarianism. It’s very much worth reading in it’s entirety, which is why I included the link. I’m just going to quote a small section that pertains to the same topic Senator Sanders discussed with the union members in Las Vegas yesterday.

Central to George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society was a government so powerful that it not only dominated all of the major institutions in a society, but it also was quite adept at making invisible its inner workings of power. This is what some have called a shadow government, deep state, dual state or corporate state. In the deep state, politics becomes the domain of the ultra-wealthy, the powerful few who run powerful financial services, big corporations and the imperious elite of the defense industries and other components of the military-industrial complex. Corporate interests such as ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies, megabanks such as Bank of America, and defense industries such as Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin are powerful lobbying groups and as such have control of the major seats of political power and the commanding institutions necessary to insure that the deeply anti-democratic state rules in the interests of the few while exploiting and repressing the many.

A recent Princeton University study analyzed policy initiatives passed under the influence of the deep state from 1981 to 2002 and concluded that rather than being a democracy, however weak, the United States had become an oligarchy where power is effectively wielded by "the rich, the well connected and the politically powerful, as well as particularly well placed individuals in institutions like banking and finance or the military." Bill Blunden adds to this description with a useful map of the interpenetrating elements and overlapping layers of interest that make up the deep state. He writes:

The American Deep State, or what Colonel Fletcher Prouty called the Secret Team, is a structural layer of political intermediaries: non-governmental organizations (e.g. National Endowment for Democracy, Ford Foundation), lobbyists (e.g. Chamber of Commerce, AIPAC), media outlets (e.g. Time Warner, News Corp), dark money pits (e.g. Freedom Partners, NRA), and private sector contractors (e.g. Booz Allen, SAIC) that interface with official government organs (CIA, Department of Defense). This layer establishes a series of informal, often secret, backchannels and revolving doors through which profound sources of wealth and power outside of government can purchase influence. . . . the American Deep State is a fundamentally anti-democratic apparatus that caters to the agenda of heavily entrenched elites.
This is a state in which people participate willingly in their own oppression, often out of deep insecurity about their freedom and the future. This is a mode of governance in which individual and social agency are in crisis and begin to disappear in a society in which 99 percent of the public, especially young people, low-income groups and minorities of class and color are considered disposable. The rulers of the deep state no longer care about the social contract and make no concessions in their ruthless pursuits of power and profits. One consequence is the creation of a state and society that no longer believes in social investments and is more than willing to condemn young people, often paralyzed by the precariousness and instability that haunts their lives and future, to a savage form of casino capitalism.

Poverty, joblessness, low wage work and the threat of state-sanctioned violence produce among many Americans the ongoing fear of a life of perpetual misery and an ongoing struggle simply to survive. Insecurity coupled with a climate of fear and surveillance dampens dissent and promotes a kind of ethical tranquilization fed daily by the mobilization of endless moral panics, whether they reference immigrants flooding the American Southwest, ISIS thugs blowing up malls or Ebola spreading through the homeland like a mad, out-of-control, death-dealing infectious disease. Such conditions more often than not produce withdrawal, insecurity, paranoia and cynicism rather than rebellion among the US populace. Under such conditions, the call for collective rebellion appears more like a joke for late-night comics than a serious rethinking of politics and an attempt to engage in collective actions fuelled by the need to reclaim and struggle over the promises of a radical democracy.

Politics and power are now on the side of lawlessness as is evident in the state's endless violations of civil liberties, freedom of speech and constitutional rights, mostly done in the name of national security. Lawlessness wraps itself in government dictates such as the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, Military Commissions Act and a host of other legal illegalities. These would include the "right of the president "to order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists," use secret evidence to detain individuals indefinitely, develop a massive surveillance Panopticon to monitor every communication used by citizens who have not committed a crime, employ state torture against those considered enemy combatants, and block the courts from prosecuting those officials who commit such heinous crimes. The ruling corporate elites have made terror rational and fear the modus operandi of politics.