 from Axis of Logic

Democracy has become an empty word that the world leaders kick around like an inflated balloon when it serves their interests. What is of importance to the Corporatocracy that is running the planet is very much the opposite of democracy. What the leaders are depending on for the continuation of the current misrule of the world is centralized power and dumbed-down, apathetic and poverty-stricken masses who pose no danger to the status quo.

Democracy doesn't promote the interests of the ruling plutocrats. Their goal is to concentrate all the money and power in the tiny elite that hold the strings of the dancing puppets who are politicians. Government and business are all one and the same. Or different parts of the same monster. Some hold the strings of power, others do the kicking and dancing.

What is the difference between a totalitarian state which controls all the means of production and one where the owners of the means of production control the state? A different brand of totalitarianism but the contempt for the people could not be more deadly.

To make the control game possible, the people have to be drugged, muzzled and rendered powerless. Also, the means of running the show have to be deprived of all transparency. Propaganda, biased or filtered media news coverage, violent punishment of 'disobedient' individuals, all clouded in a web of secrecy - these are the tools for running this show of the most flagrant in-egalitarian state of the world that has ever existed. The former lords of money empires pale in comparison to the multi-billionaires of today's distorted world.

Laws have to be ignored or annulled. People who might possibly become a threat to the puppeteers have to be rendered harmless. By any means possible. There are no more any legal limits to what can be done to individuals who are arbitrarily declared to be terrorists or aiding and abetting the 'enemy'. Since international and national laws have become irrelevant, it is no more a big deal to get rid of undesirable persons.

There is also a general tendency to destroy what are considered superfluous masses of people through calculated starvation, wars and well planned genocide. Added to this, there is a carefully staged neglect of the lower classes - with more and more of the so-called middle classes falling into the category of the working poor.

Instead of individual nations taking care of their own interests - economy, education, health care and the general running of business - we now have transnational powers, both political/financial (WTO, IMF, the World Bank) and the big corporations, who see to the piling up of the wealth of the planet in the hands of a very limited number of plutocrats. Those are the soulless robots who hold the strings of power and who make decisions like so many machines. They decide which people are destined for extinction and which ones can in some way be useful for the money and power machines.

The current dehumanizing process may have started in the U.S. but other nations are following suit. Money is what counts. People are expendables. So there is less and less concern for the rights and the well-being of the people. Use them as slaves, but make sure they are left ignorant and docile, easy to bend to the needs of the powerful.

Europe is slavishly following in the steps of the Empire in the West, and so is Russia. Concentration of power in the executive, which is a Siamese twin of the Big Corporations, is an essential step in the direction of making people powerless pawns. The legislators and the judges are easily bought up by the corporations and so we have a powerless Congress, a symbolic Parliament, a docile Reichtag, a voiceless Duma.

There is fierce competition for the diminishing hydrocarbon resources of the world and the war is on for the domination of the strategic areas where the essential riches of the planet are concentrated.

Europe is fiercely hanging on to the coattails of the U.S., not risking getting left out when the wealth is divvied up. However, China and India will be ever more powerful competitors to the West as far as the limited existing resources are concerned. And all over the world, the urge for producing agro-fuel - at any cost - is raging. If fields used to grow needed food have to be converted to the growing of agro-fuel crops, so be it.

Obviously all U.S. politicians who subscribe to the supremacy of the Empire are loyal to the idea of an indefinite occupation of Iraq. They are even blindly willing to go along with expanding our influence in the Great Middle East, attacking and occupying other neighboring sovereign countries, running the risk of causing a complete collapse of the entire region. And all the while, Israel, the U.S. 51st State, is doing its utmost to aid the American ambition of destabilizing and ultimately conquering the region.

In all of this desperate grabbing of power and resources, the fate of the people is of no importance whatsoever, nor is there any concern for the environment and the possibility of a continuation of life on our planet.

The whole idea of setting the world aflame for the unipolar domination of the most precious resources seems totally senseless since, at the same time, the planet is thoughtlessly being destroyed and made unlivable for future generations in the name of short-term profits.

What is going on in the world at this time is utter self-destruction and it is looking less and less credible that the U.S. Empire, which is leading the destruction, will ever come to its senses and reverse the trend.

There may still be a chance that the world can be ecologically, financially and socially saved. But where is the Gandhi, where is the Martin Luther King, where are the men and women with hearts and brains who are willing to step up and lead the world back to sanity?

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sivoneall



About author Siv O'Neall was born and raised in Sweden where she graduated from Lund University. She has lived in Paris, France and New Rochelle, N.Y and traveled extensively throughout the U.S, Europe, and other continents, including multiple trips to India. Siv retired after many years of teaching French in Westchester, N.Y. and English in the Grandes Ecoles (Institutes of Technology) in France. She has been living in France for 30 years, first in Paris and now Lyon. In addition to her political activism and writing, her life is filled with friends, family, music, animals, reading, traveling and she also feels that 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever'.