RE: [OPE] One party state?

> I would feel as I’m not wasting my time in OPE if they didn’t devote themselves
> entirely to kick the table whenever they are criticized.
 
 
Alejandro:
 
You kick the table yourself with the use of loaded terminology such as "one party
state", "leftist dictatorship", et al. When you make claims which are clearly
counter-factual (as you have been prone to do in discussions re Cuba and Venezuela)
then you can anticipate negative responses.
 
Wealth and class determine state policy in the US. This should be obvious to
everyone. It is a society where billionaires and millionaires use their personal
fortunes to get elected. It is a society in which elected representatives, including
President Obama, are almost exclusively wealthy. It is a society where large
corporations and manufacturers' associations effectively buy off votes of
representatives through their lobbying. It is a society where wars in defense of
corporate profits and hegemony are waged without the consent of the people. It
is a society where the media is owned and controlled by a handful of capitalists
such as Robert Murdoch. It is a society in which police brutality and corruption
are endemic. It is a society where the outcome that you receive through the
judicial process is largely dependent on the amount of money which you can spend
on legal representation. It only only ***nominally*** democratic. You simply can't
have democracy (for long) where such levels of inequality exist. This is a
reason why Cuba is - by far! - more democratic than a capitalist USA is now and
has ever been. Moreover, even if you had reforms which eliminated the corruption
and the lobbying and the campaign donations, you still couldn't have a genuinely
democratic system so long as you had capitalism: the most which you could
have is *bourgeois* democracy.
 
 
In solidarity, Jerry_______________________________________________
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Received on Mon Jun 8 11:09:58 2009