ERIC ZUESSE—he only comprehensive and scientific study which has ever been done of whether the U.S. is a democracy or instead a dictatorship, was published in 2014. It studied the period during 1981 through 2002, and it found that, “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.” Consequently, for example, prior to our invasion of Iraq in 2003, our opinions of “Saddam’s WMD” were simply being manipulated by the controlling owners of U.S.-based international corporations (including their ‘news’media, which they advertise in and/or also own), just as those same super-rich individuals (most of whom are Americans) have controlled whom the nine people will be who rule from the Supreme Court, about what the U.S. Constitution means, and doesn’t mean (and this judicial panel, of course, also decided Bush-v.-Gore, to which Chait blames America’s dictatorship).
FALSE LEFT
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DAVID SWANSON—Fascism, Stanley tells us, using numerous recent and historical examples, creates a mythic past. Yet if I consider the view of U.S. high school history books found in Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen or Founding Myths by Ray Raphael or other similar books, the fascism of U.S. schools has long extended to much more than pledging allegiance to a flag, and the struggle to teach the truth about the past can be called an anti-fascist struggle.
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PATRICK RIGOLOT—If the pressures are anti-war, as in the Johnson and Nixon examples Draitser gives, then why not add to the pressure? If the pressures are to prevent dialog between nuclear powers, or re-install a “neoliberal/neoconservative consensus”, then maybe those pressures are not such a good thing.
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Multiple activists and human rights groups have been demanding to free Assange. In 2016, a UN panel also found that Assange’s stay in the embassy amounted to “arbitrary detention,” but nothing has changed since then. The reason behind Ecuador’s change of heart towards the whistleblower is unclear, but “pressure has been brought to bear, presumably by the United States,” human rights activist Peter Tatchell believes. “The prospect of the president revoking those protections that go with citizenship and asylum, that’s a very very big deal, very big step to abrogate the right to protect an Ecuadorian citizen,” Tatchell told RT.
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It should be clear then that all these protests in regulated demonstrations and most of the leftist writing play into the hands of the status quo. Otherwise these would not be tolerated, and they form an outlet for the heaped-up steam of resistance.