The USA - no longer a democracy

Okay, I admit it, that headline is overblown to catch the eye. But a bit frighteningly the truth does not lie too far from that statement.

The story is not getting a lot of coverage in Canada from what I've seen, nor is it getting much coverage in the US from most of the leading news companies. I think this is because the issue sounds a bit innocuous to the average person, and it's easily cast in a light that sounds positive.

In case you haven't heard, I'm talking about the recent supreme court decision that has lifted all restrictions of corporate spending on election advertising, ruling that it violates the amendment guaranteeing free speech to citizens; since corporations were legally recognized as citizens back in the 1800s, then this is "technically" unconstitutional, they say. I can't help but wonder if the next ruling will be that corporations are also being denied the right to vote.

But of course, they don't need the vote anymore. If these most wealthy "citizens" are allowed to freely spend as much as they want on election advertising for whomever they want, such that a reliance is built up during election time between the media and those with the deepest pockets¹, then you no longer have democracy. Those with the deepest pockets will have defacto say in who gets elected and thus the policies that are delivered to the people. Why? Because we already know that election advertising directly affects who gets elected. People do not go out and investigate who to vote for, they let the advertising make that choice for them. (People might prefer to think for themselves, they just aren't very good at spotting when they are and when they're not.)

So what do you have, you have the situation where unelected corporations more or less have complete say over governance. A politician is not going to be able to get elected on a platform that in any way restricts the power of corporations, because there is always going to be another guy happy to ride a free wave of advertising right into the white house. The only winners in this kind of "election" are those who are corporate friendly.

Sounds like I'm totally anti-corporation, but I'm actually not. The problem imo is that the biggest corporations are publicly traded and are thus owned by faceless shareholders who have no interest except in the increased value of their 401k (US equivalent of a pension/RRSP hybrid thing). It is this separation between ownership and stakeholder that has created the psychopathic entity known as the public corporation. If corporations were only ever owned by individual private citizens, I would have a lot less of a problem with this ruling, but even in that event it could reasonably be called a direct return to medieval feudalism.

You can call the US a democracy still because it does democratic things like has a vote, but if that vote is not in the least bit fair, is it still really democratic in the way that we understand the word in modern times? No, it is not democratic. It's elections will henceforth be a giant farce. They are now necessarily corporate will dressed up to look like public demand, playing on particular weaknesses of the human mind. Will the UN even recognize any future election in the US?² Will our textbooks soon de-list the USA as a democratic nation? - because they should.

No, this isn't democracy. Instead what we have here is a sort of quasi-feudalism - a neo-feudalism. I really like that term. It's significantly different from the feudalism of the past in that there are no specific lords governing over all functions of specific lands. There are instead non-locatable corporations with collective arms-length control over the functions of the entire country as a whole. It's a curious hybrid of fascism, feudalism, and totalitarianism.

So let's all give a big welcome to the United States of America - the world's first neo-feudal dictatorship.

PS: Even less popular in the news was coverage of a chief justice (or someone like that, I couldn't even find a media report on it... my info is from The Daily Show - how sad is that when it's the only one reporting it?) making some comment or other about how previous rulings that weren't unanimous shouldn't actually be recognized. While they may be completely disconnected, it doesn't take a genius to spot the implications of these two developments taken together. Let's hope this guy is declared a nutcase and suitably ignored.

1. This relationship is already more or less built, and is often referred to as corporate censorship of the media. The media corporations in general have become so heavily reliant on advertising money that they can't risk pissing these companies off for fear of losing large portions of their budget and secondarily causing a chill effect in their other advertising customers. Just like what happened in banking industry, to the media, these advertising relationships are simply too big too let fail. The result is censored news. To what extent? It's almost impossible to know. But we do know it's happening and that it's quite widespread.

2. Of course it has to. In many ways, the US is like a Too-Big-To-Fail participant of the UN. It would have to be a very different UN before the USA starts requiring external political observers watching over its elections.