The US is the first, functioning democracy on the face of the planet. The kind of democracy you are talking about only works in city-states in ancient Greece where everybody in the city has similar interests and there is no difference in the geographical interests. The US is only crumbling to the extent that the federal government is increasing its power, by majority vote of course. An oligarchy is headed by a group that is succeeded by its hereditary decendents (Bush and Bush do not count, they were both voted into office, and if you disagree I have no time to debunk conspiracy theories). If you are calling the US a rouge state because it does not do everything the international community tells it to do, than yes, it is a rouge state, but that because it is a democracy and its people can make their own decisions about what they want to do. The fact that the most of the American people are armed, paranoid, and hateful is simply untrue (you sound like a certain elitist and his "bitter" comment). They are drenched in propaganda, a result of free speech, so they are drenched by propaganda from all sides. If you think an economic death awaits those who favor individualistic systems than I would like to remind you that democracy is the political system that lets capitalism exist. I would also remind you that, economically, capitalist systems are irrefutably superior to socialist ones, the only problem is the complaint that the workers are mistreated and that wealth is not evenly distributed. Last time I walked down the street here in America, it was not filled with the blood of people who killed themselves because they were brainwashed by our democratic government. It's funny that you want to tell society what to think while supposedly supporting democracy. It's also funny that you are a liberal lamenting the moral corruptness in our society. It supports my belief that all the religious fanatics are liberals and would go back to the democrats if it were not for the social upheaval of the '60s that the dems want back. The US may be the most hated nation on earth and that's why we want to get those terrorists back!

I think this is a complete, logical argument against your outline of points and it didn't take 6 years.

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"You are just stuck in a box."

--Zaro

There wouldnt be a single independent thinker or non-bought academic that would class the USA system as democratic.

You can argue all you like but you have a responsibility to be honest about what the words "democracy" and "freedom" mean and how they are defined in practise.

The USA is a Plutocratically based Oligarchy that funnels almost all of its power and welath through an undemocratic private coroporation system that is propped up by tax payers funds and favourable legisaltion that locks out the public from having a say. These sorts of systems are NOT democratic.

Dont feel deluded or ashamed about this fact - there are no actual democracies in operation in the world today. You can bang your head up against the wall all you like but this is a fact - research it honestly and diligently and you will discover this universal axiom for yourself.

And when you do you may be able to make a difference in your country!

Next thing you will be saying is that the US economy is a free market place and democratic

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Supreme Executive for the I.S.S.F

If by independent thinker you mean liberal, then yeah.

I repeat, the US is not a classical Greek democracy where everybody votes on everything. The country is to big for that to work or to protect the freedom of the people themselves. Face it, majority rule does not always guarantee freedom. That is why, with the signing of the Constitution, we have come to define democracy as the Federalist system proposed by the founding fathers and whose logical support for you will find in The Federalist Papers, by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay.

The US economy is mostly a free market place, with the exception of natural monopolies, which are still included in a free market place as we define it. The US is democratic by the standards that we use the word, though it is becoming less democratic as the government gets more powerful.

__________________

"You are just stuck in a box."

--Zaro

Excellent post. Noam Chomsky put it like this when he famously remarked: "The US is a single-ideological state with competing political factions." That's the reality of the situation as it stands in the US today. Clearly, the US is an oligarchy. In fact, the US is no more a democracy in terms of OUTCOME than for example Cuba is. In reality the opposite is true as I will attempt to illustrate below.

You see, in order to ascertain relative levels of purported democracy, we have to evaluate countries' democratic credentials in terms of OUTCOME rather than the FORM a particular democracy may take. For example, few people outside of Cuba would describe that country as a democracy in the FORMAL sense. But in terms of OUTCOME, as any person who has visited or lived in Cuba will confirm, the country is far more democratic than the US. So what we need to do in the first instance is define our terms. I would argue that we ought not to view democracy in the formal and abstract sense in terms of whether we get to vote once every 4 or 5 years, but rather whether it is actually delivered in a real meaningful way that is beneficial and responsive to the society in question.

In Cuba, unlike my country, Britain, the elderly do not die of preventable diseases because they cannot afford, for example, to heat their homes in winter. In Cuba, access to health facilities and treatment is not dependent upon whether you have a big bank balance. Last year my wife was refused IVF fertility treatment in our national health service, but nobody in Cuba is refused this. In Cuba, there are more medical doctors per capita than anywhere else on earth. Fidel tried in vain to dispatch many of these doctors to New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina but they were refused entry into the US by Bush for ideological and political reasons.

All students in Cuba, from the cradle to the grave, receive free medical care and free primary, secondary and university education. Nobody in Cuba is homeless and it has a higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rate than any other comparable developing country on the planet. Moreover, Cuba has a higher literacy rate than the US. It has managed to do all this despite the country being under a virtual state of economic siege by successive US administrations for the past 49 years.

Naturally, not everything is perfect in Cuba and it certainly cannot be classed as a socialist society in the Marxist-Leninist sense. What I am merely pointing out is that democracy is better judged not purely in terms of monetary and capitalist values as is the case with the vast majority of Western liberal democracies like the US and Britain, but in terms of how responsive it is to the needs of its people. In my view, this is the real measure of the wealth of a nation through which the term 'democracy' should be best applied.

Correction: Part of my initial paragraph should have read "In fact, the US is no more a democracy in terms of OUTCOME than, for example, Cuba is in terms of FORM"

The US is a single-ideological state, it's called democracy, and all you Communists wouldn't understand it if you tried (which you wouldn't) simply because you lack the intellegence to predict the consequences of your actions (your frontal lobe has not fully developed or you've smoked too many illegal drugs).

Cuba is much more democratic than the US, the general will is represented directly by a maniacal dictator instead of having the people misrepresent their interests. Your vote does not count in America of course, just like everybody else's. Didn't Cuba kill its Jews because it was beneficial to their society, oh, that was another Communist regime, sorry.

I wonder why Castro came to the US for medical treatment? Just a theory here, but if we let their "doctors" in we'd probably have seen our sick euthanized for the benefit of their country.

Now ain't Cuba just great? I wonder if you get your propaganda from their government directly or if you make it up yourself.

I think that would be a bit of an understatement, maybe.

I really don't think I have to say anything else. Of course, I might want to add that thousands of Cubans have come to the US on home-built rafts but I'm sure they were all just dirty capitalists.

__________________

"You are just stuck in a box."

--Zaro

YOU ARE NOT ONLY A FOOL, YOU ARE IGNORANT, THE UNITED STATES DOES NOT PRESUME TO BE A DEMOCRACY! IT IS A DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC FOR THE PEOPLE , BY THE PEOPLE. WHY IS IT THAT BEING THE MOST HATED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD WE HAVE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE BREAKING OUR LAWS AND DIEING TO ENTER OUR COUNTRY THROUGH THE BACK DOOR??? WE ARE HATED ONLY OUT OF JEALOUSY !!! WHY DON'T YOU PULL YOUR HEAD OUT AND ADMIT YOUR JEALOUS

MY LETTERS ARE BIGGER THAN YOUR LETTERS!!!!! Now, how ya gonna act, punk?

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I think America is finally ready for another president with polio.

Have you heard of The iron law of oligarchy? First developed by the German syndicalist sociologist Robert Michels in 1911 ?
if not, read up on it. anyways Robert Michels was disturbed to find that, paradoxically, the socialist parties of Europe, despite
their democratic ideology and provisions for mass participation, seemed to be dominated by their leaders, just like the traditional
conservative parties.

He also stated that regardless of how democratic or autocratic a country may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop
into oligarchies.
of course all this crap about oligarchy is debatable and still not quite clear or solid in it's assertion.
yet if Robert Michels is right, then I am holding the mirror up to ALL European countries as well.

Your choice, do you want to continue this argument? or do you get my point?



...

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The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson

This law holds in pluralistic republics like the US as well. The people who have the most influence in the various interest groups that they head up for the people they represent have the most voice in public policy because they are the most active in making themselves heard. Anyone can do this if they are sufficiently motivated, just write your congressman a letter and you can be heard. You are a voter, they will listen, and, no, you do not have to buy them out.

__________________

"You are just stuck in a box."

--Zaro