Top Documentary Films posted the documentary:
The most dangerous threat to democracy in the United States of America is the mistaken belief that they actually practice one… because democracy is not a noun, it’s a verb. “Demos” means “the people”, and “kratia” means “rule”, so the word democracy means “the people rule.” We have the trappings of democracy… you just get to go and pull a lever every 2-4 years only for candidates that have been pre-approved and pre-selected by the ruling elite.
But when it comes to actually participating in a meaningful way in how the society is organized, how much pay you might get, whether or not you get healthcare, whether the country goes to war or not, whether we should address the climate crisis… in those kinds of questions the people never have an opportunity to participate.
For example, if in the debate around the healthcare had there not been elected officials with a commitment to pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies, if the priority wasn’t making sure that there were profits for people that make drugs and sell drugs, and people who provide medical care as insurers, if they weren’t the priority but the ordinary people don’t you think that would’ve been different?
The prison system along with the education system and the healthcare system are three things among many others that should never have a profit motive attached. The democratic self-government experiment started in the United States over 200 years ago and has gotten completely corrupted. The real people are not been listen to.
When considering the still unfolding history of the United States the words of journalist Molly Ivins ring true: “It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.” In other words who, according to the laws and cultures, gets to be considered a person?
Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
While Americans believe in political democracy, political democracy will not work without a property-based free market system of economic democracy. The system is the problem, but it can and must be overhauled. The two prerequisites are political power, which is the power to make, interpret, administer, and enforce laws, and economic power, the power to produce products and services, whether through labor power or productive capital.
Binary economist Louis Kelso wrote: “In the distribution of social power, whether it be political power or economic power, all things are relative. The essence of economic democracy lies in the elimination of differences of earning power resulting from denial of equality of economic opportunity, particularly equal access to capital credit. Differences of economic status resulting from differences in advantages taken and uses made of differences based on inequality of economic opportunity, particularly those that give access to capital credit to the already capitalized and deny it to the non- or -undercapitalized, are flagrant violations of the constitutional rights of citizens in a democracy.”
Unfortunately, pursuing economic democracy has been frustrated by the systemic concentration of economic power and exclusionary access to future capital credit to the advantage of the wealthiest Americans. The so-called 1 percent rulers of corporations have rigged the financial system to enable this already rich ownership class to systematically further enrich themselves as capital formation occurs and technological industrialization spreads throughout the world, leaving behind the 99 percent to depend on income redistribution through make work “full employment” policies, government boondoggles, excessive military build-up and dependence on arms production and sales, and social welfare programs due to the lack of an alternative to full employment and the growing economic helplessness and dependency. The unsatisfied needs and wants of society are not in that 1 percent or for that matter the 5 percent; those people are not the ones who are hurting.
Once the national economic policy bases policy decisions on two-factor binary economics, productive capital acquisition would take place through commercially insured capital credit, resulting in a quiet revolution in which economic plutocracy will transform to economic democracy.
The 99 percent movement needs to be about returning America to economic democracy. If we do not achieve economic democracy, then plutocracy will lead to fascism—the ownership of productive capital by the rich and by their institutions.
The fact is that political democracy is impossible without economic democracy. On the basic issue of economic empowerment of each individual, the essential goal needs to be economic democracy, which will finally make political democracy a meaningful reality.
