U.S. Democracy and Elections

ôDemocracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.ö - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) (groups.msn.com)

For generations American politicians, media, and high school social studies teachers have trumpeted our form of government as the epitome of democracy. Words like ôfreedomö, ôdemocracyö, and ôlibertyö have been thrown like a blizzard of self-righteous spears at any other countries' methods of governance that diverge from ours û particularly those societies who fail to reflexively add ôand the free enterprise systemö immediately following the epithets above.

But the purportedly democratic ship of state of the United States has run aground recently, and surprise û it begins to look a lot more like those supposedly ôtotalitarianö or ôundemocraticö regimes we were taught to scorn in high school. Were it not for the lingering psychic power that American triumphalism holds on the minds of the mostly misinformed many, our citizens would be rallying to the ringing justifications for insurrection provided in the Declaration of Independence stating that governmental legitimacy is only derived from the people's will, and would tar and feather those who have stolen our democracy from us. Let us take a brief step backward to see what came before the corrupted and almost certainly stolen U.S. national elections of 2000 and 2004 to see how true our claims of democracy have ever been.

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rk in the last election. Modern America is essentially a plutocracy in which moneyed interests call the shots and almost always get their way. The most visible sign of this clear tendency is in the untrammelled prominence of corporate interests in choosing candidates and issues, buying politicians through donations, perks, and the revolving door between business and government, stifling regulation of business, trade policies, and the environment by staffing regulatory agencies with their adherents, and suppressing the competing interests of labor and the consumer wherever and whenever possible. Such a world is the regime of George W. Bush, where the Bill of Rights has been gutted by such anti-democratic acts as the Patriot Act, the Presidential election of 2000 was stolen by illegally purging more than 90,000 legal voters (mostly black and Democratic) from the list of eligible voters (Palast 2003), an illegal invasion of the sovereign state of Iraq was launched after gaining support from the American people and their representatives by a systematic lying campaign, and the 2004 election, which was marked by so many anomalies, discrepancies, implausibilities, and clear violations of the right of all Americans to freely choose their
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Minorities Votingö, Bernard Shaw, Diebold Inc, Karl Marx's, Public Radio, Act Presidential, Modern America, Peloponnesian Wars, John Zogby, Izvestia Soviet, voting machine, candidates issues, american people, electronic voting machine, electronic voting, public access, james macgregor, george washington, form government, national public, equal access,
Approximate Word count = 1658
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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