Critical Moment to Pause for Insightful Truth telling

Beware

Age

of

Nothingness

A “typical politician” is a person without principles, ideas, or values. A panderer aka a politician does not govern. A panderer “has clientele with private interests” (to which he or she is beholden): 

“a lobby for the poor who want personal benefits”

“a lobby for the wealthy who want to continue having leniency to do shady business” writes Historian of philosophy Bruna Frascolla about conditions in another America but which rings true for North America's USA.

Frascolla, Bruna January 22, 2025 “What neo-Pentecostals and drug dealers have in common” … “Their victory… consisted of being wealthy.” https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/01/22/what-neo-pentecostals-and-drug-dealers-have-in-common/
Translated from Portuguese (Brazil) to English: Bruna Frascolla is a historian of philosophy, PhD from UFBA, and essayist.


“What really matters is access (or not) to wealth,” João Carlos GRAÇA writes. 

In the United States of America, “the ability to make any subject a topic of political debate as well as the capacity to make any opinion prevail in this regard… are directly dependent on economic influences or on the weight of wealth.” 

Affluence “can transform its concerns into a topic of debate and usually manage to make its dominant opinion succeed in (that) debate.” Those who are “not rich” are simply stymied.

NON-Democracy

From the pen of 

Lisbon University Professor of Sociology 

João Carlos Graça

The United States of America is “not substantively a democracy,” wrote Lisbon University Professor of Sociology João Carlos Graça in a mid-January 2025 article.

Like it or not, this is a reality that is “imperative to recognize and from which it is necessary to start.”

The United States of America is “not substantively a democracy”; nor is the USA — in any way — a propagator of democracies, liberal or otherwise.…”

This understanding must be thorough, in-depth, and comprehensive to enable effective action, “whatever that may be.”

Made in the USA (Stateside) 

The United States of America is, “in essence, a plutocracy” (defined as a controlling class of the wealthy, a government by the wealthy). 

“Universal suffrage… “for the lower house of the legislature and for the presidency,” stretching back to the “1830s,” was (inherently, “legally”) an exclusive privilege; not “universal” “suffrage” (i.e., inclusive of or covering all, a whole collectively, distributive without limit or exception…, suffrage available without exception to all members of a society). 

Cemented in America, while inaccurately named “democracy,” a mantra often heard across the land, is a political system comprised of (as Professor João Carlos Graça puts it): 

• Weak ideologically defined dominating duo, i.e., two partnering tyrannical political parties
• “Gross promiscuous … relationship between parties and economic power…
• “Absence of limits to private funding and the full legalization of lobbying…
• Weakened “state institutions in the face of the so-called ‘civil society’ making the political system less a true res publica” (a republic, serving the general welfare) and more “… a condominium of the rich…
• “Majority electoral system in the first round (first past the post), preventing effective multi-party rule (or substantive participation) and instead inducing a de facto (two-party exclusive) domination…
• “Arbitrary definition of constituencies (gerrymandering)…
• “Impossibility of … any possible third parties’ … access (blockading or otherwise obstructing their access) to the media…
• “Fragmentation and precariousness of the systems of electoral registration and control of the counting of votes….” (among other clear illustrations of US plutocracy)

Yet, “from a formal point of view,” this “does not prevent” the USA “from being classified as a ‘democracy… even if admittedly suffering from countless weaknesses and diseases.” (emphasis added)

Made in the USA (Abroad)

Notwithstanding the prevailing mantra to the contrary, “US foreign policy …” is not guided by “the spread of democracy.” 

The foreign policy of the United States of America, “far from being doctrinally inspired by any ideas more-or-less remotely founded on a democratic or Enlightenment ideology, seems to be thinkable rather as an illustration of the powerlessness of reason in universal history.”

The Americas

U.S. relations with neighboring Latin America… indicate a systematic sociological affinity … with … the exact opposite (of) democratic forces or tendencies (even if merely formal) …

Small independent countries (usually of the tropics) “are markedly oligarchic in their deep social texture and very little inclined toward effective democracy… largely as a consequence of (US) malevolent influence, inducing the systematic destruction of any inclinations through which Latinos might (or may) be tempted to threaten the domination of the respective oligarchies, usually leaning toward the patronage of the northern Big Brother” (USA).

Acts often at odds with what may be “considered a minimum of decency,” the US hides its hand (essentially approves) “through an operation of radical symbolic distancing of North America from the set of societies south of the Rio Grande” all the while conveniently picking and choosing among and partnering with those “other” “undesirables.”

The Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, Mediterranean Sea

In the “so-called Middle East…,” there has been a “capitulation of one republican and secular regime after another, accompanied by the near disappearance of socialist tendencies, the same going for the pan-Arabist ideals.” 

In the Palestinian Territory exists “a medium- and long-term reinforcement of the … Zionist ethnocracy, the Israeli Rassenstaat (racial state) remaining untouchable in its enterprise not only of consistent ethno-racial discrimination”; but illegal, immoral, self-interestedly sadistic “extermination and/or expulsion of the (indigenous, original inhabitants of the land).”

Particularly regarding US foreign relations with countries within this region of the world, there exists “something fundamentally analogous, in the results,” to US foreign relations in the Americas — “though not necessarily in the deep motivations.” 

Some examples are found in US-orchestrated forced failures of “republican and secular regimes” together with the “collapse of state institutions.” (an interesting phenomenon evident also stateside USA)

• The Severing “of the secular and socialist republic of Afghanistan” 20th into 21st century
• The Severing “of the secular state of Iraq” 2003
• The Devastation of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya 2011
• The Severing of the Syrian Arab Republic 2024

Graça concludes that recent events in Syria represent perhaps “the closing episode of a cycle” but the story is “unfinished”: 

a story of the United States’ “arrogant” and dangerous “pretense” in domestic and foreign affairs — masquerading as emblem, exemplar and preeminent champion “of human rights, secularism, enlightenment, and democracy all the while undermining and working to destroy all possibility of these.

Independent geopolitical analyst and journalist Pepe Escobar concludes in the same headline news window in which loose talk and quotes are flying high in and around the new or rather warmed-over regime on the Potomac. 

“In this new golden era” embracing “the new, brutally benign Empire” …, “the land of the free home of the brave… will be ‘far more exceptional than ever before.’”

Says Escobar “Never underestimate” the unspeakable audacity of “this year’s model” … to “rebrand a genocide (as) a great real estate opportunity in a ‘phenomenal location’.” “Welcome to Interplanetary Exceptionalism. Embrace the new, brutally benign Empire. Or else.”

Sources

Graça, João Carlos. January 22, 2025, “Kant versus Khan: the events in Syria and U.S. foreign policy… The U.S. is unquestionably a very effective destroyer of states that it considers enemies: Immanuel Kant; but definitely Genghis Khan.” https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/01/22/kant-versus-khan-events-syria-and-us-foreign-policy/

Escobar, Pepe January 22, 2025. “The age of interplanetary exceptionalism… Only the U.S. can rebrand a genocide into a great real estate opportunity in a ‘phenomenal location’”
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/01/22/the-age-of-interplanetary-exceptionalism/

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PROLIFIC SOUTHERN-BORN AMERICAN WRITER DR. CAROLYN LADELLE BENNETT focuses on People, Press, Politics USA; Domestic and Foreign Affairs (no copyright claimed in direct quotes and individual image)

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