with use of computers, it wldn’t be that much difficult to consult with people on all major issues.
but now, consulting people on each important issue may be cumbersome and uneeded.
which is what you say as well. tnx for your comments and the explanation of what democracies are.

VENEZUELA IS THE BEST DEMOCRACY OF ALL THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. AND HUGO CHAVEZ IS THE MOST DEMOCRATIC AND HUMANIST PRESIDENT OF ALL HISTORY OF MANKIND

http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=76024

VHeadline commentarist Carlos M. Pietri writes: Oil Wars Blogspot’s article If that’s the case is “participatory democracy” really anything meaningful? seeks to convey to us that participatory democracy is just a bunch of theoretical mumbo-jumbo just because President Chavez did not consult the people before taking an executive decision related to an energy saving strategy here in Venezuela.

I won’t try to defend the Chavez decision in this regard but, please, only imagine if he referred every single thing he must decide to the Venezuelan people’s consultation.

Personally, I believe that we elected him to take decisions…

My intention, here, is to share with you some concepts on: Democracy, Dictatorship and Socialism.

Representative Democracy:
The Bourgeoisie fiction

In the bourgeois states, the only democratic participation that the citizen has is at certain intervals to choose candidates for the Presidency and/or Parliament … this is about as far as democracy gets us if we talk about our rights, since we’re up to our necks in ‘obligations.’

Elections take on a spontaneous face and fiction at the same time … they seem spontaneous when candidates are presented from the body of society as an authentic expression of most people’s interests and as fiction when offering as solutions to problems

The myth of advancement is where candidates represent the dominant class and strictly obey their interests and so advancement is nothing more than a change of appearance since the practice of bourgeois politics — independently of candidate or government — will always respond to the interests of capital and the bourgeoisie.

Dictatorship:
An unmasked bourgeoisie government.

A practical description of Dictatorship is the imposition of economic, political and ideological conditions of one class on the rest of the society using State resources. It doesn’t matter the regime’s appearance — Military, Monarchist or Parliamentarian — the conditions of development and mobilization within society will define the form; but it will always remain an economic and political imposition. A dictatorship will be more cruel if movements exists within society that look to modify existing conditions or more benign if the movements are reduced and integrated into domination.

In other words, dictatorship is the other face of the same currency of bourgeois operation and domination. If domination is effective, representative democracy is the form that it adopts … if on the contrary, capital and the bourgeoisie see their interests affected, the benevolent face is removed and the capitalist operation and domination is exerted with crudity through dictatorship.

Capitalism, dictatorship and representative democracy are the practical expression of class domination over workers exploitation to maintain economic conditions intact.

Participatory Democracy:
Socialism, government of the majority

We say that the State is a machine in the service of a class. Within Capitalism it serves to suppress and create the most favorable conditions for exploitation, however when workers transform the State into a true participative democracy it us empowered by the people.

In the socialist scenario, the State is transformed into a social state where the preeminence of its performance is centered on the resolution of problems inherited from the old regime, instead to take care of the human being, in its material and spiritual development.

In Venezuela, our Bolivarian process began with the repayment of IV Republic social debts and with the incorporation of the population to benefits generated from industries administrated by the State.
The exercise of government is directly transferred from the political elites to the people who exert it for the benefit of all of the population. Democracy, at this stage of development in the Bolivarian process, is acquiring a more general and true character … not only where election is recognized as a right, but where we now can decide on the revocation of elected officials who do not suitably respond to the people’s necessities.

Participatory Democracy (Socialism) is demonstrated when people begin to take on their own projects, financial and material resources to attend to problems in our communities and communes, granting decisive capacity in things such as the approval and reform of our constitution; popular consultations on the elaboration of the National Police Law; recognition of our Magna Carta of popular power through diverse organizations constituted to take care of different problems inherited from the old way of State administration.

Socialism is true participatory democracy because it incorporates the workers … who really are the majority … in government and social control, which directly aims to eradicate the inherent vices of the capitalism. The decision to appoint, reelect or to revoke an elected representative for public position is the essential condition of true democracy.

Only the majority can (and must) resolve the conduct of the country, its resources and social relations and of production that must reside within our society.

Since the majority … the working class … must define if the revolutionary project begun in Venezuela will continue or not, re-election means socialism, participative democracy.

A greater degree of decision and consultation has never been seen before within our mother country…

We will not allow the bourgeoisie to take it away from us…

Carlos M. Pietri
carlos@vheadline.com

“most US citizens have 2 jobs (regular jobs and domestic chores)” because they have been trained to “need” stuff. Hopefully, as the economy gets worse, folks will wake up and realize that much of the consumption they’ve been doing over the years has actually been detrimental to their well-being.

If people only comprehended that watching TV is an incredible waste of time, they could retrain themselves and family members to interact and have fun – and to relate with our natural world. And at that point, they would know what corporate control means.

“To answer the question posited in the title of this article: my conclusion is that—considering the developments reviewed in this article—yes, America is already a police state. For now, it remains one that prefers to pacify the population through the use of coerced consent and propaganda, but it will remain so only so long as the populous allows themselves to continue to be enslaved and exploited, their land bases destroyed for the profit of the few. In the end, they will resort to killing us. Mark my words. They have done it in the past, and they continue to do it elsewhere today. Soon, they will do it in America.

As the global resistance continues to unfold, so will the repressive responses of the State apparatus. We can expect escalated attacks against our communities of resistance as we escalate our revolt against this culture of death and destruction.

We must develop relationships based upon affinity and communities capable of withstanding the onslaught of the repressive mechanisms of the State and transnational capital. We must develop the networks and connections necessary to survive the endgame of the elite’s psychotic obsession with total authority, power, and control. We must free ourselves from the mechanisms of dependency that keep us suckling at the teat of systemic global ecocide. We must establish autonomous communities of active resistance and stand in firm defiance against the destruction of our world and the precariousness of our lives. The best time was yesterday. The second best time is now.”

Nathan Coe – Is America Already a Police State?
http://www.guerrillanews.com/articles/3964/Is_America_Already_a_Police_State

Similar signs are evident in the UK, e.g. thousands more tasers have just been ordered for use by the police forces.

Since you have stated that you have not made any such statement, I shall request the editor of Dissidentvoice to include your denial alongside your purported statement, which I have quoted from The Times.

Kindly note that I had used a source, which is usually considered reliable at least as far as information pertaining to Western nations are concerned. I also wish to draw your attention to the fact that the statement attributed to you is still at the same website http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article879788.ece. It is indeed very surprising that The Times has not bothered to publish your denial because of which this alleged misinformation has been circulating in the Internet for the last six years. Or is it because, The Times is insisting on sticking to the story? Once The Times publishes your denial, the issue would stand resolved.

Jayaprakash

i also aver that we may never eliminate classes of people; i.e, clergy wld still avoid to be with/of people. doctors may hobnob only or mostly with doctors. and so on.

having that in mind, i said that THE democracy is an illusion.
and we need also sanitize the language in daily use.
how to properly use laguage is sine qua non for achieving a democracy.

when i am talking ab. using language correctly, i do not have in mind grammar, spelling, or even syntax but whether transferred meanning was received and whether a fact is evaluated as fact or nonfact, etcetc.

and we shld use more english and less latin, even in law. what does it mean to my wife [and by inference other wives and husbands] de facto, de jure, ephemeral, eristic, corrollary, postulate, derivatives, and bagful and bagful of non-english?

i don’t think that more than 10% of people know what these words mean. but ?all people in US know well english. let’s use english only or mostly.
yet, in my opinion, any colloquial languge wld do to understand everything except quatum physics, etc. tnx

And indeed, the US cities are so irrational, so badly planned that every thing in America is real far, some people have to drive like 1 hour a day just to get to their exhausting wage-slavery jobs. And the excessive driving in the USA, along with the ugliness of most US cities, and environment in this prison like country, leads people to a state of total denial.

I am not a psychologist, but i think that, the lack of fun, lack of variety, and excess of chores and work is what leads US citizens to a state of desesentization, tiredness and boredom

,

With regard to USA’s involvement in Egypt, may I please draw Mr.Kenny’s attention to the publication titled “The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945-1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War” by Peter L. Hahn, University of North Carolina Press (April 1991). Kindly look for information on the “OMEGA initiative”, especially, as to why the U.S. reneged from its commitment to fund the Aswan Dam, which precipitated the Suez crisis.

I certainly do not deny the right of the Afghans to resist foreign invasion. The USSR should not have invaded Afghanistan. It committed a strategic blunder by doing so despite its claim that it was trying to support the progressive sections of the Afghan population. Whereas the United States knew from day one that it was extending support to the most retrograde, ultra-conservative and anti-women forces in Afghanistan. There was not even a pretense that the U.S. was then trying to support the “pro-democracy” forces in Afghanistan. Today, the U.S. is reaping the whirlwind and the “pro-democratic” forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere are forced to pay dearly for the mindless manner in which the U.S. establishment chose to arm and fund the progenitors of the Taliban. How is it that the Taliban has access to an inexhaustible supply of sophisticated arms even now?

The civil war in Greece was provoked through British and U.S. intervention. They had entered the scene after the anti-fascist national liberation struggle led by the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), had practically liberated most parts of Greece by March 1944. The Nazis were forced to withdraw from Greece by October 1944. Instead of supporting ELAS, Britain and USA decided to support the pro-fascist “Royalists” in Greece immediately after WW-II, which led to the outbreak of civil war in December 1944. As to who had instigated the civil war is evident from the memoirs of one of the members of USA’s Special Reconnaissance Battalion, also known as the “Greek / American Operational Group”, which was in Greece from 23 April to 20 November 1944, who could not but admit to the following:

“Greeks who waited out the war in the safe sanctuaries of Egypt, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom, along with some who had remained in Greece and collaborated with the Nazi occupation were recruited by the British to form the new government of Greece, while the brave EAM/ELAS were left out of the loop. I have often wondered if the British had allowed the EAM/ELAS to participate in forming the new Greek government, could the civil war in Greece have been averted?” – Andrew S. Mousalimas “Greek / American Operational Group Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Memoirs of World War 2”, Part 6, Greece: Drama [Preservation of American Hellenic History – http://www.pahh.com/oss/pt6/p53.html

Please also refer to “NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe” by Daniele Ganser, Routledge, New York, 2005, which further sheds light on the U.S. establishment’s questionable role in Europe.
See: http://books.google.com/books?id=VAbkogswOmEC&pg=RA1-PR3&lpg=RA1-PR3&dq=%E2%80%9CNATO%27s+Secret+Armies:+Operation+Gladio+and+Terrorism+in+Western+Europe%E2%80%9D+by+Daniele+Ganser,+Routledge,+New+York,+2005&source=bl&ots=cLynvx3NwU&sig=cb7rhwAY6dkuZJn5_Byz2CWQv7w

The information we all need is already out there. It’s been out there for years. Very little new information has been introduced to us. The majority of information has simply been repackaged over and over and over again.

Here’s the problem:
“…nearly 60 million voters, or over 45 per cent of those who cast their ballot in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, voted for the Republican Party! While the bulk of the 69 million voters, or nearly 53 per cent, …voted for Barak Obama (and expected change).”
That’s the problem!

Only about 3% of us really understand what’s going on. The rest are so dumbed-down, living in a state of denial, or otherwise so brainwashed by high-tech toys and religious affiliations that they are unable to “see.” That’s the problem!

The American Empire, and all that it entails, will exist and continue to exist as long as 97% of its citizens support it. That’s the problem!

Our efforts should be focused on the ways we can reach these people. Nothing else matters as much.

Thomas Jefferson

“Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.”

Oscar Wilde

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Henry Louis Mencken

“establishing THE democracy for humans is an illusion. democracy is for birds.” Not really, Venezuela has the closest thing to a democracy right now, so establishing a democracy is possible

Martin Kettle in Washington
Guardian

Thursday August 10, 2000

Forty years after the murder of the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, evidence has emerged in Washington that President Dwight Eisenhower directly ordered the CIA to “eliminate” him.

The evidence comes in a previously unpublished 1975 interview with the minute-taker at an August 1960 White House meeting of Eisenhower and his national security advisers on the Congo crisis.

The minute-taker, Robert Johnson, said in the interview that he vividly recalled the president turning to Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, “in the full hearing of all those in attendance, and saying something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4049783,00.html

Reality check: the Congo in 1960 was a Belgian operation. Malaya (Malaysia didn’t exist until 1963!) and Kenya were purely British operations. The Malaya insurgency failed because it was run by the Chinese minority, who were disliked by the Malay majority. Egypt in 1956 was a French/British/Israeli operation which failed precisely because the US OPPOSED it! Afghanistan was US support for a guerilla movement fighting a foreign invasion of their country (does Mr Jayaprakash deny the right of the Afghans to resist foreign invasion?)

Finally, trying to hijack the Greek civil war as a “national liberation struggle” does a disservice to all the genuine national liberation struggles around the world. The Greek communists tried to seize power by force, something they would have felt no need to do if they believed that they could win a free and fair election. The Greek people, naturally, resisted them. The British helped. The cold war broke out. A deal was done with Stalin, who called off his dogs in return for being let keep what he had already taken. Free elections were held. The communists got quite a respectable share of the vote, which they lost only after communism was discredited in the 1990s. In other words, if British aim in supporting Greek democracy was to drive the communists out of public life, they failed miserably!

The absurdity in all this is that there is so much undeniable evidence of US wrongdoing in a whole series of countries, there is absolutely no need to fabricate further evidence or distort facts! By foaming and frothing his way through every political event he can remember and attributing it to “America’s bloody footprint”, Mr Jayaprakash is being, well … bloody silly!

another good thing about birds is that they never take a vote; each bird appears be able to read each other bird’s brain waves.
so, why has ‘god’ or nature punished us so? are we destined ‘forever’ to argue with another? and with rancour?

are we going to vote forever? for oneparty system? is it a ‘god’ or nature who is mean to us or is it some of us who are mean to most others by making us vote, listen to lies, and ‘pomises’? tnx