Democracy in America

 

Military Commissions Act 2006/habeas corpus/torture

Most Democrats Voting For Bush Torture Bill Silent About It (9/06)
Military Commissions Act 2006 - Unchecked Powers? (10/06)

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

Abraham Lincoln

Books

1984 - George Orwell
America Challenged - William O. Douglas
American Conspiracies - Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies that the Government Tells Us - Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell

American Holocaust - David Stannard
Best Democracy Money Can Buy, The - Greg Palast
Buried Alive - essays on our endangered republic - Walter Karp
Clash of Fundamentalisms, The - Tariq Ali

Class. Caste & Hierarchies - the No-Nonsense guide - Jeremy Seabrook
Class War in America - Charles M. Kelly
Cocaine Politics - Peter Dale Scott

Corruption of American Politics, The - Elizabeth Drew
Crashing the Party - Ralph Nader

Decline and Fall of the American Empire, The - Gore Vidal
Democracy - the No-Nonsense guide - Richard Swift

"Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death."

Neil Postman

Democratic Facade, The
Deterring Democracy - Noam Chomsky
Dollars and Votes - Dan Clawson, Alan Neustadtl & Mark Weller
Dude, where's my country? - Michael Moore

Eagle's Shadow, The - Mark Hertzgaard
Eleanor: The Years Alone - Joseph Lash

"Were [Thomas] Paine still within reach of the federal authorities, Attorney General John Ashcroft undoubtedly would prosecute him for blasphemy under a technologically enhanced version of the Alien and Sedition Acts."

Lewis Lapham

Eleanor Roosevelt - The Defining Years 1933-1938 - Blanche Wiesen Cooke
Elite Consensus, The - When Corporations Wield the Constitution - George Draffan (POCLAD)

False Hope - Normon Solomon
Fixing Elections - Steven Hill

Hotel America - Lewis Lapham
How Democratic is the American Constitution - Robert A. Dahl

How the Left Can Win Arguments and Influence People - John K. Wilson
How to Overthrow the Government - Arianna Huffington

"In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The public for whom it is intended is generally competent to manage such discourse. In a print culture, writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don't notice, or even worse, don't care."

Neil Postman

It Did Happen Here - Bud Schultz & Ruth Schultz
Last Days of Democracy, The - Elliot Cohen and Bruce Fraser

Necessary Illusions - Noam Chomsky
New Progressive Era, The
No Mercy - Jean Stefancic & Richard Delgado
On Democracy - Robert Dahl
Paradox of American Democracy, The - John Judis
Philosophic Roots of Modern Ideology, The - David Ingersoll & Richard Matthews
Points of Rebellion - William O. Douglas
Political Fictions - Joan Didion

Politics of Meaning, The - Michael Lerner
Power Elite, The - C. Wright Mills
Powers That Be, The - G. William Domhoff
Price of Power, The - Seymour Hersh

"Books ... are an excellent container for the accumulation, quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information and ideas. It takes time to write a book, and to read one; time to discuss its contents and to make judgments about their merit, including the form of their presentation. A book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past."

Neil Postman

Private Power and American Democracy - Grant McConnell
Ralph Nader Reader
Robbing Us Blind - Steve Brouwer

Silencing Political Dissent - Nancy Chang
Stupid White Men - Michael Moore

Third Parties in America - Steven Rosenstone, Roy Behr, Edward Lazarus
Toward an American Revolution - Jerry Fresia
The Twilight of Democracy - The Bush Plan for America - Jennifer Van Bergen
This Can't Be Happening- Disintegration of American Democracy - Dave Lindorff

"The Patriot Act wipes out the rights I enjoyed."

Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of the Pentagon paper's helped end the Vietnam War

Tree of Liberty, The - Nicholas Kittrie & Eldon Wedlock
Truman Era, The - I.F. Stone
Washington on $10 million a Day - Ken Silverstein
Wealth and Democracy - Kevin Phillips
Who Killed JFK? - Carl Olgesby
Who Rules America Now? - G. William Domhoff
Why Americans Don't Vote - Francis Fox Piven & Richard Cloward

"Most [Western democracies] have not achieved the U.S. system of one political party, with two factions controlled by shifting segments of the business community."

Noam Chomsky

Articles

Was the 2004 Election Stolen? by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The America That Was Free And Is Now Dead
When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History
Learning to Love Big Brother

" The cost of being presented as a " responsible and serious candidate" by the media [is] usually to show fundamental agreement with the existing distribution of wealth and power. "

Michael Lerner, philosopher, psychologist, author

*****

"Poor people living in third-world countries are not the only victims of the so-called new world order. At the heart of this "new" order is a troubling paradox: Poor people within the United States, and the country as a whole, are getting poorer at the same time as the rich within the United States are getting richer."

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer - Brave New World Order

Was Democracy Just A Moment?
The Other America
Is Media a Danger to Democracy?
Creeping Authoritarianism
"Why should we care? It's only the Constitution"
Bush's war at home: a creeping coup d'état
Gov. George W. Bush's record in Texas

"We must mark [Martin Luther King, Jr.] now, if we have not before, as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation..."

Assistant Director of the FBI, Wiliam C. Sullivan, 1963


Assault on the Constitution
Forgotten Freedoms
Patriot Games
True Democracy & the War on Dissent
War and the Constitution
Who's Really Winning In America's Jihad? - Lewis H Lapham
The Destruction of Dissent - First Amendment Post - 9/11

"We pretend not to understand the linkages between our comfortable standard of living and the dictatorships we impose and protect through an international military presence."

Jerry Fresia, author of Toward an American Revolution

Remember When We Had Elections?
FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] exemption in the Homeland Security Act
The Real War - On American Democracy
Giving Due Process Its Due (2/04)
Our Unequal Democracy (6/04)
Democracy is Dead (11/04)
Bush and the Rise of "managed democracy" (2/05)
The Lost Founder - Thomas Paine - forgotten Founding Father (7/05)
The New Gilded Age (1/06)
Thom Hartmann interviewed (2/06)
Democracy in the Balance - Bush (6/06)
America's Nuremberg Laws (10/06)
Sanctioning Lawlessness (10/06)
"We hold you responsible ..." (1/07)
Blueprint for Dictatorship - Recent legislation sets us up for tyranny (4/07)
"Use of the Armed Forces" in America under a National Emergency - Unrestricted & Arbitrary Powers conferred to the President & Vice President (6/07)

Imperialism and Fascism are on the Rise in the USA (7/07)
Of Hampster Wheels and Men [capitalism and democracy] (10/07)
The Folly of Experience [U.S. presidency] (3/08)
The Case Against Corporate Speech (2/10)

How Democratic Is the American Constitution? - book review

" We believe that the government and the police have embarked on a strategy of repression to stop, crush or marginalize the burgeoning progressive movement that gained world attention in the protest against the WTO in Seattle last year."

International Action Center attorneys announcing the filing of a class-action lawsuit on behalf of protestors at the WTO Ministerial meeting in Seattle, Washington, April 1999

An Open Letter to the Members of Congress - Iraq

... "the United States is slipping into a category of countries - among them Brazil, Britain, and Guatemala - where the gap [between rich and poor] is the worst around the globe."

United Nations' Human Development Report

*****

"The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of people, who are innately obedient to authority. This obedience-truth will then become a consensus-truth accepted by many individuals unable to stand alone against the majority. In this way, the truth promulgated by the propaganda system - however irrational - stands a good chance of becoming the consensus, and may come to seem self-evident common sense."

David Edwards, author of Burning All Illusions

Corporate Media's Threat to Democracy

 

"Around the world, the message received is that, whoever wins [the U.S. election], expect only more of the same - national narcissism disguised as altruism, corporate appeasement, and the arbitrary use of U.S. military and economic might."

Greg Guma, Toward Freedom magazine

Civil Liberties watch

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Benjamin Franklin, 1759

Dissent page

" The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power. "

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt - on the threat to democracy by corporate power

Homeland Security page

"All the emphasis on crime and drugs and pornography used to justify the suppression of the Internet is really aimed at suppressing knowledge of the radical political alternatives that are now available."

Tony Benn, British Labour Party Member of Parliament

America page

"The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly."

Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media and foreign policy critic

McCarthyism page

" We are willing to accept lies if they make our lives easier. "

Producer from the TV series "People's Century", opining on why Americans tolerate unjust and inhumane U.S. government policies, at home and abroad

The Ruling Elites

"No matter how cynical you get, it's almost impossible to keep up."

Lily Tomlin

Right-Wing watch

"There are buried truths in our history which continue to insist themselves back into the light, perhaps, because they hold within them the nearly dead embers of what we were once intended to be as a nation."

from a fund-raising letter by Rev. James M. Lawson and actor Mike Farrell seeking support for a fuller investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Constitution of the United States of America

"Big corporations and billionaires fund 90 percent to 98 percent of the Democratic and Republican Party budgets."

Howard Zinn

The Bill of Rights

"Societies characterized by enduring deep divisions of income and wealth, such as most third-world societies, are wounded societies with little sense of the common good... As America drifts in this direction, ending poverty and redistributing income should be at the top of the national agenda."

Charles Derber, Corporation Nation

 

COINTELPRO

Domestic covert action in US (COINTELPRO) in the 60s

"No other democratic country in the world denies as many people - in absolute or proportional terms - the right to vote because of felony convictions."

Human Rights Watch - "World Report 1999, United States"


Domestic covert action in US in the 70s

"More than I00 countries have now abolished the death penalty in law or practice ... Against the global trend towards abolition, however, the U.S.A. has relentlessly increased its rate of executions and the number of crimes punishable by death."

Amnesty International "United States of America- Rights for All," October 1998


Domestic covert action in US in the 80s

" The USA has been quick to voice its condemnation of human rights violations in some other countries and to stress, by contrast, the wealth of civil and political rights which it guarantees within its borders . . . however, it has failed to deliver these rights to many of its people and there are signs that, unless urgent steps are taken, these rights will be further eroded . "

Amnesty International


Domestic covert action in US in the 90s

"There are buried truths in our history which continue to insist themselves back into the light, perhaps, because they hold within them the nearly dead embers of what we were once intended to be as a nation."

from a fund-raising letter by Rev. James M. Lawson and actor Mike Farrell seeking support for a fuller investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Website pages

"Third Worldization" of America

Third World in United States

Corporate Control of American Democracy

Militarization of America

Corporate Media & Threat to Democracy

U.S. National Security State

"Four sorrows ... are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal 'executive branch' of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens."

Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire


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