_politicalist's comments

Because that's the wrong kind of "globalization." Investor-oriented globalization is the kind where a wealthy person can move his factory to Mexico and demand many of the same rights he gets in the US; but a poor Mexican can't go to New York and do likewise. For more information:

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/2006----.htm

If you read again, the person you're responding to mentioned being "honorary white". The notion of US whiteness evolves; take for example 19th century racism against the Irish. Blacks were called the "smoked Irish," and the Irish were "niggers turned inside-out". Now of course, Irish-Americans are just normal privileged white people, while African-Americans... well, they're obviously not doing as well. They're heavily imprisoned by the country with the world's highest jail rate.

True, but the minorities they were interested in protecting weren't the kinds we normally think of. After all, many owned slaves. And even when it comes to groups like females and "Indians", their record wasn't exactly impressive either.

But they were themselves minorities: wealthy property-owners. The elite minority. And I think history shows that they were themselves the minorities they wanted to protect. With every incentive in the world to do so. The "popular passions" were no doubt a frightening thing to them.

I think this is fairly apparent even in documents for public consumption, like The Federalist No. 10. (Of course, for more serious analysis, we'd want to turn away from the Federalist Papers and look instead to the records of actual decisionmaking.)

Like most nations, the US has a founding myth. Since it's so recent and there were witnesses, the Founding Fathers can't exactly have overt superpowers like levitation or divine birth, but they are still portrayed in a mythologized way. So when looking at the founding of any nation, a little extra care is needed not to be led astray.

Also the Gates family seems honest about it too. Bill Gates Sr. (co-chair of the Gates foundation) also advocates changing tax policy, on the logic that every software or biotech company benefited from federally funded research, which they got for free, not to mention those just renting office space to them.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/url.cfm?ID=90058...

People might be interested in Chomsky's overview of the educational system, as one where even stupidity has a role -- if there's a lot of stupidity in the system, then the people who'll succeed are obedient people (including him) willing to follow the orders of someone who "couldn't think his way out of a paper bag", to get to the next rung. The rest are filtered out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq6lFOhLJ0c

Well, groups like Wikileaks aren't wanting to apply anarchist ideals haphazardly; but rather in a reasoned way to help achieve a more bottom-up democratic world, which of course requires a better-informed populace. Among other things.

For example, Wikileaks did try to work with the White House to remove names of innocents. (I cited it elsewhere on this thread; you can read how they went about it.)

Each of the state powers you mention can be used for helpful things, but usually aren't. Take for example law enforcement. Any society will need some measure of protection from sociopaths taking over. However, the US goes wild with it, using it to achieve by far the world's hugest incarceration rate!

And war requires the highest bar of justification. Needless to say, the US government doesn't come close to meeting it, illusions aside.

From Assange:

"Now we contacted the White House as a group before we released this material and asked them to help assist in going through it to make sure that no innocent names came out, and the White House did not accept that request."

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2968342.htm

It appears that the Gates Foundation works under certain contstraints, dictated of course by the elite family which runs it. For example, they appear to strongly respect intellectual property and corporate profits, as you might expect from a Microsoft founder. (This may take the form of ensuring that companies like Monsanto benefit from aid.)

There was an informed article in The Nation which touched upon the undemocratic vision the Gates Foundation allegedly has; people affected by poverty do struggle to fix their own problems in a self-governing way. Elite benefactors like Gates or Soros may conceivably help to strengthen the systems which make it hard to self-govern, along with whatever benefits they accomplish.

http://www.thenation.com/article/gates-foundation-and-africa...

(Incidentally, I don't see why Gates is considered a particularly predatory businessman. He just happened to be the one who succeeded, as usually happens; and other businesspeople don't like an entity with the resulting market power. He might be a much nicer guy than many of his competitors, for all I know.)

Actually, the incumbency rate for the House of Representatives has been well over 90%, due to corporate financing, redrawing districts, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_stagnation_in_the...

As for Germany, it seems there's a lot more political choice, even at the top levels. Due to a greater diversity of parties, which more accurately reflects people's opinions than the US's two-party system. In my view, the US isn't particularly democratic, and anyway all of these nations have top-down "democracies."