Democracy
The Russian leader has called the political situation in America a “catastrophe”
https://www.rt.com/news/594400-putin-us-elections-democracy
March 17, 2024
FILE PHOTO © Jim Bourg-Pool / Getty Images
The US has become a global laughing stock by criticizing democratic processes in other nations while suppressing a presidential candidate in its own election, Russian leader Vladimir Putin has claimed.
Speaking to journalists in Moscow early on Monday morning, shortly after preliminary results indicated he would be reelected with 87% of the vote in the Russian presidential election, Putin stated that the “whole world is laughing at what is happening” in the US.
“We are behaving with more restraint than their opponents in other countries, but this is just a catastrophe, not a democracy – that’s what it is,” the Russian leader added.
Putin claimed that the current US administration is using all its resources to attack a candidate for this year’s presidential election, seemingly referring to Donald Trump. The former US leader is facing a litany of lawsuits despite being the presumptive Republican nominee for the vote in November.
READ MORE: Putin recalls how Trump asked him about ‘Sleepy Joe’
In a pre-election interview earlier this week, Putin insisted that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections and will work with any elected US president.
“I think it’s obvious to everyone that the American political system cannot claim to be democratic in any sense of the word,” he said in an interview with journalist Dmitry Kiselyov. Putin refused to comment further on the current presidential campaign in the US, but described the atmosphere as becoming “increasingly uncivilized.”
This is fake, it is from a comedian. Well done! He speaks for most Canadians.
13 Feb 2024
In a powerful address, Tucker Carlson delivers a scathing indictment of the failures plaguing American governance and media integrity. With unflinching candour, Carlson sheds light on the erosion of democratic principles and the unchecked abuse of power within the nation’s corridors of influence.
As a devoted American, Carlson voices his deep concern over the subversion of individual rights and government accountability. He unveils the disturbing reality of government agencies targeting citizens unlawfully, highlighting the urgent need for transparency and accountability. With piercing insight, Carlson critiques the complicity of media outlets in perpetuating a narrative divorced from reality, lamenting the loss of independent journalism and the rise of censorship.
He calls on viewers to demand truth and accountability from those in positions of authority. Through poignant analogies and stark observations, Carlson challenges viewers to confront the moral decay and systemic corruption undermining America’s foundational principles.
Join Tucker Carlson as he boldly confronts the crises facing the nation and advocates for a return to ethical leadership and civic responsibility.
The Russian president reflected on the contested 2020 US presidential vote when discussing referendums
https://www.rt.com/news/590761-us-election-russia/
Jan 16, 2024
Russian President Vladimir Putin © Sputnik / Sergei Savostyanov
Elections in Russia’s new regions were honest and transparent because people showed up to vote in person, unlike the voting by mail in the US, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday.
Speaking at a meeting with municipal educators in Moscow, the Russian president brought up the 2020 American presidential election as an example of what democracy should not look like.
“It’s probably possible to falsify anything. Just like the previous elections in the US were falsified through voting by mail. Well, it’s clear what voting by mail is. They bought ballots for $10, wrote them in, and without any supervision from observers, tossed them into mailboxes. And there you go,” Putin said.
His observation came in response to a question about the voting in Kherson and Zaporozhye regions and the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, four formerly Ukrainian territories that joined Russia in 2022. No one forced people there to show up at the polls, or barred them from doing so – they simply voted with their feet, Putin said.
“What is this, if not democracy? Democracy is when people express their will,” the Russian president said.
Biden accepts he will likely face Trump
Multiple US states changed their election rules in 2020 to allow voting via mail-in ballots, citing the Covid-19 pandemic. The final official results showed Democrat Joe Biden winning 81 million votes, the most ever in US history, over the incumbent, Republican Donald Trump.
Trump has challenged the election as “rigged,” pointing to various irregularities in half a dozen states as well as the mail-in ballots that were impossible to audit. The Democrats and most US media have denounced anyone questioning the 2020 vote as an “election denier” and insisted that everything was perfectly legitimate.
According to a February 2021 account in Time magazine, Biden became president because of a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” who were “fortifying” the election by “working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
Do not comply! No masks, no vaccines, no mandates!
BY TYLER DURDEN
FRIDAY, SEP 22, 2023 – 03:30 AM
Member of the European Parliament Christine Anderson has been an unyielding opponent to Klaus Schwab’s ‘Great Reset’ Agenda. Known best for her famous smackdown on Justin Trudeau, MEP Anderson has established herself as one of the few politicians left who represent the interests of the European people.
September 13 was no different as MEP Anderson took no prisoners in her latest warning to the globalitarian elite. Before the European Parliament, in a session specifically focused on the COVID-19 response and the World Health Organization, MEP Anderson ended the meeting with a powerful statement.
Here’s what she said, word for word:
“We just need to find a way to wake the people up. Because the point is simply this: it comes down to a choice. It’s either freedom, democracy, and the rule of law — or enslavement.
“There is no such thing in between. There is no such thing as a little freedom, a little democracy, a little rule of law, just as there is no such thing as a little enslavement. So that’s the choice. It comes down to – it’s either the globalitarian misanthropists or the people. It comes down to – it’s either us or them. And that’s, I think, what this really is all about.
“Now, when my colleagues and I were elected to this parliament, there was no question about it. We were on the side of the people because the people actually pay us to act in their best interests. That’s our job. And once again, I will say to every single elected representative around the world, to every single member in every elected government around the world, if you do not unequivocally stand with the people and serve in their best interests, act in their best interests, you have no place in any parliament or in any government. You belong behind bars. You may even rot in hell for all I care at this point because that’s exactly what you deserve if you sell out the people.”
*Applause ensued*
MEP Anderson continued. “Now, I would like to make a promise to the people, and I’m pretty sure I can speak or speak on behalf of my colleagues. We will continue to stand with you, the people. We will continue to fight for freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. We will not shut up, and we will not stop going after those despicable globalitarian misanthropists.
“But we would also like to have you make a promise to us. You may have heard it’s all coming back. The first country is already starting [to talk about] mask mandates in Israel. They’re already imposing it. I’ve heard of a few universities in the United States. They’re already bringing it all back. And I would really like for you, the people, to not go along. Simply say no! They want you to wear a mask; say no. They want you to put in another mRNA shot; say no. They want to impose a curfew on you; say no. That’s really all you have to do.
“And it might not be or might sound a little hard, but it’s actually not that hard. Because once you have made it clear to them that you will no longer go along, once you’ve let them know, they cannot scare you anymore. Because as long as you are afraid of what they might do if you don’t comply, they have power over you. Take the power away from them! Simply say no. Once you do that, they don’t have power over you anymore. You will feel so free. Simply say no.
“And considering what we’ve heard today, and considering what we’ve seen in the last three years. Considering what we know they want to implement, heck, you might even be well within your right to tell them to screw themselves and go to hell! That’s where they belong. What will you get out of that? I can tell you. Once you’ve done that, once you’ve told them to just go to hell, they no longer have power over you. You will have an incredible feeling — kind of like a sensation of freedom will swap through your body. I promise you will feel so relieved.
“And this is the state of mind that I would ask all of you to get to. Simply don’t let them grind you down anymore. You are worth it. You are deserving of just standing up for yourselves. And tell them all to go to hell. Thank you very much.”
“If they can disqualify one of the main candidates in an election, we will not accept any criticism from them about how our political system functions,” Peter Szijjarto said
https://tass.com/world/1671255
BUDAPEST, September 7. /TASS/.
The US has no right to lecture other countries on democracy as it is violating democratic standards by trying to prevent former US President Donald Trump from running for president, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said.
He made the statement at a news conference following talks in Budapest with his North Macedonian counterpart Bujar Osmani, who currently holds the rotating presidency of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
When asked to comment on reports that US President Joe Biden’s administration and Democratic lawmakers seek to prevent Trump from running for president in 2024, based on lawsuits against him and provisions of the US Constitution, Szijjarto said the US will now have to “scrap their moralizing statements about the state of the Hungarian democracy.”
“From now on, we don’t want to hear the Americans talk about how democracy works here, how institutions work, how things are with the rule of law. Because if they can disqualify one of the main candidates in an election, we will not accept any criticism from them about how our political system functions,” the minister said, according to a broadcast of the news conference on Facebook (banned in Russia as it’s owned by Meta Corporation, which is designated as extremist in Russia).
Szijjarto also said that Trump’s removal from the presidential race would be very bad news because if he won the race for the White House again, he would be able to achieve a settlement of the conflict in Ukraine.
“We have every reason to believe that if Donald Trump were to become US president, there would be peace in our neck of the woods very soon. We are also convinced that if Donald Trump had remained in office as US president, this war would not have broken out,” the minister said.
“Thus, for those who stand for peace, it would be very bad news if the US efforts to eliminate the most likely presidential candidate [from the Republican Party] succeeded,” the minister said.
Szijjarto had said earlier that Hungary is counting on Trump’s return to the White House, as this will allow him to deal with the settlement in Ukraine. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has also said as much on a number of occasions. In a recent interview with US television journalist Tucker Carlson, the prime minister expressed confidence that if Trump were to win the US presidential election in 2024, he would be able to put an end to the Ukrainian conflict.
Imagine someone told you that in the run-up to a U.S. presidential election, the FBI tried to undermine a candidate at the behest of the opposing campaign by cooking up a false narrative of collusion with Moscow.
And let’s say this conspiracy implicated not just the FBI but also the White House, Justice Department, and CIA — and that nearly the entire corporate press went along with it, gleefully spreading the false narrative that this candidate was a Russian agent, running story after story of fabricated nonsense in a coordinated effort to ensure the opposing candidate won.
In normal times, you’d scoff at such an outlandish story, dismiss it as the plot of some half-baked Tom Clancy novel. That could never happen in America, you’d say, where we have free and fair elections, the rule of law, and so on. And anyway, the media would never allow it to happen. They’d be too invested in exposing the conspiracy and claiming, rightly, a Watergate-type story of their very own.
But you’d be wrong. All of that really happened in 2016, recounted in all its jaw-dropping detail in Special Counsel John Durham’s 306-page report, released Monday after nearly four years in the making. The big takeaway from the report is that the Obama-era FBI launched a full investigation of the Trump campaign, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, in the summer of 2016 despite having zero evidence of any collusion between Trump and Russia.
Not only that, but officials at the highest levels of the U.S. government, including President Obama, knew that the entire false narrative that Trump was colluding with Moscow was completely made up by the Clinton campaign in an effort to weaponize the federal government against Trump and distract from Hillary Clinton’s own email server scandal.
The Durham report recounts how in August 2016, CIA Director John Brennan briefed Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey, and other senior administration officials on what the report calls the “Clinton Plan intelligence,” a scheme Clinton approved in July 2016 “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”
Continue:
The U.S. does not have a high-functioning representative democracy. Voters are uninformed, don’t trust the media and can’t agree on the facts at the heart of stories and issues like whether climate change is real or Biden won the election.
https://sputniknews.com/20230329/the-us-is-not-a-democracy-1108886575.html
March 28, 2023
© AFP 2023 / FILIPPO MONTEFORTE
Ted Rall
Is a system working as well as possible? Inertia lulls people into believing that legacy products are great—even that they’re perfect—without objectively considering whether it’s really true.
The QWERTY computer keyboard works but the 1936 Dvorak version is superior. Skim milk makes you fatter. The U.S. may still be a shining city on a hill but our Constitution has become so out-of-date that new nations no longer refer to it as a template for their own legal charters.
Ask yourself: if our political system were created today, by a group of intelligent people, what would it look like? If the real-world system we see now falls short of that ideal, there’s room for improvement.
What if we were to scrap our centuries-old Constitution? What if we built a shiny new government from the ground up, without considering legacy or precedent?
This is a complicated question. Only one out of four Americans would vote to repeal the Second Amendment, so the right to bear arms might make it into a new charter. Much of that support, however, derives from voters who own the hundreds of millions of guns already in circulation. An America without a legacy of individual firearms ownership would be much less likely to codify it as a fundamental right.
Leaked FBI List of ‘Extremist’ Symbols Includes Historical Flags and 2nd Amendment
So what would an ideal representative democracy look like for the United States, 2023 edition?
Nothing like what we have now.
Every citizen of sufficient age to exercise sound judgment should be allowed to vote. Our society currently says 18. But there are strong arguments in favor of allowing children to vote as well as for raising the age of enfranchisement to 25. If mental acuity matters, what about the one out of ten Americans over age 65 who suffers from dementia or those with very low IQ?
Among those permitted to cast ballots, each vote ought to count equally. The principle of one person, one vote is almost universally accepted.
Yet the current system falls dismally short of our professed ideal. Due to the electoral college, the vote of a resident of Wyoming in a presidential election counts 3.6 times more than that of someone who lives in California. People in the District of Columbia enjoy no vote at all; nor do the 4 million Americans who reside in overseas territories. Gerrymandering through redistricting has radically reduced the weight of a vote cast by a Black citizen compared to a white one. Forty-eight out of 50 states either ban convicted felons, people in prison and/or on parole from voting; the U.S. has some of the most vicious disenfranchisement laws in the world.
If a representative democracy is healthy and vibrant, voters ought to be able to choose from a broad selection of candidates who represent a wide range of ideological viewpoints that reflect the broad diversity of opinions in our vast country.
Biden Backtracks After Calling Trump Supporters ‘Threat’ to Democracy
In this respect, the U.S. is not a democracy.
We only have two major parties. But not by choice. 62%of Americans say they want the option of a third party; dissatisfaction with the Democrats and the Republicans helps explain why the U.S. has one of the lowest voter-turnout numbers in the world. Smaller parties are barred from presidential debates, don’t receive coverage in the press, are stymied by draconian ballot-access laws drafted by Democrats and Republicans, and bludgeoned by nuisance lawsuits filed by the big two in order to drain their resources and block them from the ballot.
In many elections, there aren’t even two parties. In 2016, 42% of races for seats in state legislatures were uncontested, meaning there was only one candidate on the ballot. There’s no word whether any of them was named “Saddam.” In 2022, a whopping 57%of state elections for judges were unopposed. I live in New York, where the Working Families Party provides an illusion of choice by appearing on the ballot next to the Democrats. But the WFP’s candidates are the same as the corporate Democrats.
Ranked-choice voting, promoted by progressives, sometimes leads to anti-democratic results. California’s small state Republican Party rarely has one of its candidates among the top two vote-getters who move past the first round to the general election.
Party primaries can be coronations, as when Barack Obama and Donald Trump essentially ran unopposed in 2012 and 2020, respectively.
Candidates are not legally bound to carry out their election promises if they win. Evolving circumstances or further reflection—or dishonesty—may prompt a politician to change course after victory. But there is accountability for perfidy, whether real or imagined, in a vibrant representative democracy. Rather than outsource politics to a political class every two or four years or whatever, citizens in a high-functioning representative democracy keep informed beyond the carnival of election season, express their opinions and hold their representatives’ feet to the fire with public protests and demonstrations, as we’re currently seeing in France after their imperious president ignored popular will by increasing the national retirement age without holding a parliamentary vote.
France Postpones King Charles’ State Visit Over Pension Riots
The U.S. does not have a high-functioning representative democracy. Voters are uninformed, don’t trust the media and can’t agree on the facts at the heart of stories and issues like whether climate change is real or Biden won the election.
Worst of all, we fail to hold our representatives accountable when they ignore us. Abortion is no longer legal in 17 states, with more expected to codify bans in the coming months. Meanwhile, 85%of American adults favor abortion rights, yet the streets remain calm and protester-free. Two out of three Democrats want significant and immediate action against climate change, yet they don’t have anything to say to President Biden—who probably blew up a major gas pipeline and created an ecological disaster, and authorized oil drilling in the ecologically fragile Alaskan wilderness.
If we were to create a new political system out of whole cloth, it wouldn’t look anything like this.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Yes, France should learn the basic concepts of democracy. Canada should ponder this advice as well. Hypocrites.
Washington keeps meddling in the affairs of ‘its hemisphere’ and deploying propaganda to paint its interventions as benevolent
https://www.rt.com/news/573139-latin-america-russian-news/
Again, the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, forced to endure the brutality of the US in their daily lives, are not so fooled, and they are quite understandably looking elsewhere for their news, and even for help. Thus, people protesting US intervention in such countries as Haiti and Peru are even waving Russian flags and asking for Russian help against this intervention.
FILE PHOTO: Haitians take to the streets to protest over the increasing insecurity in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, on March 29, 2022. © Valerie Baeriswyl / AFP
In his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Harold Pinter spent a good deal of his time detailing the crimes of the US in the world, but especially in Latin America. He spoke about how most people have been lulled into forgetting about these crimes, if they ever knew about them at all, thanks to Washington’s sophisticated propaganda machine:
“The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
READ MORE: Russia and Cuba working to counter US sanctions – ambassador
Of course, the people who suffered from the relentless US attacks have not forgotten them. And as might be expected, these attacks have not stopped, or even slowed down, with the US supporting right-wing coups in Latin America and the Caribbean in recent years – for example, in Honduras in 2009; Bolivia in 2019; and most recently the ongoing unrest in Peru. The US also helped instigate a very violent coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018, though it ultimately failed. Moreover, in addition to forcibly kidnapping Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and flying him to the Central African Republic in 2004, it appears that the US had some role in the recent murder of Haitian President Jovenel Moise.
Meanwhile, Washington is leading NATO’s expansion of its forward-operating capacity in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to Popular Resistance, at the end of 2022, the US had “12 military bases in Panama, 12 in Puerto Rico, 9 in Colombia, 8 in Peru, 3 in Honduras, 2 in Paraguay, as well as installations of this type in Aruba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Cuba (Guantanamo), and Peru among other countries.” Washington is seeking to control the entire “land and maritime surface of the region”, including a network of NATO bases on islands in Argentina’s territorial waters “usurped by the United Kingdom.”
In light of all this activity and history, the people of Latin America and the Caribbean can be forgiven for doubting the claims that the US is helping to spread democracy, peace and truth in the region. The people of this region are simply tired of being bullied by the US, and they are equally tired of being blatantly lied to by the US government and its corporate media mouthpieces. As such, it should come as little surprise to anyone paying attention that the people of this region are increasingly looking to non-US sources like Russia’s RT to get their information, much to the chagrin of the US.
READ MORE: Cuba accepts Russian payment system
As CNN laments, “Russian propaganda has long exploited simmering resentments against the West’s imperialistic past and recent foreign policy interventions, now promoting the view that Ukraine is a puppet of the West. The narrative is particularly powerful in Latin America, where Kremlin-controlled media outlets such as RT have big audiences.” Similarly, POLITICO complains, “When it comes to Russian state media, the Kremlin’s Spanish-language services – most notably RT en Español – are a juggernaut, particularly in Latin America. Its glitzy television studios, anti-gringo editorial line and ability to tap into locals’ desire for outside news sources have made the outlet by far the largest proponent of Moscow’s talking points.”
There is much to unpack in these alarmist statements. First of all, in its very assertion about “Russian propaganda,” CNN itself engages in its own, quite typical pro-US propaganda, attempting to claim that the West’s imperialism is in the “past” and reducing its recent, anti-constitutional coups in Latin America to mere “foreign policy interventions.” For its part, POLITICO acknowledges that the appeal of RT to Latin American viewers is its “anti-gringoeditorial line” without explaining why Latin Americans would be attracted to that – that is, without acknowledging it is the cruel US actions which have driven Latin Americans away from American sources and towards those like RT.
Of course, the problem is that the US government and its compliant propaganda outlets like CNN and POLITICO have gotten high on their own supply. They believe their own line about the nature of US imperialism in the region and cannot seem to fathom that they themselves are some of the biggest purveyors of false news in the world, including about Washington’s role in the world.
READ MORE: Russian security chief addresses foreign-backed ‘revolutions’
Again, the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, forced to endure the brutality of the US in their daily lives, are not so fooled, and they are quite understandably looking elsewhere for their news, and even for help. Thus, people protesting US intervention in such countries as Haiti and Peru are even waving Russian flags and asking for Russian help against this intervention.
There is an easy solution to this. If the US wants the people of the region to look to it and its media outlets for news and information, it might be honest about its interventionist past and present conduct in this hemisphere, and it can start treating the people of this hemisphere and their countries with respect and as equals. As long as the US continues to treat Latin America and the Caribbean as its “backyard” in which it is free to meddle for its own gain, it will only continue to alienate the people and to push them towards Russia and other points eastward. This should be an obvious point, but it seems to be lost on those policymakers in the US who seem incapable of seeing past their own self-interest, all the while believing that they are somehow the good guys.