democracy is dead...

That is the title of an article by Paul Kingsnorth in this month's New Internationalist magazine. Here's a part of that article:

The global free market and systems of democracy are not, as we are told from all sides, complementary: they are antagonistic. You can have one but, it seems, you cannot have the other. The spread of the free market does not aid the spread of a free politics. Quite the oppposite: it eats democracy for breakfast.

The reasons for this have been well rehearsed. Put crudely, the more globalized the economy becomes, the less control national governments have over their own economics. The liberalization of banking and investment laws has meant that distant shareholders and brokers can bankrupt entire economies in hours if they perceive a threat to their 'stability' - a threat, in other words, to the ability to make a quick buck within the boundaries of a nation-state. At the same time, the liberalization of trade through GATT and the WTO, in tandem with the neoliberal recipes pushed on the poor world by the Word Bank and the IMF, has empowered and enlarged transnational corporations, and weakened governments, to the point where national economic policies can no longer be decided by elected officials alone and must favour the interests of huge corporate blocs.

Now you may understand a small part of why I'm angry; why Osama bin Laden is off the planet; and why anyone who really values true democracy or the freedom of their people or nation to determine their own affairs is as mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore.

A globalised economy is the biggest wolf dressed in sheep's clothing the world has ever seen. And countries where the people or the dictatorship have chosen to take their country away from this corrupt and ultimately doomed sytem of economics get economically punished or invaded and occupied (mainly by America), or the CIA interferes with the local politics till they manage to install 'their man' (I don't think they ever installed a woman).

Here's my question to any Americans reading this: Are you getting it yet about why an ever-increasing chunk of the world despises you, given that your "freedom" and "democracy" destroys any hope of their self-determination? Are you wondering why the cry "Yankee go home" is getting louder?