Protest at G7 summit in Cornwall UK
The world has been treated to successive spectacles of national
leaders gathering at a G7 Summit in Cornwall and a NATO Summit in
Brussels.
The U.S. corporate media have portrayed these summits as chances
for President Biden to rally the leaders of the world’s democratic
nations in a coordinated response to the most serious problems facing
the world, from the COVID pandemic, climate change and global inequality
to ill-defined “threats to democracy” from Russia and China.
But there’s something seriously wrong with this picture. Democracy
means “rule by the people.” While that can take different forms in
different countries and cultures, there is a growing consensus in the
United States that the exceptional power of wealthy Americans
and corporations to influence election results and government policies
has led to a de facto system of government that fails to reflect the
will of the American people on many critical issues.
So when President Biden meets with the leaders of democratic
countries, he represents a country that is, in many ways, an
undemocratic outlier rather than a leader among democratic nations. This
is evident in:
- the “legalized bribery” of 2020’s $14.4 billion federal election, compared with recent elections in Canada and the U.K. that cost less than 1% of that, under strict rules that ensure more democratic results;
- a defeated President proclaiming baseless accusations of fraud
and inciting a mob to invade the U.S. Congress on January 6 2021;
- news media that have been commercialized, consolidated, gutted and dumbed down by their corporate owners, making Americans easy prey for misinformation by unscrupulous interest groups, and leaving the U.S. in 44th place on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index;
- the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with over two million people behind bars, and systemic police violence on a scale never seen in other wealthy nations;
- the injustice of extreme inequality, poverty and cradle-to-grave debt for millions in an otherwise wealthy nation;
- an exceptional lack of economic and social mobility compared to other wealthy countries that is the antithesis of the mythical “American Dream”;
- privatized, undemocratic and failing education and healthcare systems;
- a recent history of illegal invasions, massacres
of civilians, torture, drone assassinations, extraordinary renditions
and indefinite detention at Guantanamo—with no accountabllity;
- and, last but not least, a gargantuan war machine capable of destroying the world, in the hands of this dysfunctional political system.
Fortunately though, Americans are not the only ones asking what is
wrong with American democracy. The Alliance of Democracies Foundation
(ADF), founded by former Danish Prime Minister and NATO
Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, conducted a poll
of 50,000 people in 53 countries between February and April 2021, and
found that people around the world share our concerns about America’s
dystopian political system and imperial outrages.
Probably the most startling result of the poll to Americans would
be its finding that more people around the world (44%) see the United
States as a threat to democracy in their countries than China (38%) or
Russia (28%), which makes nonsense of U.S. efforts to justify its
revived Cold War on Russia and China in the name of democracy.
In a larger poll
of 124,000 people that ADF conducted in 2020, countries where large
majorities saw the United States as a danger to democracy included
China, but also Germany, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, France, Greece,
Belgium, Sweden and Canada.
After tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle, Biden swooped into
Brussels on Air Force One for a NATO summit to advance its new
“Strategic Concept,” which is nothing more than a war plan for World War III against both Russia and China.
But we take solace from evidence that the people of Europe, whom
the NATO war plan counts on as front-line troops and mass casualty
victims, are not ready to follow President Biden to war. A January 2021
survey by the European Council on Foreign Affairs found that large
majorities of Europeans want to remain neutral in any U.S. war on Russia
or China. Only 22% would want their country to take the U.S. side in a
war on China, and 23% in a war on Russia.
Few Americans realize that Biden already came close to war
with Russia in March and April, when the United States and NATO
supported a new Ukrainian offensive in its civil war against
Russian-allied separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Russia
moved tens of thousands of heavily-armed troops to its borders with
Ukraine, to make it clear that it was ready to defend its Ukrainian
allies and was quite capable of doing so. On April 13th, Biden blinked,
turned round two U.S. destroyers that were steaming into the Black Sea
and called Putin to request the summit that is now taking place.
The antipathy of ordinary people everywhere toward the U.S.
determination to provoke military confrontation with Russia and China
begs serious questions about the complicity of their leaders in these
incredibly dangerous, possibly suicidal, U.S. policies. When ordinary
people all over the world can see the dangers and pitfalls of following
the United States as a model and a leader, why do their neoliberal leaders keep showing up to lend credibility to the posturing of U.S. leaders at summits like the G7 and NATO?
Maybe it is precisely because the United States has succeeded in
what the corporate ruling classes of other nations also aspire to,
namely greater concentrations of wealth and power and less public
interference in their “freedom” to accumulate and control them.
Maybe the leaders of other wealthy countries and military powers
are genuinely awed by the dystopian American Dream as the example par
excellence of how to sell inequality, injustice and war to the public in
the name of freedom and democracy.
In that case, the fact that people in other wealthy countries are
not so easily led to war or lured into political passivity and impotence
would only increase the awe of their leaders for their American
counterparts, who literally laugh all the way to the bank as they pay
lip service to the sanctity of the American Dream and the American
People.
Ordinary people in other countries are right to be wary of the Pied
Piper of American “leadership,” but their rulers should be too. The
fracturing and disintegration of American society should stand as a
warning to neoliberal governments and ruling classes everywhere to be
more careful what they wish for.
Instead of a world in which other countries emulate or fall victim to America’s failed experiment in extreme neoliberalism,
the key to a peaceful, sustainable and prosperous future for all the
world’s people, including Americans, lies in working together, learning
from each other and adopting policies that serve the public good and
improve the lives of all, especially those most in need. There’s a name
for that. It’s called democracy.