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Joined 7 years ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2019

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  • A few other related ones:

    • The confirmed cia program to start the crack epidemic and use it to profit off of and impoverish black communities in the US. Read gary webb - dark alliance for more on that.
    • The historical and still ongoing spread of alcohol to native communities in the US.
    • The CIA pretty much took over the majority of international drug trade after ww2 via the helliwell plan(modelled on Chiang kai-sheks program) , and used it to fund their covert ops. A lot more on that in williams - operation gladio.















  • Dessalines@lemmy.mltoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldyeah
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    8 days ago

    Some Background: History conditions much of our thinking about our political systems and most Western democracies resemble Rome’s in 60 BC when, as Robin Daverman humorously says, three aristocrats–politician Julius Caesar, military hero Pompey and billionaire Crassus–formed a backroom alliance that dominated the elected senate. The oligarchs ensured that proletarii votes changed nothing and that the masses remained invisible unless they rioted or died in one of the elites’ endless civil wars. Two thousand years later, in Britain’s general election of 1784, the son of the First Earl of Chatham and Hester Grenville, sister of the previous Prime Minister George Grenville, and the son of the First Baron Holland and Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of Second Duke of Richmond, offered voters offered a choice of dukes. Today, in many European countries (even egalitarian Sweden) ‘democracy’ is a mere veneer over powerful feudal aristocracies that still control their economies. American voters recently watched a former president’s wife competing with a former president’s brother being defeated by a billionaire who installed his daughter and son-in-law in important government positions and ensured that, as John Dewey said, “U.S. politics will remain the shadow cast on society by big business as long as power resides in business for private profit through private control of banking, land and industry, reinforced by command of the press and other means of propaganda”. Most Western politicians are related by marriage or wealth and have, like all hereditary classes, lost sympathy with the broad mass of their fellow citizens to the extent that, as American political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found, ‘the preferences of the average American appear to have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

    • Godfree Roberts

    From here