Ask a group of people what form of government the United States has and you’ll be met with varied replies. Some insist it’s a democracy, others maintain it’s a republic, democratic republic, or constitutional republic.

Technically, the US Government was founded as a constitutional republic where representatives are democratically elected. However, this definition only typifies the government at its inception. As history has shown in abundance, governments are dynamic—they rise, fall and transform with time. When this occurs gradually, it’s not always clear that a fundamental and often dangerous transition has taken place.

In recent years, the idea that the US government is now an oligarchy, or corporatocracy, has gained traction. An oligarchy is a government “in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique.” A corporatocracy, therefore, defines that dominant class as consisting of corporate interests.

It’s not hard to see why this term is increasingly being applied to the US, where corporate lobbying is used to buy political leverage, and Congress acts as the fulcrum to carry out this advantage with legislation. The incomes of the super wealthy have grown exponentially in relation to that of the average citizen, and their ability to displace the average voice has grown in tandem.

Even elite institutions are putting out research to back this claim. A recent study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University called “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” measured influence on policy by examining 1,779 policy issues occurring between 1981-2002. Four groups were considered in the analysis: average citizens, economic elites, mass-based interest groups, and corporate interest groups, concluding (emphasis added):

“Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

The study alone doesn’t definitively prove corporate rule, and its authors admit their analytical test should be interpreted in a “tentative and preliminary” fashion. However, absence of “smoking-gun” proof does not suggest absence of oligarchic rule. The empirical data clearly shows that the US government has ceased to represent the people in favor of economic elites.

Examples of corporate hegemony abound:

*The Affordable Care Act was written and implemented by Elizabeth Fowler, former Vice President of Public Policy and External Affairs at WellPoint, the nation’s largest health insurance provider. No surprise, the legislation mandated that everyone purchase private health insurance, inking into law a huge advantage for the industry. One more trip through the revolving door returned her to the pharmaceutical industry to reap the rewards.

*State initiatives for mandatory labeling of GMO foods have been repeatedly stamped out by the propaganda boot of the Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA) lobbying group, headed by Monsanto and DuPont, despite 91% of public support for GMO labeling (see Initiative 522 in Washington, Prop 37 in California). In May, Vermont passed a GMO labeling bill, only to be immediately sued by the GMA in an attempt to block the law from being implemented. If this wasn’t enough, these giants, plus Koch Industries, are now attempting to preempt the chaos of people knowing what they’re eating with federal legislation to supersede state labeling laws.

*The government bailout of “too big to fail” banks after the housing collapse transferred massive wealth from the taxpayers to the banks, with no disclosure of where the money was going and no arrests for anyone involved in the lead-up to the crisis. In fact, the US Treasury approved executive bonuses for bailed-out bank CEOs, while millions of Americans foreclosed on their homes.

*Bills overtly written by corporate lobbyists constitute a staggering proportion of legislation passed, as exemplified by an analysis of California’s 2007-2008 legislative period. Furthermore, lobbyists are de-registering from the system, limiting the ability to keep track of the extent of corporate influence.

Recently, Senator Bernie Sanders confronted Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen with statistics suggesting the US had shifted from a capitalist democracy (another misnomer) to an oligarchic form of government. Yellen replied that the statistics shared by the Senator greatly concern her. However, in a deluge of irony, her solution was that these concerns should be brought to the policymakers; the same policymakers seated at the crux of this problem. Because if Congress won’t listen, try asking Congress.

Face it—we live in a corporatocracy.

Consistently low approvals of Congress and the popularity of the Occupy Wall Street movement suggest the average person grasps the nature of the problem, but the magnitude of the corruption hasn’t yet seeped into the public consciousness. Only six corporations control 90% of what Americans see, hear and read, which adds to the disconnect between what the government is doing and what people perceive it as doing on their behalf. Many prefer to see each act of corruption as an isolated incident, rather than a series of interrelated and escalating incidents reflecting a severe systemic deficiency. This cognitive dissonance must be addressed head-on if we ever want to pry ourselves from the government’s corporate clutches.

Written by Marc Frey for Media Roots, Photo by Adbusters

Glenn Greenwald was asked all-too-familiar stock questions on mainstream programs like Meet the Press and Charlie Rose during his book tour for No Place to Hide. Although he was put on the defense in almost every segment, Greenwald held firm and consistent when combating the adversarial tone of US establishment journalists.

Over the course of his high profile interviews, many may have missed his lengthier and more candid talks in Hamburg, Amsterdam and at Harvard. Here’s some of our favorite quotes from those lectures that you probably won’t hear on the corporate media.

Obama’s NSA Lies 

“I think [Obama is] due a lot of credit because it really is impressive that he’s able to say those things with a straight face and not bursting out in laughter, I find that skill really really extraordinary, and he’s very good at it and I think we ought to acknowledge it in fairness.”

CIA Assesses Senator Obama

“The greatest hope for saving America’s war fighting ability and to stem the tide of anti-war sentiment in Europe was for then-Senator Barack Obama to become president, because what that would do is transform these wars from George Bush’s face, which the world had grown increasingly tired of and had been viewed as this kind of swagger and unilateral cowboy that was particularly hated in Europe, into this kind, sophisticated, progressive face of Barack Obama.”

“And by making Obama the face of these wars it would transform all this anti-war sentiment into people who were willing to acquiesce to the war if not outright support it. [The CIA] knew that he would continue all of these policies, but his branding was so pleasant and especially in Western Europe, so beloved that it would be an immense asset for the National Security State.”

Obama’s European Branding Power 

“There’s so much rhetoric about the US government, [and Obama is] an effective salesmen around the world for this myth of American greatness. I think one of the principal things that this debate over the last year has done is open people’s eyes about the reality of president Obama vs. the image.”

Global Obama Tarnishing

“I live in Brazil where he had been beloved and across every Brazilian newspaper is very menacing pictures of him connecting him with spying.”

The Democrats

“We have been criticized very predictably and very inconsequentially from what I will call for just  lack of a better term: ‘the Right’, which is, you know, primarily Democrats who voice this critique that our disclosures are going to help the terrorists and result in the deaths of innocent people and all of that. I was on CSPAN two days ago, and every time the host said ‘And now we’re going to go to the Democrat line’ I knew I was about to be called a traitor. It was completely reliable.”

Snowden = Russian False Flag

“Those very same people who had been saying just two weeks earlier that [Snowden] was clearly a Chinese spy suddenly switched on a dime saying obviously this is an operation by Vladimir Putin.”

“It’s really remarkable how seriously all of that has been taken despite the fact that there’s zero evidence to support any of it and mountains of evidence to negate it.”

Russia is Scary

“There is this amazing dynamic in American political discourse which is that certain words drive Americans instantly into hysteria and irrationality. One of them is terrorism, the minute you say that everybody screams and jumps under the bed, not quite as much as they did before but still.”

“The much scarier word for people is Russia, this is a word that if you really want to scare an American and make them go away just whisper Russia in their ear and they’ll start running down the street.”

“On television every interviewer would say to me ‘well what about Edward Snowden he must be completely miserable, i mean he’s in Russia‘ I guess they assume that all 160 million people who live in Russia are instantly and automatically miserable from the time of their birth until they die like it’s just one big gulag.”

The Role of Journalism

“The Washington Post, New York Times and other media outlets have been more aggressive because they would have been shamed if they hadn’t been.”

Passion in Journalism

“I think it’s much more powerful as a journalist to be honest about the way you see the world and the assumptions that you’re making than it is to try and deceive your readers into pretending that you float above opinion. I think that passion and vibrancy and soul are necessary for good journalism, the attempt to drain all that out of it has made journalism not just weak but boring and sort of neutered.”

Coordinated Scripts

“I’ve been pretty scornful of the notion that there is this active plotting among journalists and media outlets to coordinate their storyline.”

“Within 24 to 48 hours literally after we first introduced Snowden to the world, there was this immediate consensus among all these media elites that they were completely capable of taking this person that they had never heard of before and didn’t know the first thing about and were diagnosing him, like clinically diagnosing him, psychologically assessing all of his pathologies. They all settled on this coordinated script that he was a ‘fame seeking narcissist’  If you Google it you will find this phrase over and over again.”

“Where did that come from, that ‘fame seeking narcissist’ thing, I really want to know.”

Pretend Respect

“There’s all these unwritten rules that govern the ways journalists are supposed to behave.”

“You’re not supposed to be too aggressive in condemning the government, you’re supposed to pretend to have respect for their fearmongering claims about why you shouldn’t be publishing.”

Exploiting Sexual Vulnerabilities

“I never used to be able to understand why in response to the leaking of the Pentagon papers the response of the Nixon administration was to break into the office of his [Daniel Ellsberg’s] psychiatrist in the hope of obtaining his psycho-sexual secrets. It never made any sense to me. It seemed like the ultimate non sequitur, ‘Oh look we have documents showing that the US government has been systematically lying to us for years about the Vietnam war’ and the response would be ‘well Daniel Ellsberg is a swinger’.”

“It’s an incredibly effective means of excluding somebody from decent company, and making everything they say instantly dismissed for that reason.”

Privacy/Encryption

“There are chat programs such as Pidgin and OTR that provide relatively good protection, there’s the TOR browser that lets you use the internet anonymously, the Tails operating system.”

“The problem is all these names are pretty daunting to people who haven’t heard them before…I think the tech community needs to develop these tools to make them much more friendly…Once that happens and that will happen, encryption will become the default means of how people communicate on the internet.”

Email Privacy

“I do use PGP email, and in part I use it because I happen to have read a lot of NSA documents talking about how frustrated they are at their inability to invade it.”

“If you use PGP email, the NSA actually looks for the people who are using encryption, because in their twisted minds, your desire to shield our communications from their prying eyes is evidence that you are suspicious.”

Laura Poitras’ Snowden Film 

“Amazingly [Laura Poitras] filmed virtually everything that took place in Hong Kong, our interaction with Snowden, all of the conversations we had, which is going to be in a documentary she releases in the Fall.”

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Check out Greenwald’s lengthiest and best public appearances so far in May 2014:

Glenn Greenwald and Noam Chomsky on Edward Snowden & The Surveillance State 

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 Glenn Greenwald at CATO Institute: No Place to Hide

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 The John Adams Institue Presents Glenn Greenwald: No Place to Hide

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Richard Bacon Interviews Glenn Greenwald on BBC 

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 Glenn Greenwald on The Kojo Nnamdi Show: State Surveillance & The Snowden Story

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 TV Brazil’s Alberto Dines Interviews Glenn Greenwald on NSA

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Written and compiled by Robbie Martin AKA @FluorescentGrey

Prime Minister David Cameron got more than he expected at the Israeli Knesset in his recent visit, receiving a cold shoulder from ultra-Orthodox and Palestinian legislators who share common interests, being the state’s most oppressed communities. Cameron’s visit to the Knesset took place on the same day that two controversial laws, the Conscription Law and the Governability Law, were finally approved following a prolonged legislative battle. As Prime Minister Netanyahu welcomed the guest of honour the ultra-Orthodox parliamentarians left the plenary session in protest while their colleagues, Palestinian Members of the Knesset, refused to attend the event altogether. This was the culmination point of several months of heated protest over the Conscription Law which brought to the surface contradictions between Zionism and Judaism.

Hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim) of all denominations took to the streets of Jerusalem to oppose the draft law several days before its legislation. In a mass prayer, the worshippers-protesters declared their faithfulness to Torah study rather than to the military. United under the banner declaring that “the State of Israel is fighting against the Kingdom of Heaven” they held signs stating that military draft is a spiritual suicide. The event was not merely an opposition to the law but nothing short of a battle cry against the very legitimacy of a state that encroaches upon their spiritual autonomy and poses a danger to their religious liberty.

Under the slogan “Equality in the Burden” both religious-Zionist Naftali Bennett and secular-Zionist Yair Lapid were elected and became the two largest coalition partners of a Haredi-free government. The campaign called for the forced conscription of the ultra-Orthodox and garnered wide support from the Israeli public. Unlike the purist Edah HaHaredit group which prohibits its members from partaking in, voting and receiving funds from the Zionist state, the Haredi rabbinical councils which called for the mass protest have their elected representatives at the Knesset. They all walked out of the plenum stating that Netanyahu is an enemy to their religion, yet this did not stop the Prime Minister from addressing Cameron in his welcoming speech by saying “David, welcome to the City of David and to the Jewish Knesset”.

The law enforces an incrementally growing annual quota of ultra-Orthodox students to be drafted, reaching 5,200 by 2017. Religious schools that would send their students to the military will receive financial incentives but in case the goal is not met, a draft for all the ultra-Orthodox would be imposed and financial sanctions implemented. The ultra-Orthodox argue that sanctioning and criminalizing students of the Torah proves that the State of Israel cannot possibly be regarded as being Jewish. The Law’s initiators, Lapid and Bennett, along with Prime Minister Netanyahu, were subsequently depicted in an animated film as they physically abuse a Haredi Jew and place him behind bars.

People of the book, not people of the rifle

The forced conscription of the ultra-Orthodox into an army that is foreign to their culture is deemed by the Haredim as a Zionist attempt to destroy their millennia-old tradition of Jewish learning. The draft law has therefore achieved the rare feat of uniting all non-Zionist religious streams of the Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Hassidic and Lithuanian communities who are currently working together in an emergency action committee.

Following the massive Jerusalem demonstration, an immense protest of over 150,000 people took place in the United States, which united all major ultra-Orthodox Jewish denominations. Yet, the law achieved more than simply uniting the Haredi groups but has also allowed for the more radical voices, like the Mahara Satmar Rabbi, to gain dominance. While the initial call for protest referenced the word “Israel,” the Satmar Rabbi conditioned his support on omitting it and managed to convince all other Rabbis to re-sign an amended declaration that will not give an ounce of legitimacy to the Zionist state.

While the religious Zionists see serving in the IDF as a holy obligation, the ultra-Orthodox believe that living according to the Torah and serving God is the ultimate goal of Jewish life. Recent days have displayed a clear divide between the latter and the religious Zionists as the Haredi paper Hamodia referred to religious Zionists in terms unused before, such as “collaborators with Satan,” “deeply messianic” and “worshippers of the state.”

Religious nationalism, a contradiction in terms

Appalled by the statement of the revered Haredi rabbinical councils, claiming that the State of Israel is an enemy to the religion of Israel, Rabbi Haim Druckman, spiritual leader of Bennett’s nationalist Jewish Home party, instructed his students not to attend the massive gathering. For the ultra-Orthodox, such a rabbi objecting to a gathering for prayer exposes the inherent flaw in religious Zionism whereby, to put it bluntly, the state is worshipped rather than the Almighty.

In response, an op-ed in the Haredi newspaper Yated Ne’eman took the harsh and unusual step of publishing Rabbi Druckman’s name while omitting the title “Rabbi”. Ultra-Orthodox Knesset member Aryeh Deri referred to Jewish Home member Ayelet Shaked, chairwoman of the draft law committee, as a “traitor of Judaism,” “the Jewish Home and Ayelet Shaked did not [only] betray the Haredim, they have betrayed the Torah.”

This unholy union of Zionism and religion is what mainstream Israeli society perceives as the Jewish identity. Yet, the ultra-Orthodox perspective is that Zionism is nothing short of an aberration of Judaism, insisting that Zionism goes against Judaism while claiming to speak on its behalf. The late Prof. Leibowitz, an Orthodox scholar, philosopher and a proponent of separation between state and religion, explained that: “Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism is to socialism. National Socialism is not socialism but its opposite and likewise religious nationalism is not religion but its opposite.”

Boycotting the state, saving Judaism

Opposition to Zionism is not new to the ultra-Orthodox. From its very first days, the Zionist movement was strongly condemned by almost all traditional Rabbis in Palestine and throughout the world, who prohibited any Jew from embracing Zionism. As a result, Zionist ideology took hold almost exclusively among secular Jews, i.e. those of a Jewish ethnicity rather than religion.

While talks were underway concerning the future of Jerusalem, Rabbi Dushinsky, the leader of the 60,000 people strong Haredi community in the city, expressed his definite opposition to the Zionist movement and its attempt to expropriate the holy city of Jerusalem. He claimed that religious Jews have not the slightest intention of subjugating the local Arab population. Even earlier, in the years following the Balfour Declaration, Dr. Jacob Israel de Haan who acted on behalf of Rabbi Sonnenfeld, saw the Arabs as natural allies against the Zionist project and met Arab leaders accompanied by the Rabbi, in order to protect their religious autonomy under Arab rule rather than accepting an alien Zionist governance.

Merely a day before embarking for Britain to address the British government, with a delegation expressing its staunch opposition to the Balfour Declaration, de Haan was assassinated outside the Sha’are Zedek synagogue where he attended the afternoon prayer. The assassins confessed to receiving orders from the top Zionist leadership at the time, including Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi who later became the second president of the State of Israel. It is speculated that David Ben-Gurion was also involved in the decisionmaking. According to Avraham Tehomi, one of the assassins, de Haan was marked for execution due to his meeting with King Hussein and Emir Abdullah. In January 1924, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported: “The Hejas King stated that all of the Arab countries are prepared to receive the Jews on terms of equality, but he loathes political Zionism.” A signed royal letter to the same effect is also believed to have been given to de Haan and later stolen by the culprits. Following the murder, it was the Zionist Jewish Agency which in turn limited Jewish immigration into Palestine by choosing to provide ‘certificates’ only for Zionist Jews, even during the Holocaust.

While most secular Israelis detest the Haredim, rare stems of solidarity have recently appeared from the almost negligible number of progressive Israelis. The group Democracy or Rebellion claims that a state that denies civil equality and minority rights has no democratic virtue. In its activities it also reaches out to the ultra-Orthodox community and had posted its message of solidarity on the walls of Me’ah She’arim in Jerusalem as well as demonstrating their support in Tel-Aviv.

A whole new discourse is now emerging within the Haredi community. Some call for a political re-alignment with progressive parties and even with elements on the radical left. Others call to boycott the settlements and their produce, while a growing number of rabbis call on Jews abroad to boycott and divest from Israel at large. One Hassidic group went as far as making plans to migrate en masse to the US, seeking political refuge there with the assistance of American senators.

Neither Jewish nor democratic

During Cameron’s visit at the Knesset, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech focused on four points. He declared that the boycott is racist, that Jews have religious-nationalist rights to the land and that indigenous Palestinians hardly existed before the Zionist colonization of the land. Aside of the fact that these claims are patently false, a more rational and humane approach would be to propose an end to the criminal policies leading to boycotts, insisting on equality between Jews and non-Jews and acknowledging the rights of all indigenous people.

Finally, Netanyahu argued that the Balfour Declaration validates Zionist exclusive rights over the land and that this is the will of Jews worldwide. The declaration states, however, that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” and the political assassination of de Haan by the Zionists can hardly be regarded as a form of agreement between Jews and Zionists. Therefore, it would have been appropriate for the British Prime Minister to correct his colleague and explain that the Balfour Declaration, as unfair as it is, has never recognized the right to dispossess, expel or subjugate.

The so-called “Jewish and democratic” state is neither Jewish nor democratic. Religiously speaking, Zionism is a secular movement that went as far as dehumanizing and mocking the religious Jews of Europe. Israel’s majority is secular rather than religious, while it can hardly be argued that the state’s oppressive policies are in agreement with Jewish values. As religion has been “nationalized”, hardships also exist for those practicing Jews who choose a different path from the state sanctioned form of Judaism.

Ethnically, the majority of world Jewry prefers to live abroad rather than in Israel. At the same time, Israeli figures show that ethnic Jews are no longer a majority between the river and the sea, while not even counting the many Palestinians living in exile.

Paramount to the Zionist project in Palestine is the claim that the land is exclusively Jewish and that all others, even its indigenous people, are alien and unwanted. It is therefore no coincidence that Israel refuses to have a constitution or to acknowledge an Israeli nationality since this would mean, at least on paper, that its citizens are to be treated as equals. Instead, the privileged group is defined as having a “Jewish” nationality while the others may be “Arab,” “Druze” or “Circassian,” none of which are nationalities. On this basis, discrimination has been codified into law.

The Israeli regime can therefore best be characterized as an ethnocracy which practices the Crime of Apartheid as defined by international law. Israel is only “Jewish” in the ethnic-supremacist sense, in the same way that South Africa was white. Consequently, the demand to recognize its Jewish character is just as questionable as legitimizing white supremacy in South Africa at the time.

After many decades, new bonds between anti-Zionists – ultra-Orthodox, Palestinians, and progressives – are now being forged. While dispelling the myth of Zionism, a new path is being paved in the Holy Land.

Let us walk that path.

By Ronnie Barkan and Joshua Tartakovsky, photo by Tamar Aviyah
Earlier versions of this article appeared on AlterNet and Tikkun Daily

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Ronnie Barkan is an Israeli human rights activist, conscientious objector and co-founder of Boycott from Within, a group of Israeli citizens and residents that supports the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).
Follow at: @ronnie_barkan

Joshua Tartakovsky comes from an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem, went to a Zionist-Haredi army unit and is a graduate of Brown University and the LSE. He is an independent researcher and filmmaker.

“Acts of resistance are moral acts. They take place because people of conscience understand the moral, rather than the practical, imperative of rebellion. They should be carried out not because they are effective, but because they are right.” – Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class

Obey. Consume. Do not inquire further.

This is the mantra of many co-opted corporate news networks that exist as echo chambers for corporatism. It’s no different on the hill – bought and paid politicians are nothing more than suits, tailor-fit and rigged for white-collar criminality.

Yet according to journalist Chris Hedges, the corporate state is declining fast. Despite its optimistic branding, Hedges says that economic models based on profit and growth alone are “systems of death.” With this wealth driven culture at the wheel, we’re undeniably heading toward economic and environmental catastrophe.

Hedges explains that political reform has been made obsolete with the death of the liberal class. When it comes to Wall Street and the war economy, there’s a bipartisan consensus cloaked in the illusion of partisan difference. Left is the new right. Blue is the new red. Hedges claims the antidote to this unsustainable system is artistic resistance:

“Those who resist with force cannot hope to defeat the corporate state. They will not sustain the cultural values that must be sustained if we are to have a future worth living. Armed resistance movements are always mutations of the violence that spawned them… Music, theatre, art, poetry, journalism, literature, dance, and the humanities, including the study of philosophy and history, will be the bulwarks that separate those who remain human from those who become savages.”

Made in the spirit of Hedges’ call to engage in subversive forms of art, the documentary Obey is a testament to art with teeth. From mass media’s connection to the perpetual war economy to Hedges’ prognostication of the demise of the capitalist state, Obey renders dissent in lucid multifaceted form.

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Obey: Film Based on Chris Hedges Death of a Liberal Class

by British filmmaker and illustrator Temujin Doran

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Written by Mike David Micklow

Photo by Anthony Freda Studio