The Threat to Democracy

I believe that the most serious current threat to democracy in the United States is from our unaccountable intelligence services.  Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans nor the mainstream media is willing to challenge these services, which are licensed to lie in the service of protecting our country from terrorism or foreign enemies such as Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela.  Inevitably, having this kind of power and mission has led to opportunities to mislead the public, to blackmail enemies, and to conduct false flag operations.

Various foreign countries and subnational groups are engaged in life and death struggles.  These include the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the Israel-Iran conflict, the Shia-Sunni conflict, and the class conflicts in Venezuela and Bolivia.  Various parties in these armed conflicts are desperate and therefore will go to great lengths to get the United States, the world's supreme military power, involved on their side.  And so, despite perhaps having good intentions, we get involved at the behest of one faction or another.

In addition, we live in a global economy where American countries make profits around the world.  Naturally, our intelligence agencies are charged with protecting these interests.

So we have an enormous bureaucracy devoted to "intelligence", with a budget 10 times that of Russia's spy budget and in fact bigger than Russia's entire military budget.  For whatever reason, this sprawling and unaccountable bureaucracy has made enormous mistakes over the past decades (Iranian and Central American coups, Vietnam War, Iraq War).

I do not mean to imply that U.S. intelligence agents are bad people, or that the work they do is unnecessary.  Rather, I think it needs to be pointed out that they have an enormous budget in keeping with the status of the United States as the world's preeminent superpower.  While we've tried to build in safeguards against abuse of power, there is a huge incentive to subvert the safeguards in the pursuit of various agendas.

No politician has comparable power, so all must "play" with the intelligence community or lose power.  Thus, serial liar John Bolton is courted by the Democrats because Trump dared to oppose him.  The Democrats do this in the name of democracy, but they are 180 degrees wrong in basing their support for democracy on the foundation of what the intelligence community says.  Democracy should be more about what is publicly known and verifiable.

A Bernie Sanders presidency would provide better balance between the vested interests supported by the intelligence community, and the larger public who constitute the country's labor force, families, and future.