“Democracy is a system of government where power is vested in the people, who exercise it either directly through referendums or indirectly through elected representatives.” This is what Wikipedia says. During my formal studies, I was told there are lobbyists influencing politicians. And this process can be honest or truly dishonest (influencing for the benefit of some private entity).
After some years, I was reading The Economist about lobbyists. Since they could not say it directly, they just hinted at us with a picture of politicians being puppets led by the lobbyists-puppet-masters. As I later found out, I was completely right.
And what about the lobbyists and crooks pulling a politician’s strings? Whom are they connected with? I used to think they were oligarchs (in the Czech Republic’s environment), multinational companies, and so on. The reality is that banks and super-rich families are the real movers. The richest family on this planet is said to have enormous influence on the world’s central banks.
They fund parties’ campaigns; they decide whether the left and the right will compete (they used to; now we have some stagnation they benefit from), and form the international patron-client systems. And they own mass media, shaping people’s opinions.
They could give you a free mortgage, cancel your loan. Yet they don’t do it. The third-world countries could be very rich, and the burden doesn’t have to be on regular people. But people are starving, have no healthcare, are tortured or killed.
If your civic lessons were about how to remove lobbyists, crooks, banks, super-rich families, and multinational companies from politics, we would breathe freely. I would stress the word “how” because if people learn a way to get rid of them, it will happen.
We should have mass media without ads and business or political influence funded by people. They would control each other, whether it works for the interest groups or not. The parties’ structures should be transparent. Even the slightest indication of wrongdoing should mean the end of a politician. And a rapid slump of the party’s support.
One would think that nothing happens without the super-rich’s decisions. And it is correct. One would say these are the super-rich who decide everything. No, wrong. As we can definitely say, democracy is really not the rule of the people. But we have pensions, social systems, free healthcare (if you, of course, live in a social state, mainly Europe); we can regulate the super-rich’s behavior. Even though they transfer 30 billion dollars to a tax haven in the Czech Republic.
I would conclude that democracy is the rule of both the people and the super-rich.
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