Americans live in ‘oligarchy’ not ‘democracy’: Analyst

An American political analyst says that there is no democracy in the United States and that people there live in an “oligarchy.”

Speaking in an interview with Press TV on Tuesday, Daniel Patrick Welch described as “fake” the two main political parties in the US, Democratic and Republican, saying US presidential elections are not like any election in other countries.

“There is no democracy” in the US, he said, adding, “There are no elections in the same way that people around the world would recognize the term. This is just a circus. It's like a dog and pony show to convince the general populace that they actually live in a functioning democracy when what they really are in is an oligarchy where these two fake so-called parties which are just wings of the ruling class choose candidates and slug it out and pretend there's this big showdown every four years or every two years or whatever.”

He made the remarks when asked about a report that shows thousands of absentee ballots could be rejected in this year’s presidential election amid the coronavirus pandemic which has created a surge in mail-in balloting and postal delays.

According to an Associated Press analysis of rejected ballots, the number of rejected ballots in November is predicted to be a great deal higher than previous elections.

Up to three times as many voters in November could be disenfranchised in key battleground states in comparison to the previous presidential election if ballots are rejected at the same rate as during this year's primaries, the report added.

Absentee ballot rejections could triple in battleground US states

The number of rejected ballots in November is predicted to be a great deal higher than previous elections, a report shows.

But this year, these problems could get worse as millions of voters cast mail-in ballots for the first time due to election changes forced by the virus. President Donald Trump, for months, has been claiming that widespread mail-in voting will result in fraud.

Experts note there is minimal evidence of meaningful fraud in mail-in voting, and some see Trump’s latest round of attacks as an effort to restrict ballot access and preemptively cast suspicion on the 2020 election results should he lose.

Welch went on to say that “There's no evidence in this country or anywhere else that mail-in voting results in a significant amount of fraud. In fact, voter fraud itself is fairly rare.”

He also commented on presidential candidates in the US, saying, “Nobody really has any control over these candidates. They're controlled by billionaires who spend literally billions of dollars to convince the public that the other guy wet his bed when he was seven and that's the meaning of democracy in the United States.”

Following is the complete text of Mr. Welch's interview. 

Well, it becomes increasingly tiresome to explain especially to foreigners the quadrennial shit show that is voting in the presidential so-called elections in the United States, and the thing is that it has to be looked at on a number of levels. You have the kind of overarching level which is there is no democracy, there are no elections in the same way that people around the world would recognize the term. This is just a circus. It's like a dog and pony show to convince the general populace that they actually live in a functioning democracy when what they really are in is an oligarchy where these two fake so-called parties which are just wings of the ruling class--choose candidates and slug it out and pretend there's this big showdown every four years or every two years or whatever.

So, analyzing it is a little bit like dissecting a cloud: you can't do it scientifically. It’s more like analyzing poetry, or rather really bad literature. So that's the kind of meta-level. Then on the day-to-day or the ground level, you've always had this fierce battle. It looks like a real election: one party is accusing the other of fraud and so on. So then you get this thing like Trump tweeting that there's so much fraud. There's no evidence in this country or anywhere else that mail-in voting results in a significant amount of fraud. In fact, voter fraud itself is fairly rare. Electoral fraud is rampant from the first level that I just said, which is nobody really has any control over these candidates. They're controlled by billionaires who spend literally billions of dollars to convince the public that the other guy wet his bed when he was seven. That's the meaning of democracy in the United States.

But between those differences, you have the nitty-gritty, which is so repulsive that most people like I said wouldn't understand it if they look close. The Carter Center admitted flat out, Jimmy Carter said they couldn't analyze, or monitor elections in the US because it doesn't even meet the minimum standards of their analysis.

There's no central voting. There's no paper ballot. There's no paper trail. There's no way--no way of knowing whether your vote is actually counted. That's shocking when you just think of it, you see a video of people voting all over the world and what do they all have these big Lucite boxes in which people are checking off the candidate of their choice and sticking it in the bin. That doesn't happen anywhere in this country. DOESN'T HAPPEN.

And so now you have these tricks that both parties use. And for the most part, the Republican Party is more guilty than the Democratic Party if only because they are wedded to the oligarchy in slightly tighter ways. Like the two companies that own most of the voting machines and the proprietary software that goes with that are both owned by right-wing oligarchs and that's obviously going to tilt more to the right, rather than the pseudo-left which is what the Democrats represent.

Then you have the traditional view how it’s always been: the Republicans say that Democrats are voting twice, dead people are voting, all these old saws that are meant to discredit the very concept of universal suffrage.

You have to remember that universal suffrage is only the latest step, the attainment of some power by the people, and every time that the people have advanced the ruling class has managed to shift the game. This is why when the British were marching for suffrage [for women], and Helen Keller wrote to one of her British counterparts that look, you know if voting did anything for men, you would have seen it by now. So that just voting is not is not gonna do anything.

We're supposed to believe this show that Biden? Bide won…what? Biden won some sort of casino rigged game—overnight!--became The Choice of the People when he had no money, no backing, no anything, literally overnight.

That's the real story of this election. We can talk about Trump, we can talk about... but the only big thing about this election is that the Democrat establishment, the power brokers were much more afraid of losing to a milquetoast social democrat like Sanders than they are of losing to Trump. They would rather lose to Trump than lose to the so-called left of their own party. And look at that: Sanders just turned tail on his base, his so-called base in a heartbeat, and is now running to support this candidacy of Biden and Harris.

I mean talk about tone-deaf. This party at the height of the mass uprising in this country and around the world for police accountability and brutality against Black people chooses a cop for vice president and the guy for a president who more than anyone represents the gateway to the mass incarceration of Black people--the author of the crime bill. It’s absolutely out of touch. And that's because it's meant to be. It has nothing to do with people.

There is no voting in that sense in this country. But Trump can take that and use it cynically like he does with everything else, and try to skew it, and now this is where the rubber meets the road. He's saying in these battleground states in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, whatever, that there is going to be such a clusterf&%k of problems that people are going to get disenfranchised, the votes won't be counted and yada yada yada, Trump will wind up winning those states again and he'll win the presidency such as it is.

And then everyone's going to try to come around and blame the Russians, now the Chinese, everyone ‘meddles’ in our voting system. Somehow, that is a story. Even though, again, the real story is the US meddling in every other election in the world that they can get their hands on for 100 years. I mean it's such a ridiculous notion, and the US needs to sit down and stop talking about voting irregularities or elections in any other country, because if they don't have a democratic election system in theirs, and that's the honest truth.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.ir