As a young man, toward the end of the Cold War, I realized something was fundamentally amiss. We were told we were fighting for Democracy and against Communism. But one of these is an economic system and the other is a system of government. The USSR at the time was a democracy, in that they held elections. So why this switcheroo? I figured people really didn’t have a great interest in fighting a long expensive war for Capitalism, so “Democracy” was quietly substituted. And so somehow everyone went along with this very inaccurate description of this very important subject.
Of course when the USSR collapsed, they got Milton Friedman-style Free Market Capitalist economics (and kept their Democracy, relatively unchanged). What resulted was the situation today, with a country ruled by oligarchs. The US seems to have been following the same path, led by the exact same economists. The Hartmann Report discusses money and democracy in America today.
Steven A. Guccione 