Eric Zuesse
The http://youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig , which was the first study anywhere to examine the data to determine scientifically whether or not a given Government is a democracy or instead a dictatorship, studied the U.S. data, and found conclusively that it's a dictatorship. The U.S. is controlled by its six or seven hundred billionaires (the study identified America's ruling class as only "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests", but the people who own the controlling interest in over 90% of that and hire their lobbyists and fund the careers of the winning politicians are simply America's billionaires, the U.S. oligarchy or "aristocracy"). After that landmark 2014 study, other reports came forth, all adding further confirmation to its findings.
What is the result of billionaires-rule?
America has a higher percentage of its people in prison than any other nation on Earth, and none of America's prisoners are billionaires nor spouse or child of any, except for the very few organized criminals who were cheating and stealing from other billionaires (and, since billionaires rule America, that's the only type of crime a billionaire can be successfully prosecuted for perpetrating in America - crimes against other billionaires). The people who control the people who write and enforce the laws don't need to worry about prison. Almost all of America's prisoners are, in fact, poor people, not even middle-class - and virtually none are upper-class. They're born poor, live poor, and die poor.
Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and George W. Bush, have all had their careers funded by America's billionaires, and that's why these politicians received their respective Party's nominations. Without the billionaires' support, they'd be nothing, just losing politicians. You get the nomination by representing your Party's billionaires, not by representing its voters. Behind the scenes, even America's racial caste system is enforced on behalf of both Parties' billionaires, because supremacism is what they all share, regardless of their rhetoric to the contrary, and there is a groupist element to this supremacism. (Every aristocracy is like that - very groupist.)
And this fact shows itself most starkly in international relations, America's imperialism, from which the whole world suffers.
That's why the U.S. Government is profoundly evil: destroying Iraq in 2003-, destroying Libya in 2011-, destroying Syria in 2012-, etc., and trying so hard to destroy Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, and any other country it hasn't yet destroyed and is still trying to conquer via sanctions, coups, or invasions.
It's not the American people who are evil; it is all of America's billionaires - not a one of whom funds any anti-imperialist candidate. They ALL want conquest, because they all are supremacists.
Here's just one example: Elon Musk.
A 29 November 2019 article "Bolivia: Post-Coup Update" presented the 10 November 2019 coup there as having been internally based upon targeting that country's native indian 70% as being inferior to the country's 30% white European-derived aristocracy and upper-middle class, so that this was a targeting by the richest, a bigotry which serves the interests of the wealthiest. And, as usual, the U.S. regime was backing that bigotry. Furthermore, on 24 July 2020, Tesla corporation's founder, Elon Musk, tweeted back in response to a tweet from an "Armani" which criticized "the U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there." Musk replied "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." After some negative public reactions to that, he added, "Also, we get our lithium from Australia." Then, on July 25th, "Carlos Reymon G" replied "Dude you get Lithium from Ganfeng which gets their Lithium from Bolivia; a quick google search will tell you that." Immediately prior to those exchanges, Musk had tried to signal his virtuousness by tweeting, on the morning of July 24th, "As a reminder, I'm in *favor* of universal basic income." So, though he thinks it's fine to rob the poor in Bolivia, he doesn't want to treat his own nation's poor so psychopathically. His bigotry against the masses in Bolivia doesn't extend to the masses in his own country, he was saying. At Reddit, many of the commenters were in denial, and just assumed that Musk had been joking - "In order to understand the joke you have to understand the coup thing (and his involvement) is a conspiracy theory in socialist circles without any basis in reality." - or etc. Many ordinary people simply refuse to believe how evil and deceitful, and outright bigoted (basically supremacist), people have to be in order to become and remain a billionaire. The idea that wealth reflects virtue - maybe even God's blessing - is heavily promoted, by billionaires. For them, it's a self-'justifying' belief. The myth of the kindly 'philanthropic' billionaire (supposedly not motivated by the tax-writeoffs and buildings that will be named in their honor for the 'donation') is thus intrinsic to the culture in America and many other countries - countries that are largely controlled by the U.S. regime (its billionaires).
Musk himself was born in 1971 and lived his entire formative years in apartheid South Africa, leaving for Canada in 1988, so that he lived all of his first 17 years under the racist apartheid White dictatorship. He was raised in an exceptionally wealthy family, and went to Canada for college, specifically so that he would be able more easily to be received into America's Wharton School as a Canadian. He and his entire family were obsessed with money and sex, surrounded by intense racism and with being on the "gifted" (i.e., lucky) end of that supremacism, and they were satisfied to live as extremely wealthy and successful Whites under an apartheid White-supremacist Government, never condemning it, either before or after the end of apartheid in the 1990s. So, it's perhaps natural for Musk today to view the 70% native-indian population of Bolivia as being just fine to exploit and crush - even to rob them - much like Blacks had been robbed by the racist bigoted system, when and where he was growing up.
To view people like Musk as models to emulate, is common, but evil - systemically evil, because it sets an abhorrent standard, as being something that should instead be perpetuated and copied. There is no way in which the social sciences should shun moral evaluations, but they need to be empirically justifiable, which is not the way nature itself functions - nature is unplanned (nothing that is justifiable or unjustifiable). This type of planning can be done only by deviating from the natural dominance of psychopathy ("It's I versus everybody else") in social matters. To deny the unnaturalness of good, and to set the natural psychopathy as being instead something to emulate, is the opposite of science. It is not only to lie; it is to avoid the application of science to the planning of society. It is to negate any social science, and to advocate instead for the "state of nature," which is "red in tooth and claw," and to apply that standard to human society. It is to take what is the systemic norm (chaos), as being instead what should be the systemic norm; it is to reject any social science, at all. Victory to the psychopaths is bad, not good. That actual societal chaos is what billionaires push for, even when their rhetoric is the exact opposite. Their rhetoric is the opposite because, in order to win, they need to deceive the public; they need to do this in order to conquer the public, as any supremacist wants to do. Deceit is their primary weapon.
On 8 June 2020, Glenn Greenwald headlined at The Intercept "The New York Times Admits Key Falsehoods That Drove Last Year's Coup in Bolivia: Falsehoods Peddled by the U.S., Its Media, and the Times", and he documented that the U.S. regime and its Latin American vassal nations had engineered the coup that took place during October and November of 2019 in Bolivia. This was little more than two years after Bolivia's President Morales, on 17 July 2017, had publicly announced a plan, with funding from his Government, to develop Bolivia's lithium - the world's largest reserves of the mineral - so that the Bolivian people, instead of foreign investors, would reap the rewards from that lithium.
On 20 July 2020, Forbes headlined "Elon Musk Is Now The Fifth Richest Person In The World" and reported that "As of Monday afternoon, Musk's net worth surpassed $74 billion, meaning he is now the fifth-richest person on the planet." Bolivia's entire Gross National Product during 2019 was $40.58 billion. That's for 11.4 million people - $3,559 per person. How much of an opportunity will each of those 11.4 million people have to 'earn' $74 billion (assuming they'd be psychopathic enough, and gifted enough, to 'earn' it)?
For a person to become a billionaire, or stay one, psychopathy is the first requirement. It's that way everywhere, unless the Government is very strict in prohibiting that. A libertarian (otherwise called "neo-liberal") government offers maximum freedom for the richest, but grinding servitude for everyone at the bottom, where there are typically found many decent, and even many heroic, individuals. It's an upside-down world, but that's naturally the way things are. What's natural isn't necessarily good. Billionaires want the public to believe otherwise, but they know themselves to be lying when they say that what's good is natural. A good society never happens naturally, and they know this, but they don't want the public to know it, and they make sure that the majority of the public won't know it.
While a pauper who kills one person will likely go to prison for decades, a billionaire who crushes millions and kills tens or hundreds of thousands will have no accountability, at all. And most, even of Bolivia's 70% native-indian population, won't know who robbed and crushed them, and how it was done to them. They will know only the result - nothing else. The result is something that they'll know, only too well.
A progressive wants equal opportunity for all, and equal liability to all. The state of nature is exactly the opposite: it is libertarian (total opportunity, and no liability) for the richest, but stifling serfdom for everybody else. Libertarians call the state of nature simply "libertarianism," but it's actually the most liberty for the fewest. And today's America exemplifies that, in an extreme way. The suffering, from it, extends globally.
And the source of this suffering is hidden by billionaires, globally, which is the reason why the regime that perpetrated Iraq 2003-, Libya 2011-, Syria 2012-, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, etc., and that is also profoundly bigoted against Blacks and some other groups domestically, is still accepted in some countries, and not yet sanctioned worldwide, and why its brands are not even being boycotted, anywhere.
This isn't to say that America's billionaires are abnormal, but only that they are the most powerful, because they are the billionaires who control the imperial regime. America's allies such as UK and Holland are just as corrupt (and new reports of their corruption keep coming in all the time), but they would not be the threats that they are if they weren't vassals of the imperial regime. The problem isn't only their evilness; it's the power that they hold. That's why the focus right now needs to be on the U.S. regime, and on the billionaires who control it. That's where the main threat to the world is, at the center. Voters in the corrupt countries accept it, they continue to vote for it; they don't revolt against it; so, if the counterforce won't come from the outside, then it won't come at all. And, if counterforce won't come at all, then what hope is there, really? Individuals in foreign countries can vote against it, and boycott it. That's all.