The Charade of American Democracy: Exposing the Oligarchy

Shahid Bolsen
9 min readJun 8, 2024

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America is not a democracy. America is an oligarchy, a plutocracy. It is rule by the rich. Of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.

Democracy in America is a smokescreen. It’s a charade they perform every election cycle to pacify you, to make you believe that you have a stake in the system. But let’s look at the reality. For roughly the first 100 years of American democracy, only white male property owners could vote. The so-called land of the free was built on the exclusion of the vast majority of its people from the democratic process. This gradually expanded to include all white males, theoretically Black males, but not in practice. Eventually, they had to grant the vote to women and Native Americans. Imagine that! The indigenous people of that land were the last to be given the right to vote in that land. What kind of democracy is that?

But they never wanted power in the hands of the people: as the franchise of voting expanded to include those who were not white male property owners, the real power moved further away from the democratic process. They dangled the right to vote in front of you to make you think you were a participant in power, but they kept the real power in the hands of the wealthy elite. As the right to vote expanded, the relevance of the vote contracted. I said, No one ever intended for power to be in the hands of the people, and it never has been.

Look at how money controls politics today. The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United opened the floodgates for corporate money in elections. Billionaires and corporations pour millions into political campaigns, drowning out the voices of ordinary people. They’re hiring the candidates, writing the laws, purchasing the policies that serve their interests. This isn’t democracy; it’s oligarchy. When a handful of wealthy individuals can dictate policy and sway elections, democracy is dead. Politicians just do a tour of duty in government to prove their loyalty to their funders before moving on to highly paid positions in the private sector, working for the same people they worked for all along.

Every time they do a tax cut, Who benefits? The richest 1% receive the lion’s share, while the rest of the people have to make up the difference. Whatever they don’t take from the rich, they take from you, instead of taking from the 1% who own and control more wealth than the rest of the 99%, they take it from you. And somehow you still think you live in a democracy. No, the democracy they have is the one they always intended to have, which is one in which only the rich and the owners of the society have any say. You have the right to free speech only because no one listens to you.

And where has this led? Well, it has led to where it only ever could lead. It’s led to the creation of an unaccountable oligarchical elite who don’t see you as anything but entries on their accounting books , either as assets they own or liabilities they need to eliminate. And through globalization this nation within a nation, because that is what the rich are, a nation within a nation; they became a global nation, an empire, and America is just one of the territories under their sovereignty. Oh, they colonized you. America became a colonized country, conquered by their own monopolistic, plutocratic elites; and they are subjugating you and the entire collective West the same way you colonized our countries.

They have created global institutions, imperial institutions, like BlackRock and Vanguard. That’s why I talk about the owners and controllers of global financialized capital. The owners organised institutions of control, and that is what BlackRock is. BlackRock is the ministry of imperial expansion. It’s like the Colonial Office of the old British Empire, and we recognize it as such.

Nobody likes BlackRock. Nobody likes the fact that we have to deal with this now. This predatory monster, this predatory monster that you made. That your system created, because you created the most insane wealth gap in history, and you created financialized wealth accumulation. You brag about how your brilliant economy has created more billionaires than any other economy, as if that is a sign of economic health, not economic deformation. You don’t say that about anything else, for anything else, disproportion is seen as ugly and unnatural. Like if you have someone with abnormally large teeth or something; or like those guys who lift weights at the gym but only work upper body muscles, but have spindly little chicken legs. Your economy is a mutant. The point of a healthy economy is not to produce huge disparity. But you brag about it, even as you hate BlackRock; well you made BlackRock, you created this class, this nation of parasitic wealth hoarders and the institutions they use to organise their economic power, the institutions of the feudal elite they use to consolidate and expand their control over everything. Nobody likes it, but you did it, you created this super predator, and now we all have to deal with it.

And of course, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard are not the first time you did this. The East India Company and the United Fruit Company were earlier versions of these institutions of economic imperialism; and of course, for all of these — the previous versions and the current ones — their main business has always been war and pillage. Because the fact is, you have never really come up with another way to make money. All your technology is only made possible by vicious exploitation, slavery, and violence. It bewilders me. Every argument Westerners make to substantiate their claim that their so-called civilization is superior, every argument is materialistic. We have nice things, we invented all the technology of the modern world, and so on. You don’t realize that, when you make that argument to the Global South, we are living in the background where all that technology comes from. It comes from our minerals, our rare earths, our mines, our ravaged environments, and our subjugated labour. We are living in the part of the Apple logo where the bite is. So, that doesn’t impress anyone in Africa or Asia or Latin America. You have nice stuff, and we know how you got it, and it wasn’t by brilliance it was by brutality. It was then and it is now. So, you should really stop using that argument, it’s self-incriminating.

So, we don’t have the option to ignore BlackRock, or pretend it doesn’t exist. We have to deal with it, with the reality of it. And the reality is that those billionaires you brag about creating have eaten you down to the bone, and they are coming our way now. They have completely captured your governments, and all the powers at the disposal of your governments. We can see what is happening in Europe, how BlackRock and the World Economic Forum are humiliating and sabotaging the whole continent, weakening the countries of Europe while simultaneously driving them into war. Your inspirational billionaires are leading Europe to the slaughter. It is really quite remarkable. They got rich by colonizing us, and now they are colonizing you; and if they can, they will come back and pillage us all over again.

But we have experience now. Now we know better how to strategize and contain the threat your OCGFC pose. And we know how the power dynamics have changed. That’s why countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Malaysia are initiating deals with BlackRock, partnerships with BlackRock, we know the risk, of course we do, but like I said, we cannot safely ignore them either. By voluntarily giving them a stake in our economies, we disincentivize open hostility and aggression, and we can set the terms, define the relationship, fix the limits to ensure mutual benefit.

Look, there isn’t a part of the Muslim world that is not under threat. There isn’t a part of the Muslim world that they don’t already have a prepared pretext for invasion and violent coercion. From the Sahel to Southeast Asia, and obviously, the Middle East. All the pretexts are there for violent disruption and destabilization. If it weren’t for the partnerships between BlackRock and Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the Gulf; I don’t think there is any reason to believe that there wouldn’t already be a region-wide war in West Asia. But those deals have given the OCGFC a reason to prefer stability. It is those deals, it is because of those strategic alliances, in my opinion, that Israel is getting more and more isolated, and it is why Zionism is fast becoming obsolete. There is no doubt in my mind that if our countries completely cut off access to institutions like BlackRock, if we completely shut them out — as many are inclined to do, quite understandably — I have no doubt that the Neocons in Washington would have OCGFC backing to launch multiple wars and campaigns of violence across the Global South.

Again, nobody likes it. And everyone is fully aware that these people are vicious predators and cannot be trusted. But it is precisely because they are this way, that we have to deal with them. Just like the mafia, giving them a cut of your revenues keeps your shop from being burnt to the ground.

Because, you see, your OCGFC want to come over here, your BlackRocks and Vanguards (I mean, for Vanguard, the name gives it away); they want to come over here, but our systems are not like yours over there. I have talked about this many times. Our authority structures are not like yours. We have our own OCGFC, we have our own elites, our own domestic owners and controllers, kings, sultans, emirs, tribal chiefs, mukhtars, and what have you. Especially in our richest countries, like the Gulf States. And they are connected, often by actual family ties, to the population. They have a heritage of power and control, and they rule both the public and the private sector; and they have a memory of colonization. That memory informs their strategies now, because they don’t want to get co-opted again, they don’t want to get subordinated again. They know your tricks and your traps and your triggers, and they know your criminal intentions. And most importantly, they know that you are coming over here, let’s be honest, because there is nowhere left for you to go; and that means they have bargaining power.

Our liberation from colonization is not going to happen by means of a dramatic revolution, but by a careful meticulous succession of manoeuvres. Just like a prison escape, moving at just the right moment, just the right distance, and once we get out of the prison compound, there’s a minefield we have to navigate through. It is going to happen by a series of trade-offs, with each one resulting in more sovereignty and more independence than the last; and every door we pass through, we will close behind us. Until eventually, the prison guards and the prisoners have completely traded places.

I believe that is what our countries, the Muslim countries, the BRICS nations, that is what they are doing, and they are doing it masterfully, in my opinion. And there is no doubt that it is treacherous, it’s dangerous, again, just like a prison escape. But I know, from my own experience, that solidarity and unity is absolutely essential. Everybody has a role to play, everyone has to do their duty and keep a cool head . This is not a drill.

We are taking back our lands, taking back our territory, politically, economically, psychologically, and culturally, and we are doing it methodically and systematically. And in my opinion, anyone who tries to incite emotion and impatience is working for the enemy, whether they know it or not.

Look, our liberation will liberate everyone. And no one can do it but us. The West certainly can’t do it; you created the problem, you gave birth to this monster, and we are your only hope of slaying it. And who do I mean by “we”? I mean the Muslims. The Muslims are the only ones who can stop this juggernaut, we have experience in toppling empires, but we do it our way, not your way. The Sassainians, the Byzantines, the Visogoths, the kingdoms of North Africa, India, Central Asia….no one has confronted and transformed more empires than the Muslims. And we have never been conquered, that’s a lie the West likes to tell itself, and tries to convince us about. But no, we’ve never been conquered. You never succeeded in turning our lands away from Islam, and you never will. And that is what our empire was about, it wasn’t like yours, it wasn’t about colonization and wealth, we didn’t have materialistic or power-hungry motives; all we wanted was Islam to reach the people, and it did, and once it did, it stayed. The only way you could turn a Muslim land away from Islam was by driving us out of it, which invariably resulted in a miserable orgy of violence and repression in any country you drove us out of; but you never conquered a single land of ours and successfully drove Islam out of it. Not even Communist China and the cultural revolution could uproot Islam from the hearts of the Muslims. So, yes, we have converted empire after empire, and we can do it again with your monstrous empire of capital, your corporate colonizer empire, your OCGFC. Tyranny of elites. And we will do it our way, with tact, with da’awah, with strategy, with trade and negotiation. And if you have any sense at all, you will be praying for our victory, because Muslim victory over your psychopathic predatory 1% will free the whole world; and it’s the only thing that can. You can thank us later

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