Close to a century after Augustus seized power and made himself emperor, the common Roman citizen still believed their State remained a republic.
The Roman senate continued to hold sessions and the Roman emperors continued to speak of themselves as consuls.
Today, something similar has transpired within the Western world — a corrupt oligarchy rules over it yet continues to maintain a façade of just democracy.
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Two decades of data show from the United States shows that, in general, governments do not really care one iota about the needs, wants and opinions of the average citizen.
Rather, what really influence their decisions are the moneyed folks — big businessmen, bankers, lobbyists, and other economic elites.
I saw it myself when I served as a Member of the Australian Parliament.
The pretty much could have put a turnstile between the financial services sector and Parliament House.
And this is pretty much the case right across ‘democratic’ Western countries.
Government has stopped listening.
In Europe, most citizens are overwhelmingly opposed to mass migration because of their countries’ complete failure to integrate them properly.
However, governments continue to open the floodgates to more and more migrants.
In Australia, Labor and the union movement have spent years attacking the previous Liberal National government over the rising level of foreign workers in the country, pointing out that it displaces the jobs of average Australians and drives down wages.
Yet the relatively new Albanese Laborgovernment has just approved the largest rise in Australia’s migration after caving in to a push by big corporations for more foreign workers at the government’s Jobs & Skills Summit.
Those big corporations no doubt like the sound of Labor’s previous complaints about foreign workers driving down wages.
Macrobusiness recently ran a brilliant opinion piece in which they lambasted all sides of politics for seeking to turn Australia into a guest worker nation, saying:
So as predicted, the Jobs & Skills Summit has been turned into one giant immigration scab grab that will see permanent and temporary migration lifted to unprecedented levels against the direct wishes of the Australian people, who have not gotten a say.
There are few countries whose citizenry welcome the prospect of open borders.
Rather, they see it for what it is: an example of crony business interests trump the will of the people, where those big corporations and the globalist ‘elites’ stand to gain from mass migration by suppressing wages, eroding social cohesion, and creating deliberate animosity between natives and migrants.
The growing dissonance between the electorate and the elected reflects a widening gap in terms of power and influence between the 0.1 percent and the rest.
The decay — or corruption — of democracy can now be felt in every facet of our society.
Where once merit, smarts and hard work determined one’s standing in a society, today it is all about connections and money.
Where once freedom of speech was championed, now everything spoken word is carefully curated, particularly when it comes to ‘sensitive’ topics.
We wouldn’t want to hurt the snowflakes’ feelings with facts now, would we?
(Actually, we’ve slipped so far down this slope that they’ve just jailed a teacher in Ireland for refusing to use a student’s ‘correct’ pronouns… by which it’s really meant incorrect pronouns.)
Where once the politicians worked towards furthering the national interest, they now work towards furthering corporate interests or woke minority interests (which are also now backed by big corporations).
And by ‘corporate’ and ‘corporation’ I don’t imply that politicians are furthering the free market but rather the opposite; strangling it with regulations and ad hoc policies so as to help enrich their fellow ‘elites’ and themselves.
There is nothing more oppressive to a small business or disruptive start up than such red tape and, likewise, nothing more welcome to a big corporation who have oodles of middle management cubicle prisoners to fill in whatever forms or collect whatever data that government requests of them.
Nowhere is the enrichment of the ‘elites’ more explicit than in revelations from Hunter Biden’s laptop of President Joe Biden’s dealings with a Chinese company – CEFC China Company.
CEFC was a company with deep ties with the Communist elite with Ye Jianming, its chairman, being closely affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army.
For a supposed 10 percent stake in his son’s business, the ‘Big Guy’ was willing to compromise his country’s national security.
In a better world, this bombshell news should have disqualified Biden from running for the presidency, yet he right now stands as a ‘leader’ of the free world.
In Australia, we witnessed just how far our political rights could be eroded due to government overreach during the so-called ‘pandemic’.
Just over a year ago, the State of Victoria, now known as the socialist State, actually suspended the sitting of its parliament under the pretext of “preventing the spread of COVID-19”.
They then applied a night-time curfew on grown adults.
No debates in parliament about such an egregious breach of human rights. They just did it.
When this can happen in a country like Australia, touted as among the most robust democracies, one can only wonder how worse the political climate has gotten elsewhere.
The recent (and ongoing) global protests against the ‘elites’ — that the legacy media are largely not talking — about may give us a guide.
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George Christensen was a Member of Parliament from 2010 - 2022 who popularly represented the federal electorate of Dawson in north Queensland for the LNP, part of the Government coalition. He explores both the big philosophical questions of our time and current events from a conservative worldview. He comes from a farming family and his background is in journalism and business.
