Our reader Nelson Candelaria: Open letter to President Putin

Russia was a democracy; is it a plutocracy today? Why this question? Socialists live in real democracy, while the Western Hemisphere is otherwise plutocratic. Look up these words in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary on the web: - “Plutocracy: 1. Government by the wealthy. 2. A controlling class of the wealthy. Pure democracy: In which the power is exercised directly by the people rather than through representatives. Social democracy: a political movement advocating a gradual and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism by democratic means.” On the occidental way of “free” elections, the media, chiefly TV, fraudulently manipulates people. Human Rights and individual freedoms are another controversy. Socialist people assert that those Rights have, actually, been brought to fruition only in their countries. In western nations only the wealthy and controlling class enjoys those privileges. For the lower castes of a society Human Rights and individual freedoms are purely theoretical and do not exist as a matter of fact. This last statement is thoroughly demonstrated by an instance, among others: ownership. Every Socialist is the owner of his house, bought from the state by low monthly installments during no more than ten years; nobody is compelled to pay rent. Renting a house to somebody else is forbidden, just to avoid economic parasitism. And so on. It is important to emphasize that Capitalism is lexically and actually an economic system in which a country’s trade and industry are organized and controlled by the owners of capital, all of them parasites. Never by the working people. For instance: those who left Cuba in the 50’s and now live in Miami did so because they were the wealthy Cubans that had been getting rich out of the sweat of the poor Cubans. They were also parasites on the economic standpoint. The same has happened in Vietnam. I suppose that I have pointed out the core of the problem. Of course, there are a lot of other considerations to be taken into account; notwithstanding, I presume that they are only circumstantial. But what is it all about? What happened? Is Russia still a democracy? Or otherwise it is a plutocracy nowadays?

Nelson Candelaria Brazil