The most talked about world democracy is a democracy for the owners and managers, like the ancient Athens was a democracy for free citizens, and not for their slaves. Of course, there are no more slaves in the U.S., and politically everybody has equal rights under the law, everybody is allowed to vote and every vote counts - but politics doesn't count a bit in the down here real everyday life. It doesn't matter who the president is or who your congressman is - what it does matter is who your boss is, because he is the one who has your day-to-day existence in his hands, by having an unappealable right to hire or fire your ass. And you have no control over him and his decisions whatsoever. .

Theoretically he will be an honest and good manager and he will exercise his God-like right over your well-being for valid reasons: like if you screw up or if the company screws up and can't pay you any more. But life is often less than perfect: your manager can be an asshole and can fire you at a whim, because he doesn't like you. That's called an attitude problem, and it is always your attitude problem (regardless of if it is yours or his attitude in question).

If you are an owner, or a manager or, at least, a unionized worker, for you the U.S. still resembles a democracy, and you believe that the American way of life is the right way, but if you are not, and millions are not (particularly now when unionization of labor declined to a meager 10+%), then you don't actually live in democracy of America: you live in an authoritarian dictatorship of your corporation, which is just vaguely affiliated with a country called USA. Media, Hollywood, cable TV, credit cards - they are all in place to create an illusion of a perfect democracy for you (which most of people anywhere in the world identify with living standard, anyway).

The fact that you don't actually live in a democracy, means that the rules which would apply to you in let's say former Yugoslavia, apply to you as well in any of such corporations. The only difference from slavery or from the life in a communist country is that you are always free to leave any of those corporations, there is no passport necessary, and go crash on a subway asking people for donations. Not surprisingly, more people prefer paying exorbitantly high rents and keeping their heads down, pretending they love their work and, more importantly, that they admire their bosses as demigods, their personal integrity be damned. That's called "eating shit." You wouldn't believe how shit from your bosses ass is nutritious.

In 1987 when the Yugoslav State Security Police interrogated several my friends trying to obtain testimonies to arrest me, some of them indeed wrongly testified against me, and some of them did not want to see me after the interrogation. Like my friend Branko: he was always an above average timid guy, anxious to the bone. The police threatened him to "throw him in the mud" by ruining his career in its beginnings (he was finishing Law School in Zagreb). After that, he would always run to the other side of the street if he saw me, just to avoid being seen with me. It did pay off: today he is a senior official in Croatian embassy in Rome.

In 1997 when the Normandie Court's Health Club manager arbitrarily fired me, my friend Jonathan, who is, incidentally, an above average timid and anxious personality, too, told me that he can't see me any more: I can't call him in the Club, where he is still employed, and I can't come to the building where he and the aforementioned manager live, lest not be seen by anybody who could make a connection that we are still friends. Maybe this is a smart decision and will make Jonathan a manager of some building in New York city one day, who knows.