Jimmy Carter Says U.S. "Has No Functioning Democracy"

 “America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy,” he said at an event in Atlanta on Tuesday sponsored by the Atlantik Bruecke, a private non-profit association working to further the German-U.S. relationship (its name is German for “Atlantic bridge.”)
 
Carter’s remarks did not appear in the American mainstream press, but were reported from Atlanta by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, whose Washington correspondent Gregor Peter Schmitz said on Twitter he was present at the event. The story does not appear in the English-language section of the Spiegel website, but is available only in German.
 
The 39th president also said he was pessimistic about the current state of global affairs, wrote Der Spiegel, because there was “no reason for him to be optimistic at this time”. Among the developments that make him uneasy, Carter cited the “falling of Egypt under a military dictatorship.” As president, Carter managed to get then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to sign the Camp David peace agreements in 1979.
 
Carter said a bright spot was “the triumph of modern technology” which enabled the democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring. But the NSA spying scandal, said Carter according to Der Spiegel, endangers precisely those developments, “as major U.S. Internet platforms  such as Google or Facebook lose credibility worldwide.”