[Marxism] U.S. democracy (was re: something or other, I forget...)

["Jose G. Perez" <elgusanorojo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Juriaan writes, "To me the American idea of democracy increasingly seems
really weird  - it is as if the 20th century never happened."

And the 19th Century, too.

Actually, United Statesians are blissfully unaware they have possibly
the most primitively barbaric, medieval and corrupt system of all the
pretend-democratic systems in the world. 

People on this country *seriously* believe that the U.S. system is the
finest, most perfectly democratic in the world. They also believe things
like that a being that is all-seeing, all-knowing, all powerful and
created everything is REALLY PISSED at you PERSONALLY because you were
getting laid last Sunday and didn't go to Church. Really.

Hence famous aphorisms like "nobody ever went broke underestimating the
intelligence of the American public." Which, in typical United Statesian
fashion, subsumes the rest of the hemisphere 

For example, in most self-styled democracies nowadays, the elections are
run by an independent branch of government or some other
quasi-autonomous setup. In the U.S., they are normally run by an elected
official, often one with political ambitions, since in many states the
secretary of state is usually viewed as a possible future gubernatorial
or federal congressional or senate candidate, and they own the
elections.

And there isn't even an attempt to protect the system from actual,
overwhelming conflicts of interests, never mind the appearance of a
conflict.

For example, the person who ran the 2000 election in Florida, Kathleen
Harris, had been (Fla. Gov.) Jeb Bush's running mate in the previous
election cycle; she was co-chair of (then Texas Gov.) George W. Bush's
Florida presidential campaign, and since the election of the president
is indirect, and you aren't really voting for your candidate but a slate
of "electors" committed to vote for the presidential candidate in the
electoral college (which, BTW, never meets -- its members gather in
state capitals in mid-December and send in their votes by Pony Express),
she was ALSO a Bush elector, i.e., the real candidate in the race. 

I submit than even in the most backward, shameless third world
dictatorship, under such circumstances, a person in the position of
Kathleen Harris would at least *pretend* to recuse her or himself from
making decisions about whether or not to count the votes that were cast.


Not in Amerikkka.

I think the most telling comment on the 2000 elections was made by Mr.
Jimmy "Human Rights" Carter, who is the world's leading expert in giving
bourgeois electoral farces an air of respectability and transparency. 

Asked at that time whether the Carter Center would have been willing to
monitor the 2000 presidential elections in Florida, Mr. Jimmy responded
that it would NOT have been, because the minimum pre-requisites for a
possibly democratic, free and fair election --mind you, democratic, free
and fair by Mr. Jimmy's lights, and just the pre-requisites-- were not
in place. 

Although we should keep a sense of proportion about this. The United
States is said to have about half a million elected government or
quasi-governmental posts. Of those perhaps 1% are truly contested. Even
for the federal House of Representatives, there are at most in any given
year about 5% of the 450-odd seats that are actually "in play" -- in all
the rest the outcome is a foregone conclusion. So this idea that most
elections are routinely stolen in the United States and so on *must* be
considered a slander. In fact, there is rarely a need for stealing an
election at all, for most United Statesian elections are completely and
utterly meaningless. 

But its not just the elections. 

The U.S. today has, for all practical purposes, no written constitution.
That old parchment means whatever the Supremes say it means this week,
and they change THAT all the time. In 1985 it meant you could be
arrested, tried and burned at the stake --err, I mean convicted and sent
to prison-- for being intimate with someone of the same sex in the
privacy of your own home (at least in the sovereign state of Georgia).

In 2003 the meaning had changed 180 degrees -- what had been perfectly
legal a few years before, pigs looking in the bedroom window, became an
outrageous violation of individual rights! Evolving community standards
or somesuch, said the Supremes. 

Bullshit. Those robed reactionaries of the ruling rich follow public
opinion polls, that's all.

Before the 1920's that bit in the First Amendment about Congress making
no law restricting freedom of speech, etc., meant literally that:
*CONGRESS* could not do it, but the state and local governments were
free to do so. It was the Wobbliest and Socialist Party left wing that
challenged those restrictions thru direct action and got them struck
down. 

The criminal justice system is an absolute horror. Negotiations over the
sentence and crime the person will plead guilty to between the
prosecution and defense lawyers, something that in most civilized
countries would be considered a criminal offense, here is revered. Some
90% of criminal cases are settled that way. 

Unlike "repressive police state tyrannical regimes" like, for example,
Cuba, in the United States, a defendant does not even have the RIGHT to
speak in his own defense. The defendant may speak only as a WITNESS,
with cross-examination and the threat of perjury hanging over them, or
acting as his own attorney, i.e., deprived of competent legal counsel. 

The idea that someone facing long deprivation of liberty or even the
death penalty should be allowed to speak on their own behalf was
considered is so utterly alien to the U.S. judicial tradition that in
one Star Trek segment it is presented as "the Klingon rite of statement"
(or was it the Romulan rite...?) which Spock (the Lt. Cdr., not the
doctor) takes advantage of.

Subornation of perjury is an everyday, nay, everyhour occurrence in
every single criminal court throughout the United States. 

A couple of years ago, one three judge panel of the federal appeals
court in Denver heard a case in which the feds bought the testimony of a
supposed co-conspirator in drug running by giving the person a reduced
sentence. And the person perjured himself by denying it. 

Now two of these three judges read the statute on subornation or perjury
(whoever offers money or "anything of value" in exchange for testimony
[the testimony itself does not have to be false, that is not an element
of the crime] is guilty of subornation of perjury. And it doesn't say
except for cops and prosecutors. It says whoever, anybody, anyone at
all.

And these two judges said, hey, liberty is something of value. What the
prosecutor did was a felony. Obtaining testimony by criminal means is
contrary to public policy, and the woman (I think it was a woman)
convicted on the basis of bought testimony should be freed.

The government didn't even have to appeal the decision. The "Circuit"
--federal appeals court-- decided on its own initiative to rehear the
case en banc, with the participation of all the regular appeals court
judges, 12 in all, I believe it was, and overturned their panel 10-2.

When you tell lawyers and such from a quasi-civilized country like those
in Western Europe that prosecutors are elected and a part of the
executive, not a dependency of the judicial branch, that trials are
strictly oral, that competing "experts" are hired by the prosecution
and defense, rather than the court seeking out ITS OWN independent
experts, that the government regularly relies on stool pigeons, and that
*exculpatory* hearsay is banned, but incriminatory supposed statements
by the defendant are admissible, they just can't imagine it. They'll say
things like, my God, this is like the Spanish inquisition. 

Exactly.

Then stop to consider that the U.S. has more than 2 million people in
prison, 1% of the adult population, 4-5 million more under parole, tens
of millions branded "felons" in government archives. And the BIG
majority of those folks are Blacks and Latinos -- and in reality, more
disproportionately Black than Latino. And that you have a
similarly-sized segment of the population -- several percent, who are
either state, federal or local government pigs, prison pigs,  airport
luggage pigs, or private pigs including the rent-a-pig outfits, and you
start to get the image of a society that can be maintained only by the
most extreme repression, extreme not in the sense that they use tactical
nukes if you don't pay a traffic ticket, but extreme in the sense of
pervasive and penetrating into every pore of civil society. 

DEMOCRACY in the United States? What a great idea! I'm all for it. But
it is so far away from where I live you can't even see it with the
Hubble Space Telescope.

José



-----Original Message-----
From: marxism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:marxism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jurriaan
Bendien
Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 2004 6:50 PM
To: Lou Paulsen
Cc: Marxmail List
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Numbers question


Yes, okay... I did not understand this properly, because I thought that,
by registering with a US electoral committee, you actually affiliated
formally with a party, and that apart from this, you might still have
some measures of the active political participation in parties of some
sort. To me the American idea of democracy increasingly seems really
weird  - it is as if the 20th century never happened. In the countries
where I've lived, you have representative democracy, proportional
representation and so on, you have laws requiring political
accountability by parties, and state subsidisation of party-political
activity to some extent. Therefore, all political tendencies with a
minimum level of support have a realistic chance of a voice in
government, and the parliamentary representation must reasonably reflect
the actual distribution of votes cast.

J.

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