FW: CANOVA ON THE ELECTION

["Canova, Timothy" <CANOVA@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 	As the U.S. presidential campaign nears mid-December, Americans wait
> to see if their next president will essentially be chosen by the nine
> members of the top court acting like an unelected college of cardinals
> choosing a new pope.  It would be a gross irony if the U.S. Supreme Court
> should prevent the hand-counting of disputed votes in Florida on grounds
> of Equal Protection.  Unequal protection is more like it as the other
> branches of government found ample methods to keep many Americans --
> particularly blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities -- from ever
> casting ballots in this election.
>
>
> 		From Economic Reform, vol. 12 (Dec. 2000), pp. 4-5
> 		The Journal of the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform
> 		Toronto, Canada
>
> 		"Deadlock and Dissolution"
>
> 		by Timothy A. Canova
>
> 			A very dark cloud hangs over the U.S. presidential
> election as well as the economy.  Gross domestic product has finally
> started to stall and even fall in recent months.  The stock market remains
> in the dumps, more a result of disappointing corporate earning reports
> than from political instability.  And why are profits down?  For the same
> reason that the corporate bond market has taken an even bigger nose-dive
> than the Dow or Nasdaq stock indexes: a year of Federal Reserve interest
> rate increases are finally coming home to roost, even as the Fed
> threatened (until only recently) to raise interest rates further.  And
> Greenspan's ability to lower rates is now extremely hampered by a soaring
> U.S. trade deficit and a sky-high dollar that has nowhere to go but down.
> Wall Street analysts are beginning to use phrases like hard landing and
> recession.
>
> 			A harvest of bitterness awaits the winner of this
> election.  Half the country will swear the winner stole this election.
> And the winner will have to preside over the first serious downturn in
> more than a decade.  Whatever party wins could face catastrophic defeat in
> two years.  And yet it is hard to feel bad for either party or either
> candidate.  Both were complicit in the silence about Federal Reserve
> policy throughout this election campaign.  In fact, the Democrats indulged
> in such silence.  President Clinton reappointed Alan Greenspan as chairman
> of the Federal Reserve Board six months early to make sure that monetary
> policy did not become an issue in the election campaign.
>
> 			Monetary policy was only one of many issues that was
> excluded from debate.  While both major party candidates have acknowledged
> with varying degrees of subterfuge their own past drug use (Bush with
> cocaine, Gore with pot), the drug issue was never discussed.  And this at
> a time when the war on drugs has been fought against a discrete and
> insular segment of the population.  Black and brown men and boys are being
> sent to jails and prisons in record numbers, all to presumably send the
> right message to white kids.  With more than two million Americans now
> behind bars, the prison-building program and the prison-industrial complex
> will go down as this generation's greatest contribution to the decline of
> civilization.
>
				Also missing from the presidential debate
was a peep of criticism of the present top-heavy distribution of wealth and
income. Chief executives of companies in other nations typically earn 20 or
30 times the average pay of their rank and file workers.  In some Latin
American countries, their executives make up to 50 times their workers' pay.
Only one country is literally off the charts:  the United States.  Chief
executives of U.S. companies now make 475 times the pay of their
non-management employees ("Executive Pay," The Economist, Sept. 30, 2000, p.
110).  The top one percent of U.S. households now control more wealth than
the bottom 90 percent.  It's no small wonder that the real economy is more
endangered than ever before by slumping corporate bond and stock markets.
But again neither major political party had any incentive to rain on the
parade, to warn that the top-heavy prosperity might necessarily be
unsustainable -- not while each party was raising millions of dollars from
corporate executives.

> 			For many days Americans have been treated to endless
> reports of ballot recounts and legal maneuverings in Florida.  But the big
> news -  the news that we all know -- is that both major party candidates
> are big losers and failed leaders.  If any party leaders in any other
> great and major democracy on the face of the earth had had the kind of day
> that both Al Gore and George W. Bush had on Election Day -- failing to
> capture even a slim majority of voters -- they would have lost their jobs
> immediately.  Yet our system would reward one of these two men with the
> keys to our most powerful office and for four full years, even if that
> person wins by a thousand votes, a hundred votes, or only a single vote.
>
> 			Here in New Mexico, it first appeared that Al Gore
> had won by several thousand votes.  Then came 67,000 ballots that the
> voting machines were not able to handle.  The ensuing hand-count resulted
> in George W. Bush edging ahead by four votes, then by a couple of dozen,
> until an election official in densely-populated Dona Ana County reportedly
> noticed that a paper clip had partly obscured part of the number "6",
> making it look like a "1."  That discovery added five hundred more votes
> to Al Gore, putting him over the top by barely four hundred votes out of
> more than half a million cast.
>
> 			The two parties are so much alike on so many
> important issues that there is little real difference.  And yet they are
> so closely divided that they are so equally despised, very nearly down to
> the last voter.  For instance, in the closing days of the race it seemed
> that Bush's momentum created its own counter-momentum.  The prospect of a
> Bush victory sent many to the polls, holding their noses, to vote for
> Gore.
>
> 			Gore, we were told, was so much smarter on the
> issues than Bush.  But for all of his smarts, Gore failed to show much
> leadership.  While Bush got his right wing in order - largely behind
> closed doors - by getting Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and others on the
> religious right in line, Al Gore's strategy was to ignore the voices to
> his left.  It was as if Gore had not noticed the demonstrators at the
> Republican and Democratic Conventions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles this
> past summer, or at the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in
> Seattle last December.  The Seattle protests were quickly dismissed by the
> mainstream corporate media because of the actions of a hundred black
> hooded goons who smashed store windows.  The Democrats accepted this
> distortion and ignored the fact that there were more than 50,000 Americans
> in those streets, representing a far greater number of like-minded voters.
> The Longshoremen's Union shut down every port from Long Beach, California
> to Vancouver for more than three days.  It was a moment that hailed the
> advent of a largely leaderless Blue-Green coalition:  Teamsters and
> Turtles together at last.
>
> 			Al Gore's strategy towards this growing movement was
> to ignore, ignore, ignore.  An ignor-ant strategy.  While Gore had the
> power to choreograph the stage, he chose to silence all opposition within
> his party, first by breaking all Democratic records at fundraising, then
> by spending big against former Senator Bill Bradley to knock him out early
> in the primaries, and quickly giving the left nowhere else to go but
> consumer activist Ralph Nader.  Then he made the cowardly blunder of
> agreeing to Nader's exclusion from the debates. In hindsight, it now seems
> to many Democrats that Gore's best chance for a decisive victory would
> have been to throw down the challenge of a four-way debate, to portray
> himself as the real John McCain of the race, while showing George W to be
> in way over his head.  Instead, Gore made it a one-on-one, mano-a-mano
> series of debates, a pathetic personality contest that Gore was sure to
> lose.
>
> 			Likewise, when Al Gore conceded the election
> prematurely on election night, it was not the first time that he conceded
> prematurely.  Although the only reported public opinion poll showed him
> winning the first debate against Bush by 47 to 41 percent, Gore walked
> into the second debate with his tail between his legs, a pathetic and
> defeated figure.  He failed to show any inspired confidence in himself.
> Instead, he hid from Nader, demonstrating a sickening contempt and fear of
> democracy.  By so doing, he effectively conceded much of the anti-Nafta,
> pro-Ross Perot vote to Nader's anti-WTO and anti-establishment message.
> And then, of course, there was the pathetic message that Gore's own
> running mate, Joe Lieberman, had prepared for defeat by  refusing to give
> up his Senate seat.
>
> 			Bush's failure of leadership is even easier to
> describe: he was simply unable to exploit Al Gore's many many failures.
> It has been said that this was an election when the two major candidates
> did not ask anything of Americans.  Instead, they came into our living
> rooms time and again to tell us what they would do for us.  But this
> should come as no surprise.  These are not true leaders; they are
> consummate money-raisers. For the past year or more, both men have spent
> most of their waking hours raising money from large contributors,
> promising all kinds of backroom deals in return.  And indeed this year's
> election spending broke all records - with more than $3 billion spent, a
> three-fold increase from previous highs.
>
> 			For many voters - the 3.7 million who voted for
> various third-party candidates, and the majority who never made it to the
> polls to vote at all -- the two-party system is an abject failure.  Every
> move and counter-move in the Florida chess-game reveals how puny is the
> character and vision of our two entrenched parties.  What kind of leader
> would settle for recounting a dead-heat, for a razor-slim victory, and a
> divided nation?  A true leader would insist upon a new campaign and a real
> mandate to unite the country. Yet it is impossible to imagine either of
> these failed candidates calling for a rematch, calling on this do-nothing
> Congress to remain in session to begin the work of amending the
> Constitution and setting the rules for a re-vote.
>
> 			There has been so much attention paid in the U.S. in
> recent years to the issue of term limits - limiting the maximum term of
> elected officials - that we have ignored the most glaring difference
> between the American political system and virtually every other major
> democracy in the world.  We have minimum terms: four years for President,
> six years for the Senate, and two years for the House of Representatives.
> In more modern democracies, elected officials do not have minimum terms:
> they can be kicked out of office at a moment's notice and forced to face
> the voters in a matter of weeks in a snap election.
>
> 			Moreover, those other democracies conduct election
> campaigns without spending an arm and a leg for television time.  Instead,
> in return for their broadcast licenses, the media conglomerates
> essentially provide free media exposure - ironically, much like U.S.
> broadcast firms are finally doing in the aftermath of this deadlocked
> election.  It should come as no surprise that all of those other
> democracies have national health insurance and four to six weeks of paid
> vacation for all citizens.  Maybe Americans would have all that and more
> if our elected representatives had no guarantees of a single day in office
> without public confidence -- and if our candidates did not have to pander
> to pay for expensive television air time.
>
> 			While many Democrats are venting their rage at Nader
> and the Greens, they would do better to look long and hard in the mirror
> if they don't want a repeat of this year's election.  Senator Joe Biden of
> Delaware promised that Nader would no longer be welcomed in the corridors
> of power.  Hello?  Al Gore, drunk with his own arrogance, would not even
> return Nader's telephone calls a year ago.  A great many Americans have
> not been welcome for more than eight long years of Democratic rule.  And
> the Democrats will not win back those voters by ignoring, excluding, and
> then attacking in desperation.  The fear of a Bush is great, but
> apparently not great enough.
>
> 			For all of his flaws (and they are many), Nader may
> have done this country a great service by helping to deadlock this
> election.  We are now finally face to face with the reality of an archaic
> constitutional system, one originally drafted in the 1700's when blacks
> and poor white men and all women did not have the franchise.  The
> Electoral College system is hardly the worst of it.  We are face to face
> with a 21st century version of Jim Crow.  More than 13 percent of black
> men (some 1.4 million nationwide) are disenfranchised for many years,
> sometimes for life, a result of felony convictions, many for passing the
> same drugs that Al Gore smoked and George W. snorted in years gone by.
> And many other law-abiding black citizens were harassed from voting by
> little brother Jeb Bush's Florida state troopers.  These, and other voting
> irregularities, would never have seen the light of day if the election
> results were anything short of deadlock.
>
> 			Meanwhile the U.S. economy approaches a reckoning.
> The coming days and months will present great challenges and hardships,
> and new opportunities.
>
> 			Tim Canova is Assistant Professor of Law at the
> University of New Mexico School of Law.  E-mail:  canova@xxxxxxxxxxx
>
> 		"Deadlock and Dissolution" by Timothy A. Canova
> 		Published in and exerpted from Economic Reform, vol. 12
> (Dec. 2000), pp. 4-5
> 		The Journal of the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform
> (COMER)
>
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