The United States “elects” a pontiff!

[The fifth essay in a collection titled 'Love notes to democracy', written during a visit to the USA in 2004 as a member of an international team of election monitors]

“Even God’s Kingdom is not a democracy.  He doesn’t stand for re-election.” Yes, an old quote and one whose humor is employed to heal the wounded and create a comfort zone for those usurping the franchise. 

One of the jokes doing the rounds before November 2 was that both John Kerry and George W Bush wanted to be elected for the first time.  Some were hoping that Bush would not be re-selected. Aaron Kuder a friend of mine from Ithaca, NY, referred to “this sad, re-selected, re-stolen November”, after Kerry “conceded”. 

But this is, if some of the pundits who have ventured to reason out the result are to be believed, god’s country.  The people were, according to them and the Bush, voting on God.  It was not a contest between George W Bush and John Kerry, but between the Religious Right and the Religious Wrong.  And the winner got to say who was right and who was wrong. 

My sister, however, contends that the pollsters got it wrong.  She had been polled after voting and she had said that sure, moral issues were the determining factor in her decision to vote.  She believes it is immoral to vote for George W Bush!  Well, if we forget, like the media networks, that a true reflection of voter sentiment was not obtained on November 2, then the majority of voters do not agree with her.  They elected a pontiff, Pope George the First. 

The Bush campaign got jets to write herald the second coming across the free and fair skies above Florda: “SAVE BABIES VOTE BUSH”.  How beautiful and inspiring, this unflinching celebration of the sanctity of life, one would have concluded.  Except that politicians indulge in shooting debating points, which are after all little more than half-truths.

Abortion was an “issue” apparently.  Bush, agent of divinity, was framed as the Holy Father of the Unborn Child.  A savior who is at once the issue of an immaculate conception, how wonderfully postmodern! 

It is worthwhile going with the Christian metaphor.  What happens to the innocent after delivery?  Crucify him (can’t be a “her”, now, can it?) and reconfirm biblical prophesy?  Deny the child a proper education or else impose mis-education, build up his character with myths and legends borrowed from medieval times, send him to fight the crusades of the 21^st century, celebrate him when he kills heathens, unbelievers, and infidels and wait for his third-coming if by chance he gets in the way of an enemy bullet? 

I find it difficult to accept that one can be pro-life only until a given fetus emerges from his/her mother’s womb.  I find it difficult to believe that only Christians (especially in the United States) are God’s Children and that one can be pro-life and at the same time sanction the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of little children in Iraq and other unhappy lands inhabited by non-Christians.  I find it immoral and contradictory the notion that God and not State has the right to determine the parameters of terminating a pregnancy while advocating the annihilation of cities and villages full of living, breathing, weeping, laughing, human beings.  Indeed, isn’t there something wrong when this same State is allowed to perpetrate legal murder courtesy the Death Penalty?  But then again, I am an atheist and a non-recipient of God’s Word and therefore subscribe to a different Cosmology of the Moral.  Call me ignorant.

Perhaps I am a heathen, and forego my civic rights on that account, but I like to talk about the issue of gay marriage, voted on in 11 states as per amendments proposed by the Republicans.  How can the union between man and man be so vile when successive presidents in the United States (both Republican and Democrat) have bedded with men of the caliber of Osama bin Laden, Fulgencio Batista, Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Zia ul Haq, and countless other tyrants and mass murderers, profited from these unions and later committed the heinous act of divorcing some of them? 

How can the profanities use in the movie Saving Private Ryan be problematic and the act of war be considered sacred?  Forgive me if I get this wrong, but I have heard of a Commandment called “thou shalt not kill”, but haven’t heard if God qualified this edict to exclude those outside the United States and states like Texas?  Since human beings are biblically deemed to be flawed wouldn’t it be prudent for God Fearing America to let God Himself decide and mete out punishment at the appropriate time, in the appropriate way? 

The United States of America believes in God.  Their currency is stamped with the words, “In God We Trust”.  And yet, the constitution specifically separates church and state.  There were churches that urged their flock to vote Republican.  Should they remain tax-exempt?

The United States needs to amend the constitution.  Let state and church be conflated.  Let the country be re-defined as a theocracy.  That would give more beef to the real war, the war on non-believers, wrongly called “war against terror”.  Let the rallying cry be “Our terror or theirs!”  Let war music be played in maternity wards and let all new born children, by the fact of birth, be enlisted in a Reserve Army.  Forget Little Baby Johnny Wright.  Let us have Private Baby Simpsons, Private Baby Boomers, Private Baby Angels and the like.  

Perhaps I am being too sarcastic.  But I, being a “lesser” child of some lesser god, or an aberration of the divine creation machine, when Bush ends his inauguration speech with the traditional “God bless the United States of America,” will be saying from somewhere, who knows where, “if god exists, may he save the United States of America”.  

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Sweeping away irregularities 1

Another “regular” election

[The fourth part of a series of essays on the US Presidential Election 2004, written while in Florida as a member of a team of USinternational election monitors]

I am not sure who the first election monitor was.  I mean, the official, named, election monitor.  Ever since the Western World learnt about democracy and found in the idea an excellent way of pooh-poohing discontent a la “the people have so you shut up” there have been those who raised questions about the legality, legitimacy, and transparency of the process.   Somewhere down the line, there must have been more questions than answers, which is why someone would have got the bright idea of monitoring elections.  Of course, like most things, monitoring was embraced spoken, as both a remunerative business and yet another way of endorsing legitimacy of process.  The world is yet to develop the faculty of complete submission, however, and we still hear cries of foul-play.  Sometimes subdued and under-the-breath, sometimes loud and clear.  And sometimes, stuff is so unspeakably foul that even the most meticulously designed shuttering system cannot stop the bad news from spreading around.  Even in the United States of America (yes, there is a lot of tongue in my cheek).

Complaints about the refereeing typically come from the losing side.  True. So, does this mean that the loser is deemed to be out of order, out of hand, simply because he/she lost?  I don’t know.  What we do know is that there has not been a single election anywhere in the world where if the losing side happened to be Uncle Sam’s darling, Uncle Sam did not make a statement, in grave tones, about rigging and legitimacy. Yes, free-and-fair was never an issue for the USA.  What mattered, to spin Roosevelt’s infamous remark on Somoza, is not if the winner was a son of a bitch, but if he was “our son of bitch”. 

Salvador Allende was not a Rooseveltian son of bitch, for example.  Pinochet was!  Need I say more?  What is pertinent is the following assertion: Yes, it is okay to cry foul, Uncle Sam has taught the world this.  The important thing is that Democracy, that a divine being, that astral entity, intangible but worthy not just of worship, but worthy of fanatical reverence.  Yes, Democracy is such a revered deity that its followers have to be willing to kill, maim, displace, dismember and destroy in order to build its temple.  We saw this in Nicaragua, in Afghanistan, in Iraq (as we write) and probably in Cuba once Fidel Castro dies a natural death sometime in the near future.  And if killing, maiming, dismembering etc is free-and-fair, then some mild criticism cannot be out of order. 

There was a strong odor emanating from Florida in 2000, so strong that it spread all over the world.  It brought tears to the eyes of those who were naïve enough to believe that the USA was a model democracy.  The year 2004 is no different, and this is becoming increasingly clear as the foul air bursts through the tight containers called collective amnesia and nauseating euphoria 

The fairytale is that the 2004 election was free of fraud.  Sure, there was nothing like what happened in 2004.  There was, however, systematic disenfranchisement of voters by way of disinformation regarding the location of precincts, whipping up of fear psychosis regarding the possibility of arrest for traffic violation, non-payment of bills etc., and other forms of intimidation such as challenging voters at polling stations. Still, most people would agree, that Florida 2000 was not repeated to the letter.  What happened, if the initial reports trickling out from certain states are anything to go by, is that the fraudulent operated at a different, more sophisticated level.

Consider Broward Country, Florida, where the software started counting down after the number reached 32000.  Consider Collier County where 128,352 votes were cast for Bush although voter turnout was 127,409. Or Duval where he got 357 votes more than the number that actually voted.  The same goes for Glades, Highlands, Lake, Miami Dade, Okaloosa, Orange, Osceola, Leon, Palm Beach and Volusia. 

In LaPort County, Indiana, a “computer” glitch indicated that each precinct had an identical number of registered voters, 300 each, whereas there are actually more than 79,000 registered voters! According to LaPort County Clerk, Lynne Spevak, this may have been due to a power surge: “something zapped it!”  In Mecklenburg County, there had been a significant discrepancy in the original unofficial results, there being more early votes than early voters.  The culprit? Computer Glitch!

In Sarpy County, Nebraska, some votes are reported to have been counted twice.  In Carteret County, North Carolina, more than 4,000 early votes were lost because the electronic voting system could not store the volume of votes it received. The manufacturer of the voting system had said that the units could store up to 10,500 votes.  The limit was actually 3,005 votes.
 
In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, there had been an inverse relationship between voter turnout and support for Kerry. In Parma, at Precinct 6450, the turnout was 94%. 40% of the voters left the presidential candidate blank, according to county records.  Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.  An electronic voting machine added 3,893 votes to President Bush's tally in a suburban Columbus precinct, even though there are just 800 voters there.

Citing concerns about potential terrorism, Warren County officials locked down the county administration building on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns.  The Warren results, delayed for hours because of long lines that extended voting past the scheduled close of polls, were part of the last tallies that helped clinch President Bush's re-election. Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

Thom Hartman has posted an excellent piece about the possibility of hacking in Common Dreams, a progressive webzine.  He cites the inexplicably high gap between the percentage of registered Democrats and the actual pattern of voting. 

“In Baker County, Florida, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry. In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.  The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the smaller counties where, it was probably assumed, the small voter numbers wouldn't be much noticed. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush. Yet in the larger counties, where such anomalies would be more obvious to the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry.”

Little drops of water make the mighty ocean, they say! As Harman point out, “Although elections officials didn't notice these anomalies, in aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to Bush. If you simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the "anomalous" numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked, suddenly the Florida election results resemble the Florida exit poll results: Kerry won, and won big.

But can computers err?  We know they can.  The problem is, how come they consistently erred in favor of George W Bush? Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room, has shown how. Bev points out that regardless of how the votes are tabulated, the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC. "In a voting system," Harris explains, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?" In other words, anyone who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator.  Indeed if the hacker happens to be operating the said tabulator, altering the outcome of an election and perpetrating grand electoral theft is a piece of cake!

 Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said on national television, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software. “Diebold wrote a pretty good program and you can’t tamper with the software, but it is running on a Windows PC. But all you have to do is to open the vote count in a database program like Excel and flip the numbers!  It can be done in 90 seconds flat!”
Yes the year 2004 is no different.  There is foul air bursting through the carpets.  The mainstream media and the people in general in the United States of America must be pretty odor-insensitive not to notice, not to comment.  It was, in the final analysis, another son-of-a-bitch of an election.  The people of the United States have to decide whether it is their son of a bitch or someone else’s son of a bitch. 

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The revolving nightmare

[The third part of a series of essays on the US Presidential Election 2004, written while in Florida as a member of a team of USinternational election monitors]

All “exits” closed!

The story of exit polls and the huge discrepancy between these and the final “result”, reminded me of a line from the popular Eagles’ song, Hotel California: “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave”.  I think a lot of people have heard the most abiding definition of statistics, “there are lies, damned lies and there is statistics!” but this would not have prepared any statistician to the problem of exit polls in this election. 

Ok, in 2004 the media networks got it wrong.  They called it for Bush, then for Gore and finally, for Bush courtesy of the scandalous fraud perpetrated in Florida.  This time they were careful.  They had fine-tuned the exit polling exercise.  They had complicated statistical models in place that were expected to minimize the margin of error, usually to 2-3 percentiles.  Kerry was leading Bush by margins greater than that country-wide, and in some places (which he ultimately lost) he was heading for landslide wins.  How could they get it so wrong?  Surely the people doing this were not fifth graders who had flunked in arithmetic? 

During the 12:20 a.m. on election night, in an Associated Press Radio News feed a reporter detailed how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.  Twelve hours later, John Kerry conceded the election to Bush. 

According to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points.  Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.

What really happened to these voters and their votes?  Was it some dirty trick to keep people happy for a while only to bring the world down on them like a ton of bricks? 

I don’t know much about statistical models, but I can think of possible scenarios whereby prediction was rendered irrelevant and incompetent.

Maybe the pollsters didn’t know whether their subjects were on their way to vote or on their way out.  Maybe the voters didn’t know if they were coming or going.  Maybe the pollsters made it worse by not knowing if they were coming or going either.  Maybe many people actually voted for Bush, but didn’t want to reveal that red side of their brain to the world, so they said “Kerry” as they exited. 

Maybe the “voters” were just passing through like random radical cloud that blots the happy and complacent, hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil skies that make up the US Conscious. Maybe they came up to the voting machine, decided, in a quasi-radical kind of way, that in the end their vote wouldn’t count (maybe they were right, actually) and just walked out and when queried by the diligent pollster said “any old thing”.  Maybe the Democrats had a sophisticated voting pattern in place, strategically getting into line and exiting the polling station so that they and not Bush-voters would get polled.  For what purpose, we do not know, of course.  Maybe the pollsters themselves were all over-zealous, ostrich-like buffoons, whose couldn’t allow their pencils move towards the Bush column on their enumeration cards or whatever pieces of inconsequential paper they were jotting this misinformation on. 

Maybe all this is wrong.  Maybe the voters voted, the pollsters polled, and everything was methodologically above-board, until the data was entered into a computer and the results laid out on an Excel file, at which point the statistician (a Democrat, naturally, and strategically “placed” in the Prediction Industry) cooked the numbers in Kerry’s favor.  Maybe even these people got it right, but something happened when the relevant newscaster was reading out the results for public consumption. 

The truth, then, some would argue, is that if there was limited access (however you may want to define that word), exits too were restricted.  There was an Iron Curtain.  And the USA has not had its Gorbachev and its Perestroika is yet to come.  Let the Party decide, for the Party is always right.  Right?  Wrong! 

You see, we shouldn’t be so suspicious.  Thinking the unthinkable at this time when the country is in the middle of a war for democracy and justice for all people (not infidels of course, like that guy Osama and the fanatics in Fallujah and other infidel-infested areas).  Yes, let us not think the unthinkable now. 

No, no conspiracy theories now, mates.  Let us be stoic and accept the given wisdom that the system works on well-oiled wheels.  Let us believe that computers don’t err, and forget that they are made to work by real human beings, partisan and capable of fraud.  Let us brush aside allegations of post-voting tampering when it came to collating results.  That cannot happen.  This is the United States of America, for “god’s” sake.  This is Jesus Land governed by the ten commandments, which include “Thou Shall not Lie”.  That, friends, is the lie of the land.  Accept or perish.

What is wrong if entrances and exits are conflated and democracy gets trapped in a revolving door that will not yield a result that is truly reflective of popular will and/or a result that can be celebrated as such an articulation?  They say that justice should not just be done, but it must seem to be done.  Why can’t people forget the first past and be happy with the second?  Why shouldn’t the people of the USA, like the editor of the Sentinel “accept” that the election was “free and fair” and disregard as rubbish the stuff that the alternative media is putting out about fraud and induced computer malfunction?  Why can’t they live happily in that never-never land of doors revolving too fast for us to enter or if we already have for us to exit?  Why can’t they spin with the spin doctors, dance to their music, be in step to the rhythm of holy drums beating out the machine-gun staccato “status quo status quo status quo status quo status quo status quo status quo status quo”?  

The Man has spoken.  He says “Abide”.  He says more.  He says “Thou Shalt Abide”.  It is the age of elevens.  Seven-Eleven. Nine-Eleven.  And Commandment Number Eleven.  It is the Eleventh Hour.  Enjoy.  Apocalypse is nigh!

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Niggers and dogs not allowed: the question of access

[The second part of a series of essays on the US Presidential Election 2004, written while in Florida as a member of a team of USinternational election monitors]

About fifteen years ago, my friend Jude Fernando who was then reading for a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania visited Boston to meet Sri Lankan friends and catch up with old times.  Jude is a left-leaning easygoing man who doesn’t carry the weight of his reading on his shoulders or on his clothes.  I still remember the first thing he said when I saw him.

“There was a protest outside the Port Authority in New York.  A bunch of people in wheelchairs had been demonstrating about access.  They were shouting ‘Access is a human right!’” 

Among the key issues about this election was “access”.  The complaint was about structural disenfranchisement on account of the unavailability of access, not just to people with disabilities, but to those who were reckoned to be “with the other guy”.  Thanks to the excellent documentary about democracy a la Florida titled “Unprecedented”, the more immediate of the access issues are known.  Of these, the one about the infamous felony lists, i.e. the purging of convicted felons, was the most appealing to me.  Yes, that sounds a bit crude, but then again the USA has an ethnic fascination with twisting words and giving the opposite meaning (shell shock = post conflict trauma, for example) that I couldn’t but smile. 

The Western media which is essentially McCarthyist had robbed the word “purge” from its original meaning referring to bowel movements and equated it with the Stalinist drive to “cleanse” the Communist Party of “reactionaries”.  What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, they say.  Things come home to roost.  What’s the difference?  Label, bastardize and evacuate is a time-honored formula used by despots who feel their grip on power slipping.  I do not know how the US courts define “felony” but I think systematic disenfranchisement by creative evacuation of the opposition ought to be a crime far worse than “felony”.  The Republican party, George W downwards and through Katherine Harris, ought to apply the formula to itself.  Yes, self-purging, self-disenfranchisement should be the national cry in the USA.  One question for the god-squads that have and are stripping the citizenry of civic rights: if taxation should go hand in hand with representation, shouldn’t these ex-cons be exempted from paying taxes? What next?  Forbid them from having sex with non-felons, or enforce celibacy on them, period? 

Florida might have woken up sleepy-eyed Democrats to some disturbing (putting it mildly) flaws in their “democracy”, but disenfranchisement is not news to most African Americans.  They have had almost 30 years since the Voting Rights Act and they know that what happened was that rules were made to be bent and that democracy was a road that by-passed their communities.  Democracy was and still is a high security zone where the color of one’s skin or the language one speaks can elicit a curt message “Access Denied”.  The subtext goes without saying: “Jim Crow lives”.

I was one of 23 election observers from 14 countries from all parts of the world.  We did not have “access” to observe the product of structural disenfranchisement simply because we got to Florida a few days before November 2.  We did not have access to the relevant facts in Ohio, simply because we could not be in two different places at the same time.  We had limited access to watch the voting on that Tuesday for similar reasons.  We had limited access to the polling stations.  We had absolutely no access to the process once polls closed, that critical after-birth period where we could assess the health of that deformed and illegitimate creature that issued from what most people are asked to believe is democracy, namely voting. 

But all this inaccessibility pales compared to the inaccessibility that the people of the USA have to the structures of power.  For “access” is essentially a question of who is in and who is out, about who has the qualifications to access and who doesn’t, and what the parameters of access are.

For starters, who gets to “run” and who is crippled and made incapable of walking or even crawling, forget running?  Does Mary Robinson, a single mother of two living in a run down apartment struggling to pay her rent and put the food of the table get to “run”?  Who would fund her campaign should she declare her candidacy?  Which party would endorse her candidature?  How about Joaquin Rodriguez living in the Bronx, dodging the over-eager, trigger-happy, racial-profiling NYPD?  And how about Muhammed al Shabbaz in Detroit?

Let us not forget that we are talking here about a country whose “democratic” party let down the one man who tried to whip up confidence in democracy at the grassroots, Howard Dean!  No, it is Mister Moneybags and/or Mister I Can Access Moneybags and/or Mister I will Please Mr and Ms Moneybags that has the edge, has the access.  Let us not forget also, that Mr. Candidate has to have a certain religious affiliation, a particular sexual orientation, a color that is not discolored by racial mixing, and be as close to the political right as possible, preferably a Rush Limbaugh clone.  There’s accessibility for you in a nutshell!

If the democratic process does not begin at 7.00 am on election day, then it does not end at 7.00 pm either.  Nor after “all the votes are ‘counted’”.  Participation means getting heard all the time.  It can’t be about someone claiming, after “winning” 51% of the vote, that he has won his political capital and he will spend it as he thinks fit! 

The media in the USA has taken up cartography.  On election day and for a couple of days afterwards, they spent a lot of time colouring the map of the United States.  There were “blue states” (those won by Kerry) and “red states” (those “won” by Bush).  In fact some wit had repainted/redrawn the map of North America with the blue states as part of “The United States of Canada” and the vast swathes of red in the middle of the country under a new banner titled “Jesus Land”.  These are pretty bold strokes of that easily wielded political brush called Masking Reality.  The reality is that there is a decent mix of blue and red in all states if one were to paint these places in colors proportionate to the way the people voted.  The truth is that, after Kerry conceded, all of the USA turned red! 

George Bush has said, “I have won my political capital and I intend to spent it”.  In other words the people of Massachusetts, California, New York, New Jersey and Maine, for example, can go to hell.  As can the people of Broward County, Miami Dade, and those in other counties and precincts in the “red states” that actually voted blue!  They can shout all they like, but Democracy USA says “sorry, can’t hear you; access denied to your voice!”

How about access to information?  The mainstream media has shut up.  Or, as some have argued, been made to shut up.  One really cannot say what’s worse, censorship or self-censorship.  But if the democratization of media is in the final instance being the media, and if this involves keeping one’s eyes open, ears open and being able and willing not to keep one’s mouth shut, then the word does get out.  Slowly, in a convoluted, disguised way perhaps, and maybe another 100,000 Iraqi civilians including 60-70,000 children have to die before it happens, but it does get out. 

Victory of democracy in the USA means that anything and everything that casts doubt about the legitimacy of the result and indeed the reliability of the electoral process gets edited out.  For democracy to win, the fourth estate has to be buried.  In this instance the fourth estate, or at least its mainstream, has decided to bury itself.  Much like the ostrich. 

If the collective conscious of the United States is a house and if air is made of truth and its articulation, then democracy is fast using up the available oxygen.  It is not the Democrats who “lost” this election, it is the United States of America that lost.  If certain communities were marginalized or, to put it more correctly, they continue to be marginalized, then this election has proved that the malady had been misdiagnosed or misidentified. 

Not marginalization, the correct word, ladies and gentlemen of Conscious America, you have been banished from that fairytale world called By the People, With the People, For the People.  You are refugees in your own country, people without access.  Reflect well on this, because although it may be “new” to you, it is not “new” to the vast majority of peoples in the world.  Uncle Sam has done to you what it has been doing to other people for decades now.     

Well folks, the vote’s in.  You know who is in and who is not.  Check yourself out in the mirror called Democracy USA, see if you can find your reflection. 

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LOVE NOTES TO DEMOCRACY I: Observing the “minders”

Leonardo DiCaprio once related a hilarious incident involving the paparazzi.  “We started chasing them.  We just flipped the script on them.  That really threw them.  Instead of us dodging them, they were suddenly in a situation where they had to run from us!”

I remember a long time ago, as a graduate student in a PhD program in Development Sociology, commenting on this in a missive to my advisors.  I told them how it brought to mind the well-known painting titled “The Scream”.  This was roughly what I wrote, if memory serves me.

“Social scientists are used to investigating people, following their life stories, recording their lives.  What if the subject(s) began investigating the interrogator?  What is communities began chasing us and hordes of people with the image of “the scream” imprinted on their faces come running after us?  Where would we run?  Where could we hide?  I believe if such scenarios were necessarily part of the investigating exercise, we would become less arrogant.  We would be humbled enough to write more nuanced narratives or better still to give up the pretensions of narrating in the “this is the truth” mode.  Ideally, we would stop advocating and begin to listen; we would come out of the ivory tower and start recognizing community.  We might even begin to live a little, love a little.”  For the record, I was kicked out or facilitated my kicking out of academe. 

I remembered all this when my sister emailed me a few weeks ago and asked if I was interested in helping monitor the US Presidential Election.  Apparently, a Catholic peace group called Pax Christi USA, was looking for international election observers to come to Florida and help deter malpractice in the counties reporting untrammeled fraud during the previous election in 2000.  I laughed when I read the email.  My friends laughed when I told them.  Yes, flipping scripts is a laughter-providing exercise. 

Sure, a part of me was happy and indeed honored to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the good and honorable people in the United States who were humble enough to recognize that their country had a problem and were trying to correct it.  These were people who, like me and indeed like millions all over the world, had no illusions about the United States of America and were wont to chortle when their “representatives” touted peace, justice and democracy to the rest of the world.  I knew enough about political economy to know that in this increasingly and perniciously global world, I was as much a victim of US democracy or lack thereof as was the average US citizen and perforce it was as much my struggle as it was theirs to overhaul “their” archaic and undemocratic system.  

I would be lying, however, if I did not admit that my disenfranchised participation in the US electoral process tickled me pink.  It has been a week since George W Bush was “elected” (note the quotation marks for they are deliberate).  The more forgiving and less alert would say he was “elected for the first time” while the more discerning about the entire electoral process would say “he was re-selected” and not just because the system of the electoral college rebels against notions of representative democracy.  All we can say at this point is, sadly, “they say he won the popular vote”.  Anyway, it has been a week since George W Bush, let’s say, prevailed against John Kerry.  The Democratic Party has stopped dead in its tracks.  Without a whimper.  I have not stopped laughing, though.

I attended several “teach-ins” about monitoring/observing in Broward County, Florida, where the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or NAACP had worked tirelessly to educate and mobilize the marginalized and structurally disenfranchised African American community.  Literally hundreds of democracy-desiring people from all parts of the country had come to Broward County to help ensure that democracy-mugging of the kind that happened in Florida in 2000 would not happen again. A white woman from California, accosted me during one of the breaks and said, “I am embarrassed that you have to be here”.  That came from the bottom of her heart. 

Why should she or any other American from the United States be ashamed of someone “observing” them?  Why did Jean-Roll Jean-Louis, a fellow election monitor from Haiti be pursued by countless media outfits and asked “what does it mean for a Haitian to come to monitor the US election?”  Why was Jean-Roll so enthused about responding to this question?  The answer is simple.  When the script is flipped, all characters have to do a re-think, they are lost on the grand stage of political theatre, and in that confusion some home truths get articulated.  

What I will write now is not something the world, by and large, is ignorant of.  America of the US is not a democracy.  America of the US is not a fan of democracy and one need not have read Noam Chomsky’s “What Uncle Sam really wants” to know that the USA will support tyrants, autocrats, military juntas, dictators, despots, monarchies with as much vigor as it would support democrats, democracies and democracy as long as its interests are safeguarded.  This is why it is not possible to apply the analogy of a basketball coach need not be a good basketball player to be a good coach to the USA teaching democracy to the rest of the world.  The good basketball coach knows the game and is committed to producing good basketball players and teams.  His/her job depends on it.  Unless he/she happens to own the particular basketball franchise or has enough firepower to control the franchise.  The USA has the guns and the personnel (for now) to brush aside charges of contradiction, foul play, and inconsistency, in its democracy verbiage. 

What Florida 2000 did was not simply a matter of overturning the democratic will of the citizens of the USA.  What was tragic about it for that country is that it served to tear to shreds its practiced script.  Even if the people of Iraq do not have the power to ask “what gives you people the right?” when Colin Powell waxes eloquent about the virtues of “restoring democracy”, they can still laugh and speak the Arabic equivalent of “yeah right!” So too the people of Afghanistan, where George W Bush established confirmed warlordism and called it democracy.  Florida 2000 gave the people of all those unhappy countries the world over and especially Latin America where the US “democratic” obsession overthrew popular and popularly elected governments and established/celebrated murderous tyrannies, the right to laugh openly.  More than all this, Florida 2000 woke up the complacent American of the US, made him/her swallow his/her pride and admit, although unwillingly, that Malcolm X had a point when he said "This is not a democracy, this is a hypocrisy!”  The American Dream, he said, was for him nothing less than a nightmare.  Well, Florida 2000 was the nightmare erupting through the hard layers of myopia that makes up the psyche of Comfortable America of the US. 

In Miami Dade, Florida, the Elections Supervisor, after much agitation that included press conferences and rallies, grudgingly allowed some of us to enter the polling stations (carefully selected) for a limited period of time.  She sent “minders” to accompany us, to make sure we did not abuse the “professional courtesy” she extended to us.  I was not insulted, because that was not “new”.  The USA has always “minded” people.  It has never allowed other countries to mind their own business, but has made it the core element of its national ethos to “mind other people’s business for them”.  Yes, it felt good, minded or otherwise, to observer these global “minders”, even in a limited sense. 

Jean-Roll says: “I come from Haiti, a country where we have had just 2 proper elections, where your country sent troops to oust a leader and establish democracy, where the elected leader is deposed courtesy your government, and yet a country which has an independent authority to conduct elections, and where there is no confusion about the ballot card, where there is uniformity across the board.” 

And I say, “I am proud and honored to be a part of this important first step as the USA struggles to protect its democratic spirit, still in its infancy, and strives to become a representative democracy with free and fair elections.  It is going to be a long and hard road, believe me.  It will be a road that has to be walked.  I am glad that the people of this country have chosen to walk it.”  

[From a set of essays written around the time of George W Bush's re-selection as US President in 2004 when I was part of a team of international election monitors]

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Accountability queries: legitimate and laughable*

Accountability is an issue that’s talked about a lot with respect to Sri Lanka’s efforts to eliminate the terrorist menace.  There’s been a lot of self-righteousness in the demands.  A lot of double-tongue too.  The entire discourse of accusation, sadly, has been marked by the word ‘allegation’, which in turn appears, again sadly, to have been constructed from claims made by the most dubious of sources.

It is in this context that one has to consider the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister’s comments to MPs recently.  Minister John Baird stated, ‘Sri Lanka needs to take accountability for the serious allegations of war crimes committed’.  One notes that it is downright silly to ask anyone to account for ‘allegations’, except of course the accusers whose burden it is to offer tangible proof of systemic and unacceptable levels of transgressions that warrant the use of the terms ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. 

Baird offers by way of rant-justification a report put together by a panel appointed by the UN Secretary General, a report fraught with inaccuracies, heavily reliant on claims made by people whose integrity is questionable and woefully lacking in substantiation. 

Any member of the international community (with all its many flaws and crimes of myopia and selective vilification) has the moral right to call out nations with respect to rights abuse and other transgressions, such umbrage should be founded on hard evidence and not conjecture.  If this were not the case, the UN would have nothing else to do than investigate each and every member state because some ill-intentioned members level charges, using the correct language of indignation.

It is strange that neither Baird nor the man whose words he echoes, Prime Minster Stephen Harper, have thought fit to castigate Canada’s neighbor, the United States of America for proven (not alleged) crimes against humanity. They have not found it disturbing when top US officials routinely brush aside accountability queries with ‘had to be done, did it, let’s not talk about it’. 

More disturbing however is Canada’s own ‘human rights’ track record and not just in the matter of routinely endorsing US aggression in all parts of the word and indeed acting like international cheer-leaders at these global power games that have nothing to do with democracy or civilization.

There’s worse to come.  Prime Minister Harper, even as he harps on alleged Canadian values (freedom, democracy and human rights), insisting that those who do not share these values are considered a threat and adding for good measure that Canada ‘will have no truck with dictators’, seeing nothing wrong with making deals with a man who carried out a coup.  As for ‘freedom’, it is strange that Baird does not object to Canada’s new electronic surveillance laws which according to Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner of Canada ‘substantially diminish the privacy rights of Canadians by enhancing the capacity of the state to conduct surveillance and access private information while reducing the frequency and vigour of judicial scrutiny’. Just to keep thing in perspective and domestic, the life expectancy of those who belong to the first nations in Canada, i.e. descendants of those whose lands were robbed by ‘settlers’ and were massacred brutally (some by way of the ‘gift’ of Smallpox), is just 27.  Canada is not a democracy, technically, but a constitutional monarchy, a fact which makes these noises even more odious. 

Baird may have forgotten that Tom Flanagan, one of Harper’s senior advisor and strategists, called for the assassination of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange. He even wanted Obama to put out a (murder) contract on Assange and said he would not be unhappy if Assange ‘disappeared’. This too is relevant.

Accountability queries from Canada or other locations and polities which have sad track records of self-accounting can therefore be dismissed as the utterances of international bullies.  If Canada does boycott the 2013 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Sri Lanka, sad to say, that country will hardly be missed. 

Accountability, however, remains on the Sri Lankan political table for reasons other than those enumerated by the myopic and mischievous Baird.  It is an integral element of good governance, corporate and public and a vital aspect of political wellbeing. 

With respect to the conflict, the LLRC (Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission) has concluded sittings and compiled a comprehensive report.  While it is ridiculous for US Ambassador Patricia Butenis to demand a ‘preview’, it is imperative that the citizens of the country get to view the contents at the earliest.  The findings and recommendations can only boost the process of reconciliation that began with the defeat of the LTTE, rescuing of some 300,000 Tamil civilians held hostage by that organization (whose foreign representatives are routinely sought by the likes of Baird for comment), release of all child combatants (some 500 plus) and rehabilitation and reintegration of thousands of ex-LTTE cadres (a ‘favour’ that the US, for instance, has not granted to hundreds if not thousands of captured Al Qaeda and Taliban ‘suspects’). 

Accountability has other dimensions.  It is very clear that constitutional provisions for accountability and transparency are woefully inadequate.  It is also known that the absence of checks and balances have made for political interference that compromises the rule of law.  The recent controversies regarding share market regulations also indicate that accountability queries are as relevant to the private sector as to the public.  A lot of people appear to have been consuming free lunches for years and years.  

The conspicuous sloth in the matter of correcting these flaws in fact empowers those mischief-makers who demand accountability in matters where none are warranted.  It is easy to mutter ‘double-standards’ and ‘tendentious’ when someone like Baird does the foot-in-mouth number, but these dismissives do not work or else should not be expected to work forever when it comes to the citizens of this country. 

In other words, Baird (and Harper) are eminently ‘forgettable; not so the people of this country.

*The Nation editorial, December 4, 2011 

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The political economy of outsourcing responsibility

Ranil Wickremesinghe has found fault with the Government for adding its voice to the chorus of Commonwealth members in rejecting a proposal submitted by the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group to set up a ‘Commissioner for Democracy, the Rule of Law and Human Rights’.  The Leader of the Opposition has buttressed his objection thus:

‘Why does the Government of Sri Lanka want to oppose such a recommendation? If we are a functioning democracy (where) the rule of law and human rights are upheld then there is no need to oppose such a recommendation. Supporting this recommendation would have answered the allegations made against the Government in the Report of the Secretary General of the United Nations’ Panel of Experts on accountability in Sri Lanka. I want to ask why the Government did not table this report for debate in Parliament. This is an issue related to fundamental rights which is a component of the sovereignty of the people. Hence the people’s representatives must be given an opportunity to discuss such issues. It is a violation of the responsibility and answerability of the President and the Cabinet of Ministers to Parliament. The government of Sri Lanka has no right to take a decision on these matters without consulting Parliament.’

Tough words. They say a lot.  A lot about Ranil Wickremesinghe.  They reminded me of Ranil Wickremesinghe taking off his ‘Commonwealth tie’ a few days ago, a move which made me think that it is easy to take off tie but tougher to divest oneself of ideological slavery.  I am not privy to government reasoning regarding this issue, but it is eminently clear that a functioning democracy where the rule of law and human rights are upheld does not necessarily have to subject itself to monitoring of any sort by any outside agency, least of all one that is likely to be run by those who are not beholden to the people of that functioning democracy. 

As for tabling the report of some ill-informed, myopic jokers whose integrity is highly suspect, such a move would seriously injure that which Wickremesinghe wants to champion most, the sovereignty of the people.  Wickremesinghe has chosen to be ignorant of the fact that the UNSG’s move was way out of line and in violation of relevant UN protocol.  That report is tendentious and Wickremesinghe has enough intelligence to recognize the fact.  It is a pity that he didn’t frame his statement with the relevant caveats.   I can’t put it down to naiveté, but ‘unbridled sycophancy’ might be a good enough descriptive.  In fact the point has been alluded to by the External Affairs Minister Prof. G. L. Peiris who not only accused Wickremesinghe of misrepresenting facts regarding Sri Lanka’s strong opposition to the appointment of such a commissioner, but advised the man not to ‘outsource his responsibilities to Colombo-based foreign envoys’.

Peiris offers that the Government’s objection (as those of other countries that opposed the move) was about the costs involved. Be that as it may it is more likely that the reluctance of India, Pakistan, South Africa and other nations were more conscious about their sovereignties than anything else.  The address to which concerns relating to human rights, democracy and law and order should be directed is elsewhere and that ‘elsewhere’ must lie within national boundaries.  If Wickremesinghe doesn’t know that address nor lacks the intellectual and political wherewithal to pen the relevant petitions, he should resign all posts currently held and give way to someone more capable.  As someone said in the early nineties, the longevity of the UNP regime is less about popularity and skill of the party leadership but the incapability of the opposition.  The same could be said (in reverse) of the current regime and its would-be topplers. 

Getting back to Peiris’ valid contention regarding outsourcing responsibility, it is clear that Wickremesinghe is not alone in the politics of deferment. He is in the company of some pretty shady characters, the TNA for example.  R. Sampanthan believes that India has some kind of suzerainty over Sri Lanka.  Dayan Jayatilleka, who believes he is a nationalist, frames the limits of his nationalism in a box called ‘Indian interests’.  Then there is the Government itself. Indeed I can use the plural and include all regimes post-independence and especially those that came after 1977. 

We have ministers acting as though policy making and performance can obtain meaning only from IMF/World Bank certification.  This implies a certain kind of outsourcing of responsibility or, to be more precise, replacing responsibility to people with responsibility to lending institutions over and above the contractual obligations between lender and borrower.  Indeed, it is doubtful if there has ever been adequate consideration of effectiveness, sustainability and implications on sovereignty and national security (especially food security) of the relevant policy imperatives scripted in.

It is worthwhile recalling that the struggle to rid the country of the terrorist menace was crippled for decades because policy on this was obtained from ‘foreign experts’.  In the final instance, the overriding factor was the recognition that it would have to be an api-wenuwen-api effort, with whatever support our friends could provide. 

Last week the Cabinet approved a controversial paper to obtain funds from the Pacific Fleet of the USA to build some hospitals. Common sense tells us that aid (with or without strings) comes from states or agencies especially set up for such purposes (e.g. JICA, USAID, CIDA) and not military outfits.  The public should be informed of the details, the ‘give’ that goes with the ‘take’, the who-does-what and whatnot of the deal.  The last thing we need it a US military presence on Sri Lankan soil, in whatever guise.  If it’s all about love for Sri Lanka then there’s nothing wrong.  If it’s a loan then we need to know the terms.  Sri Lanka has the expertise and the labour to build sophisticated hospitals.  We don’t need foreigners ‘volunteering’ to mix cement and lay bricks and especially not US military personnel, given the long history of US interference in and wrecking of sovereign nations.  That would come under ‘outsourcing’ too.  The outsourcing of sovereignty, in fact, which of course means an outright conceding of the issue.

We have to keep in mind that we have outsourced the formulation of not just development policy but development paradigm as well.  Issues such as sustainability, the worth of certain technologies, vilification of traditional practices, deferring the formulation of seed policy to multinationals, ravage of forests and an unholy and uncritical embracing of outdated and destructive models such as ‘growth-led development’ have brought Sri Lanka some frills and colours but robbed and continues to rob the nation of identity and control over destiny.  A lot of outsourcing there too.  Ranil Wickremesinghe can take a bow on behalf of the UNP while this Government cannot plead innocent either. 

In the end, in a democracy or autocracy or any other kind of governance structure, the people take the hits (or the garlands). Sooner or later they are compelled to take ‘responsibility’ as a personal matter.  There comes a point when outsourcing is not possible.  That’s something that Wickremesinghe and Peiris would do well to remember. So too everyone in this country. 

Prof. Peiris said that a vast majority of member states of the Commonwealth, including, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, South Africa and all African nations had opposed that move. The new office would have cost the Commonwealth 500,000 Sterling pounds, the minister said adding that those opposed to the EPG’s move felt that the new office shouldn’t be set up at the expense of existing priorities.

Prof. Peiris lambasted Wickremesinghe for taking all domestic issues before the international community instead of having local mechanisms to tackle problems faced by the Sri Lankans. An irate External Affairs Minister stressed that the responsibilities of the Opposition shouldn’t be handed over to Colombo-based foreign envoys. He said that Sri Lankans could solve their problems, without being advised by external elements.

[Courtesy 'The Nation', December 4, 2011] 

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