Thursday, September 23, 2004

The shameful state of democracy in the U.S. We are living a lie.  We have the icons of freedom and democracy thrown at us mercilessly by the corporate media and politicians.  Yet few Americans know that we live in one of the less free democratic countries in the world.  Two examples, that are not tolerated in most established democracies, are election for life in the House of representatives, and the disenfranchisement for life of millions of Americans because of prior felony convictions.   One often wonders why so many people vote against their basic interests.  Here is a brief, egregious, example.  From today’s Washington Post:   “Congressional negotiators beat back efforts yesterday to expand and preserve tax refunds for poor families, even as they added $13 billion in corporate tax breaks to a package of middle-class tax cuts that could come to a vote in the Senate today.”   How, in a democracy, could Congress grant $13 billion in corporate tax breaks while taking away about $4 billion in tax credits from the poorest of the poor.  The reason is a collusion by incumbents in both parties to gerrymander congressional districts to make about 95% of Congressional districts “safe” for incumbents for life.  These politicians, no longer needing to face the voters, become captives to their funders, which are mostly corporations who pay them to get money from the government.  This is in essence no different that Stalin’s politburo, or North Korea’s legislature, except their the delegates were selected by a authoritarian party.   Gerrymandering, which is the process of drawing a district based on demographic data so that it is either safely democratic, or safely republican with at least a 55-45 split, essentially makes all House elections uncompetitive.  The reason is that once an incumbent gets in, they almost never have a serious challenge.   A simple fix would be to require all Congressional districts to be as geographically compact as possible.  This would make the districts more representative—and also vulnerable to change as the needs or outlook of the people in the district changed.   But a worse example is the disenfranchisement of felons.  A group called the Sentencing project has been carrying on research for years about the ways in which drug laws and the prison building complex is destroying liberty in America.  The felon disenfranchisement laws have replaced the Jim Crow laws, and now exclude about 1 in 8 black men from voting.  In the south, in some states, 1 in 3 are excluded.  Felon disenfranchisement, often for minor drug offenses, is the single greatest reason for the disparity in voter registration between blacks and whites.   Not only would Al Gore have carried Florida by 50,000 to 60,000 votes in 2000, but a number of republican senators would never have been elected without the disenfranchisement of about 4 million Americans.   Democracy is a fragile thing.  When those seizing power can prevent whole classes of people who would likely oppose them from voting, it undercuts the very idea of representation.   Virtually no other democratic country in Europe has the punitive laws we have that deny citizenship and civic participation for life to an 18 year old who cops a plea on a drug deal.   The right works by powerful memes.  With Reagan, they managed to convince large majorities of working Americans to get hysterically fearful about crime, and they used that fear to isolate and incarcerate millions of non-whites.  In effect, Reagan’s republicans were able to shift the make up of the electorate in their favor by eliminating a class of people likely to oppose them.    Democracy is at risk in America because we have a class of ideologues in power who are bankrolled by corporate interests who then get paid off through the rape of the public treasury, e.g. corporate tax cuts take precidence over even keeping the miserly tax credits the poorest of the poor now are getting.    What is so dangerous is this is a self-reinforcing cycle.  As media and other companies get more dependent on the government to make or maintain their profits, they are more and more directly involved in making sure the government only serves their needs.  Examples are media conglomeration, the writing of the tax code to virtually eliminate corporate taxation, the elimination of taxes on the wealthy, and the gutting of social spending programs.   The next big battle will probably be over the dismantling of social security--taking a government program that supports incomes for a huge elderly population, and transforming it into a Wall St. orgy where possibly up to 20% of the entire amount will be consumed by banks and brokerages.    To fight back, we have to defend the same idea of representative government that led to the American revolution in the first place—and that means ending Congressional elections for life, and ending all disenfranchisement in America for the millions and millions of voters under attack via drug laws, mandatory draconian sentencing, and also voting disenfranchisement. 1:09:07 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2004 Toby Sackton. Last update: 10/1/2004; 4:52:43 PM.