Democracy is No Place for the People

Americans love democracy so much that some will kill or attempt to harm those who they think oppose it.

(Image from Flickr, by dahnielson)

Yet what is it that they love so much?

If it is the notion that “The People” get make the social and political decisions that most impact their own lives, they are in love with a fantasy that has never existed. Democracy is about voting for others who get to make these decisions and almost always in the interests of the wealthiest subset of “The People.”

Yet even the part of democracy that does include “the people,” (e.g., voting or speaking at public hearings), includes them only so long as they glorify the system and do not challenge it. Consider the case of Oakland, California, which aborted a meeting of their city council last week rather than endure public criticism and protests of yet another murder of an unarmed black man by the police.

The most recent police shooting involved the death of teenager Alan Blueford, who was killed by police in April, just prior to his high school graduation. Police say he had been brandishing a gun. His family and witnesses deny the charges and are demanding a full investigation, accusing the police of lying. Blueford’s mother said she wanted changes in how the police department is run so that police were more accountable to and had deeper understanding of the communities in which they work. She also accused council members of turning their heads when she spoke of her grief and expressed outrage and frustration that they would shut off the microphone when she spoke. (Blueford’s comments were broadcast on KPFA’s “Letters and Politics,” on October 3, 2012.

Meanwhile, a recent court-ordered report blasted the Oakland police department for failing to make adequate improvements in how it addresses deadly force by police, and in another lawsuit, lawyers are expected to ask for federal oversight of the Oakland police department for failing to make court-ordered reforms.

The city council met again yesterday in closed session to decide how to prevent such disruptions of its meetings in the future. When the closed door session ended and the “public” portion of the meeting began, attendees found the balcony closed and the doors barricaded, with seating reduced by 50% and more than 100 people barred from getting inside.

One might argue that the city council has important business to attend to and that it cannot be hampered by protests or filibustering by unelected members of the public. The public be damned if they cannot understand this simple fact. After all, they elected the council members and should be satisfied with what the council members do and how they do it.

Yet it seems as though some Oakland residents have a different understanding of democracy, one in which they get to directly influence the agenda and decisions made by their representatives. If the city council cannot be bothered to prioritize and resolve the problem of police violence, then perhaps they need more forceful persuasion by having to face so many angry, frustrated and grieving constituents that they must stay extra late just to hear them all, let alone have time for their other business.

The Oakland city council’s new policies are designed to have the opposite effect. It will become harder for residents to use the democratic process to air their grievances or to use their voices and bodies to disrupt or commandeer council meetings. However, this won’t be a substantive change from the status quo. The elected officials will continue to be the ones who make the decisions, listening or not to the concerns of their constituents. But when they choose to ignore “the people,” they will now do so with less blowback. Their decisions will still heavily favor the interests of the city’s wealthiest business leaders, but now with less public oversight and scrutiny. And “the people” will not have any less say in the policy matters that affect them; it will simply be more difficult for them to irritate their elected leaders when things don’t go their way.

Democracy in Action: No Hoodies in Congress

Up Against the Wall Motherfu=*#er (Image from Flickr, by keatssycamore)

A legislator was forcefully removed from Congress  this week for wearing a hoody as he spoke out against racial profiling and the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida by a racist vigilante. Speaker of the House, John Boehner, had Congressman Bobby Rush (D-Ill) removed by the sergeant at arms because hats and other head coverings are prohibited by the rules of decorum.

What Does Modern School Have Against Democracy?

First, Modern School reserves the right to criticize everything. Nothing is sacred. By criticizing Democracy, I am not condoning any other form of government, or lack thereof. However, I would ask people to consider what they so cherish about Democracy?

Of course the notion that Democracy is the best possible form of government has been inculcated into us from an early age, so it is no surprise that people embrace it uncritically. However, I suspect that what Americans cherish even more than the actual form and practice of Democracy in this country is the notion that we live in a nation governed by “the people,” which is to say that we, the people, the 99%, the masses, have actual power in the decisions that affect our lives, income, personal freedom and living standards, which simply is not true and which should be abundantly clear from the evidence.

The OWS movement and liberals, in general, argue that Democracy is simply broken and needs fixing, and that if it were fixed, we would have power. However, Democracy functions exactly as it was intended and designed: to facilitate the monopolization of power and wealth by those who already have wealth and power.

The rules of decorum in Congress, for example, exist in part to stifle free expression and to limit the boundaries of discourse. By demanding that Rep. Rush remove his hoody and then removing him from Congress, Boehner effectively cut off Rush’s argument that one’s clothing and skin color should not mark him for assassination and that racial profiling is still a significant problem in this country.

Of course the fact that the rich generally do not wear hoodies and are seldom, if ever, profiled by the police or by vigilantes was never even considered a topic worthy of discussion in Congress.

This is What Democracy Looks Like--No, Really!

This is What Democracy Looks Like—Literally!

“This is what democracy looks like!” the occupy movement has been proclaiming proudly.

The irony is that while they demonstrate direct democracy and people power in the streets and in their encampments, they are also demonstrating the complete and utter failure of official state democracy to deliver what they believe it should (thanks to my friend at Ruthless Criticism for drawing my attention to this).

The fact that they have been forced to take over public spaces in order to gain attention in hopes of forcing their representatives to “do what’s right” ought to alert everyone to the fact that their representatives do not represent their interests at all, and cannot since democracy is designed to protect the interests of the wealthy and not the 99%.

Indeed, democracy is precisely about ensuring that the 99% are perpetually screwed by the 1%. The 99% are required to work for low wages and long hours for the 1% to create their wealth. They are required to purchase the goods and services sold by the 1% in order to increase their wealth. They are needed to fight the wars that help secure raw materials and cheap labor for the 1%. And the 99% consent to this exploitation and oppression through the annual ritual of voting, during which time they give their official approval to be ruled by leaders who represent the interests of the wealthy.

While this ritual gives people a sense of empowerment by allowing them to participate in the political system, it does not give them any real power or control over their own material well being. And though it occasionally allows them to complain about the economic system, it does not allow them to change it. Regardless of who is in power, whether Democrat, Republican, Green or Socialist, the system will continue to keep the rich wealthy and the rest of us subservient.

While voting allows people to feel empowered, they have been feeling less empowered lately as they watched their leaders unabashedly hand over billions of their tax dollars to the wealthy while they lost their jobs and homes. This is nothing new—it’s been going on since the earliest days of the state. But it is particularly obvious right now, with unemployment lasting longer than any time since records have been kept.

Somewhere the 99%-ers got the silly notion that the government ought to protect the people, to work for them, to treat them fairly, to give them an equal footing. Yet the government does provide an equal footing—it’s capitalism that unlevels the playing field. Democracy allows all Americans to be homeless or to sleep in shelters, as it allows anyone to strike it rich. The problem is that in order to be successful in business, one generally needs connections to acquire the necessary funding, something the wealthy are more likely to have, both through inherited wealth and through existing family and social connections and expertise. They are also more likely to graduate from an elite school, giving them more advantages in the business and political arenas.And yes, the political rulers do make laws that make it easier for the wealthy to maintain and grow their wealth.

Of course this notion of being treated fairly begs the question of what is fair. Is it fair that there are billionaires or millionaires at all? Is it fair that hundreds of thousands of Americans are homeless and 20% of all children go hungry on regular basis? What if no one was homeless or hungry, would it then be fair for 1% of the population to have multiple mansions, boats and monthly vacations in Monaco? Would it be fair for the bosses to make 100 times what their employees make instead of 10,000 times, even if the employees continued to have little control over their working conditions, could still be fired at will, and continued to have the higher rates of stress, diabetes, heart disease and hypertension that tend to go with it?

The Revolution IS Being Televised Because It's Not A Revolution

The occupy movement, to its credit, has captured the hearts of millions throughout the world and given a sense of empowerment to many at a time when people have been feeling terribly disempowered. However, a sense of empowerment is a far cry from holding actual power, something that the 1% still monopolize and will continue to monopolize until the rest of us take it from them. Unfortunately, this cannot happen simply by occupying public spaces or even voting, and it certainly won’t happen by demanding a 1% tax on stock transactions.

This is one reason why the movement has garnered so much positive press. It is not threatening or challenging the monopoly on power and wealth held by the 1%. Rather, it is simply asking that they pay a tiny bit more in taxes. At the same time, they are mostly behaving themselves in a manner considered acceptable by society (and the wealthy). They are not organizing and mobilizing workers to take over the factories and farms. They are not blockading private companies or preventing people from going to work. They are not slowing down production or cutting into profits.

They are, however, putting a real face on suffering. The media has been interviewing and photographing participants who are unemployed, who’ve lost children in Iraq and Afghanistan, who’ve lost their homes, who are saddled with unprecedented levels of college debt and no hope of employment in the foreseeable future.

This too might seem like a victory for the movement. However, not only is this unthreatening to the ruling elite, it is exactly the kind of public interest story the media love. Suffering sells papers. Neighbors coming together to support each other sells ad time. In many ways, the occupy movement is a classic “feel good” story—at least it has been so far.

Of course there is still potential for it to evolve and become something quite different, like a general strike. While it is unlikely that large numbers of Americans will suddenly start demanding an end to wage slavery and bosses entirely, it is possible that, instead of demanding jobs, regardless of how terrible, low paid or dangerous, as the mainstream unions have done, workers might make reformist demands like shorter hours, free universal health care, middle class wages, more sick and vacation leave, safer working conditions, and guaranteed middle class pensions for all.

While this would still leave the 1% far wealthier than the rest of us and still completely in control of social and economic power, it would have a much more immediate and noticeable effect on working Americans than the nebulous demand that politicians do their jobs or that the rich pay their share.

America’s Billionaires’ Coup (Part I)

The OB Rag just reprinted the following articles from two of Europe’s largest papers, Der Spiegel, in Germany, and the Guardian, from Britain, portraying the U.S. today as a third world banana republic controlled by a billionaire’s coup.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 The articles are interesting for their outsiders’ perspectives and honest portrayal of the rapid and intense decline in living standards for the majority of Americans. However, they also both suffer from the same bogus nostalgia for a nonexistent golden age, in which “West” meant something noble and wonderful, and America was its respected leader.

The Der Spiegel article is reprinted below, with my commentary in italics. The Guardian article will be reprinted tomorrow, as Part II.

Once Upon a Time in the West

by Jakob Augstein / Der Spiegel (Germany) / August 4, 2011

Hate has become a part of the everyday culture of American politics.

This week, the United States nearly allowed itself to succumb to economic disaster. Increasingly, the divided country has more in common with a failed state than a democracy. In the face of America’s apparent political insanity, Europe must learn to take care of itself.

The “solution” to the debt crisis may actually be the beginning and cause of an economic disaster. It is true that the debt crisis was a fraud and fantasy, used by Republicans to ramrod through spending cuts. But they essentially succeeded. The spending cuts will devastate millions of Americans and exacerbate the real problem with the economy: people cannot afford to pay their living expenses because of slashed wages, unemployment, ballooning mortgage payments and evaporated equity.

The word “West” used to have a meaning. It described common goals and values, the dignity of democracy and justice over tyranny and despotism. Now it seems to be a thing of the past. There is no longer a West, and those who would like to use the word — along with Europe and the United States in the same sentence — should just hold their breath. By any definition, America is no longer a Western nation.

West may have meant “democracy” to some, but they were not paying attention very well. “West” included fascism in Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal. West included imperialism and wars of aggression by most Western countries, especially the U.S. Europeans may have once idealized American civil liberties as stronger than their own, but the U.S. still has greater civil liberties than many European countries (even if it has far fewer than a decade ago).

The US is a country where the system of government has fallen firmly into the hands of the elite. An unruly and aggressive militarism set in motion two costly wars in the past 10 years. Society is not only divided socially and politically — in its ideological blindness the nation is moving even farther away from the core of democracy. It is losing its ability to compromise.

America has changed. It has drifted away from the West.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

The governments of the U.S. and European countries have always been in the hands of the elite. The difference between today and the “golden age” is that unions have been so weakened that there is virtually no resistance to the greed and hubris of the wealthy. They are now unabashedly attempting things that they could only dream of doing just a few years back. In terms of militarism, there has been another change that has emboldened the U.S.: the collapse of the U.S.S.R., which served as a counterbalance with the ever present threat of the Cold War turning hot or even nuclear, should the U.S. go too far in its imperialist endeavors.

The country’s social disintegration is breathtaking. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz recently described the phenomenon. The richest percent of Americans claim one-quarter of the country’s total income for themselves — 25 years ago that figure was 12 percent. It also possesses 40 percent of total assets, up from 33 percent 25 years ago. Stiglitz claims that in many countries in the so-called Third World, the income gap between the poor and rich has been reduced. In the United States, it has grown.

Call it a “coup” or whatever you want, but it’s still essentially just capitalism. Capitalism has always been class war declared by the rich against the rest of us, and the capitalists have always been winning this war. The difference today is that they are using weapons of mass destruction. They are fighting more aggressively than ever and meeting very little resistance.

Economist Paul Krugman, also a Nobel laureate, has written that America’s path is leading it towards the “status of a banana republic.” The social cynicism and societal indifference once associated primarily with the Third World has now become an American hallmark. This accelerates social decay because the greater the disparity grows, the less likely the rich will be willing to contribute to the common good. When a company like Apple, which with €76 billion in the bank has greater reserves at its disposal than the government in Washington, a European can only shake his head over the Republican resistance to tax increases. We see it as self-destructive.

Again, a weak labor movement makes all this possible. Wages have been steadily declining for the past 40 years in terms of buying power. As companies relocate overseas to exploit cheaper labor, competition for jobs increases and wages in the U.S. are undermined. With declining wages and purchasing power, Americans have become more dependent on cheap imported consumer products, accelerating the loss of domestic jobs. Meanwhile, automation and technological advances have pushed productivity to its highest levels ever, making workers superfluous, leading both to increased profits for the bosses and downsizing for workers. Rather than sharing the increased profits with workers or allowing them to relax and let the machines do the bulk of the work, bosses are pocketing the profits AND jettisoning the workers. The latter further increases competition for jobs and brings down overall wages.

The same applies to America’s broken political culture. The name “United States” seems increasingly less appropriate. Something has become routine in American political culture that has been absent in Germany since Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik policies of rapprochement with East Germany and the Soviet Bloc (in the 1960s and ’70s): hate. At the same time, reason has been replaced by delusion. The notion of tax cuts has taken on a cult-like status, and the limited role of the state a leading ideology. In this new American civil war, respect for the country’s highest office was sacrificed long ago. The fact that Barack Obama is the country’s first African-American president may have played a role there, too.

When was reason ever a universal trait of American culture? World War I? World War II? Scopes Monkey Trial? Internment of Japanese-Americans? Jim Crow? Fear of vaccines? Salem witch hunts? Communist witch hunts?

The West, C’est nous

There’s no deliverance in sight. One can no longer depend on politics in America. The reliance of Congress members on donations from the rich has become too great. Nor will there be any revolutionary storming of the Bastille in America. Popular anger may boil over, but the elites have succeeded in both controlling the masses and channeling their passions. Take the Tea Party, which has enjoyed godfather-like bankrolling from brothers and billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch and found a mouthpiece in Rupert Murdoch’s populist, hatred-stirring Fox News.

One never could depend on politics in American (unless they were wealthy). The difference today is that this has become very transparent to nearly everyone.

From a European perspective, it all looks very strange: it’s a different political culture. There are other rules at play, different standards. More and more we view America with the clear notion that we are different.

Still, America’s fate should serve as a warning: We must protect our political culture, our institutions and our state. The success of Thilo Sarrazin, with his anti-Muslim message, shows that even Germany isn’t free of the kind of cultural coldness that can eventually ossify the vital functions of the political system. Our society has already made significant and deplorable steps on the path towards growing inequality and de-democratization.

Nevertheless, at least one good opportunity springs from America’s fate: The further the United States distances itself from us, the more we will (have to) think for ourselves, as Europeans. The West? That’s us.

These last few paragraphs could be read as: “The European ruling elite now thinks of the American ruling elite as unstable and dangerous, a threat to their own wealth and power.”

Kids May Not Know Democracy, But They Know A Bum Deal When They See It

(Expanded version of the Letter to the Editor that I submitted to the San Francisco Chronicle this week):

In the Sunday Insight, (San Francisco Chronicle, 6/12/11), California State Supreme Court Justice Ming W. Chin expressed alarm that 75% of U.S. students lack a basic understanding of democracy. While disturbing, this is not surprising considering that reality is quite different from the idealized system we are taught in school. For example, the one person-one vote rule is violated each election, when the wealthy are able to disproportionately influence the outcome. The fairness of our legal system is called into question by the fact that affluent defendants can afford better attorneys and are more likely to be acquitted. The separation of powers is routinely undermined when Congress defers its power to declare war to the President, as they have for every war since WWII. Even when civics is well-taught, the take-home message is muddled by propaganda like “America is the freest country in the world,” repeated ad nauseam, leading many to believe we have complete and unfettered personal freedom, a delusion that can cause confusion, frustration and hostility when the Legislature or Court limits personal freedom. And why should children believe their textbooks when they themselves are denied the right to vote, yet are subject to laws created by adults?

One might also question why one should care that children lack a “basic understanding of democracy,” or, for that matter, what a basic understanding of democracy means? Being able to recite the responsibilities of the three branches of government may help students pass an exam, but will it make them better people? Will it help poor children earn a living or grow into affluent adults? Or is it really all about getting everyone to agree that we really do live in the world’s greatest country so that we all remain docile and accepting of our lot in life?

Contrary to the propaganda, democracy does not mean freedom or equality or justice. Rather, it means rule by the people, rule that can and does include injustice, inequality, imprisonment and slavery. Furthermore, while “rule by the people” implies that everyone gets to participate, even this is inaccurate, as juveniles, foreigners, prisoners and even some “rehabilitated” convicts are denied the right to vote. Ironically, while “the people” love Democracy and their right to vote, they have great disdain for politicians and elections, complaining about the greed, dishonesty and sleaze, and the fact that their elected officials do whatever they like once in office, often contradicting their own campaign promises.

Part of the problem lies in the paradoxical definition of Democracy. “Rule by the People” implies that the people have power, a very appealing concept, especially when contrasted with autocratic forms of government. Yet, the existence of a ruler (the people) implies there must also be a subject (the people, again?) As Ruthless Criticism points out, “rule” loses its meaning when the subject and ruler are one and the same.

Fortunately for the English language, everyday experience shows us that despite the vote, the “people” are not really the rulers. Rather, we elect representatives who, in effect, rule over us.  The structure of the state, the political and economic system, the existence of inequality and fact that we must be governed are never up for vote or even debate. The “peoples’ rule” is thus reduced to yearly ritual of voting for those who will make the real decisions and wield the power. Most importantly for the rulers, this yearly ritual also serves to reaffirm the people’s consent to be ruled, thus justifying their claims to have a mandate from the people to impose their profit motivated agenda.

What about Judge Chin’s concern that we’re raising a bunch of barbarians who do not appreciate the independence of the judiciary? For the poor who make up the vast majority of the nation’s death rows, the judiciary’s independence was irrelevant—it was their inability to afford good legal counsel that was the problem. Yet prejudice (if not dependency) does occur, too. Consider Judge Sabo, who presided over Mumia Abu-Jamal’s capital case, who said he wanted to “fry the nigger.”

Regardless of judges’ independence and objectivity, the judicial system is designed to protect private property and the power and privilege of the capitalist class, not for the betterment of the rabble. Thus, even independent judges would uphold everyone’s right to sleep under a bridge (if such a law actually existed), but they would never deny Larry Ellison’s right to own multimillion dollar homes up and down California, or entrepreneurs’ right to develop a decommissioned army base rather than leaving it as housing for the homeless.

They also enforce the stipulations of a contract, even if that contract is inherently unfair. (A deal is a deal, after all). Working people, for example, have no choice but to enter into contracts with their employers in order to secure employment and earn wages necessary for their survival, thus placing them in a weaker position during contract negotiations. (A hungry person will accept a lot in order to fill their belly). While unions increase workers’ power in these negotiations, the labor contract always favor the interests of the employers, who simply refuse to sign if the profits are not considered high enough (even at the risk of closing shop and moving out of town).

Judge Chin may be correct that American children (and adults) lack a basic understanding of the American political system and Democracy, but I do not see this as a crisis. In fact, it might actually be a positive sign that they have not completely bought the fantasy that the U.S. political system is the epitome of perfection and that they find it troubling that so much want, misery and oppression could occur under it.

School Girls, Teachers, Targeted in Middle East Violence

As pro-democracy uprisings continue throughout North Africa and the Middle East, students and teachers continue to be targeted in the violent crackdowns by local governments. Democracy Now reported today that school girls as young as 12 were abducted by Bahraini government forces and beaten severely and threatened with rape. A 16-year-old girl told Al Jazeera that she and three classmates were taken from school and savagely beaten with rubber hoses.

Sanaa, Yemen (Image by Saliam)

The Teacher Solidarity website reported that Yemeni police fired upon demonstrating teachers this week with live ammunition and tear gas. Three teachers have been killed in recent weeks. Thousands had been occupying the education ministry in Taez, Yemen’s second largest city, demanding a pay raise and the removal of President Saleh from office. Several students have also been killed. Overall, 150 people have been killed in the Yemeni protests.