Democracy Doesn't Exist - It Is Made

How is democracy made?  Although we see people making democracy – self-ruling, to put it in the verb form Jennifer Whitney so insightfully calls for – the question of how they are doing it, for me, requires a full answer to the question Whitney poses at the end of her brilliant article:

...why did [Ukranians] refuse to go home, discouraged and defeated, and making plans to emigrate north to Belarus?  And why have Bolivians refused to accept the presidential interpretation of the referendum, and continued to fight for national control over natural resources?  And why have Chávez supporters refused to capitulate under immense pressure from the national media and international pressures?  And why are Iraqis giving their lives in the effort to drive the Americans out?  Could it be that they know something about democracy that we in the US don’t?

These questions may be rhetorical, but I'm a tad slow, and need the answers spelled out.  Our brothers and sisters in Bolivia and Venezuela, and to a lesser extent the Ukraine, certainly know something more about democracy than we do, or have a greater willingness to use their knowledge.  I do not accept the conclusions of our most exciting new co-publisher, Washington D.C. correspondent Chris Herz, that U.S. citizens understand and approve of military force to grab the world's resources and subjugate it's people.

Why can the U.S. spray pesticides over Colombia, but can't even force the Bolivian government to manually uproot all the coca in the zones deemed illegal?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but I'm convinced their answers are critical for importing democracy to the United States, with all the positive side effects this can have for people's self-rule in the rest of the world.

Some partial answers:

• It's the media, stupid.  People in the U.S., perhaps more disconnected from each other, rely on the world's most sophisticated mediation of reality.
• We have a lot of rich people, or rather, proportionately more people who have or feel they have a stake in the status quo.
• Perhaps related to that, the tactics used to supposedly exercise the people's power – as called for by what passes for leaders of what passes for our social movements – barely ever stops the functions of business or government, dooming efforts to irrelevance.

So what are the full answers, and what do we do to make democracy?  Please help.  I'm already on record that I'm not running from this fight for people self-ruling in the United States or the world.

The description of the 40% abstention in Bolivia's gas referendum as high, and the 35% in Venezuela's referendum on Chavez as low, is something that struck me.  Different social movements in Bolivia have claimed different interpretations of their referendum turnout, and this is reflected on the pages of Narco News.  My guess is turnout was higher in Venezuela and about average in Bolivia (before the 15% nullification is figured in) but I'm curious as to the actual numbers.

I also wanted to mention that Robert Fisk's description of "hotel journalism" in Iraq is backed up by Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi's internet-famous e-mail to friends, a more true than the published articles.

Thanks for your comments Ben. It's true that when taken out of context and put side by side, calling 35 percent abstention low and 40 percent abstention high, in Venezuela and Bolivia, respectively, the figures might seem strange and contradictory.

However, context is everything. Here's why:

In Bolivia, Latin America's poorest country, voting is mandatory, and there is a significant financial penalty for abstaining. If one does not pay the fine, one cannot do any "tramites," that is to say, any financial or business transactions. So the fact that so many people chose to bear that burden carries a lot of weight.

In Venezuela, voting is not mandatory. So in the recall referendum, 65 percent of the electorate freely chose to go stand on line for up to 10 hours to vote. Compare this to the 45 percent voter turnout rate in October's municipal elections, and things look a little different.

And for the record, my figures come from what was released by the National Electoral Councils of each country at the time of the elections. If there is more accurate data available, I'd be happy to see it.

Jennifer,

Great essay, inspiring.

Reminds me of a quote from Abbie Hoffman. (I hope I get this right -- or I expect Al will correct the record.)

Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it's something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.

don't know a lot of things. Because we don't want to know. We don't want to see the steer killed, just go to the store and buy our meat in clean cellopahne wrapped pieces.

We don't ask where the gasoline comes from when we fill the tanks of our car or if the people that reside above the pools of oil from which it was produced got paid. Or if we had to kill and displace a lot of people to get that oil.

We don't want to know that the shirt we buy from Wal-mart was produced by someone making two dollars a day in a sweat shop of a third world country.

We just want the stuff to be there when we need it and we want it cheap.

Despite the good news from the south laid out so well in Jennifer Whitney's article here, some of which I have been lucky enough to seem happen with my own eyes, I'll admit to a fair amount of depression about America's "day of shame." I posted a comment last week about presidential chutzpah... well, those Latin American presidents can't hold a candle to Bush in terms of the sheer magnitude of his hypocrisy yesterday.

As Al Giordano warned over a year ago,

More important than the terror war or economic wranglings, if suddenly this bad seed child of Bush I gets "re"-elected, when he was never elected in the first place, say goodbye to American democracy.

It will be like Bolivia's military dictator Banzer suddenly getting "elected" after having tortured and killed his opposition. (Something that did in fact happen.) It will set the United States back decades, and the United States does not have decades left to slowly repair the damage that it has already suffered (and correspondingly inflicted on too many others, even its natural friends, like the rest of this hemisphere.)

Judging by the inauguration speech, which the commercial media are hailing as unprecedented in its "ambition," this administration will make the last four years seem like a cakewalk.   "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," in Bush's own words. Get it? Democracy no longer means the will of the people, but rather the will of the U.S. government. And so Condoleeza Rice threatens and insults the democratically elected (three times) leader of Venezuela, whose politics don't match U.S. "interests." Meanwhile, the Latortue regime in Haiti, which drove out the democratically elected government by force and has bathed the streets of Port-au-Prince in the blood of its opposition, gets American taxpayers' money from Bush. The government of Colombia – where the leaders of the illegal and violent coup in Venezuela are given refuge, where the drug traffickers who helped President Uribe come to power and the paramilitaries he implicitly encourages have created one of the worst situations for press freedom in the world, where real democratic leaders are routinely assassinated – receives Bush's unwavering support.

Speaking of assassinating journalists, last year was the deadliest ever for journalists,  mostly due to the violence Bush unleashed in Iraq. From Latin America to the Middle East, reality has never looked so different from the fantasies spun in the White House. And as Bush "proclaims liberty throughout all the world," opinion polls continue to show that the U.S. is enjoying perhaps its lowest level of global popularity in history.

But I am slightly less depressed about all of this after hearing incoming Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney's words from the podium yesterday to the tens of thousands in D.C. who didn't feel much like celebrating either. I couldn't be more proud that we have the support of one of the few politicians that, to me, makes the word "Representative" mean something. Her words were brief but inspiring:

We come here today because we believe in a just America. A good America. A strong America. Able to help people here and all over the world. We see humanity as our family, and we know that we are indeed our brothers' keepers. Therefore, we should export books, not bombs; doctors, not depleted uranium; dignity, not dictatorships. As a country, we must reclaim our heart, and lead with love.

I also want to say thank you to the voters of the fourth district of Georgia, and of course to all of you, because I have been sworn in as your representative in the United States Congress. [applause] And in Congress, we will be a voice for peace, dignity, justice, once again. So lift me up, in your thoughts and in your prayers, because I need it. Our country also needs you. Thank you very much.

(Transcribed from the recording at Democracy Now)

The fact that Georgia voters ignored all the vile lies and distortions heaped on McKinney by media hostile to anyone who ventures outside the establishment's defined talking points, especially anyone non-white or non-male, is very encouraging. If Georgians, like their Venezuelan and Bolivian neighbors to the south, can, in this small way, create their own reality, independent of the one the media and ruling establishment want to create for them, well, perhaps there is some hope for gringolandia after all.

A statement of conscience against war and repression

Not In Our Name
Statement of Conscience
Updated January 18, 2005

As George W. Bush is inaugurated for a second term, let it not be said that people in the United States silently acquiesced in the face of this shameful coronation of war, greed, and intolerance. He does not speak for us. He does not represent us. He does not act in our name.

No election, whether fair or fraudulent, can legitimize criminal wars on foreign countries, torture, the wholesale violation of human rights, and the end of science and reason...

(more at link)

and not knowing the meaning of fighting for survival, in any true sense of the word, has made a vast number of the voting population in the U.S. ignorant and/or indifferent.
Note, I say the voting population, because I believe there is a non-voting population here that are beaten down by the system in their fight for survival. These people have no belief left that they can  fight for change. We who still have fight in us need to teach that each of us have the right to be an active part of government, not the victims of governing.  This non-voting sector are people who don't have a credit card to their name, their credit was probably trashed long ago by medical bills that they couldn't pay.  They live from month to month in inadequate housing or homeless.  It is these people who really know what the issues in this country are, and it is these people that politicians want to keep stifled and victimized by the government.

Sometimes it takes losing everything and having your spirit beaten down to spark that desire to battle for survival. I have found this to be true in my personal life, and I see it to be true politically in countries such as Bolivia, Venezuela, and the Ukraine.  People in these countries do know what it means to fight to have next to nothing and fight to  survive.  In the U.S., a majority of people don't care about who worked in slave labor for the clothes they put on their charge card, or the politics and death behind that tank of gas for their Hummers. By the time this sector of society loses enough to wake up and care it could be too late for democracy in the U.S.

Honest, unfiltered media is a major tool in effectively changing this pattern. The internet opened up a great channel for authentic journalism.  But, here in the U.S. we are working on ways to get true media channeled from the internet and out to those who don't have the benefit of access to a computer.  
This last week proved more than ever how essential this task is. Friday arrived before I could stomach watching television news or read a newspaper covering the inauguration.  The rubbish I found was what I expected.  If any protests were mentioned they were minimized, and implications were made that protesters were a terrorist threat, as discussed in this Media Matters article. These pictures document what are government controlled media did not have the integrity to honestly report to this nation.  

Whitney brilliantly observes that "How quickly we forget that deep, substantive change has only ever come from below, the grassroots."  It is my personal goal to work with any tools possible to reach the real grassroots, not the spoiled, selfish and ungrateful sector that put Bush in office for another four years. Democracy in the U.S. failing will be a domino effect, tumbling democracies globally with their power.  That is something we should all fear, and do whatever is neccesary to implement a "deep, substantive change."

Washington Post

By Marcela Sanchez
Specal to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, January 27, 2005; 10:30 PM

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush spoke during his inaugural address about bringing freedom to the "darkest corners of our world," he most likely wasn't including Latin America. The battle for freedom there began more than two decades ago and today, the basic components of democracy can be found throughout the region...

I don't necessarily ascribe to all of this but I do think parts of this woman's opinion merit admission to the discussion.

Aside from the interesting notion that people are "turning against democracy" when they rise up against elected politicians who have betrayed them, Marcela Sanchez' article is a good-faith attempt to convince U.S. policy-makers that democracy won't make it unless governments address inequality as well as economic growth.

That a majority-poor population is prima facie evidence that democracy hasn't actually arrive doesn't occur to our "Desde Washington" columnist.

She takes it as an article of faith that a free market (for capital and goods, not people) by itself brings economic growth, and that economic growth is a good thing.  She takes issue with the assumption that inequality and poverty will inevitably be addressed by economic growth.  The way she phrases it reveals the logical improbability of this ever happening:

Adam Smith's invisible hand is supposed to work its magic and ensure that the concerns of the poor are met as a natural consequence of such economic growth.

What does the market respond to, by definition?  Money.

What don't poor people have, by definition?  Money.

Though I side with the socialists in nearly every struggle in history, I think the market can work, but only if justice is constantly addressed.  Why does one person have billions of dollars and billions of others have nothing?  Very, very little has anything to do with effort put in or benefit provided to society or other individuals.  Even to the extent that luck and talent play in making fortunes, why should either be rewarded in itself?  The grossly unequal market we have systematically rewards the already rich and, secondarily, those who help most directly in the process of rewarding the rich.  The market decidedly does not reward most those people who benefit their fellow human beings the most.

This would all change significantly, of course, if wealth were spread relatively equally so that responding to the market would also mean responding to the needs of people.  Also, if wealth were spread more equally, so would the opportunities to do those economic activities, like acquiring technical skills or starting a business, that in today's economy make lots of money and benefit some people (and in the fairer economy would benefit lots of people and make some money).

Spending oil income for the poor and claiming land reform, as Chavez is doing, is merely the faintest heading of a simple call for justice.

And the would-be rulers of the world in Washington, D.C., and the would-be rulers of Venezuela in Colombia or wherever hate him for it.

That's the reality Marcela Sanchez doesn't see, or doesn't accept, in her meek request for U.S. policy makers to allow Latin American governments to buy a little stability (what she calls democracy) with a little poverty reduction.  If her target audience — a government that almost always acts in the interests of the rich, and now under the Bush administration seeks to amass unprecedented power and wealth for its inner circle — cared at all about democracy, her ideas might find a home.  But although nominal democracy might be preferred, by policy-makers for the rich, as the most effective method to maintain the unjust economic system, if it can't cut it they will try to choose outright dictatorship over losing some of their privilege.

Let's do all we can to deny this choice.