FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! DECEMBER 2000/JANUARY 2001
‘The American presidency is a very big deal. In electoral politics there’s no bigger deal in the world’. Hugo Young, The Guardian
‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle; For Tweedledum said Tweedledee had spoiled his nice new rattle’. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Few looking on cannot have admired the splendour of the US democratic system in action. What more unlikely places than Palm Beach and the Florida Supreme Court to demonstrate Marx’s dictum that hitherto philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however remains to change it. For what is it if not the concerns of philosophy brought to life by the deliberations of the Florida courtrooms and US constitutional law. For example, what is a vote but also when is a vote not a vote and when is it a chad. Florida can tell us. If X voted for candidate A then they cannot have voted for candidate B or C would seem to be the rule. However, may there not be circumstances when a vote for A is not a vote for A but a vote for B — and vice versa of course? And who is to tell us what those circumstances may be and when they may occur? Florida can. And may such circumstances not be the exception but so common in fact for A to be B and B to be A and presto — here is the next President of the USA? Such is the stuff of Plato and Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Russell, George W Bush and Al Gore.
This US election cost over $3 billion, a record. About half the electorate voted — not a record. As an exercise in decision making it was pretty poor value for money. As a means of hood-winking the public that this was democracy in action — well they will just have to spend more next time. The whole event should be seen for what it is: too much of a good thing to let go, the circus cannot leave town, there are still wealthy customers queuing up for the show.
It is almost three weeks since the election and they are still counting, but we should not mock, this is more a case for pity. The US National Centre for Education Statistics shows US children ranking last of 50 industrialised countries in physics and next to last in maths. Almost a quarter of US children in their last year at high school are illiterate. Cuba generously offered to help with the Florida recount — having previously offered to send doctors to Mississippi, both gestures being rejected by the US government.
GW Bush celebrating victory a trifle early
For the poor of the world, for those fighting imperialism, for the Palestinians, for Cuba it matters little whether Bush or Gore is elected. Both chose to compete for the votes of the reactionary Florida mafia and opposed the return of Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez from Miami to his family in Cuba. Both support massive US military budgets, both support the death penalty; both are in the pockets of the giant corporations. Bush is the more imbecilic, he proposes putting the social security system and pensions at the mercy of the stock market, expanding private health care into the already small public provision, restricting existing abortion rights and reducing restrictions on the right of corporations to wreck the environment.
The US election is a shambles and a fraud: voting machines that do not work, misleading ballot papers, voters intimidated at the polling stations, ballot boxes disappearing and the legal arbiters of the whole process fully signed up members of the two contending parties. It is a spectacle that dispels the myth of US democracy.
Trevor Rayne
