I remember growing up as a political junkie, intrigued with the drama of debates, and watching the televised presidential debates. These debates were always sponsored by what was to my young mind a strange group, The League of Women Voters. To me it sounded like a militia of warrior women defending the election system.
Whatever they were, this League crumbled when sponsorship was taken from them by the financiers of the US two-party junta.
It did not actually begin wth H. Ross Perot's invitation to join the debates, but that was the straw on the two-parties' back. The problem stirred with the historical challenge posed by Dr. Lenora Fulani, socialist, early gay-rights advocate, feminist, and presidential candidate from the New Alliance Party [in some states, aka Peace & Freedom Party]. Fulani had qualified from 1980 onward for Federal matching funds, had qualified to appear on the ballots of all 50 states, and yet was ignored by mainstream media.
She challenged the League of Women Voters to invite her to join the presidential debates, and the League refused with some garbage about her percentages not being high enough.
Enter Perot. His percentages met the League requirements, so to the chagrin of the two-party elite, he made his famous appearance between tweedle dee and tweedle dummer. But it would be the last time.
In a coups, the Democratic and Republican Parties snatched the historic debates from the League and created the Commission on Presidential Debates, which we have to this day. It should have been called the Commission to Keep the Two-Party System, because it assured no other party would grace the stage and be known to masses of people ever again.
This is YOUR democracy.
I tell this story because as we approach another election in a few weeks, we are stuck in the old narrative on national, state, and local levels.
Why bother voting when the choices given us at that critical point have been pre-screened and pre-weeded by interests diametrically opposed to working people and the poor? Fidel, after the Cuban Revolution, 1959, promised to hold elections. But when he saw what the US was planning by heavily funding candidates who would give Cuban lands back to the US, the revolutionary government cancelled the elections: he noted, in the 2nd Declaration of Havana, what elections in the West actually are: ways for the US, the monopolies, and Cuba's ruling class to offer versions of their policies and the people given the indignity to ratify them. To what end? Not to the benefit of working people certainly.
Interestingly, when Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega pondered whether to hold elections in the late 1980's after 10 years of bloody US-backed Contra war, Fidel cautioned him what would happen, and certainly did happen. The US CIA flooded Violeta Chamorro's election coffer with millions of dollars, and she handily beat Ortega and plunged Nicaragua's poor into pre-revolution poverty.
I hope Iraq's dissidents are taking note as the US tries to bring democracy there.
Green Party and Socialist Party USA candidates are being ignored by the press and excluded from televised debates all over the US. They are told that they are not known, they are told that people usually vote for Democrats or Republicans so their presence would be a distraction, they are told they are not polling high enough to qualify.
Peter Camejo, Green Party gubernatorial candidate in California, is a member of a party which has polled high enough to be recognized by California's Secretary of State [the Socialist Party USA has not]; he polled third in the infamous run-off between Schwarzenegger and Grey Davis ... and yet, he will not be covered, has not been covered by the press, and was not allowed into the debate between the current Republican governor and Democrat Phil Angelides.
Meanwhile, we are in a state of angst about Electronic Voting Machines, worried that our votes might not be fairly counted, demanding a paper receipt.
So what if they are or aren't counted when what we are being offered to vote for has been pre-treated and homogenized by corporate interests and ruling elites?
Why vote at all? Moreover, why vote when we apparently have no democracy in which to participate? I think it was Emma Goldman who said that Voting was the Opiate of the masses, and that every 4 years they doped themselves.
I cannot think of any significant social movement won at a ballot box: the abolition of chattel slavery, voting rights for women, the 8-hour work day, the minimum wage ... not even the end of the British colony soon to be known as the United States of America. None came to us by ballot but by struggle and organizing and war.
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