For Our American Readers: Debate – Is America Really Democratic?
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By David Cobb
It never ceases to amaze me that the United States government, which champions multi-party democracy for countries such as Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan, manages to ignore one-party corporate rule of the U.S. by the Republican-Democratic duopoly. It is time for the U.S. to practice at home what it preaches abroad ? genuine, inclusive, grassroots democracy. Indeed, the greatest threat to our democracy is the dangerous and mistaken assumption that we have one.
Let’s get one thing straight. This country is not and was never intended to be a democracy. The word “democracy†appears nowhere in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. This country was founded by rich, white people for rich, white people. It took hundreds of years of struggle, evolution and dedicated work by citizens and activists to secure the right to vote for people of all persuasions and walks of life, for women and people of color, the poor and illiterate, for freed slaves and Native Americans, for Jews, Catholics, Japanese and Chinese people. And our struggle for democracy is far from over.
The very institutions that govern us as a people are anti-democratic. We, the people, don’t elect the president. The Electoral College does. We, the people, don’t select the federal judiciary. The un-elected president does. In fact, we, the people didn’t elect U.S. Senators until the Seventeenth Amendment was passed in 1913.
At the federal level, when our government was created, the only institution that “the people†elected directly was the House of Representatives. And today, that election process is so corrupt that a greater percentage of incumbents are re-elected to the U.S. House than were re-elected to the old Soviet Politburo. You really can’t call this a democracy with a straight face.
When there is no democracy, the people suffer. The poor fight wars for the rich. The rich get tax cuts and the poor get pink slips. The rules of the game are inextricably tied to its outcome. It’s time to change the rules.
The way that we conduct elections in this country is not the only way to do it. In fact, many of our election processes are hundreds of years old, dating back to Elizabethan times. There have obviously been advances in science, medicine, communications and transportation since the 1600s and it’s about time we brought the American government into the modern era as well.
Many countries, in contrast to American practices, put candidates on the ballot with few restrictions or requirements, give them free media time, provide them with government funds for their campaigns and use much more democratic methods of elections, such as proportional representation and instant runoff voting. We need to do the same.
In the U.S., just qualifying for the ballot can be a prohibitively expensive, logistical nightmare. Qualifying for the ballot as a presidential candidate in the United States means complying with 51 separate and different requirements for each state and for America’s last colony, the District of Columbia. Getting on the ballot, however, is just the first of many hurdles faced by an independent or so-called “third party†candidate.
Once on the ballot (or on as many as can be achieved), an independent candidate’s struggle has just begun. The national corporate media will do their best to ignore any challenges to the duopoly. In all fairness, our campaign has received excellent local coverage, although most of the national media (with very notable exceptions) seem intent on covering the horse race between the establishment party candidates and ignore any in-depth treatment of the critical issues we face.
Where is the discussion in the national media about the 46 million Americans who don’t have health insurance? Every other industrialized nation provides lifelong health care coverage for its citizens. Why can’t we?
Where is the discussion in the national media about the working poor in this country ? people who work one, two or even three jobs and still can’t earn enough to get by?
Where is the discussion in the national media about the racist effects of the “war on drugs†and how people of color are incarcerated at much higher rates than are white people?
And, at this phase in our country’s slide into what can only be described by the “F-word†? fascism ? w? where is the coverage of the thousands of people who have been killed in Iraq by Bush and Kerry’s war to “liberate†these people?
We, the people, own the airwaves. We, the people, should have access to them. As it stands now, transnational corporations who owe allegiance to no people and no country control our media. And for those corporations, war is good for business. That’s why we’re seeing the Disneyfication of coverage of the illegal, unjust and immoral war in Iraq.
We need to open up the presidential debates to these issues. We need public funding of campaigns to get private money out of public policy. We need instant runoff voting to solve the perceived “spoiler†situation in presidential elections so people can vote their hopes and not their fears.
Creating a genuine democracy is the best legacy we can leave for future generations.
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David Cobb is the Green Party’s presidential candidate. He is a community organizer and an attorney who has worked on corporate accountability issues with the Program for Corporations: Law and Democracy, Reclaim Democracy, and Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County. You can visit the campaign’s website at www.votecobb.org.
Submitted via email by Greenguy
@ September 30, 2004