The End Of Democracy And The End Of...The World

The End Of Democracy And The End Of …The World

Honduras recently began a move towards a real and effective democracy.  The military – trained and equipped by the U.S.A. – stopped it…in order to protect the rapacious, oppressive, so-called “democracy” in place.

The U.S. president has muttered…things…and the coup regime remains because U.S. power in the world cannot have “Bolivarian (peaceful) revolutions” in Latin America delivering real democracy and a just redistribution of wealth, taking away the right to destroy people by Capitalist corporations.

In Europe in 2005, when the “new constitution” for Europe was exposed as a pro-Private Corporation document, 70% of French voters entered the lists.  The “new constitution” was defeated (in and for all Europe) by democratic referendum.

Since then, the “elected” political representatives in Europe (and France) who overwhelmingly supported the new constitution, have met, have treatied, and – in fact – have put the new constitution in place despite its rejection by the people.

All over Europe voters are staying home…refusing to vote.  In June 2009, French elections saw 25% of those of voting age at the polls. 

Steal democracy and the first response of voters is numbness.  Later responses may not be numb.  The future, Alain Garrigou writes in le monde diplomatique, however, may see democratic regimes without voters. 

That contradiction in terms is what corporations and – more and more – politicians want to see.  They want to see “democracy” without any changes in power, ever.  Of course that implies ruthless oppression and increasingly militarized (police) states.

Don’t think Canada is not in that neighbourhood.  When the Harper government decided it was running a democracy without voters or elections (and, therefore, without accountability), the response was fast.  A truly democratic coalition emerged, representing a majority of Canadian voters.  But before it could coalesce, parliament was shut.  Press, bourgeoisie, and the apparently mentally-challenged Governor General confirmed that we live in a “managed democracy”.  The corporate class was confirmed as the “ruler” of Canada.

The cards were then shuffled to produce a federal scene – levelled. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff supports Harper’s Private Corporate Program.  There is NO independent, Liberal policy on  Afghanistan, the environment, health care, homelessness, housing, the tar sands, the economy – anything!

And the Jack Layton NDP supports Harper, too, by failing (as the NDP does across the country) to cut out a people’s democratic platform that bites so hard it can only gain increasing support.

U.S. commitments of troops to assure “democracy” in Afghanistan are being raised, quietly, without fanfare by the Obama government.  To put the “democracy” sought there into perspective, a U.S. general in Afghanistan said a week ago (quoted by Rick Salutin, Globe and Mail, July 3 A13): “We’re going to seize the population from the Taliban and never let them go”.

How’s that for democracy?  Generals don’t fool around with the truth.  You might say they aren’t afraid to “bite the bullet”.  Especially if it’s going to be lodged in someone else’s back.

In British Columbia, police state growth is exponential.  The Braidwood Inquiry into Robert Dziekanski’s taser death at RCMP hands is a wash-out.  It follows other RCMP “kills” glossed over and supported by all “investigations”.  Faced with an alarming and sudden production of evidence that should have been disclosed much earlier – that must re-focus and force re-investigation and huge time wasted, Mr. Justice Braidwood did not call for all RCMP personnel responsible to appear before him immediately.  Instead, he closed the Inquiry for two months.  Precisely, I believe, what the RCMP wanted.

The RCMP hand in the BC Rail Scandal is so black the force seems more and more like a personal bodyguard force for Gordon Campbell, leader of the corrupt sale of BC Rail and of the Private Corporation giveaway of all B.C. publicly-owned wealth.

Lawyer for the Campbell cabinet just reported that ALL e-mails exchanged by all relevant cabinet members and offices between 2001 and 2004 – relating to the BC Rail Scandal – have disappeared, are “not recoverable”. (Despite laws demanding retention of materials for at least seven years, and more.)

That claim is based upon two affidavits signed by civil servant information control officers.

Defence counsel expressed shock at the information.  I believe it is a ploy by the Gordon Campbell forces to derail the disclosure process before it entangles them in revelations of serious, criminal wrong-doing.  The announcement, I believe, should have galvanized the court into action.

Madam Justice Elizabeth Bennett didn’t show the slightest alarm.  She didn’t express surprise.  She didn’t order the appearance of the two civil servants and their minister to face examination by Defence, Prosecution, and herself.  With unalarmed casualness, she suggested the matter be handed on from pre-trial hearings to the trial judge.  Her abdication of responsibility, I believe, is major and grossly unacceptable.  It reveals, perhaps, that any attempt to achieve democratic accountability of private corporate controlled government in the courts of British Columbia will be met with a judicial stone wall.  Justice, in British Columbia, we are being told, must not be done.  And we are being told in a casual, off-hand way intended, I believe, to mask gross impropriety.

These Canadian things are, we might say, “country matters” compared to coups and armed conflicts being conducted around the world.  But they relate … and they connect.

U.S. officials scoff at claims the U.S. has a hand in Iranian affairs.  If it does not, what is the enormous budget (in hundreds of millions) used for to further U.S. policy in Iran?  Many Iranians want change.  No one doubts that.  Many Iranians work for change.  No one doubts that.  But those facts don’t alter the question about the huge U.S. budget to further its policy in Iran.  What is it spent on?

It is spent to influence Iranian politics even as the U.S. vice-president drops down in Israel to say that country may bomb Iranian nuclear facilities if it chooses for the U.S. doesn’t interfere in decisions made by sovereign states.

Real democracy is in a hand to hand conflict with imposed, Private Corporate rule masked as democracy and backed by huge military regimes.

Who can see clearly cause and effect in the vicious exchange between (Muslim) Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi?  There no pretence is made of democratic society.  Military force makes law. Who cannot marvel at the thousands of Chinese troops investing the city and attempting to pacify the region?  Ethnic tension, we are told, is the cause.  Planned Han migration to dispossess Uyghurs, we are told.  Ambitions to create an independent Uyghur state, we are told.  Threats to Chinese unity, we are told.

We are not reminded that the Communist/Socialist China of Mao is gone, or that universal health care is gone, or that the iron (unbreakable) rice bowl promised every Chinese person by Mao with food in it guaranteed each day – is gone.

The new Capitalist China thrives on unemployment and the precarious existence of workers.  Grandsons and granddaughters of Mao’s troops who made The Long March are worked 28 days a month, ten hours a day, to make a bare living.  A growing, rapacious, avaricious Chinese bourgeoisie grows richer and more luxurious and spews corruption and pollution into the Chinese air.

The question pressing more and more is whether China can hold 1.4 billion people in unity as more and more Chinese are treated as disposable, as garbage.  Is there a Mao, is there a Hugo Chavez inside the uniform of a soldier presently being told to gun down ordinary fellow Chinese who are offensive to the New Capitalist State?

There may not be time for that question to be answered.  Global warming is already changing Chinese life – making conditions  sometimes almost unbearable in parts of South China.  Chinese factories spew out wealth for the new bourgeoisie.  That bourgeoisie engages in new and old kinds of corruption.  As a result China manufactures dissent.  And it manufactures pollution – as dissent and corruption grow.

Scientists assure all governments that there is little time.  When the control limit is passed (on pollution) the race downward, hellwards, will be at breakneck speed.  The world’s population could easily be rapidly fried to a level of a few million – with anarchy, turmoil, rampant disease, and unimagined brutality on the way down.

But everything Capitalism stands for rejects solution.  Capitalists do not retrench, re-think, pull-back, find ways to simplify consumption, think about social responsibility, and consider the idea of producing for need not for a stupid, wasteful, and luxurious market.  They do not consider production as First Aid for a threatened planet. Capitalists expand, cut throats, compete, over-produce to force over-consumption, bribe, traduce, and destroy uncooperating governments.  As Private Corporations become governments, in fact (U.S., Russia, China, Canada, most European counties) hope fades even more.

China’s future may be taken out of its leaders’ hands.  It is already beginning to be, for its great internal unity has evaporated in a new Capitalist war of all against all.  Life for increasing numbers of Chinese is becoming nasty, brutish, and short.  Will global meltdown happen before internal revolution?

Maybe it doesn’t matter.  For everything Capitalism stands for rejects solution – and Capitalist Private Corporations govern most of the powerful nations of the world.  In Canada Stephen Harper is their spokesperson.

In Canada – to speak of country matters – Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Opposition is empty of policy, empty of solutions, empty….  He spoke in Calgary recently.  He declared the Canadian Tar Sands (a Major global polluter) the hope and wonder of Canada!  Not a word about their lethal, short-fused global-time-bomb nature.  Just…only…everything Private Corporate Oil emperors want to hear.  To hell with the people of Canada…the people of the world.

No longer a democratic politician in any real sense of the word, Ignatieff incarnates the end of democracy in Canada.  Cosmopolitan, a world citizen, true patriot love for Ignatieff resides – as it does for Stephen Harper - in fulfilling the wishes of Private Corporate North America.  And as they do so - they incarnate the meaning of The End Of The World.