Neither Brian Kemp nor Jon Husted nor even the Purge’n General himself, Kris Kobach, will win any Award from the International Society of Vote Suppressors. Because what Kemp and Kobach are doing is neither new, nor original, nor even a made-in-America invention.
In India, which preens about declaring itself the world’s largest democracy, the Hindu fascist Prime Minister Narendra Modi has acted to take away the voting rights of Muslims using the Kobach trick, “prove you’re a citizen!, “but on a scale Kobach can only dream of: threatening to remove a number of voters equal to the entire US electorate.
In Italy, vote suppression is done with panache. The ruling class simply refuses to accept the vote. For more than a decade, Italy’s economy has had its bones crushed by its membership in the euro currency zone. Italians, rising up against the globalization cudgel that has brought them 29.6% youth unemployment, voted for parties committed to getting out of the euro. The “President,” His Excellency Sergio Mattarella, selected by a lame-duck Parliament, not the people, simply nullified the election, declaring he would not permit a government that didn’t accept subjugation to the euro. Let’s hope that the Republican country club known as the US Supreme Court doesn’t hear about democracy Italian style.
☐ ☐ ☐
In June 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union, “Brexit,” in the highest turn-out election in the history of the realm. The working class victims of globalization had risen up in revolt—but impertinently did so without first seeking the approval of the Great and Good in their fern bars in Islington. As the autoworkers of Detroit and Dayton objected to seeing US elites send their jobs to Mexico and China, so the British auto workers objected to their jobs’ disappearance into Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder Reich. Brexit threatened to cut off their London betters from Nutella, cheap French wine and cheap Polish plumbers.
Upper-middle-class voters Left, Right and Center were apoplectic about the Brexit vote. The Liberal-Democratic Party, an organization dedicated to avocado toast and yoga, promised to simply ignore the voters’ will. The Labour Party, not to be confused with a party of working people, promised to keep re-running the referendum on Brexit until voters were too exhausted to fight the bank industry’s preference to remain in the EU.
Lucky for the Mother of Democracy, even those who had favored the EU were so offended by the anti-democratic anti-Brexit campaign, that the Labour and Lib-Dem parties were crushed.*
I must repeat: vote suppression is Class War by other means. If my Guardian colleagues, normally stalwart progressives, were hysterical about the working class’ anti-globalization uprising, firing fusillades of condescension at voters in the Northern rust belt, it’s only because no Guardian writer has ever been replaced by a Bulgarian offering to write a column at a lower wage.
Before we applaud the democratic credentials of the winner, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, I note that his Tory Party has welcomed the arrival from the USA of Jim Crow: the Tory Party’s plan to require ID to vote. This will cost 3.5 million Britons their rights, calculates the UK’s Electoral Reform Society, especially lower-income, darker-skinned, urban voters who lack passports or driver’s licenses.
Obtaining ID in the UK is difficult because Britain does not issue citizenship cards . . . because there are no citizens, only subjects of the Queen—and Her Majesty does not issue Subjugation Cards either.
OIL OR DEMOCRACY
On January 23, 2019, Donald Trump chose the next President. Not the next President of the United States. For that, we’d have to pretend to hold another election.
No, Trump chose the President of Venezuela, though the Venezuelans had held an election. Notably, Trump declared that the winner of the election was a guy who didn’t bother to run. But, hey, Juan Guaidó had the five things that qualified him for the Presidency.
See if you can guess all five by looking at these photos of Guaidó’s party’s deputies in Venezuela’s Congress.
Juan Guaidó’s qualifications are that he . . .
is white.
speaks English perfectly.
was schooled in the US and worked for a right-wing think tank in Washington.
is collaborating with Trump and US oil companies to return ownership of Venezuela’s oil to Exxon.
is white.
Compare this to Guaidó’s opponent and his Congressional deputies. Nicolas Maduro is suspect because he . . .
refused to turn over Venezuelan national oil resources to Exxon and BP.
speaks Spanish.
was elected President by the voters.
is not white.
The vast majority of the population is like Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez: Mestizo, mixed race. Not white.
I was first assigned to Venezuela in 2002 by BBC Television, when George W. Bush also decided to pick their president by endorsing a coup d’état against the elected one, Hugo Chavez.
While Chavez was held prisoner by the coup plotters, the US Ambassador ran down to the Presidential Palace in Caracas, not to denounce the coup, but to attend the “inauguration” of Pedro Carmona, an oil company executive who represented Exxon, as President.
Carmona’s “Presidency” was voted on in a grand ceremony and inaugural ball with Venezuela’s bankers and the head of the Chamber of Commerce solemnly “voting” in Carmona of Exxon. Carmona told me (we met in his fancy condo while he was under house arrest) that his electors called themselves “civil society”—that is, no brown “monkeys,” as they called Chavistas—and held a swearing-in worthy of a Jean Genet play.
The farce fell on its face quickly. Over a million dark-skinned citizens poured down the hill from the new high-rises built by Chavez and surrounded the Presidential Palace. “President” Carmona took off his purple sash and bolted through the secret underground exit and offered himself up for arrest.
Once back at his Presidential desk, Chavez told me he was hated by the white owners of the nation because he was “Negro e Indio,” Black and Indian.
And, boy, was he hated by the elite. I asked a white Caracas news reporter—interrupting her sensual poses (she was in the midst of a publicity shoot)—why the Venezuelan public was so overwhelmingly in favor of Chavez. She pointed to the hills, once covered with a million cardboard shacks, replaced by government built high-rise apartments. She spat out, in disgust: “Chavez gives them bricks! He gives them bread!” Bricks to build houses, food to eat. Shame on him! You just don’t do that in Venezuela, not for a bunch of poor Negros e Indios.
☐ ☐ ☐
And while we’re south of the border wall, let’s not forget that, while Trump’s plan to whiten Venezuela’s government has, as of this writing, failed so far, he successfully backed the overthrow of Evo Morales, elected President of Bolivia. The current “caretaker” President installed in a coup has brought order to the nation by shooting indigenous protesters from helicopters, 20 dead as of this writing.
Then Trump supported the coup d’état against Honduras’ President Manuel Zalaya and his replacement with a lighter-pigmented president. (My mistake! It was Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who backed the coup in 2009.)
WHO DESERVES DEMOCRACY?
What’s the point? Why did we leave Georgia and Ohio for Venezuela, Honduras and Bolivia?
Democracy does not mean accepting the election of people we like; it’s accepting those we don’t like, accepting the will of the people. (And yes, I have no problem with the election of Donald Trump as President, as long as he’s voted in by the public, not by Mr. Kobach’s black ops trick bag.)
I have met Maduro several times and I’m not a fan. He’s no Hugo Chavez. But it’s not my choice, it’s the choice of Venezuelans. And their vote counts more than mine or Exxon’s or Trump’s.
Why do I have to write something this obvious?
Because the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, endorsed Trump’s selection of the unelected Guaidó as Venezuela’s president, bowing to Pelosi’s belief in Trump’s superior understanding of foreign policy.
Madame Speaker: Our Founding Fathers did not grant the United States our Liberty nor Liberty’s inseparable twin, Democracy. Rather, in their slave-owning, rape-approving, Indian-murdering conflicted hearts, they believed in the Rights of Man, all men, and that these rights are granted by The Creator. These rights, Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence, are “inalienable”—they can’t be voided because a nation is sitting on our oil.
The Creator created the USA; and She created Venezuela as well, Bolivia and all those nations Trump calls “shitholes.” A world of The Creator’s creations, all born with the right to vote.
THE PRICE
We cannot deny the right to the ballot box in other nations, even with the endorsement of “civil society,” and not expect the contagion of plutocracy to stay off America’s shore.
I’m not endorsing, as Bush did in Iraq, that we drop democracy from a B-52. But denying democracy anywhere has its consequences. Three examples of a hundred:
☐When you see Trump locking up kids in cages on the border, I must uncomfortably remind you that this is the denouement of Obama and Clinton endorsing a coup d’état in 2009 against the elected leftist President of Honduras. The coup led to political-economic implosion, the takeover by gangsters—and hundreds of thousands fleeing for their lives to the US border for asylum.
☐The CIA overthrew Iran’s elected government in 1954. According to cables now public in the National Archives, the CIA’s plot centered on empowering Iran’s mullahs who had previously kept at arm’s length from government, to declare a fatwa against the elected government (which had, as in Venezuela, nationalized Western-claimed oil reserves). Today’s nuclear stand-off with Iran began with vote suppression—suppressing the vote of Iranians.
☐That same year, 1954, the US blocked the election of Ho Chi Minh as President of Viet Nam. (For younger readers who don’t understand the consequences of that act of vote suppression, google “Viet Nam.”)
Lesson? You can screw voters around the world, but expect the disenfranchised to screw back.
* No, do not send me nasty little notes about pro-Brexit racism or other such foodle. This is a book about democracy, not the European Union, a corporate contrivance I’ve dealt with more fully in the “Globalization and Its Discontents” chapter of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. As the late Tony Benn said, if we can’t “get rid of you [the European Commission], we don’t have a democracy.”