The Real Inconvenient Truth

(feebleness… yeah. that’s it. – promoted by pfiore8)

I was in the middle of reading “Dear Senator Obama” by Marc Ash http://www.truthout.org/articl…

and a word leaped out at me.  It was the word “inconvenient”.

In 2000, we were a nation rushing to put hanging chads behind us. Dealing with what really happened in Florida was inconvenient. Seven and a half years later, we are still paying the debt.

I’m reading Sheldon J. Wolin’s (Chalmers Johnson’s prof)”Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Capitalism” and he also zeros in on Florida as either a coup-d’etat or, he theorizes,  akin to a corporate hostile takeover.  

(For more on Wolin see my posts “I Feel Like a Change” and “Democracy is Messy, So Stop Trying to Clean It Up, Barack!”- http://montanamaven.com/ ).  Wolin states:

…Congress which was once thought to be the predominant branch of government because it supposedly stood “closer to the people,” has been demoted to a position of power comparable to that of a corporate board.  The latter tend to be creatures of the CEO rather than the independent supervisory power to which the CEO is theoretically responsible.  Like a board, Congress may occasionally display independence, especially when it and the president represent opposing parties.  But the main point is that Congress has lost its close connection with the citizenry….Finally, in the image of shareholders, who wield small power over their CEOs or boards and are stirred to protest only when dividends disappoint, so the citizenry has embraced a diminished role.  Like shareholders they can vote out their own CEO, the president, or their board of directors, Congress, but mostly they want to be assured that the CEO-president is “heading the country in the right direction”.

Whether coup or takeover, what had been a gradual move from democracy, after Florida, became a downward spiral.  The stage for the coup/takeover was set with awkward ballots, impossible to find polling places, voters turned away because they had the same name as a felon,  and other intimidations.  Then Wolin says:

   Once the polls were closed, the slanted process began: actual counting and decisions were supervised by a loyal Republican official whose politico-mathematical correctness was later rewarded by elevation to a safe seat in  the U.S. Congress.  Then the high-powered legal talents and public relations experts took over, fought the case through the Florida Supreme Court, and appealed to the U.s. Supreme Court.  There a pliant judiciary hurriedly produced a contorted justification for a manipulated result.

And here’s the chilling part.

What was striking was not so much the highly coordinated attack on the system of democratic elections by the Bush loyalists as the feebleness of the opposition.

Wolin states bluntly that:

A healthy democracy would have ignited the opposition party in Congress to denouce the coup and contest the legitimacy for as long as necessary.  Throughout the nation there should have been massive protests, even a general strike and acts of civil disobedience, at the cynical subversion of elections, the one nonnegotiable supposition of a democracy.   Instead, an illegitimate president took office amidst scarcely a ripple of discontent.  The masters of ceremony and the media ensure that the inauguration was made to sem like all previous ones:  authority was transferred, continuity preserved, as the formerpresident, whom for all practical political purposes the Republicans had earlier destroyed, looked on:  constitutional democracy is dead; long live the president.

And I might add that the former vice president looked on silently and remained silent except to mumble something about this being a nation of laws and something about having lost fair and square.  But the voters in Broward County had fought back and protested and screamed their lungs out.  And the Democratic Black Caucus of Florida stood up and asked for help.

But the inconvenient truth, the real inconvenient truth is that Gore, Warren Christopher, and a gaggle of elites let it happen.  “Why?” I ask over and over.  Coup or cowardess?

And now, finally, journalists, pundits, lawmakers, other than Greg Palast, are waking up.  Marc Ash again:

We are in a bloody and endless quagmire in Iraq, the nation’s economy is in ruins and the greatest threat to freedom and democracy comes from our own leaders. For a leader, principle is terra firma (solid earth). Pragmatism places one foot on a slippery slope. Opportunism is descent. And Machiavelli waits at the bottom.

   Choose wisely, Mr. Obama.

The change most Americans believe in is getting out of Iraq, putting big reins on the finance guys, and stopping the gutting of our bill of rights.  If our 4th amendment rights of privacy are gone, our jobs diminished, our houses foreclosed or worth nothing,  we all become prisoners trapped in fear and powerlessness and no amount of guns aka the 2nd Amendment will change that.

Who is behind this bad decision by  Barack Obama?  Is the answer back in 2000? Is Wolin right about a coup? Did we miss our only opportunity to stop this coup by not taking to the streets in 2000?  Shouldn’t the lawyers have taken to the streets like the Pakistani lawyers just did when their constitution was under attack?  Is it too late? Is the fix in? Or as Wolin theorizes, are we in this state of inverted totalitarianism where there is an appearance of democracy, but it is only an illusion?

Or are all my questions or cries for protest just an inconvenience?