Friday, May 16, 2008

Your alienable rights

More on the modern American (and in this case Republican) theme that the government owns the people: via digby. The bigger story is that the Republicans are rushing to put similar rules in effect in Missouri, a key swing state, and where, without such rules, Obama can be expected to bring out a huge number of first-time voters. So much for government of the people, by the people, for the people, it is no different from Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny
"All the discourse here is about immigration," Arizona ACORN organizer Monica Sandschafer observes. "But we're really talking about Arizonans who are Americans and whose legal right to vote is being denied. And while Latino citizens are hit hard, we're finding that all Arizonans are at risk of being disenfranchised by this requirement."


Perhaps no one knows that as well as 97-year-old Shirley Freeda Preiss. She was born at home in Clinton, Kentucky in 1910, before women had the right to vote, and never had a birth certificate. Shirley has voted in every presidential election since FDR first ran in 1932, and proudly describes herself as a "died-in-the-wool Democrat." After living in Arizona for two years, she was eagerly looking forward to casting her ballot in the February primary for the first major woman candidate for President, Hillary Clinton. But lacking a birth certificate or even elementary school records to prove she's a native-born American citizen, the state of Arizona's bureaucrats determined that this former school-teacher who taught generations of Americans shouldn't be allowed to vote.

"I have a constitutional right to vote, don't I?" she asks with her soft Southern drawl. "I didn't get to vote because of a birth certificate. What am I going to do now?"

Her strong-willed 78-year-old son, Nathan "Joey" Nemnich, a World War II veteran, is infuriated. "I'm pissed. She's an American citizen who worked her whole life and I want her to vote," he says. He went down to the local Motor Vehicle Division to get her an Arizona ID and register her to vote, armed with copies of his mother's three drivers' licenses from her previous home in Texas, along with copies of her Social Security and Medicare cards. All that wasn't good enough for the state of Arizona. "The sons of bitches are taking away our Constitution," Nemnich says.

In Arizona and now as seems likely in Missouri, Kafkaesque rules blend with right-wing ideology to block American citizens like Shirley Preiss from voting, collateral damage in the Republican-led war on democracy. "I was very disappointed," she says of the state's roadblocks to voting. "It's not acceptable. I've always voted."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"So much for government of the people, by the people, for the people, it is no different from Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny."

Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny?

The form of democracy practised in the USA, where there is basically the choice between two rich power-greedy old fools once in every four years, is not so much a farce of a democracy, it is more of a travesty of a democracy.

Democracy was the daily referendum on key issues by all the citizens in each of the city states of Ancient Greece.

Hence, you have 100% democracy in a population of N citizens when N citizens are able to vote on key issues daily.

Comparing this numerically to the travesty of "democracy" in the USA today, only 2-3 people have a serious chance of being elected President and only 1 person ends up being elected president and is able to take key daily decisions for a population of 300 million.

Hence the relative amount of "democracy" in the USA today is 300,000,000 times smaller than it was in Ancient Greece. If the Greek Democracy is normalized at 100% by definition, then the amount of democracy in the USA is 100/300,000,000 = 3*10^{-7} %.

That's not true democracy. It's far closer to 0% democracy (i.e., to dictatorship) than it is to 100% Ancient Greek democracy. This is a numerical fact that no amount of obfuscating spin and hype can ever discredit.

You can see the signs of dictatorship better in England, where the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition party both were in favour of the war on Iraq, and went ahead despite the fact that opinion polls showed that the majority of the British public was against the war.

Personally, I was in favour of getting rid of Saddam and other dictators who caused so much suffering, but it was still disgusting to see the farce of "democracy" here in England laid bare.

The most accurate name for the current system of government is "elected dictatorship".

I'm just waiting for the government to declare itself a banana republic. The laws of probability insist that eventually this must happen. Sooner or later some rich Hitler-like nutter will again slip through the system, learn to make himself popular by writing a Mein Kampf, get elected, then declare a state of emergency and set up concentration camps for opponents.

This is the real and present danger of the travesty of democracy existing today, whereby such a small number of people have complete control over the lives of hundreds of millions, and have proved it by actions like going to war against Iraq against public opinion.

There was much greater stability in the Ancient Greek system of democracy, where all citizens would vote daily in referendums on key issues.

Anonymous said...

Can I just add that it would be possible for all citizens to be allowed to participate in daily referendums today, because of te internet. If it is same enough for online banking, it is safe enough for online voting in policy referendums.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, but can I actually make a minor correction to the paragraph above where I refer to USA presidental candidates as "old fools"?

I don't think George W. Bush is a fool. He - and the previous presidents (excepting Nixon on some issues of bad judgement) - isn't a fool. However, he is one person and there are over 300,000,000 Americans. It's a massive responsibility to place trust in one guy as President with such awesome powers. Really, the motto "in God we trust" does sound like spin to me. Surely, it is the President in whom every American must trust?

I'm Catholic and have always seen the abuse of God by those who prefer to advise people to "trust in God" or "pray to God" when they have problems, instead of doing something more realistic. The problem for God (assuming for sake of argument that God is real in some popular religious superstitious sense) is that the universe is observably 13,700,000,000 light years in radius and contains 10^21 stars. That's not as bad a problem as the string theory landscape of 10^500 universes, but it's still a big problem, and even assuming that God really exists in the form specified in popular religions, and has some interest and mechanism by which to intervene in human affairs, then you still face the huge problem that the universe is a big place and His attention may be focussed on more important problems than human affairs on this planet.

So religion just helps to buttress political doctrines by encouraging people to pray inbetween the elections that only occur every four years.