Joe Bageant: Getting Out the Bling Vote; Dispatches from Kirby's Cool Spot in Belize

[tom_paine]

http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant01152008.html

I know it's unpatriotic as hell, but I just cannot get a hard-on about the '08 American presidential elections. As in, I haven't read or heard a word about them in a couple of weeks and could care less whether Hillary showed publicly some emotion, which was the big news when I left the States. The will just isn't there. And it's even more difficult from here in this Central American village where so many people have real problems. The kind that that come with being born under one empire, the British one, and living in the shadow of the present American living in the shadow of its walled fortress of armed privilege. One of those problems is who to sell your vote to and for how much.

(snip)

Belizean politics works that way. Next February 7 Belizeans will cast their ballots in the national election for candidate of either the liberal People's United Party (PUP) or the conservative United Democratic Party (UDP). Between now then the People's United Party will hand out a lot of cash and pay off a lot of voter's outstanding bills. Once every five years it's payday for the poor, who consider their ballot a net cash asset worth $50-100 Belizean dollars (USD$$25-50) or more. Here in Hopkins, fifty Belizean dollars pays the village utilities water bill for a year. Then too, voters here often feel that their "vote money" is likely to be all they'll ever get from what they consider an unresponsive government. It's hard to argue against this "one in the hand is worth two in the bush" reasoning if you live their lives. There's certain pragmatism, even ironic fairness in vote bribery here. On the other hand, it's a sorry system in which the actual voters are monetarily corrupted by the politicians. I'm more accustomed to the American system, where voters are corrupted morally and intellectually by media. In either case, free market politics is the handful of corruptive mud thrown into the fishbowl. We cannot see a damned thing but what is closest to out noses, usually put there by a politician.

Indeed, the Belizean government is fucked up, misled, inefficient and corrupt. All things taken into accord however, in some respects Belizeans get back more than Americans get in return from their government, considering how much Americans work and pay (15 times more than Belizeans), beginning with health care. Belizeans at least have free health clinics in the cities and villages, and dirt cheap higher education, about USD$15 a credit hour. These systems may not be as glossy as their profiteering American equivalent, especially the public hospitals here. But it ain't China, where hospitals do blood transfusions out of Pepsi bottles (according to American media, anyway) and it's not rural India where poorer patients often sleep under the beds of more heeled patients. In any case Belize does not have 47 million people with no access to health care at all, and a not-so-good hospital beats no hospital. In fact, a not-so-good hospital beats even Johns Hopkins if Johns Hopkins won't let you in because you cannot pay the freight.

Same goes for public schools. The school system is a wreck. But so is the American system. Both graduate kids who can't find their own country on a map, the main difference being that Belizean kids don't demonstrate it on YouTube. As an underdeveloped country, we are also way behind in school shootings, and sexual assaults, and have yet to install a metal detector anywhere, so far as I know, even in airports, much less schools. Hope remains of catching up: U.S. Bloods and Crips moved into Belize City last year and have been shooting up the joint.

(more...)
http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant01152008.html

[dweller]

1. another snip

"I dunno. Come November '08, assuming I can find the stomach for it, I will vote. My choices are not even as good as in Belize, where the candidates are flesh and blood people, not holographic media illusions. In November I can cast a vote for the manufactured candidate of my manufactured choice, vote Democratic as they vote PUP, on the grounds that at least some of the national swag will land in poor people's laps, after it passes through the innards of bureaucratic waste, the fraud of government contractors and privatization. I can write-in vote my conscience as I have traditionally done, which would necessarily mean Kucinich. That's assuming I don't get cut from the voter list through fraudulent voter caging tactics (not too likely, since I am white and few felons are likely to be named Bageant). I'll be punching a touch screen voting machine with no accountability because no recount possible. And my vote will legally be reduced a set of digits that instantly become the undisclosed intellectual property of Diebold."


rec.

dp

[fed-up]

2. Belize Channel 7's last news story for today-"No Guns on Election Day"

http://www.7newsbelize.com/index.shtml#1

No Guns on Election Day

The Commissioner of Police met with those candidates vying for the Belmopan and Cayo South seats today to make sure that everyone is on their best behaviour through the election season. The Commissioner and other senior officers met with PUP, UDP, VIP, and NBA candidates to discuss election regulations including the sale of alcoholic beverages during elections, and the carrying of firearms at the polling and counting stations. A statutory instrument is already drafted and will be gazeted and published shortly prohibiting the carrying of firearms during elections.

[groovedaddy]

3. Hey, at least he likes Kucinich! n/t

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. Why do you say, "at least"? Does he offend you in some other way? I wouldn't

go a single day without checking out the latest letter or article on his website.

[tom_paine]

5. Even though I still believe in capitalism, Bageant's points ring very true in Imperial Amerika.

I have a theory for that. When the Right begins seizing authoritarian control in a nation, the Left becomes more prescient and starts making more sense.

When the Left begins seizing authoritarian control in a nation, the Right becomes more prescient and starts making more sense.

It's all relative, and as we have seen, authoritarianism of either stripe tilts the political playing field. Such that as an FDR-style capitalist, believing in capitalism's strength when it is well-regulated and serves the people, I am viewed like a Hardcore Communist in this current debased political environment.

Conversely, in the Old Soviet Union, anyone to the Right of the Soviet Communists was probably considered an extreme-right facsist...if they argued that incentivization might just be a better way to get people to do things willingly than command-and-control.

And of course now America, Russia, and China are basically three variants of the same government, the New Totalitarianism...which lacks a name because it continues to camouflage itself.

We Imperial Subjects of America are as ground under the heels of our rulers as those in Russia or China, but ours is more gently done because the Old Republic is not fully snuffed out of our memory yet.

Currently, we are the best-treated peasants the world over, but the Bushies and the rest of the rulers are reversing that as quickly as they can without "waking the peasants" until the chains are fully wrapped around us and we are controlled when Crunch Time comes.

[Joe Chi Minh]

6. Well, imo, when Adam Smith promoted the idea of allowing businessmen

a measure of self-interest (and it was just that, a "measure") in their dealings, he was only harking back to the old Roman Catholic Christian precept that grace builds upon nature. (And that, not overnight). Our propensity for selfish materialism can be harnessed for the common good, and thus, should not be suppressed or inappropirately constrained. At the same time, he was implicitly conveying the truth that while, one cannot enforce common decency by legislation alone, the right governance of the business world is no less imperative than is the right governance of society at large, to which, of course, they also belong.

Scandinavia and even Britain for a while after WWII, have afforded us with ample proof of how, with the democratic consent of the population, society's laws and customs can be framed in a humane fashion, beneficial to all, i.e. to foster the common good: true patriotism, which has precious little to do with waging imperial wars. What a bitter irony that the "power people", i.e. the politicos of both left and right, have wanted none of that grace building upon nature, none of that harnessing of the productive energies even our fallen natures for the common good. Both are arch materialists, who, formally or informally, view religion as irrelevant to the conduct of human affairs. When God is left out of the equation, so is man. They spite themselves, and us, unfortunately with them.

Smith recognised the anti-social, indeed, anti-business proclivities of the business ethos, and, for instance, warned that businessmen should be kept strictly away from government! Nor should they be allowed to become too predatory, or it would lead to precisely the kind of economic depression we are now facing. And for the same reasons. Trade needs people who can afford to buy the seller's wares. How shameless, the far right, that it should so shamelessly tout Smith as their guru of lawless, unfettered greed.

[tom_paine]

7. Very interesting points, KCDM-III.

You should e-mail Joe Bageant directly, on his website, if you haven't already.

I would be interested to hear his responses to these insights of your and more...

[Joe Chi Minh]

8. Thank you, tom_paine. I might do that, though he has such eclectic

knowledge anyway, I doubt he'd learn much from it he doesn't already know.

You've just reminded me to check his site for a new letter. I actually feel pangs of resentment at the dilatory way in which leaves us without sustenance for even a day. But lately, he's really overshot the mark, and I might just write him a snorter.