Viva Morales !!!! (Bolivia)

[marmar]

from The Nation:



Bolivia's Next Steps
By Benjamin Dangl

December 16, 2009


A rainbow of campaign posters covered the stairways and tinted glass walls in the Bolivian Congress building. After arriving in the crowded office lobby of leftist Congressman Gustavo Torrico, I sat for hours next to union leaders and other rank-and-file constituents, waiting to speak with the politician.

Torrico was meeting with members of the Bolivian Workers Center, one of the largest unions in the country. When I finally sat down on the couch in his dimly lit office, the smiling Congressman explained one of the key reasons for the success of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), the party he and indigenous President Evo Morales helped construct.

"We choose political ideas from below and move those politics upward," he said. "Social organizations are important to us because they are our essence. Without social organizations, we would not exist."

It was largely this dynamic relationship with the country's powerful unions, social organizations and movements that led to the December 6 re-election of Morales with 63 percent of the vote, according to exit polls; his closest rival, conservative former governor Manfred Reyes Villa, won just 23 percent of the vote. Voters also gave MAS more than two-thirds control of both houses of Congress, a broad mandate to meet the needs and demands of the party's national base. The coming months will say a lot about the administration's goals and obstacles as it begins, in the words of Morales after his re-election, to "accelerate the process of change." ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091221/dangl

[leftstreet]

1. K&R

[Ken Burch]

2. We need an Evo Morales HERE!

Genuine change and genuine democracy!

[Peace Patriot]

3. Agree!

Here's the key requirement: transparent vote counting.

They have it, in the Latin American countries with the best, most representative and responsive leaders. We don't. Transparent vote counting was taken away from us during the 2002 to 2004 period, when electronic voting machines run on 'TRADE SECRET' programming code, owned and controlled by a handful of rightwing corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls, were fast-tracked all over the country, with a $3.9 billion electronic voting boondoggle from the Anthrax Congress. 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting not only allows rightwing forces to easily--EASILY!--'select' disasters like Bush/Cheney, it permits said forces to play our system like a piano, for instance, permitting a leader like Barack Obama to be elected for a "liberal" interlude of forgetting just how bad the Bush Junta was, while saddling him with a Puke/'Blue Dog'-infested Congress, so that no reform can be implemented, and then, when he fails to meet voters' expectations, the drumbeat of the 'failure' narrative starts up, to march somebody worse than Bush into the White House in 2012.

The war profiteers and corpo-fascists who rule over us can put anyone they damn please into any office in the country (except in New York--the only holdout on electronic vote counting--but that resistance, noble as it is, may well fail to keep this pestilence out of New York).

We are f____d until we change this. We really are. There is absolutely NO possibility that we could elect an Evo Morales as president. We couldn't even elect an FDR, at this point.

There are many things wrong with our election system. For one thing, you have to have at least one million dollars in hand to even think of running for Congress. The filthily corrupt campaign donation/lobbying system, combined with a completely non-free speech corpo-fascist media, is how we got here. Non-transparent vote counting by rightwing corporations is intended to keep us here. No reform is possible in this circumstance. Reform is completely blockaded. If we could restore transparent vote counting, however, we would have a chance at reform; not a guarantee, but a chance, if we worked very hard to elect good people. It would take time, but it would be doable, and we could solidify and increase reformist gains as we went.

We still have a chance--for how long, I don't really know--to restore transparent vote counting. Election systems are still under the jurisdiction of local/state government, where ordinary people still have some potential influence. We need a big citizens movement in every state and county, to harass county registrars, state legislators and others to give us back a vote counting system that everyone can see and understand. They can keep their optical scanners, if they do a substantial audit (comparison of electronic totals with the actual ballots--it needs to be at least 10%). But there MUST BE a paper ballot for every vote.

Venezuela uses electronic voting, but theirs is an OPEN SOURCE system--anyone may review the code by which the votes are tabulated--and they handcount a whopping 55% of the votes as a check on machine fraud (more than five times the minimum needed to detect electronic fraud). That's why they have universal health care and we don't.

Bolivia also has a transparent vote counting system, and both are certified by all the international election monitoring groups as fair, honest and aboveboard election systems on every criteria.

The U.S could not pass their tests. Our system stinks to high heaven compared to these supposed "third world' countries.

Half the states in the U.S. have NO AUDIT AT ALL, either because that they have NO paper trail at all, or because the e-voting corps have corrupted the state so thoroughly that they don't have a law requiring an audit. And the other half are not much better. Even the best states do only a 1% audit! And all of them (except New York) have systems run on 'TRADE SECRET' code that nobody--not even secretaries of state--are permitted to review.

And this isn't even the worst of it. ES&S recently bought out the notorious Diebold (aka, 'Premier'). ES&S is worse than Diebold--with rightwing connections that you would make your hair stand on end--and it now has a monopoly covering more than fifty percent of the voting systems in the country.

We must change this. We MUST!

[mdmc]

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