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Friday, March 29, 2024
HomeNewsArchivesU.S. CONDONES AT HOME WHAT IT CONDEMNS ABROAD

U.S. CONDONES AT HOME WHAT IT CONDEMNS ABROAD

No one could have foreseen the debacle set in motion on Nov. 7, 2000. Imagine the scenario: The son of a former president who had been a director of the Central Intelligence Agency claimed victory prematurely before 10 p.m. EST. His announcement came as major television network anchors and pundits rushed, stumbled and bumped heads to congratulate the new president-elect hastily as the election returns for the prized state of Florida with its decisive 25 electoral votes came in.
However, due to the dynamics of a close presidential vote, we soon discovered that something had gone wrong with the ballot count. Machines had not worked properly, and on Nov. 8, a lot of things had gone wrong. "Voting irregularities" were everywhere. And, by the way, the governor of Florida is Jeb Bush, younger brother of George W. Bush; the secretary of state is Katherine Harris, who co-chaired the Florida Bush campaign committee; and the Republican Party controls both houses of the Florida Legislature. The rest is history.
Had they occurred in any other nation in the world, these so-called voting irregularities would have been condemned by the mainstream U.S. media, sanctions would have been devised, and the offending country could have expected unbearable "heat" from by the world's most powerful nation-state. Indeed, our neighbor Haiti has been placed on the list for further genocidal treatment because its electoral process (which, incidentally, is only 10 years old) has institutional weaknesses. How can any American leader with an ounce of ethics or morals condemn impoverished developing states such as Haiti and Zimbabwe for their electoral weaknesses and then wink at the recent "irregularities" in the U.S. presidential elections?
The United States is a liberal democratic system that has held elections for over 200 years! If it can have problems with missing ballots, misplaced voting machines, disenfranchised voters (many of African ancestry) and institutional weaknesses, why can't the rest of the world have electoral problems? President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney will have a tough time lecturing to serious leaders about "democratic elections" in countries which are seeking rapid development and have 100 times more socio-economic problems than the United States.
In Nigeria, Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia and Palestine, political leaders have endemic regional, tribal, and political conflicts that cannot be resolved by imitating American politics. And with the recent electoral "troubles" (we do not want to mis-classify the Gore-Bush conflict), the entire world has come to de-mystify the American model of democracy as a formula that is far from perfect in the very society that it evolved during the past two-plus centuries. If after such a long period of time elections can still contain so many irregularities, the "holier than thou" attitude must be thrown in the garbage, and all Americans must become a lot more patient with and respectful of other societies that seek democratic governance but in ways that are practical.
On that note, we here in the Virgin Islands can learn a few lessons from this experience. For the last two years, I have observed a vocal, rabid minority insulting the people of the Virgin Islands by demanding a "federal takeover" and insinuating that the local people are basically too dumb to run their own government. (Nowadays, the backward thinking people do not use the "n" word or overtly racist terms, but they encode their concepts by using terms such as "housing majority," "Black racists" and "anti-private sector" to identify the African-Caribbean working strata and their leaders).
I have observed numerous discussions of local government reform take a turn toward the negative – and implicitly an anti-Virgin Islands posture. A new unspoken strategy has become the systemic disenfranchisement of the masses, or working majority, as an effort to correct the political and economic errors of the welfare state in the territorial setting. Many in the private sector have taken a dangerous perspective on the local political system: They openly support ultra-rightist solutions to every societal issue.
For example, they support privatizing everything that "the government cannot manage properly" – implying that the private sector does not have bankruptcies, profit shortfalls, mergers and failures. They support the mass firing of at least 3,000 government workers without any well-thought-out plan to retrain them and reintegrate them into our economy. I have heard some suggest that we should "export" the newly fired and the unemployed to the mainland, just as we exported them to the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama and New York City in the early decades of the 20th Century.
Some are calling for a federal financial board to come in and fix our problems for us. They proclaim that on the mainland there are no political problems – no corrupt leaders, uninformed voters or shady political deals. In the states there were no electoral problems until the Nov. 7 elections.
The federal government has problems bigger than our fiscal issues. I started this article with the tone of "no one knew what would happen" with the presidential election. I end by saying that politics is a fact of life.
Political scientists are not voodoo priests, psychics or divine people; we cannot predict everything. For us, it is easier to tell you what will most likely not happen than what will. The upcoming Bush-Cheney administration will not be like that of the earlier team of George H. Bush and Dan Quayle. The president-elect will not seek to revisit Reaganomics, nor even to create the global alliances forged by his father.
The international system has changed since the Cold War ended. Enemies are now friends, and friends have become enemies. We are in uncharted waters. The Virgin Islands is a small fish in these troubled waters. The 24th Legislature will have to swim well and smart as the Bush-Cheney leadership steps into office. On the national level, the Republicans will be a political force to be reckoned with for the first decade of the 21st Century.

Editor's note: Malik Sekou teaches political science at the University of the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas campus.

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