| From: | "Bruce Eggum" <bruceeggum(at)gmail.com> |
|---|---|
| Date: | Mon, 13 Aug 2007 01:11:05 -0500 |
| Subject: | Re: [WDDM] Anarchism and Direct Democracy |
This is an Anarchy following and
designed group. George Salsman professed Anarchist has guided this
political movement. The non-violent, marches often with hundreds of
thousands a time or two over a million people. Holding Assemblies,
yet making few decisions other than planning another march. Refusing
to negotiate directly with "the government".
What if they had demanded Initiative
and Binding Referendum? I suggested it but it was never brought up.
With all these people, they could have
supervised these elections and perhaps voted out those they despise.
What about The UN or other organizations also supervising elections?
But no, Anarchism refuses to address
the government directly. Anarchism refuses to address the real
problem, find a solution and demand the solution in a democratic way
because it refuses to comply with the process necessary to confront
government.
I don't have actual numbers, but this reveals the tally:
This is the official count, published
in Noticias on August 10:
63.13% of the registered electorate
abstained. 36.87% actually voted. The
PRI won with 17.4% of the
vote.
Bruce:> So there is no record of anyone who failed to vote. Had there been a slot to state no to all, they could have had a decisive majority of rejecting the candidates. Since the tally of votes cast is the method of election, the candidates won. Not voting obviously accomplishes nothing. VOTE is the necessary way, and make sure the election is conducted in a legal, right fashion.
Posted by: "Nancy Davies" nmsdavies(at)gmail.com nmsdavies
Mon Aug 6, 2007 10:40 am (PST)
AND
THE WINNER IS...ABSTENTIONISM
"A pox on both your
houses."
commentary from Oaxaca
August 6,
2007
More than seventy percent of Oaxaca's registered voters
did not vote in the
state elections on Sunday, August 5.
Approximately two and a half million
voters were eligible to
select the 42 deputies who represent the 25
electoral districts,
by a system which employs direct and proportional
selection.
In
a gesture of popular repudiation of all candidates of all parties,
the 25
districts were won by the PRI.
The record level of
abstentions indicates that the call for the "punishment
vote"
issued by the APPO was not enough to overcome popular feeling that
the
electoral system doesn't work and is irrelevant to their
lives.
While some may believe that "democracy"
consists in the freedom to choose
between Hilary Clinton and Barak
Obama, followed by the freedom to choose
between Democrat or
Republican, the people of Oaxaca know better. Almost
universally
they despise the corruption of political parties and
delegates
controlled by and for money.
For most
Oaxaqueños, "democracy" must
be participative, without leaders,
and based on local assemblies.
While local assemblies are indeed
proliferating since the onset of
the Popular Movement in 2006, the system
remains locked into the
old party corruption. In Mexico the breakthrough
from one
established party to alternative parties is very recent.
In 1989
Ernesto Ruffo Appel
was elected the first opposition governor,
in Baja California, in
the PAN party. Two years later, his future
successor in the Baja
California government,
Héctor Terán Terán,
became
the first federal senator from the PAN. For the presidency,
an
alternate candidate wasn't elected until the year 2000. The
third party,
the PRD, won the Federal District presidency of
Mexico City only within the
decade.
The internal corruption
spread from party to party, in a power struggle
which seemingly
eliminates the people as players.
In Oaxaca, the governor, and
control on the state level has been in the
hands of the PRI for
almost eighty years. Control of all the powers —
legislative,
judicial and executive — in
Oaxaca has always been PRI, and
always dominated by the governor.
But he can not claim a popular mandate in
2007.
On Sunday,
voting day, the city looked calm. At the small pre-school nearby,
the
street was lined with cars bringing voters. That was warning sign.
One
need only ask, who has a car? A friend told me that in her
colonia, when
she went to vote, the voting place was empty. This
is a family which only
recently built an indoor kitchen, but still
bathes out of buckets. No car.
I arrived at the zócalo
in time to hear Florentino Lopez, the APPO
spokesperson, announce
to yesterday's rally the withdrawal of the APPO,
including Section
22, from their encampment in the square. By nightfall one
could
see the tent supports being dismantled. The zócalo
has been filled
with vendors and noise; will they stay, or also
go? Lopez announced upcoming
plans for the next march, August 10.
He said that other plans are being
made. I guessed that without
results of Sunday's elections, no plans could
have been made
beyond getting all the teachers back to their towns to
prepare for
the October 7 elections. Asambleas of both Section 22 and the
APPO
will take place next week.
City councilors and presidents will
be selected October 7 for the 570 towns
in the state. Of these,
418 govern themselves by the rules for usos y
costumbres (ways
and customs) and 152 by political parties. In
municipalities where
authorities are chosen by the system of usos y
costumbres,
community assemblies for naming authorities may be carried out
all
year long.
The August 5 elections were staged under great
political instability. Even
before the vote count, news is that
the townspeople of La Ventosa in the
Isthmus on August 5 burned up
the election ballots, the ballot boxes, and
the polling booths in
a confrontation between PRI and PRD factions. La
Ventosa is one of
the towns in conflict overt the introduction of wind
generators on
communal lands.
The social crisis which exploded in the state
in the middle of the past year
continues; the assassinated are
mourned; the disappeared are sought; four of
the imprisoned have
not been released. The economy is shot to hell,
restaurants have
closed, and with few if any American tourists, the vendors
earn a
scant living. One could speculate about the consequences of giving
up
on the electoral system.
Furthermore, 188 public schools were
taken during the political conflict by
parents of families and
instigated by municipal authorities sympathetic to
the PRI, or
specifically, by teachers of the Comité
Central de Lucha (CCL),
the dissident wing of Section 22 of the
SNTE. Many of these schools have
not been returned to teachers of
Section 22; the situation has led to
violent confrontations
between teachers and parents, with no resolution
offered by the
government despite so-called negotiations.
Another
confrontation is taking place in various municipalities where
the
Popular City Councilors have taken charge: municipal
authorities were
disowned and authorities from the people were
named. This is the case in San
Antonino Castillo Velasco, Santa
María Atzompa, Villa de Zaachila (see
the
garbage trucks with slogans), San Juan Lalana, and others.
"Bills coming
due" both to sympathizers of the APPO and
to sympathizers of the PRI may
show up in the October
elections.
Meanwhile social mobilization has spread. Following
the assault by the
governor on the marchers for the Popular
Guelaguetza, once again feelings
run high. The zócalo
has been adorned with twenty-one wooden crosses, each
with the
name of a hero fallen in the struggle. Daily demands, both
locally
and from abroad as with Amnesty International, to free the
political
prisoners and respect human rights are ignored, as is
the demand for the
ouster of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz as Governor of
Oaxaca. The system doesn't work.
If all this weren't enough,
the current election was shaped by the Supreme
Court of Justice of
the Nation which examined an Electoral Reform passed by
the
Congress of Oaxaca in the month of September 2006. This
Electoral
Reform, passed somehow while no true governability was
possible at the
height of the crisis, reduced lengths of
campaigns, removed the ability of
the Congress to qualify the
elections, reduced prerogatives of the
political parties, and
outrageously, lengthened by a year the period of
office of the
deputies and municipal presidents, pushing elections back to
2008.
This last part was what the Supreme Court threw out. Write-in
votes
have never been valid, because a candidate requires
certification by a
political party or parties, no matter how many
votes he/she receives. These
are the political conditions in which
the electoral process in Oaxaca
proceeded.
Meanwhile, the
practices of purchase and compulsion of votes continues. In
the
federal elections of 2006, the ngo EDUCA, and the Foro Ciudadano
de
Oaxaca, documented the following practices of buying and
compelling votes,
and one might suppose they continued on August
5:
● Storing materials
and supplies in official warehouses, handing out tools
and
supplies, asking for electoral credentials, payments for
attending
campaign meetings, and promises of public services or
social programs.
Allegedly ten thousand irregular taxi concessions
were sold in return for
votes.
●
Use of State Social Programs to further the candidacies, such as
Program
Firm Floor, Mobile Units for Development, Modules for
Machinery and Program
for Adult Literacy.
●
The Public Information Media, especially the Oaxaca Corporation of
Radio
and Television, used public space to promote public works
and handing out of
Government resources as if they were part of
the campaign.
●
Channeling public resources through the town councils,
intimidation
against municipal presidents of the North Sierra,
South Sierra and the
Isthmus, who were informed that if the PRI
didn't win in these
municipalities they would no longer receive
resources or they would be
audited.
●
Compulsory work, especially in government offices, with the structure
of
links of assistance. Obliging employees to fill lists with
names of voters
and the number of their voting credential, as they
were obliged to bring in
votes for the PRI.
●
Contempt on the part of Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz for the Accord
of
Political Neutrality, promulgated by the Federal Electoral
Institute. In
addition to making public declarations to minimize
the accord, he traveled
the state doing electoral political
proselytizing, handing out social aid
and calling for votes for
PRI candidates. Newspapers such as Noticias
carried for the past
month daily paid political articles depicting good
works done by
the governor and the PRI
To what extent illegal practices were
carried out on August 5, we don't yet
know: the first complaint
was been received from the Sierra Norte. Others
irregularities
apparently had to do with failure to install voting booths,
but
those problems, a this moment, appear to be few, affecting only
a
thousand or so voters. Perhaps it no longer matters.
Oaxaca
is a key state. The necessity for institutional changes and
profound
reforms remain. Civil society as well as the APPO aim to
extend civic
education and citizen participation. The professed
goals are to guarantee
economic, racial and gender equity,
establish horizontal control, make
transparent the use of the
public resources, and reinforce social programs.
With a majority
of the population situated outside the legal electoral
system,
Oaxaca will have a long way to go.