Speaking of Democracy

[im10ashus]

by Maud Schaafsma and Charlie Cray

In the popular American imagination democracy is primarily a system of government that enables the people to vote every few years for their elected representatives. President Bush and the Congress reaffirmed this core concept of representative government this month when they moved to extend the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for 25 more years. In important ways, however, it was little more than a hollow gesture.

Back when President Johnson first signed the landmark civil rights legislation into law, he committed the nation to eliminating race-based voting discrimination. The Act gave the Department of Justice the authority to oversee election practices in nine states where such discrimination was rampant, and often acutely violent.

Yet the commitment that Johnson and Congress pledged the country to was effectively reversed in 2000, when state and federal officials allowed the disenfranchisement of thousands of black voters in Florida, where Bush supporters stripped them from registration roles, ensuring his election. Instead of the brutal beatings that haunted Americans on the nightly news back in the 1960s, the disenfranchisement of minority voters has shifted to more obscure means, including technology- and data-based fraud.

Thus, forty years after enacting a comprehensive Voting Rights Act, we have been unable to secure a fundamental right to vote for all Americans and we cannot ensure fair and inclusive elections for our highest political offices. We all know that there is something fundamentally flawed and impoverished in the state of American democracy, something that cannot simply be attributed to the imperial personalities of Bush and Cheney. The renewal of the Voting Rights Act should force us to take stock, to perform a much deeper reassessment of the state of American democracy, now weakened on so many fronts.

cont'd...

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0801-20.htm

[sweetheart]

1. Voting should be mandatory & a multiparty coalition system

It is devisive and misrepresentative, and 1 reponsibility in a democracy is to vote, 1.

[im10ashus]

2. I agree, sweetheart.

And I am not getting fresh with you. :-)

[sweetheart]

3. democracy ideas

Only English...?

The debate over English-only education in the US is a fascinating example of how a state's linguistic policy has serious implications for it's internal cultural and identity dynamics.

There are a slew of news articles examining the high-level political arguments. Here's a few: Forbes, Washington Post, channel3000.

I wonder if, in the way that the debate is tied with questions of ownership, centre-periphery relations and the linking of language to a particular cultural history, the debate isn't an analogue of broader questions regarding 'Global English' and state's approach to it?


http://www.demos.co.uk/projects/thefutureoftheenglishlanguage/blog/onlyenglish

Are we the pinnacle of democracy because we discuss it on this large board in english?