That’s how it looks outside, gray or grey, however you want to call it. The sky is gray, the sea is gray, the streets are gray and so are the people. Yes, there are people on the streets as the late November darkness closes in. The stores and the commercials are pumping Christmas, but there seems to be precious little “holiday joy” out here. It’s as though everyone is walking around with a large weight on their shoulders. Most people know, whether they are willing to admit it or not, that the 2008 elections won’t change very much at all.
The two-party system is a failure, here and everywhere else it’s been tried. It inevitably leads to two parties that are different in name only, no matter what they supposedly were when they started. In America, it’s the Democrats and the Republicans. Radio talk show host Joe Mtume was asked on CNN what he and millions of other Americans think of the two parties. His reply, “The Republicans are robbing the bank and the Democrats are driving the getaway car!” In England, many people look at the Labor Party and the Conservative Party as one and the same. In Belize, it’s the PUP and the UDP. So what else is new?
The two-party system has failed because special interests need to control the playing field in order to win. It’s easy. Just finance both of them. That way you win, no matter which one of the parties wins. Don’t believe me? Read Michael Moore’s book, the one called, “Stupid White Men.” “Go with the winner, even if the winner supports executing people, won’t ban land mines, signs gag orders, throws the poor out on the street, doubles the prison population, bombs four different countries, killing innocent civilians, allows a few conglomerates to own most of the media (which once were split up among over a thousand companies) and continually calls for increases in the Pentagon budget…” Who is he talking about – George Bush? No, he’s talking about Bill Clinton! He calls Mr. Clinton, “One of the best Republican presidents we ever had!”
The sad truth is that there is precious little difference between the policies of the Clinton administration and the Bush administration. The genius of Mr. Clinton was that he could make you think that he was different, even though he really wasn’t. The same holds for England. Be honest – was Tony Blair really different from Margaret Thatcher?
The UDP took office in April 1993. In the Belize version of the Westminster system, the winning party takes over as soon as the election results are confirmed. No matter. Things continued as before: in fact the fat cats never missed a beat! The same people who were ripping off the country under PUP rule continued to do so under UDP rule. I know. I was one of those people who asked the UDP leadership, “What the f—k is going on?” They didn’t bother to answer me or anyone else. They knew!
Why did this happen? Because that’s the way the system works. You do the bidding of the paymaster, and the paymaster, or the paymasters as the case may be, are the same! The needs of the people don’t matter; honesty doesn’t matter. Appearances don’t even matter after a while. When you take money from a paymaster you will do his bidding. If you don’t, not only do you risk losing the next election, you may find any future endeavors sabotaged before you get them off the ground. If the paymaster gets real pissed, well……you might not have a future at all!
The two parties are so well financed that a third party will always have trouble matching that money. Besides, our elections are held under the rules of the “first-past-the-post” system. In that system, the country is divided into districts. The winner is the candidate who gets the most votes. It doesn’t matter if that candidate wins by one vote or a thousand. The horse that wins the race can win by a nose or by 25 lengths. That’s where the term came from – horse racing. This system is designed to frustrate third parties. The loser in a district gets nothing. His votes (and his voters) are rendered meaningless; therefore why vote for a party which probably can’t win a seat? Even if a third party wins a couple of seats, what power do its representatives get? Likely they will get none, because power comes with a Ministry, and Ministries are filled by the winning party. This system is tailor made for the maintenance of the status-quo.
There is another way to elect leaders. It’s called “proportional representation.” In this system the electorate votes for a political party, not an individual candidate. There are variations of “proportional representation” that feature candidates to a certain extent, but the bottom line is that each party gets the number of seats in the House of Representatives that is proportional to the percentage of the vote that party wins, hence the name. This is a system designed to increase the representation and therefore the power of minority political views and small parties, a feature that is deliberately missing from “first-past-the post.” Since a total of 51% of the vote is required to form a government, “proportional representation” encourages the formation of coalition governments; governments that reach the required percentage by having two or more parties form an alliance to share power.
An alliance is only as effective as its principals’ willingness to compromise. The incentive to compromise is the prospect of remaining the government. Refuse to compromise and the likely result is a new election, ASAP! Opponents of this type of government criticize the tendency for weak coalitions to fall apart. I believe, however, that this weakness is more than offset because it is harder for a government like this to fall prey to the “we’ll do what the hell we want to for 5 years because we were ‘legitimately elected,’ therefore you can’t stop us,” syndrome that has been the bane of our 26 years of “independence.” I suspect that a lot of Belizeans would agree. The leaders of the PUP obviously don’t agree. Neither do the leaders of the UDP. They talk about the need “for a strong central government.” A “strong central government” is easy for the paymasters to control.
Look at today’s spectacle involving the Kolbe high command, a former police officer who became a prison official after having a bunch of problems as a senior police officer, the last straw apparently being an incident involving the disappearance of $5,000 that was held as evidence in a case, and two alleged killers with access to family money who apparently went out for a weekend “on the town.” Isn’t that former cop exactly the kind of trustworthy character whom the Kolbe Foundation couldn’t wait to hire as an integral part of their senior command? And look who is the defense attorney – a guy who expects voters to trust him as an area representative and Minister in a UDP government for 5 years! It apparently hasn’t even occurred to this guy that he is not exactly inspiring public confidence in his good judgment by taking this case! After all, isn’t everybody entitled to a defense, especially if they have money to burn?
This deal opens several cans of worms, and I will be coming back to it again as more information becomes available. I have long been aware of the religious brainwashing that takes place at the prison – my wife and I did a free concert for the inmates two years ago and we heard the loudspeakers broadcasting specific theology – and as Mr. Henry Gordon pointed out on tonight’s Kremandala show (November 27th), there are some serious Constitutional issues as to whether this institution has a right to enforce the practice of one set of religious beliefs and to exclude all others. Believe me, the fastest way to win the approval of the Kolbe administration is to embrace “their” religion. Winning the approval of the people who hold the keys to your cell and who have absolute control of your life, becomes a matter of survival! No other denomination – this includes so-called “mainstream” denominations – is allowed to preach to the inmates. Gee, what about “freedom of religion?” A convicted prisoner still retains the right to the religion of his or her choice.
There may well be a possibility that prisoners can be pressed into service to commit political crimes, an extremely serious prospect indeed. So is the allegation that prisoners are being used as laborers on the outside. Not only is this a complete end run around the jurisdiction of the courts, but it becomes another shining example of interference in the “free market,” usurping jobs from others on the outside and giving the beneficiaries an unfair leg up on their competition, a competition that has no access to free labor!
I would really like to know who Mr. Puga pissed off to the point that someone was willing to pull off something like this regardless of the level of embarrassment it caused to a system that is already the laughingstock of the streets! Must have been somebody big! This whole mess shows why the prison should never have been privatized in the first place! Prisoners are citizens who have been deprived of their liberty by the order of the judiciary, which is one of the three branches of central government, therefore prison inmates need to be supervised by that same government, making the treatment they receive while confined subject to judicial review. Putting inmates under the supervision of a private entity opens the door to a whole pile of potential abuses, some of which are just surfacing. Wait till we find out the rest!
We like to boast about “Belizean culture” and how unique it is, while we adopt the worst characteristics of the white man’s system of government. According to the most recent statistics as cited by www.nationmaster.com, the USA has the highest per capita percentage of its population locked up in prison, 715 per 100,00 people. Little Belize is 5th in the whole world, 459 per 100,000 people, up from 9th and 7th just a few years ago! The great majority of those people, in America and in Belize, are poor people.
In Chapter 9 of his book; the chapter called “One Big Happy Prison,” Mr. Moore comments, “What we have done, in this great country, is to wage a war not on crime but on the poor we feel comfortable blaming for it. Mose Hyde made a comment a few days ago: “We have a system that gets the ants and lets the elephants run free.” Guess we’re more like America and less unique than we like to admit.