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Our Corporate Democracy Merits ‘Civic Disrespect’

etters appearing in profusion in a paper in Florida’s hinterlands indicate that large numbers of voters haven’t been fooled by the media’s silence about what now appears to these voters to have been a right-wing coup.

From Titusville, a reader of Florida Today writes: "Republican post-election extremism has polarized this nation as never before. Today we are a democracy in name only."

Blaming Republicans sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court, the same reader reflects that "when partisan legal decisions pervert the democratic process, oligarchy ensues."

Another reader says that the Republicans are being hypocritical when they ask now for everyone to work with them harmoniously. "After all those years they harassed Bill Clinton and his wife?"

The anguished tone of such letters has seemed to increase as further reports of faulty voting machines in Florida’s minority neighborhoods find their way into the public consciousness.

"If there was nothing wrong or illegal in this election, then what in the world is Jeb going to fix? Is he saying now that we have won, we will make the next election honest?"

In Great Britain, as Gore’s lead over Bush in late state tallies passed the half million mark, talk of America’s coup d’etat could not be hushed.

Will Hutton, in his Christmas Eve column in The Observer of London, wrote:

"I never thought I would live to see it. There has been a right-wing coup in the United States. It is now clear beyond any doubt that the winner of the Presidential election was Al Gore."

"The issue," for Hutton, he says, is not Bush’s conservatism, but that America’s "democracy only has vitality and political tension if its philosophy and stream of thinking is articulated and pitches to win elections."

"The Right has subverted pivotal U.S. institutions to win power…and in the process disgraced the legitimacy of U.S. democracy at home and abroad, and undermined conceptions of the rule of law. It is a poor augury for the twenty-first century."

Hutton is not fooled by Bush’s talk of reconciliation and charges that the President-select is "building a tribal conservative administration bent on supporting business at home and asserting U.S. unilateralism abroad."

He predicts that the Bush years "will prove a disastrous administration for America and the world, and the coup will become widely understood as a moment of partisan infamy."

John K. Galbraith, writing for The American Prospect Online titled his essay Corporate Democracy; Civic Disrespect:

"With the events of late in the year 2000, the United States left behind constitutional republicanism, and turned to a different form of government," he charges.

Galbraith calls this new form of government "Corporate Democracy" and suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court is its Board of Directors, while George W. Bush is its CEO.

Voters are shareholders, he explains, and may cast their ballots, but they are generally disregarded and have no real power. The only votes that count are those of a management that holds all the proxies. "On no important issue do the CEO and the Board ever permit themselves to lose," he writes.

Gore, the non-loser, Galbraith notes, followed corporate etiquette when he conceded the election. Corporate-run media immediately seized on the course Gore publicized: allowing how one might disagree with the Supreme Court, but that one must not question the legitimacy of its decision. By taking this position, Gore assured himself the possibility of a later re-run and media professionals, long accustomed to corporate censorship, began to call Bush America’s "President-elect."

As for Bush and the Republicans, Galbraith insists he will not reconcile himself to them.

"They lost the election," he says, "then they arranged to obstruct the count of the vote. They don't deserve to be there, and that changes everything. They have earned our civic disrespect, and that is what we, the people, should accord them."

"In social terms, civic disrespect means that the illegitimacy of this administration must not be allowed to fade from view," writes Galbraith.

U.S. "information ministries" in this "new corporate republic," he says, must not be allowed to "successfully cast a fog of forgetting over the crime that we have all just witnessed, with our own eyes."

Michelangelo Signorile, in his Gay.com column, says Bush has already scrapped  any pretense to bipartisanship and is moving swiftly to the right.

The Washington Post, he notes, says: "Advisers said Bush has determined that the best way to establish his legitimacy despite his messy victory is to lead as if he had a mandate…So he is nominating thoroughbred conservatives to his Cabinet instead of appeasing Democrats with moderates, and is vowing to take his campaign platform to Capitol Hill¦"

"Of course," Signorile points out, "Bush has little choice: In the iron grip of big oil and the religious right, among others, he, like any president, now has to pay back those who brought him this far, some of whom never hesitate to grumble."

Consequently, to fill his cabinet, George W. Bush is "bringing people back" from what Signorile refers to as "Neanderthal administrations."

Some who doubt the legitimacy of the Bush reign are already calling him "The Boy King," as does Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. "After the Hundred Chads' War, the Bush dynasty once more seized power," she writes. Dowd does not miss that the King is renewing "Bushian alliances with the princes of business and the barons of oil." Others, like veteran Florida gay activist Bob Kunst, derisively refer to the President-select as "King George II".

"Thursday," a busy Kunst told me, "was an extraordinary day of impact, outreach, and understandings." Kunst is working to mobilize public opinion against the electoral thievery he believes was engineered by Florida’s Governor, Jeb Bush.

Both Oral Majority, and Democratic Cause met last week with Franklin Johnson, Congressional Aide to Representative Alcee Hastings in Ft. Lauderdale, delivering 1000 signatures on a petition supporting "a federal investigation into the voting fraud and the stealing of this election by Bush."

Kunst says he and other activists emphasized to the Congressman’s aide that the 'silence' from the Democratic Party "has already become deafening" and that it will backfire.

"If the Democratic representatives refuse to object, they’ll be seen as not having any allegiance to the American people, that they’re just short-sighted politicians who are ignoring this theft to everyone’s peril."

Kunst rejoices that Jeb Bush is being subpoenaed this week, by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, on election fraud charges brought by the NAACP, which took 450 complaints.

The Oral Majority Freedom Ride, which leaves Miami-Dade from its Government Center at 6:30 p.m. on January 17, is fast gaining momentum as Kunst appears on a variety of talk shows, some from as far away as Arizona. Major newspapers too are already contacting him to seek coverage of his group’s planned protest during the January 20th Bush Inaugural ceremonies in Washington, D.C.

Jack Nichols is the author of The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists (Prometheus Books, 1996) Of Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (Penguin Books, 1975) and of Welcome to Fire Island: Visions of Cherry Grove and The Pines (St. Martin’s Press, 1976)

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