The week before the NYC protests, I wrote a piece for Common Dreams where I said that having no right to vote in the US elections, I felt I was being held hostage by middle America. Many readers from different parts of the world wrote to me in agreement. Today, that feeling has deepened, although I realise that about half of US citizens with the right to vote are also held hostage by their own government and by their fellow citizens.
It is now no secret that this electoral process was one of the most undemocratic and unfair in recent history. With widespread voter suppression and intimidation, if not downright fraud, there is little reason to accept it as legitimate. As instances of pervasive and systemic electoral irregularities have surfaced, I have often heard it being described as third world chicanery. Perhaps, yes. Who can deny that third world governments are corrupt and power-loving and have little interest in serving their electorate? But on the reverse side of that chicanery and brutality of third world elites are entrenched stories of continuous resistance wages by the disenfranchised masses of the third world. Thus, to many in the third world, the story of US elections appears as not only as one of third world chicanery, but also of first world quiescence. Why are there no largescale public protests against this election, even when there are excellent grassroots efforts which are attempting to challenge it? This is a question that many of us outside the US are asking, and answering all too often, in my view, too simplistically. This is the US, what do you expect, goes the typical refrain.
Yes, but: it is not true that there is no appetite for political action. I have heard, over and over again, the Ohio testimonies. It is absolutely unbelievable what American citizens had to endure in order to cast a vote. I have read every column by Palast, Fitrakis and Wasserman who have compiled amazing evidence about how the vote was stolen. I watched Dave Pentecost
