Jackson, Recall season

It’s a time of high drama for politics junkies, as California Governor Gray Davis definitely is and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez may well be facing a recall election.

I’m a passionate believer in the right to recall. If we had that as a part of the Panamanian constitution, the Mireya Moscoso nightmare would be a thing of the past by now and a bunch of legislators would have been dishonorably discharged from the feeding trough.

However, the one time that I have had the opportunity to vote in a recall election --- wherein several members of the Ypsilanti, Michigan school board were removed --- I voted no.

Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD do it. It’s a lesson that most people learn before they can walk, when they decide to exercise their innate ability to bite someone.

Recall has been in the California constitution since the time of Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Republicans. It was put there so that if the city machines or the robber barons’ lobbies finagled things so they couldn’t lose, they could still lose. In the rare circumstances when it has been successfully used, the people recalled have generally broken campaign promises, generally about not raising taxes.

In the present California case, it’s a matter of bad times in the state’s economy and Gray Davis being the kind of a guy whom few people like. Unpopular and running for reelection, he did his part to tip the Republican nominating process toward a far-right troglodyte of the sort whom Californians haven’t usually elected in recent years. Thus he finagled things so that he couldn’t lose, but now he may well lose anyway. It may be a rare case, but it is more or less how recall is supposed to work.

The alternatives are on that same October ballot and they’re mostly entertaining, but in a few cases quite serious. The guy who did the most to put the recall on the ballot, US Representative Darrell Issa, won’t get to move up to the governor’s mansion. To me that’s a good thing because he’s a car alarm zillionaire and for that reason I think he should be on trial for crimes against humanity rather than holding high office. Actor Arnold Schwartzenegger is a more serious candidate, as is Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante. If Californians want to ditch Davis, they do have reasonable options.

One of the worst arguments in favor of recalling Davis is the energy crisis that the state has suffered. Maybe from the labor movement or the left there’s a good case to be made, but to the extent that the big business Republicans raise that issue, it’s a matter of those most responsible for the problem making somebody else take the rap for what they did. After all, weren’t they the ones who insisted on the ENRON model for the state’s power system, with its emphases on privatization, prices set by energy oligopolies and the primacy of corporate profits? Yes, it’s true that there were many Democrats among the accomplices, but California’s energy system was basically cast in a Republican mold.

The same reasoning applies even more directly and forcefully if the Venezuelan opposition tries to use the economic issue to recall Chávez.

The opposition that’s largely led from Miami by media baron Gustavo Cisneros used lockouts, strikes, a coup attempt, riots, oil tanker mutinies and a huge extraction of capital from the country to trash the Venezuelan economy. They should not now be heard to complain about how many layoffs and bankruptcies there have been under the Chávez administration. It’s the opposition, not the government, that deserves to be punished by the voters for the sad state of the Venezuelan economy.

Meanwhile most of the US-based multinational news media, many of which have close business ties with Cisneros via his ownership interest in DirecTV, are as usual slanting the Venezuela story in a most obnoxious way.

We are told in the mainstream corporate media, for example, that polls indicate that two-thirds of Venezuelans are for recall.

What’s usually not reported is that the polls were commissioned by Venezuela’s opposition media, whose pollsters don’t venture into the slums where 70 percent of the people of Caracas live and which tend to be Chávez strongholds.

The New York Times gives us political analysis of a possible recall without mentioning that the Venezuelan constitution provides that for an elected official to be recalled, there must be at least a 25 percent voter turnout and there must be more votes in favor of recall than were cast in favor of the recall target’s election in the first place. Given that Hugo Chávez won his current mandate with about 61 percent of the vote in a relatively high-turnout election, two-thirds in a low-turnout recall election probably wouldn’t be enough votes to constitutionally remove him from office.

Then there’s the AP, underestimating the huge turnout for a recent pro-Chávez march through Caracas by at least an order of magnitude.

The set is being fabricated for a real US intervention against this caricature of an awful dictator who refuses to go.

However, the caricature of the democratically elected Chávez is an exceptionally crude one. It’s like one of those grade C monster movies in which the overhead microphone shows at the top of the screen. The role played by some major news organizations in the creation and propagation of this distorted image is surely the biggest scandal in contemporary journalism.

So does Chávez deserve to be ousted? Maybe, but not for the reasons the opposition offers. Will he be ousted? We shall see.

Also in this section:
Leis, The fifth ballot
Martínez-Piva, Trade talks and labor issues
Jackson, Recall season
Martin, The world's protected areas
Weisbrot, The US on its Labor Day
Bernal, Constituent Assembly and civic participation

opinion

Recall season