He who pays the piper…
“EMANCIPATE ourselves from mental slavery, because while others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind…mind is your only ruler, sovereign.” Thirty three years after its release, the lyrics to Jamaican music legend, Bob Marley’s iconic ditty remain as prescient as ever.
Long after the formal ending of physical bondage under slavery and its similarly dehumanising twin, indentureship, the freedom of people to collectively make decisions has been long in coming. For countries in the Western Hemisphere especially, winning independence had been limited to a titular achievement, particularly by the United States, which since the latter part of the 20th century, has been the world’s lone superpower enforcing its will on the newly independent nations in its backyard, employing a variety of overt and not very covert tactics, which included a still-standing embargo against the revolutionary governments of Cuba, arming insurgents in Nicaragua, and staging bouts of occupation in Haiti as well as in The Dominican Republic.
As the international and domestic political backlash against these brazen interventions intensified, however, the American strategy of shaping policymaking in foreign countries evolved to include the surreptitious – but no less ruinous–imposition of set economic agendas. This the US did using varied instruments such as aid conditionality, structural adjustment programmes and free-trade policies, which were primarily deployed through the medium of supranational organisations in which the US had substantial influence, viz. the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation.
However, with the near simultaneous ascent of multiple emerging economic powers, particularly China, other developing countries turned to these rising stars for aid and capital investments and began to drift out of the orbit of American supranational economic influence. Enter the most recent American contrivance to guide policymaking abroad: direct material support for chosen candidates and political parties. On the Americans’ part, it is a stellar coup de grace: whereas they had previously subverted and dismantled democratic structures in foreign countries in order to have their way, this time around they would participate in the democratic process and, they hope, commandeer it.
Turning purse strings into puppet strings is a distinctly American modus operandi in politics. Through direct campaign contributions and external support through Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs), wealthy individuals and big corporations are widely believed by the American public to wield tremendous influence in both legislative and executive arms of government. The hand of these forces in the popular democratic process is regarded as having been strengthened as a result of a United States Supreme Court ruling in the 2010 case of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission which allowed any independent group or individual to spend as much as it or he feels in support of a preferred candidate or party. Writing during the US presidential election year 2012 in Washington-headquartered publication, The Atlantic, James Bennet noted that since 2010, the year Super PACs began participating in elections, their spending had risen nearly 400%, north of US$349M, as at 2012 with nearly 60% of that coming “from just 100 donors.”
It is a truism that money alone does not win an election. Writing in the British newspaper, The Guardian, Gary Younge during the Republican primaries of 2012, noted that “candidates’ debate performances, policy positions, personal histories and retail politics play a role.” However, he did point out that though money is not the sole determinant doesn’t mean it’s not the key one, observing that during the 2011/2012 primaries, Republican candidate New Gingrich’s surge in the US state of Iowa was halted after Mitt Romney’s Super Pac ploughed millions of dollars into campaign ads attacking him. Similarly, he added that Mr. Romney’s “commanding lead in South Carolina was similarly thwarted when Gingrich’s Super Pac injected several million dollars.”
The capture of the popular elections process transpires on two fronts: donors get candidates to endorse an agenda set by the former in exchange for financial and political support, and secondly, the donors set about engaging in political advertising to manipulate public opinion and build popular support for their cause or at least, popular opposition to those candidates who do not sympathise with their cause. It is a similar process which the United States, by way of a $250M USAID-funded “Leadership and Democracy (LEAD) project”, seems poised to unleash on Guyana’s electoral processes. When a foreign power begins providing direct logistical and material support to political parties, as the United States has begun to do under the LEAD project, it blasts open a yawning conduit through which the American government can potentially exercise de facto political control of both the legislative and executive arms of our government, thereby effectively supplanting a home-grown policy agenda with one that prioritises US interests.
The concept of democracy as a contest of ideas is, therefore, perverted by the money play. Retired US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who was a presiding judge and had dissented with the majority court ruling in the Citizens United case, noted that major political financiers distort the public debate by outspending rivals on political advertising in the media and dominating “the marketplace of ideas.” Mr. Roberts further contended that this cash-fuelled campaigning puts an outsized spotlight on the ideas favoured by the financiers, thereby creating the perception of widespread support for said ideas, irrespective of the actual support. Thus, Mr. Roberts contended, this process marginalises the speech of other individuals and groups. Even if they don’t win, the beneficiaries of these donor funds can create sufficient disruption as is the case with the billionaire bankrolled-Tea Party Republicans that shut down the US federal government or the US-funded activists which fuelled a coup that toppled the democratically elected President Mohammed Morsi in Egypt.
That the United States bypassed the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) and the Parliament Office to deliver its ‘support for Guyana’s political parties and its democracy’ through the independently contracted and controversial International Republican Institute (IRI) is especially telling of its desire to exercise direct sway over the political parties here. The US Embassy’s nonchalant dismissal of the Guyana government’s rejection of the LEAD project and persistence with its implementation, reeks of a moral double standard, since US President Barack Obama, reacting to the Citizens United ruling is quoted as saying: “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”
Some have tried to paint the United States as a noble interlocutor in our domestic political affairs and often refer to the role played by the Carter Center in the restoration of democracy here in 1992. But as we noted in our editorial of December 24, the US meddling in political affairs of foreign countries is premised on its own priorities which often conflict with the popular will. That the United States backed away from its customary vote-rigging assistance to the People’s National Congress and facilitated free and fair polls is more as a result of the waning days of the Cold War and a decline in the communist ideological fervour.
How the Guyana government intends to defend the looming American enslavement of the Guyanese political consciousness remains to be seen.