Thursday, May 31, 2018

Assad Abu Khalil — The West & Gulf Couldn’t Sway These Lebanese Elections


Excellent backgrounder. It's mostly about the intricacies of the Lebanese voting system and Lebanese politics, but this is an interesting aside on the US showing that "democratic elections" are not so democratic in the developed world as well as the emerging world.
In the U.S., there is still a clear agenda to suppress wide political participation. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world which holds the vote on a working day—and in the winter where much of the East coast is buried under rain and snow. Furthermore, the U.S. requires voter registration, when most democracies don’t. The low voter turnout in the U.S. is by design, and not by default. If the U.S. were to adopt a proportional representation system—which both parties won’t allow because they enjoy holding the exclusive monopoly over political representation—voter turnout would increase. Most world democracies have—at least partially or at some level—adopted proportional representation.
Incidentally, the West "lost" the recent election in Iraq, too.

Of course, the West lost the recent election in Russia, too, but that was a foregone conclusion with the level of support for Putin going in. The only thing is question was the margin of victory and what percentage of the vote other parties would get. Not that the US didn't try to influence the Russian election, it did, as documented in a recent official report in Russia recently linked to here.

Meanwhile we are still being bombarded with faux outrage over the supposed influence of Russia on the 2016 election from "the Resistance."

Consortium News
The West & Gulf Couldn’t Sway These Lebanese Elections
Assad Abu Khalil | Professor of Political Science, California State University, Stanislaus

2 comments:

Konrad said...

The USA lost the Mexican election in 2006 when Andrés Manuel López Obrador won.

Therefore the USA ordered Mexico’s oligarchs to ignore Obrador’s victory, and to install the neoliberal Felipe Calderón as president in 2006.

In 2012 Obrador won again. Therefore the USA ordered Mexico’s oligarchs to ignore Obrador’s victory again, and to install the neoliberal Enrique Peña Nieto as president.

Obrador is now the front runner, and he will win the presidency again on 1 July 2018. Therefore the USA will again order Mexico’s oligarchs to ignore Obrador’s victory and to install the neoliberal Ricardo Anaya of the PAN-PRD coalition, or else the neoliberal José Antonio Meade of the PRI Party.

Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook will not let Russia rig the Mexican elections.

(Rigging foreign elections is the USA’s and Facebook's job.)

Konrad said...

The Empire regards Hezbollah as a “terrorist organization,” since Hezbollah stomped Israel twice.

Russia and China do not.

In this case the Empire includes…
The Arab League
Australia
Bahrain
Canada
The European Union
France
The Gulf Cooperation Council
Israel
Japan
Netherlands
New Zealand
United Kingdom
United States

All these are Israel’s little b*tches.