Farewell to the Universal Franchise (was Re: Castro on US elections)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>CB: These Yanquis talk like Congress knows anything about organizing 
>free and fair elections, as if the election in Florida was free and 
>fair, as if the whole U.S. criminal injustice system is not a 
>political system of emprisonment, of warehousing the relative 
>surplus population, and stealing working class votes.
>
>
>The Guardian (UK)
>
>November 14, 2000
>
>It's divine justice, Gore is told
>
>Drugs policy denied vote to 2m blacks
>
>By Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
>
>Al Gore may have lost America's presidential election
>not because of a badly designed ballot, dubious counting
>practices in Florida or the defection of independents to
>Ralph Nader, but because of the criminal justice policy he
>and Bill Clinton have pursued for the past eight years:
>
>http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,397152,00.html

Now, one in eight voting-age black men cannot vote.

The fact of the increasing denial of voting rights -- the most 
_sacred_ of the bourgeois rights for lovers of _procedural_ democracy 
-- for blacks (counting 2 million blacks and more) through the wars 
on crimes & drugs shows that the period of so-called universal 
franchise was _very brief_ in the USA.  The universal franchise only 
lasted from 1965 (the Voting Rights Act) to perhaps the beginning of 
the 80s.  Now the USA's short career as a democratic nation is over.

Yoshie