sv-wolf wrote:Hiya Kali
By all the available evidence, Galloway appears to be a crook and con man.
How is it I'm not surprised.
It is the distribution of votes that elects a party to government here not the overall percentage.
We call it gerrymandering here. It may be a term borrowed from UK.
You probably know about the 'constitutional' issue here in the UK. England has not been successfully invaded or had its political institutions disrupted by external influence since the Norman Invasion of 1066. That means the English have a legal and constitutional system that is older than (and completely unlike) anything else in Europe. Everything here is based upon the ancient common law, precedent and traditional practice.
The reason we have so many bizarre and anomalous institutions is because we've never had anything like the French Revolution, so there has never been an opportunity or an incentive to tear up the system and start again on a rational basis. We just adapt what we already have to new circumstances. That is why we have medieval institutions mixed up with modern ones, eg. a hereditary King or Queen presiding, as head of state, over a modern 'democratic' system. And if we haven't got any suitable 'ancient' traditions to hand, we invent some. We're quite good at that.
The constitution' is no different, it is just a huge pile of ancient practice and tradition. Nothing is written. Within this tradition, the 'Will of Parliament' is sovereign. Parliament can do anything it damn well likes and there is no legal power to stop it. A simple majority in parliament could change the constitution wholesale any time it wanted. That doesn't happen only because the weight of tradition hangs heavy on the mental processes of British politicians and the British populace. The state must adapt, to new circumstances, the theory goes, but the weight of tradition ensures that it will change only slowly and carefully. The main stabilizing force in British law and governance is therefore historical inertia (not written documents or checks and balances).
You have succinctly summed up 1000 years of British political history and you would be lucky if 5% of the American population could repeat it.
The main counterbalance to the power system is a long history of rioting, political activism and a skeptical approach to political and legal authority among the general population. This might surprise you. We are a pretty surly lot. Yes, the British appear to be docile at present, but I suspect you will find that is skin deep.
I believe that. I've seen your soccer matches.
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(I get the impression that most Americans appear to be ignorant of their own grass roots political traditions, where the populace regularly confronted power on the streets and often with great heroism and self sacrifice right from the early settlement days up to the mid-20th century.
Of course a major turning point was the US civil War. It is popularly understood as a war against slavery. It wasn't. President Lincoln repeated on many occasions that if he could preserve the union without freeing a single slave he would gladly do so. Being of Irish descent you may be aware that it was not until 3 years into the war when it seemed that the north couldn't win (the south having only not to loose) that the north fired into crowds of Irish draft resisting immigrants who couldn't afford the fee to buy themselves out of "serving their country" (see here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Draft_Riots ). Only then did Lincoln embraced the moral slave freedom crusade that echoes through the Spanish/American, Philippine, Vietnam, and Iraq wars of today.
For some the Civil War marks the beginning of American imperialism, some believe the Spanish and its Philippine offshoot which came less then 10 years after the final clearing of the US mainland of the last of the Native American Indian resistance to the stealing of their land and which interestingly enough to me coincides with your own manufactured Boer war. Most don't know that the first civilian concentration camps were not invented by the Nazis', but by the British, and civilian casualties were fantastic. Photos of the camps look strikingly similar to WW2 death camps sans ovens.
Oh God this could go on, let me just say that I believe our expansion has always been. Even our president Jefferson, a proponent of an agrarian society with limited government, couldn't resist the temptation to expand the nation with his purchase of the Louisiana land tract from the French. Never mind that it wasn't his money to buy it, the French's land to sell, or that the inevitable Indian displacement would invariably involve deception and violence.
And as to the current US global imperialism, well that's just a continuation of that fine European tradition we inherited from you. And like you, when the bankers have left us broke from the interest due on the lending us of all our own future earnings, the torch will pass to the next group waiting veraciously to embrace debt and enslavement, Asia.
I'm sorry, the short answer to your remark as to whether Americans understand ANY aspect of their own history is - no.
In the UK the relationship between Parliament and government have never been clearly defined and they change slightly as governments succeed one another. Over recent years the office of the Prime Minister has become increasingly dominant both over the government and over Parliament, and this, according to many, is leading to a constitutional crisis.
As you probably know, there is no clear 'separation of powers' here, so the members of the government also have seats in Parliament. Strictly speaking, in the British system we do not elect a government. We elect individual politicians to parliament. The party which has the majority of politicians elected in parliament is, by tradition and practice, invited by the Queen to form a government. That party's leader becomes Prime Minister (usually) and he selects his major ministers, who then form 'The Cabinet,' which is the core of the UK Government.
From an establishment point of view, this all works pretty well. And, relatively speaking, it has some positive consequences. For instance, unlike most western nations who have a Bill of Rights we have none. Americans often think this is a bit scary and regard their system as superior, offering more protection for the individual. That's debatable, however. It is actually the very lack of a Bill of Rights which secures individual freedom in British society. Almost everywhere a Bill of Rights exists, the principle is 'everything is forbidden unless it is specifically included in the Bill.' Under the British system, everything is permitted unless it is specifically forbidden by law'. And that right to do anything you like so long as it is not illegal is maintained by the 'common law,' the same ancient, weighty pile of tradition I was speaking about earlier. The problem with a Bill of Rights, so the argument goes, is that it cannot codify everything that a citizen might want to do even though it might not be specifically outlawed by statute. A Bill of Rights is therefore likely to limit rather than permit individual freedoms.
I absolutely agree with this and this was a topic of heated discussion within the continental congress at that time.
In practice, looking at it from a dissenting perspective, it probably doesn't matter a damn. I don't see any particular advantage any way. Whatever way you have of codifying power relations, the result is the same. The whole legal and constitutional system as well as the doctrinal system changes and develops according to the needs of Capital, and the interests of its owners, not the needs of the population at large. That's as true here in the UK as it is in the US or anywhere else.
Although I agree with this, I would say that it is not capital as such that is the culprit as it is power, in any form. Much as an interpretation of the biblical passage that may be read as, "Money is the root of all evil", or, "The lust for money is the root of all evil."
I feel a part of the libertarian argument has some validity as concerns money's representation of my work and time and that we deserve an honest attempt to protect our choice of use of it. This is a huge area for debate of course.
I must be nuts
Who are we to disagree
Namaste
