Sebagai kelompok paling konyol dalam sejarah peradaban, sudah sepatutnya G8 yang terdiri atas 8 negara maju itu menerima kenyataan bahwa justru merekalah yang paling tidak demokratis. Dengan kekuatan industri yang tak tertandingi mereka terus memanggang dan menghisap 4/5 penduduk bumi demi memakmurkan 1/5 sisanya. Apalagi tanpa sekretariat, mana mungkin G8 mempertanggungjawabkan perbuatannya.
"The G8 is an unaccountable organisation of world leaders that only comes together to maintain the status quo. They want to remake the world in their image." - BdA ................. Bad Democracy Award 1. G8 2. IDF 3. Rupert Murdoch 4. Gloria Arroyo 5. Pope Benedict XVI 6. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang 7. BHP Billiton 8. King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud 9. Lech Kaczynski 10. Felipe Calderon 11. Bob Geldof 12. Joseph Kabila 1. G8 The "Masters of the Universe" last month reprised their annual fest of pious rhetoric and naked self-interest. As protesters and tramps were rounded up in St Petersburg, we caught a snippet of the banter of the mighty. George Bush's nuanced summary of the middle east crisis - "what they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over" - offered an unsettling taste of the analysis with which the planet's eight most potent leaders direct world affairs. Bush and Blair chirruped about Russian democracy; Vladimir Putin coolly noted that the men who preside over Guantanamo Bay and the cash-for-honours scandal are in no position to lecture. Jacques Chirac sat in a corner and sulked, and another year at Earth's least accountable international body trundled by. - 2. Israeli Defence Force Reasoned debate with its neighbours is not the Israeli army's strong point. This month, the top brass demonstrably went too far, adding insult to grievous injury. The IDF had the gall to conclude, after the most cursory of investigations, that the explosion that killed eight Palestinian picnickers on Beit Lahia beach in Gaza was caused by a mine left under the sands by Palestinian militants, rather than one of the shells it was blasting at the shore at the time. Add to that a plan to make the IDF a tool officially to annex parts of the West Bank unilaterally and a long record of recklessly bumping off Palestinian children and you start to think Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's daughter has a point when she stands outside the chief-of-staff's house shouting "murderer". - 3. Rupert Murdoch Last month afforded the world's most potent politicians, wonks, hacks, schmoozers and nepotists that rare opportunity: an audience with the Sun King. Gathered at Pebble Beach, those who tired of pressing the flesh of some 250 News Corp execs could talk salvation with Bono or termination with Arnold Schwarzenegger. As if his tentacles had not sufficiently penetrated the daily lives of practically everybody, Murdoch displayed his latest investment, MySpace, on which he has found time to create a personal site to gripe about tax. Surpassing himself, he has also of late managed a series of contortions that have left him cosily aligned with the power-hungry camps of Hillary Clinton and David Cameron. As Groucho Marx put it: "Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others." - 4. Gloria Arroyo About 700 people have been bumped off in political killings in the Philippines over the past five years. Now, the president has set out to stem the bloodshed, announcing a ten-week long commission to probe ten cases. Human rights organisations smelt a rat, observing that those recently dispatched have almost all been unsympathetic to the government, and that no one is being brought to trial. Arroyo survived a second impeachment attempt in August, thanks largely to a parliament full of her allies. But the signs are not good. Her administration has declared "all-out war" on the country's Communist rebels (themselves a pack of maniacs). With little scope for the state's institutions to rein in Arroyo and the zealous military, Filipino democracy is looking decidedly peaky. - 5. Pope Benedict XVI For all its stylised (and costly) electoral ritual, the Vatican has never been a paragon of democracy. After all, the man on its throne is no less than the Almighty's chief human henchman. No surprise, then, that the present pontiff, God's Rottweiler, saw fit to slap down the elected Spanish premier for not paying homage during a papal visit last month. The expansion of civil liberties undertaken by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's government, the Papa told the prayerful, should be stricken from the record. From the sublime - his pronouncement that happy-clappy church music must give way to cacophonous organ voluntaries - to Ratzinger's deadly and ridiculous intransigence on the use of condoms to counter HIV, it seems mere mortals must suffer the fallout from the theocrat's will. - 6. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang Disease has always been a fillip for two sorts of people: quacks and chancers. It remains unclear which category South Africa's health minister falls into, but her performance at an international Aids conference suggests it may be both. Her delegation's stall - festooned with lemons, beetroot, garlic and other little-known elixirs - caused the UN's HIV tsar to describe Pretoria's "obtuse, dilatory and negligent" policies as worthy of the "lunatic fringe". President Thabo Mbeki has helpfully suggested that HIV is not the cause of Aids and has tasked Dr Beetroot, as she is known, with ministering to the country's 5.5 million sufferers. That is the highest total in the world, and yet anti-retrovirals remain hopelessly scarce. About 800 die every day. Maybe there isn't enough garlic. - 7. BHP Billiton There's something about doing business in Chile that brings out the worst in multinational corporations. Following the forestry firms and gold-diggers, this time it's the BHP, the British-Australian mining company that announced $10 billion in profit - a record for an Australian company - just as it was telling thousands of striking staff that a decent pay-rise was out of the question. BHP has taken a hammering before for its shenanigans in West Papua. And recent revelations that the company pulled strings attached to Dick Cheney and Malcolm Rifkind to help it quietly sink its paws into the Iraqi oil pot suggest once more that for all its talk of corporate social responsibility, the company is still a few steps away from being reborn as Democracy Inc. - 8. King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud The Saudi monarchs have made it clear over the years that democracy is not their cup of tea. But after 11 September 2001, when 15 Saudis wreaked havoc in the name of Allah, Riyadh made a lot of noise about its newfound tolerance. That was rather undermined this month with when Freedom House smuggled textbooks out of Saudi schools, in which a particularly right-on exercise instructed children: "Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words (Islam, hellfire): Every religion other than ____ is false. Whoever dies outside of Islam enters ____." Given the concentration of Saudi oil wealth in royal hands and the continued willingness to crush dissent, it is puzzling to hear King Abdullah declare, when describing the Saudi government: "I believe it is now a democracy." - 9. Lech Kaczynski Not lightly do the Poles use the word "fascist". They know better than most that it is not a term to be bandied around. Some, however, are reaching back into the vocabulary of the ghettos to describe the virulent racism and homophobia that have pervaded public discourse since the president's Law and Justice party entered a coalition with a pair of factions so far to the Right they're about to fall off. In the name of upholding ancient Catholic values, Kaczynski and his identical twin, the party's leader, have hopped into bed with lunatic collections of vigilantes, charlatans and neo-Nazis. Small wonder that campaigns are proliferating to inform curious Poles that homosexuals not only drink blood but, it transpires, account for almost all society's murderers. - 10. Felipe Calderon Only Mextli himself can say for sure how much skulduggery, and on whose part, besmirched Mexico's July presidential election. Convinced he was diddled out of power, the populist Andres Manual Lopez Obrador demanded a recount after the official result saw him lose to the pro-Washington Calderon by a sniff, reversing the projections of exit polls. After a relieved George Bush called Calderon to congratulate him, videos emerged apparently showing irregularities including a Calderon supporter stuffing ballots into unsealed boxes. Given mounting evidence that Calderon's people got their paws on some illicit voter lists, the ferocious smear campaign he ran and his refusal to back a recount, it seems certain the eventual loser will be that frail creature, Mexican democracy. - 11. Bob Geldof It goes without saying that the faded Irish crooner is no despot. All the same, he seems far keener to cosy up to the mighty than to make good on his self-trumpeted campaign to eradicate poverty, hunger and tunefulness. Tony Blair's announcement last month that Geldof is to sit on an "Africa Progress Panel" to oversee the implementation of the promises made at Gleneagles last year was immediately dismissed as a "gimmick" designed to muffle the news that next to nothing has been done in twelve months. But it seems we can relax. Not only will the panel enjoy the presence of Nigerian tough guy Olusegun Obasanjo, its quest to render humanity a little more equal has been endorsed by none other than Bill Gates, the world's richest man. - 12. Joseph Kabila It is the UN's largest ever electoral operation and the inaptly named Democratic Republic of Congo's first multi-party vote since independence from Belgium, but the war-battered African state has yet to be transformed into a functioning democracy. That is largely because its dictator tyrannises the media and because his opponents have suddenly become accident-prone, like one whose barracks mysteriously burnt to the ground. A group of former vice presidents issued a statement ruing the electoral sham they fear they are witnessing: "Perhaps we are heading for a masquerade or a parody of elections," they wrote. For ordinary Congolese, 1,000 of whom still die daily from privation and disease, the sight of Kabila jumping through a shabby democratic hoop will be of little solace. Sebagai kelompok paling konyol dalam sejarah peradaban, sudah sepatutnya G8 yang terdiri atas 8 negara maju itu menerima kenyataan bahwa justru merekalah yang paling tidak demokratis. Dengan kuasa industri yang tak tertandingi mereka terus memanggang dan menghisap 4/5 penduduk bumi demi memakmurkan 1/5 sisanya. Apalagi tanpa sekretariat, mana mungkin G8 mempertanggungjawabkan perbuatannya. "The G8 is an unaccountable organisation of world leaders that only comes together to maintain the status quo. They want to remake the world in their image." - BdA ................. Bad Democracy Award 1. G8 2. IDF 3. Rupert Murdoch 4. Gloria Arroyo 5. Pope Benedict XVI 6. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang 7. BHP Billiton 8. King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud 9. Lech Kaczynski 10. Felipe Calderon 11. Bob Geldof 12. Joseph Kabila 1. G8 The "Masters of the Universe" last month reprised their annual fest of pious rhetoric and naked self-interest. As protesters and tramps were rounded up in St Petersburg, we caught a snippet of the banter of the mighty. George Bush's nuanced summary of the middle east crisis - "what they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over" - offered an unsettling taste of the analysis with which the planet's eight most potent leaders direct world affairs. Bush and Blair chirruped about Russian democracy; Vladimir Putin coolly noted that the men who preside over Guantanamo Bay and the cash-for-honours scandal are in no position to lecture. Jacques Chirac sat in a corner and sulked, and another year at Earth's least accountable international body trundled by. - 2. Israeli Defence Force Reasoned debate with its neighbours is not the Israeli army's strong point. This month, the top brass demonstrably went too far, adding insult to grievous injury. The IDF had the gall to conclude, after the most cursory of investigations, that the explosion that killed eight Palestinian picnickers on Beit Lahia beach in Gaza was caused by a mine left under the sands by Palestinian militants, rather than one of the shells it was blasting at the shore at the time. Add to that a plan to make the IDF a tool officially to annex parts of the West Bank unilaterally and a long record of recklessly bumping off Palestinian children and you start to think Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's daughter has a point when she stands outside the chief-of-staff's house shouting "murderer". - 3. Rupert Murdoch Last month afforded the world's most potent politicians, wonks, hacks, schmoozers and nepotists that rare opportunity: an audience with the Sun King. Gathered at Pebble Beach, those who tired of pressing the flesh of some 250 News Corp execs could talk salvation with Bono or termination with Arnold Schwarzenegger. As if his tentacles had not sufficiently penetrated the daily lives of practically everybody, Murdoch displayed his latest investment, MySpace, on which he has found time to create a personal site to gripe about tax. Surpassing himself, he has also of late managed a series of contortions that have left him cosily aligned with the power-hungry camps of Hillary Clinton and David Cameron. As Groucho Marx put it: "Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others." - 4. Gloria Arroyo About 700 people have been bumped off in political killings in the Philippines over the past five years. Now, the president has set out to stem the bloodshed, announcing a ten-week long commission to probe ten cases. Human rights organisations smelt a rat, observing that those recently dispatched have almost all been unsympathetic to the government, and that no one is being brought to trial. Arroyo survived a second impeachment attempt in August, thanks largely to a parliament full of her allies. But the signs are not good. Her administration has declared "all-out war" on the country's Communist rebels (themselves a pack of maniacs). With little scope for the state's institutions to rein in Arroyo and the zealous military, Filipino democracy is looking decidedly peaky. - 5. Pope Benedict XVI For all its stylised (and costly) electoral ritual, the Vatican has never been a paragon of democracy. After all, the man on its throne is no less than the Almighty's chief human henchman. No surprise, then, that the present pontiff, God's Rottweiler, saw fit to slap down the elected Spanish premier for not paying homage during a papal visit last month. The expansion of civil liberties undertaken by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's government, the Papa told the prayerful, should be stricken from the record. From the sublime - his pronouncement that happy-clappy church music must give way to cacophonous organ voluntaries - to Ratzinger's deadly and ridiculous intransigence on the use of condoms to counter HIV, it seems mere mortals must suffer the fallout from the theocrat's will. - 6. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang Disease has always been a fillip for two sorts of people: quacks and chancers. It remains unclear which category South Africa's health minister falls into, but her performance at an international Aids conference suggests it may be both. Her delegation's stall - festooned with lemons, beetroot, garlic and other little-known elixirs - caused the UN's HIV tsar to describe Pretoria's "obtuse, dilatory and negligent" policies as worthy of the "lunatic fringe". President Thabo Mbeki has helpfully suggested that HIV is not the cause of Aids and has tasked Dr Beetroot, as she is known, with ministering to the country's 5.5 million sufferers. That is the highest total in the world, and yet anti-retrovirals remain hopelessly scarce. About 800 die every day. Maybe there isn't enough garlic. - 7. BHP Billiton There's something about doing business in Chile that brings out the worst in multinational corporations. Following the forestry firms and gold-diggers, this time it's the BHP, the British-Australian mining company that announced $10 billion in profit - a record for an Australian company - just as it was telling thousands of striking staff that a decent pay-rise was out of the question. BHP has taken a hammering before for its shenanigans in West Papua. And recent revelations that the company pulled strings attached to Dick Cheney and Malcolm Rifkind to help it quietly sink its paws into the Iraqi oil pot suggest once more that for all its talk of corporate social responsibility, the company is still a few steps away from being reborn as Democracy Inc. - 8. King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud The Saudi monarchs have made it clear over the years that democracy is not their cup of tea. But after 11 September 2001, when 15 Saudis wreaked havoc in the name of Allah, Riyadh made a lot of noise about its newfound tolerance. That was rather undermined this month with when Freedom House smuggled textbooks out of Saudi schools, in which a particularly right-on exercise instructed children: "Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words (Islam, hellfire): Every religion other than ____ is false. Whoever dies outside of Islam enters ____." Given the concentration of Saudi oil wealth in royal hands and the continued willingness to crush dissent, it is puzzling to hear King Abdullah declare, when describing the Saudi government: "I believe it is now a democracy." - 9. Lech Kaczynski Not lightly do the Poles use the word "fascist". They know better than most that it is not a term to be bandied around. Some, however, are reaching back into the vocabulary of the ghettos to describe the virulent racism and homophobia that have pervaded public discourse since the president's Law and Justice party entered a coalition with a pair of factions so far to the Right they're about to fall off. In the name of upholding ancient Catholic values, Kaczynski and his identical twin, the party's leader, have hopped into bed with lunatic collections of vigilantes, charlatans and neo-Nazis. Small wonder that campaigns are proliferating to inform curious Poles that homosexuals not only drink blood but, it transpires, account for almost all society's murderers. - 10. Felipe Calderon Only Mextli himself can say for sure how much skulduggery, and on whose part, besmirched Mexico's July presidential election. Convinced he was diddled out of power, the populist Andres Manual Lopez Obrador demanded a recount after the official result saw him lose to the pro-Washington Calderon by a sniff, reversing the projections of exit polls. After a relieved George Bush called Calderon to congratulate him, videos emerged apparently showing irregularities including a Calderon supporter stuffing ballots into unsealed boxes. Given mounting evidence that Calderon's people got their paws on some illicit voter lists, the ferocious smear campaign he ran and his refusal to back a recount, it seems certain the eventual loser will be that frail creature, Mexican democracy. - 11. Bob Geldof It goes without saying that the faded Irish crooner is no despot. All the same, he seems far keener to cosy up to the mighty than to make good on his self-trumpeted campaign to eradicate poverty, hunger and tunefulness. Tony Blair's announcement last month that Geldof is to sit on an "Africa Progress Panel" to oversee the implementation of the promises made at Gleneagles last year was immediately dismissed as a "gimmick" designed to muffle the news that next to nothing has been done in twelve months. But it seems we can relax. Not only will the panel enjoy the presence of Nigerian tough guy Olusegun Obasanjo, its quest to render humanity a little more equal has been endorsed by none other than Bill Gates, the world's richest man. - 12. Joseph Kabila It is the UN's largest ever electoral operation and the inaptly named Democratic Republic of Congo's first multi-party vote since independence from Belgium, but the war-battered African state has yet to be transformed into a functioning democracy. That is largely because its dictator tyrannises the media and because his opponents have suddenly become accident-prone, like one whose barracks mysteriously burnt to the ground. A group of former vice presidents issued a statement ruing the electoral sham they fear they are witnessing: "Perhaps we are heading for a masquerade or a parody of elections," they wrote. For ordinary Congolese, 1,000 of whom still die daily from privation and disease, the sight of Kabila jumping through a shabby democratic hoop will be of little solace. Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
