Our+Dillusioned+Electorate





__Posted: 23/01/2012 - 07:53 PM __

__Author: __ __Editoral __ __AMANDALA __ **Our disillusioned electorate ** What should jump out at you from the recent Karim Berges/Yasmine Andrews poll are the results of the following two questions. Respondents were asked their opinion of the present UDP government’s performance, and 56 percent were dissatisfied. When asked, however, if they would prefer for the Opposition PUP, which was in office from 1998 to 2008, to return to power, 67 percent said no.

There is a small group of people, many of them related by family and marriage, who control the wealth and economics of Belize. They also control the politics of Belize, by way of what Clinton Uh Luna first called the “PUDP.” The two major political parties here are essentially the same thing, in that they are the only political groups which the oligarchical ruling families of Belize will support financially. The ruling families feel safe with the PUDP. It does not matter to them that much whether the red or the blue are in power. Nothing changes fundamentally. The ruling families continue to be rich and powerful, not to mention greedy and selfish.

At the base of the social pyramid, three or four thousand people lose their jobs when their party is voted out of office, and three or four thousand will become employed, replacing those from the other party who are terminated, when __their__ party is elected to power. There is where all the hoopla is coming from; there is where all the noise is generated: from the three or four thousand Belizeans who are fearful of losing their jobs, and the three or four thousand who want those said jobs. Nobody else really cares. This is your disillusioned electorate.

There are more than three hundred thousand citizens in Belize. There are only a couple hundred people, when you add elders, parents, and children, in the families which control Belize’s wealth, economics and politics. The vast, vast majority of the people of Belize realize, just months after every general election, that nothing of consequence changes in their daily lives – same circus, different clowns.

The masses of the people theoretically have the numbers to force real changes in the Belizean reality. But the masses of the people are too desperate economically to organize and work together on an everyday basis. Hence, when a sincere or revolutionary element emerges from the masses, the PUDP can disguise and finance some of their own loyalists well enough to confuse and undermine the masses of the Belizean people. In fact, we ourselves have seen individuals emerge from Kremandala, which individuals we believed to be sincere and revolutionary, who have been bought by the PUDP. More than that, go back four decades. The UBAD movement was sincere and revolutionary. Half of the UBAD leadership were deceived in 1973, however, when the UDP was first established. They thought real change was forthcoming. After three different UDP terms of office, where is the real, substantive difference between the red and the blue?  There are things we can be grateful for in our political system. One is the right to vote. Another is the fact that we enjoy freedom of expression. Outsiders describe our Belizean democracy as “robust,” but that is because of all the hoopla and all the noise. There are destructive processes which take place amongst the masses of our people. Perhaps the most destructive of these processes involves the annual throwing of half our children into the cruel streets as unschooled, unskilled teenagers. From this pool of //desgraciados// come the crime and the violence. It is a case of night following day – inexorable. The job of the PUP and the UDP is to blame each other for the destructive processes, which are actually systemic.

Inside the Opposition PUP, then, they know they don’t have to change anything. The PUP is the only credible alternative to the UDP. This is how the ruling families designed it, and this is how the oligarchy wants it. All the PUP has to do is wait until enough Belizeans become tired of the UDP, and until enough Belizeans forget how much of their money the PUP misappropriated between 1998 and 2008. Then the voters of Belize will replace the UDP with the PUP, and there will be great rejoicing amongst those Belizeans who will be returned to gainful employment. That is, three or four thousand, while those they replace go into mourning. The rejoicing, however, will be infectious, so that some of the masses who don’t really have much to gain, will participate in the euphoria. Soon, they will return to disillusion. The oligarchy will yawn in boredom. Same circus – different clowns.