VOTING IN BOLIVIA (TO THE TUNE OF "LIVING IN AMERICA" BY JAMES BROWN)

A lot is going on about Bolivia and whether or not what is happening right now is a coup. I tend towards saying "yes, it's a coup" because a coup is what happens when the military removes a democratically elected leader from power and that is very likely what happened. But I am getting ahead of myself here, and news about Bolivia tends to be problematic at the best of times, so some background.

Evo Morales was, until yesterday, the President of Bolivia, having first been elected in 2005 as an expression both of popular disgust with the right-wing regime that most South American countries have every so often and as an expression of indigenous Bolivian political power. Most South American countries in the west half of the continent have a strong indigenous presence, and it's strongest in Bolivia where somewhere in between forty and sixty percent of the country identifies as indigenous. (Ethnicity in South America as a whole is a little confused at times because of the extensive history of interbreeding and slavery and exterminationa and war, to the point where "Mestizo" is an official demographic category is most countries and means "mixed between Spanish white and indigenous, or occasionally African, but there was a lot of fucking around way back in the day so nobody is quite sure" - which means a lot of Mestizo identify as indigenous and a lot don't.)

Morales won with a decent majority on 2005, and then with landslides in 2009 and 2014. He was an enormously popular politician for most of his tenure as leader and did quite a lot to improve the lives of average Bolivians - strengthening the economy, significantly reducing poverty and illiteracy rates, that sort of thing. However, Bolivia used to have a term limits law stating that nobody could be elected President more than three times, and Morales wanted to have a fourth term, so in 2016 Bolivia held a referendum to see if people wanted to abolish that law. The referendum narrowly failed, so Morales then sued the government arguing that the term limits law in the Bolivian Constitution that his own government wrote was a violation of the American Convention on Human Rights, which Bolivia ratified forty years ago. This argument was transparently stupid, but the Bolivian Supreme Tribunal of Justice (a body which Morales' government created to replace the previous Supreme Court) was extremely sympathetic to Morales and approved it. This meant that Morales' popularity took a major hit, because regardless of ideology, a whole lot of people don't like it when it looks like you're trying to cheat. His popularity took a further hit over the last couple of years as climate change issues got worse in Bolivia because a lot of people think he's pandered too much to farmers cutting down rainforest, and that only got worse this past year right before the elections with the wildfires. All of that said, this only cut his polling down to 35-40 percent in a multiparty system, so he and his party were still relatively well-posed for another win.

The election back in October is where things get a little complex. The first thing you need to know is that Bolivia has a two-round electoral system for the Presidency - if nobody breaks 50 percent or if the top vote-getter doesn't beat second place by at least ten percent, it goes to a runoff election between the top two candidates. The second thing you need to know is that when tabulating elections, Bolivia does a thing called a "quick count," which everybody agrees is not the official count and is not a formal and legal vote count but is usually good enough for determining a winner early because Bolivia has a lot of rural areas where it can take a lot of time to tabulate votes properly. (From here on in, a lot of this is me summarizing notes from the Center For Economic and Policy Research's report on the Bolivian election.)

Following the election, the quick count started as normal and Morales' Movement for Socialism was in a sub-50% lead, ahead of the second-place Civic Community coalition by about seven or eight percent. When the quick count hit 83 percent, the government stopped it. This is apparently standard practice, because once the official count begins the quick count is halted because there's not much point in continuing an unofficial count. In fact, the Bolivian government actually only ever promised, before the election, to release the quick count up to about 80 percent of results anyway. Carlos Mesa, the leader of the Civic Community coalition, had been telling people based on the incomplete quick count results that there would be a second round (because he was within 10 percent of the Movement), and when the government stopped the quick count, Mesa started complaining and demanding that the government restart the quick count. The Organization of American States - which has something of a historic anti-socialist bias, not to be too blunt about it - also started demanding this, despite the fact that they know perfectly well that the quick count isn't a formal tally, because they have recommended the quick count system be used in multiple countries. (Which in and of itself is understandable, because the quick count lets people know the system is working as it's supposed to work and lets winners in landslide races learn quickly that they've won, both of which are useful things to have.)

Anyway, after a few days the Bolivian government said "fine" and restarted the quick count. When they hit 95 percent, they reported that Morales's socialists led Mesa's civic communitarians by 46.86% to 36.72% - very slightly over the 10 percent threshold necessary to avoid a second-round election. (The eventual result was 47.08% to 36.51%.) Mesa immediately declared the election fraudulent and then the OAS also claimed it was fraudulent, arguing that it was impossible for the election results to have trended that way. The problem with this argument is that it's not really clear that it's impossible at all. Morales' support tends to be rurally based, which means his votes take longer to be tabulated because the polling stations are more widely spread, so a gain of 2.5-3% in the final ten percent of votes isn't that unrealistic because it's his base. (In the United States this tends to be the exact opposite: rural votes are tabulated more quickly because there's fewer of them and reporting is centralized and digitized.)

Anyway, because all of the opposition conflated the quick count and the official count, Morales agreed to let the OAS audit the election and abide by the results. The OAS eventually released a report complaining at length about the quick count and saying very little about the official count, and calling for a new election, but at this point it's kind of moot because Morales has resigned after the military have... done something. It is unclear at this point what exactly they have done; the range of possibilities extends from "will not stop violent protests" to "pointed a gun at him and said to quit." Morales himself has claimed there is a warrant for his arrest and that his home in Cochabamba was attacked; the Bolivian national police have said there isn't any warrant for his arrest. (There's video on social media of people walking through what is alleged to be Morales' ransacked home, but do you know what his home looks like inside - or outside, for that matter? Because I don't.)

All of that said, though, generally presidents facing another election with another chance to win re-election (and barring major electoral interference it seems likely that Morales would win re-election) don't resign, so the most probable answer is that Morales resigned because the military threatened him, either directly or via inaction. Given that the police have since arrested the president and vice president of Bolivia's national electoral tribunal, though, this is almost certainly now a coup, and one essentially endorsed by the Organization of American States, which is deeply gross, and one on behalf of Bolivia's right-wing element, which is grosser because a whole lot of them are not terribly subtle about their desire for religiously inspired genocide.

ONE BIG BLOOMBURGER

Michael Bloomberg announced this week that he is running for President, because... [reasons to be inserted later].

Just kidding, we all know the reason is because he's scared of Elizabeth Warren and/or Bernie Sanders getting nominated for President and then winning the election and then doing literally anything that might inhibit the power of billionaires, because that is literally all the Democratic party elites have been talking about for months now, ever since Joe Biden started stumbling in the polls because Joe Biden's secret is that he is pretty bad at running for President: Liz and Bernie are too far left, Liz and Bernie will lose in a landslide, et cetera et cetera. Never mind that they're running on popular policies and together combined command the lead in polling (occasionally even breaking into majority territory); they can't win. You know the song and dance as well as I do at this point, I'm sure.

Anyway, we should all be thankful that Bloomberg is running, because instead of donating money to an appropriately-elite-friendly current candidate like Biden or Amy Klobuchar or (most likely) Pete Buttigieg, instead he's going to spend somewhere in between fifty million and a hundred million dollars on a campaign that will go nowhere and get very few votes, because Michael Bloomberg is a former Republican with an awful record on race issues, which is Democratic Party for "goes nowhere," and because the Democratic race already has one billionaire candidate in the race - Tom Steyer - who has demonstrated that spending a hundred million dollars on advertising for a party race when you have no real history with them gets you maybe three percent support.

Anyway, I'd like to take the rest of this subheader to briefly talk to all the Bernie and Warren stans out there on the internet, who are increasingly at each other's throats over the stupidest of possible reasons: mindreading about the candidate based on minor snippets of publicly available information that don't actually say anything. You know what I'm talking about: Bernie Sanders clumsily says something inelegant to a black voter about how he'd tell a young black kid not to get killed by cops and it means he's a racist, or Elizabeth Warren says "I'm a capitalist to my bones" so it means she's a stealth Manchurian candidate for plutocrats. That sort of thing. All of this is extremely stupid.

I am a big believer in one thing: most of the time in the first world, candidates who are campaigning about what they want to do in office are generally pretty honest about what the specifics of what concrete things they actually want to do. They may well lie (or, if you want to be generous, wrongly believe) about the actual effects of the things they want to do, but they are generally pretty honest about what they want to do. (This also tends to be more pronounced in left-wingers than it does in right-wingers, mostly because left-wingers don't have to pretend that tax cuts will balance the budget.) Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, for example, both fulfilled a large majority of their campaign promises, and many of those that they did not were in fact things they actually tried to do: think healthcare for Clinton or cap and trade for Obama. Both of those men being considered "left-wing" when Clinton ran a conservative campaign and governed mostly as a moderate conservative and Obama ran a moderate campaign and governed mostly as a moderate has much more to do with people's images of them than what they actually promised to do and did; Clinton was the first Baby Boomer president and had actual experience being a student leftist in the 1960s so he was perceived as left-wing despite not being so, and Obama's willingness to be (let me check my notes) "black in public" was considred radical because being black in public is a de facto radical act. All of this is why voters were able to ignore Clinton promising welfare reform or Obama promising to extend the war in Afghanistan, because voters are not entirely rational people and can be selective.

Given this praxis, being extremely upset about Warren or Sanders winning the nomination over one another is quite possibly the silliest thing a person can do. Their actual policy positions are extremely close to one another, so much so that a couple of weeks ago, when Warren released her plan for how to pay for universal healthcare, some Bernie stans were calling her plan to pay for it in part via a head tax on employees rather than a new personal income tax a "secret plan to sabotage universal healthcare." This is deeply idiotic, because neither Sanders nor Warren will get to simply implement their chosen healthcare plan anyway: they will presumably negotiate with other Democrats to get something passed (forget Republicans, there simply isn't any point) and those other Democrats will likely include half-a-dozen current Presidential candidates who disagree with the entire concept of Medicare For All in the first place. See also any other issue where they have not introduced literally the same plan: Sanders got criticized for not immediately agreeing with Warren's plan to require corporate boards to require labour representatives, for example.

Oh, and while we're at it: Warren isn't a neoliberal and Sanders isn't a socialist, regardless of whatever anybody says (them included), because words mean things and neither one of them are advocating for positions that are reflective of neoliberalism or, for that matter, socialism. They are both (fairly obviously, I might add) left-liberals or social democrats, who advocate for a strongly regulated capitalist system with a robust welfare state. Everything else is just salesmanship and who they're choosing to try to sell themselves to: Sanders is banking everything on "energize the disaffected masses" and Warren is going with "convert left-leaning moderates without them realizing they're being converted."

Both Sanders and Warren are fine presidential candidates. There is nothing wrong with preferring one over the other. But the polarization that is a natural by-effect of the competitive process has long since reached the poisonous stage, and if you are seriously contemplating withholding your vote in the event that your chosen candidate of the two does not win, you're just a goddamned fool.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Good Boys (2019, Gene Stupnitsky, theatre) - 3/5

The King (2019, David Michod, Netflix) - 3/5

Jojo Rabbit (2019, Taika Waititi, theatre) - 4/5

Also watching Daybreak, Netflix's new sorta-zombie-apocalypse-meets-The Breakfast Club sort of a show, and it's not bad? It tends to get lost in its own ass a bit with swirls of self-referential foofarah, but the performances are mostly pretty engaging and the jokes are good. Not a classic by any means, but a good light watch.

See you in seven.