Three Constitutions

The US government seems to be happily shredding the US constitution while two new ones in other neo-colonies are getting adopted. First, it goes without saying that the elimination of basic separation of powers within the US government, secret trials, the ability to strip people of citizenship, and related benefits of the war on terrorism has been a process by which the US constitution is being dismantled.

In two other remote parts of the world new constitutions have been adopted. One in Iraq where a puppet government is being setup in the hopes that the US will continue to be able to extract the wealth of Iraq without having US Soldiers killed on an almost daily basis. According to al-Jazeera most Iraqi’s don’t have the same high hopes of a western style parliamentary to guarantee the rights of all factions in Iraq. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as it was never meant to guarantee the rights of Iraqi’s, so much as to lay the groundwork for a stable, non-costly, long term occupation of Iraq. Remember that the US has a permeant military presence in 131 countries. The oil in Iraq was nationally own and is being divided up among US and British companies. Beyond that, and perhaps more important, by following through on the threat to invade Iraq, the US has rewritten the rules with it comes to other client states which step out of line. You can see this in policy changes in Syria, Libya, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc…

The other colony which just adopted a new constitution is Bolivia. Like in Iraq where Bremer doesn’t speak fluent Arabic, the Bolivia president can’t speak spanish without an American English accent. Goni, as he’s called, grew up in Washington DC and was the richest man in Bolivia. A popular uprising overthrew his government in October after a plan to privatize the natural gas reserves with very little of the economic benefit going back to the bolivian people. Among the demands during the uprising was a complete restructuring of the Bolivian political system, even going so far as to demand a decentralized democratic system based on the traditional aymara and quecha village assemblies, to develop a constituent assembly which would then rewrite the bolivian constitution. What got approved yesterday is far short of the full monty. It does have some very interesting aspects including a provision for a constituent assembly to be called with a 2/3rd vote of the parliament. The CA would be given exclusive right to rewrite the Bolivian constitution. This opens a way to constitutionally rewrite the bolivian political system. It’ll take a few uprisings between here and there, but it’s a hopeful opening. Miguel, a bolivian american political science student / blogger tends to have a rather institutional non-leftist perspective, but he has put together a nice article looking at the changes in the new constitution. Note: you’ll need to know some spanish to read the whole thing, the commentary is in english, but the quoted constitution isn’t.