Direct Democracy Means Sustained Disruption of Anti-Public Interests

On the people’s arms embargo in Canada

The defining feature of Western representative democracy today is that the individuals we elect don’t represent anything other than monied interests and corporate power. We know this from the daily news, from our gut sense, from watching time and again our electeds act in ways contrary to the public interest.

Aristotle predicted this eventuality in the 4^th century BC: Democratic elections, he warned, would invariably lead to oligarchy, the rule of the few, because elections tend to favor candidates from the ranks of the elite, who bring to bear against the electorate the weapon of their personal wealth and connections to other elites.

During the golden age of Athenian democracy, from the 6^th century BC following the reforms of the great lawgiver Solon to the final decades of the 4^th century, representatives to run the city-state in Athens were chosen not by election but by lottery, a process called sortition, in which rich and poor alike were called at random to serve in citizen assemblies and in jury-courts.

This was consecrated as rule by the demos, and it was during this period of vigorous direct democracy, with the freedom it afforded in an open field of competing ideas, that Greek culture laid the foundations of Western politics, philosophy, logic, mathematics, theatre, poetry, and much else.

Would that we had selection by lottery today to govern society.

The majority of the American public wants socialized medicine and would probably enact it if they ran an empowered citizen assembly in lieu of the overlords in Congress. Our electeds, of course, continue instead with a market-based system designed to maximize profits, producing rotten outcomes.

Some 86 percent of Americans would prohibit stock-trading by members of Congress, and by the president, vice-president, and Supreme Court justices. A vast majority supports government negotiating down the prices of prescription drugs. Roughly eight in ten Americans support age caps and term limits for electeds in Congress as our slobbering gerontocracy races in its wheelchair to the cliff.

Does Congress listen to the people on any of these matters? Of course not.

We have empirical evidence that representative democracy in the United States is a sham. A landmark 2014 study into the massive non-representation in our so-called democratic republic, conducted by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern universities, respectively, analyzed 1,779 policy issues between 1981 and 2002 to parse the influence on government exerted by average citizens, economic elites, and organized interest groups.

Gilens and Page found that average citizens have a “near-zero, statistically non-significant impact” on public policy and that policy outcomes are overwhelmingly determined by economic elites. There is occasionally an illusion of representation, as when average citizens get their preferred outcome – but only because their interests happen to align with what elites already want.

So what do you do when the citizenry demands change and the government carries on with business as usual?

In Canada, on the matter of war and mass killing in the Occupied Territories and the wonderful profits tied to it, more than half of the citizens now oppose arming Israel for genocide. Yet the Carney government, not dissimilar to previous administrations, ignores the people and lets the weapons flow.

Last week, hundreds of Canadians, in what’s being called a “people’s arms embargo,” took to the streets to put suppliers for notorious Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems on notice: divest or face sustained public pressure.

On August 13, activists from the Arms Embargo Now coalition picketed and leafletted outside industrial facilities from British Columbia to Newfoundland, targeting more than forty companies identified as logistics partners to Elbit, Israel’s largest weapons firm and one that boasts of battle-testing its products in the Gazan genocide.

The activists also launched a pressure campaign aimed at senior executives at dozens of the targeted companies, bombarding them with emails. The message: Cut ties with Elbit now. (Arms Embargo Now will appear to some observers as an exercise in extreme moderation. Last autumn, I wrote for Drop Site News about the successes of the UK group Palestine Action’s campaign of sabotage, vandalism and destruction of Elbit manufacturing sites in the UK, for whom an email campaign is small beer.)

One of the companies is TTM Technologies, in Ontario, which has shipped millions of dollars in circuit boards to Elbit for use in precision strike munitions.

“Providing circuit boards for Elbit’s Lizard laser-guidance kits isn’t some distant or neutral business relationship,” said Haneen Ismail, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement and Arms Embargo Now. “Elbit’s suppliers in Canada operate largely outside of public scrutiny while providing the components and technology it relies on. We are ending that anonymity.”

The movement has seen significant victories. Last week, Montreal-based Elbit supplier Apollo Microwaves announced it ended its contract with the company after organizers with Arms Embargo Now pressed it to do so. And after campaigners targeted Scotiabank, Canada’s third-largest commercial bank and once Elbit’s largest foreign shareholder, it pulled its $500 million investment earlier this year. Elbit’s CEO complained to the Israeli press that the divestment was the work of the damned Canadian people.

“This is about accountability,” says Ismail. “If you help Elbit function, you are complicit in its crimes, and we will continue to expose those relationships.”

These people aren’t waiting for the government to act, because the government doesn’t care what they think and has made clear it won’t move. They’re hitting the pressure points to interrupt real-time supply chains – what rule by the demos looks like.