Democracy

Stress Test: Democracy Confronts Climate Change

January 3, 2018 By Gus Speth, Thenextsystem.org Educate! Climate Change, Democracy, Global Warming, Science

Many climate scientists and others have reached the conclusion that, because we have dithered so long, we now face the prospect of either extreme rates of emission reduction or extreme impacts from global warming and ocean acidification. I fear that we could experience both of these great disruptions, despite all the technological progress now underway and despite the climate action commitments we see outside of Washington. Major climate impacts are now inevitable. Global temperature has already increased by 1˚C, with huge consequences. Another 0.5˚C is essentially baked in. I think we will easily exceed 2˚C global average warming in this century, and quite possibly more.

End Of US Empire May Be Our Best Hope For US Democracy

January 3, 2018 By Jacob Bacharach, AlterNet.org Educate! Democracy, United States, US Imperialism

When the United States vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution asking nations not to build any more diplomatic missions in Jerusalem only to be drubbed 128-9 in the General Assembly, which voted on a similar non-binding resolution last week, America’s ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, loudly proclaimed that the United States would be “taking names.” Her warning fell on deaf ears, although the U.S. and Israel did manage to cajole that titan of geopolitics, Guatemala, to come around to the American view. The whole pitiful episode merely confirmed what the Trump administration has made readily apparent: Haley, like the president, has internalized the same impossible tale conservatives have been selling to Fox News grandmas for decades now...

How Corporate Power Killed Democracy

December 8, 2017 Richard Moser, counterpunch.org Educate! Corporations, Democracy, Fascism, State

By Richard Moser for Counter Punch - The rise of Corporate Power was the fall of democracy. Over the long haul, US politics has revolved around a deep tension between democracy and an unrelenting drive for plunder, power and empire. Granted that our democracy has been seriously flawed and only rarely revolutionary, yet the democratic movements are the source of every good thing America has ever stood for. Since the mid-1970s, when the corporations fused with the state, a new imperial order emerged that killed what remained of representative democracy. Not only would corporations exercise public authority as only government once had, but government would coordinate and serve corporate activity. Power and profits became one and the same. Corporate power has replaced democracy with oligarchy and justice with a vast militarized penal system. Instead of innovative production, they plunder people and planet. To achieve this new order, elections and the economy had to be drained of any remaining democratic content. Both Democrats and Republicans were eager to have at it. By the 1990s “Third Way” Democrats like Bill Clinton abandoned what was left of the New Deal to try to outdo the Republicans as the party of Wall Street. The Republicans pioneered election fraud on a national scale in 2000, 2004, and 2016; a lesson the Democrats learned all too well by the 2016 Primary. Neither major party wants election reform since free and fair elections would threaten the system itself.

Protests Continue On Honduras Amid Curfew, Police Repression

December 3, 2017 Staff, www.telesurtv.net Resist! coup, Democracy, Hondura

By Staff for Telesur. Former Honduran president and coordinator of the Opposition Alliance, Manuel Zelaya, called on all Hondurans to take to the streets to defend presidential election preliminary results which showed opposition candidate, Salvador Nasrallah with a comfortable lead over the right-wing incumbent, as the electoral board continues to withhold final results. A day after denouncing vote count irregularities by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, Nasrallah posted on Twitter for people to assemble "To defend the victory of the people!” The protests mark the second day of mass mobilizations despite the government enforcing a 10-day curfew, suspending constitutional rights and declaring a state of emergency.

Honduras Suspends Constitution As President ‘Flees’ Violence

December 2, 2017 Staff, www.telesurtv.net Educate! Democracy, Honduras, US Imperialism

By Telesur TV. The Honduran government has voted to suspend constitutional guarantees across the country as of 11pm local time, hours after President Hernandez reportedly fled the country to avoid violent street protests in the wake of the disputed presidential election, Diario La Prensa has reported. The government has also implemented a curfew meant to deter people from publicly demonstrating. The move was announced on television and radio networks across Honduras by Ebal Diaz, secretary of the Council of Ministers, as a bid to control violence which has erupted across the country since the ballot. "The officials will announce the scope of the constitutional guarantees that have been adopted by the council of ministers led by the government coordinator, Jorge Ramon Hernandez Alcerro," Diaz said during the broadcast.

U.S. Elections: A Poor Substitute For Democracy

December 2, 2017 Paul Street, truthdig.com Strategize! Democracy, Electoral Politics, US elections

By Paul Street for Truth Dig - The passivity of the American populace in the face of the endlessly outrageous presidency of Donald Trump is chilling to behold. There were some meaningful outbursts of mass anger over and against his patently discriminatory travel ban and against early Trump-led Republican efforts to throw millions of Americans off health insurance. Beyond those early protests, however, it’s been abject surrender for the most part. There were no mass protests when President Trump embraced and advanced the greenhouse gassing-to-death of life on earth by pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord or when Trump approved the ecocidal, planet-cooking Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. No mass marches rocked the nation when Trump advance-pardoned a convicted racist and fascist county sheriff (Joe Arpaio) who created deadly open-air “concentration camps” (Arpaio’s own proud term) to detain suspected undocumented immigrants of Latino background. The streets stayed silent when Trump defended neo-Nazis and other vicious white nationalists, offering them dog-whistle encouragement after they marched and killed in defense of Confederate (slave power) war statues. Nobody marched on the White House when Trump threatened genocidal and thermonuclear war (“fire and fury”) on North Korea, putting millions of lives at risk on and around the Korean Peninsula. Trump’s remaking of the federal bench in the image of the hard-right Federalist Society has yet to elicit significant mass protest.

Urgent Action For Democracy In Honduras

December 1, 2017 Staff, www.ggjalliance.org Resist! Democracy, Election fraud, Honduras, Police violence

By the Grassroots Alliance for Global Justice. Tegucigalpa, Honduras – Just before midnight on Wednesday November 29, a crowd of several thousand anti-fraud protesters in Honduras - including numerous young children - was tear-gassed repeatedly by a military police tank and riot police outside of the INFOP – the building where all of the ballots and tally sheets from last Sunday’s elections are being stored and counted. The incident took place three tense days after national elections left both sides claiming victory, but official initial results pointing to a five percentage point victory for the Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship’s candidate Salvador Nasralla. After several days delay, numerous irregularities and unexplained transmission outages, Wednesday afternoon official results began to show a slight advantage for the incumbent Juan Orlando Hernandez.

A Question Of True Democracy

November 25, 2017 David Companyon, transform-network.net Create! Catalonia, Democracy, Nationalism

By David Companyon for Transform! Europe - A mixture of economic, social, and territorial crisis is a cocktail without which it is impossible to understand the Catalan politics that follow the 1978 regime’s structural crisis. Faced with Rajoy’s constant “niet”, the Catalan independence movement took the option of going up against the State, the so-called unilateral path, all while confusing a majority in favour of the referendum with a majority in favour of independence, which sits at around 50%. That has led to strategic errors: despite Rajoy having declared it illegal, 2.3 million people showed up to vote that day, and they thought that the State wouldn't use violence (real or the treat thereof) to stop the October 1st referendum or the Declaration that proclaimed the Catalan Republic. Another strategic mistake was the lack of a social proposal, thinking that they could amass a wider majority that favoured independence without giving them radical, socially advanced democratic content through a constituent process. The divisive thought of “first independence, and then everything will be worked out” did not work for the portion of the population that is struggling to make ends meet, and for whom independence is not a priority. It will not work without contesting the hegemony of the neo-liberal right over the sovereigntist process, the driving force behind the same slashing of social services, with the same cases of corruption as the Spanish neo-liberal right.

How Closing Public Schools Undermines Democracy

November 8, 2017 Jennifer Berkshire, alternet.org Educate! Democracy, Education, Public schools

By Jennifer Berkshire for AlterNet - Jennifer Berkshire: There's been a lot of attention paid to how students who attended the schools Chicago closed down in 2013 are faring now. But you've been measuring a different kind of impact: what's happened to those communities in terms of voter turnout and democratic participation. What are you finding? Sally Nuamah: We’re basically finding that support among the African American community for the Democratic Party, specifically in areas where closures occurred, decreased in a really substantial way. You actually see lower levels of participation, higher levels of negative attitudes toward people who are in the same parties in which most of these people identify, which is the Democratic Party. Beyond that, you see these communities are further losing population. There’s less will, or less faith, in the traditional public school system across this population, because they are afraid they’re going to be betrayed again, they’re going to have to move schools again, and that’s a very volatile situation. Then there is the economic piece, and the fact that the number of African American teachers in Chicago has declined by 40%.

Public Power As A Vehicle Towards Energy Democracy

November 7, 2017 Johanna Bozuwa, thenextsystem.org Create! Democracy, Energy, Public, Public Utilities, Utilities

By Johanna Bozuwa for The Next System Project - “We would line up all of our inhalers in a row on the benches before we would go run, just in case,” recounts Kristen Ethridge; an Indiana resident near some of the most polluting power plants in the country. Asthma rates are so bad from the toxic emissions that many students cannot make it through gym class without their inhalers. Cancer and infant mortality rates in the area are through the roof. These plants are owned by some of the biggest names in the utility business including groups like Duke Energy and AEP. Gibson Power Plant, the worst of them all, emits 2.9 million pounds of toxic compounds and 16.3 million metric tons of greenhouse gases a year. What’s more, most of the energy generated in these plants is transported out of state, leaving Indiana with all the emissions and very little gain. Indiana’s power plants provide a window into how our current electrical system works. It is a system dominated by a small number of large powerful companies, called investor-owned utilities. Their centralized fossil fuel plants are at the heart of our aging electricity grid—a core contributor to rapidly-accelerating climate change. The carbon emissions associated with these power providers are but one symptom of larger systemic issues in the sector. Investor-owned utilities are traditionally profit-oriented corporations whose structures are based on an paradigm of extraction.

Imagining A New Democracy With Participatory Budgeting

November 2, 2017 Maria Hadden, newamerica.org Create! Budgets, Democracy, Participatory budgeting

By Maria Hadden for New America - In 2007, I thought the City of Chicago and I had a pretty good relationship. In 2008, I woke up from the little bit of the “American Dream” I thought I could achieve. As a black, queer woman growing up in low income family, it was less of a dream and more of a daydream, to be certain, but still a version of the middle class life promised to all “hard-working” Americans. But in the fall of 2007, I met my goal and purchased my first home. At the time it not only seemed to be a good idea because I wanted a place to settle down for a bit (rents were high and I had finally achieved some financial stability), but it was also, according to the dream, the thing I was supposed to do. Then the housing market crashed. Our developer fled the country, leaving all the residents in our 39 unit building to fend for ourselves. We had no one but each other to rely on for advice, support, and to take care of housing needs. So I began to organize in my community, starting with my neighbors. I learned the procedures and processes needed to keep our building afloat, and despite unfinished units, a leaking roof and an unpaid pile of bills, we made it work.

Anti-Government Popular Uprising Continues to Grow in Haiti

October 29, 2017 Kim Ives, haitiliberte.com Resist! Anti-Austerity, Democracy, Haiti, Neoliberalism

By Kim Ives for Haiti Liberty. Massive, raucous demonstrations, sometime several times a week, have rocked Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and other provincial cities over the past two months and show no sign of subsiding, despite a lack of clear or unified leadership. Police repression of the demonstrators has grown as their calls have morphed from denouncing a tax-laden, fee-hiking, austerity budget proposed in early September to demanding the resignation of President Jovenel Moïse, who came to power in February following controversial, anemic elections in November 2016. The neoliberal measures, featuring privatizations, public employee layoffs, and tariff reductions, included slashing gas subsidies which resulted in a 30% hike in transportation costs overnight. The Caracazo revolt led to the 1992 coup d’état attempt and subsequent 1998 election of Hugo Chavez. Similarly, Jovenel Moïse’s Washington-influenced budget proposes a host of taxes and fees on everything from drivers licenses, vehicle registrations, and passports to a 10,000 gourdes ($157US) annual tax on expatriate Haitians.

The Revolt That Shook The World

October 22, 2017 Pete Dolack, www.indypendent.org Strategize! Democracy, Revolution, Socialism

By Pete Dolack for The Indypendent. History does not travel in a straight line. I won’t argue against that sentence being a cliché. Yet it is still true. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be still debating the meaning of Russia’s 1917 October Revolution on its centenary, and more than a quarter-century after its demise. Neither the Bolsheviks nor any other party played a direct role in the February revolution that toppled Tsar Nicholas II, for the leaders of those organizations were in exile abroad or in Siberia or in jail. Nonetheless, the tireless work of activists laid the groundwork. The Bolsheviks were a minority even among the active workers of Russia’s cities then...

Moral Courage, Redefining Progress And Myth Of Social Democracy

October 12, 2017 William Hawes, www.counterpunch.org Create! Capitalism, Democracy

By William Hawes for Counter Punch - The revolution will only come as a result of inner, mental transformation, as Krishnamurti foretold. Political movements may urge people towards an outward revolution of the economic structure, but ultimately, it is up to each one of us as individuals to awaken from the slumber that imperialism and capitalism has imposed on us. This is a huge problem in the West: expecting some sort of political party or savior to rearrange the structure of society, from the top down of the establishment, without a viable protest movement and without on-the-street citizen engagement. Liberal “progressives” are therefore attracted to social democracy. Piecemeal reform, led by establishment Democrats offering a “New New Deal” to industry and workers will most likely lead us to the slaughterhouse, to the bottomless pit Western civilization has been leading us for centuries. “Green capitalism” is another lie advanced by such mainstream social and environmental justice advocates and Democrats. There’s been a lot of talk among progressives and self-styled Leftists about social democracy. Bernie Sanders talked up social democracy on his campaign, heaping praise on the Scandinavian countries as models the US should emulate.

Congress Asks Pentagon To Prepare To Intervene In Venezuela

October 7, 2017 Mision Verdad, www.telesurtv.net Educate! Congress, Democracy, Venezuela, Wars and Militarism

By Mision Verdad for TeleSur. The importance of the U.S. Congress in the country’s foreign policy matters is well known, just as it is the center of decision-making on finance and trade issues in relation to the corporate sector in general and, specifically, the military-industrial sector. In the U.S. Congress, important actors from outside the political bureaucracy play a decisive role in terms of lobbying and moving things along so as to favor their interests. In earlier articles, we reported how ExxonMobil has spared no expense to affect the focus of U.S. government policy decisions on Venezuela.

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