Mediaboss Marketing

United States President Joe Biden has cast the conflict between the western world and its competitors as a clash between democracies and autocracies. This masks the American desire for power and the complex realities of creating democracy.

Democracy is supposed to base a states legitimacy in its accountability to its people. It supports peoples freedoms and human rights. What these ideals mean in practice and how to achieve them are difficult questions.

But its clear the U.S. is no longer a credible champion for, or exemplar of, democracy.

In fact, it has a long history of overthrowing and undermining democracies abroad.

Barack Obamas administration, for example, greenlit the military coup that overthrew Egypts democracy and ended the Arab Spring uprisings in 2013.

The U.S. also has a long history of supporting authoritarian regimes. It has made it clear that being authoritarian does not impede any country from joining its coalition against China.

The U.S. itself is a failing democracy or perhaps a better description is a plutocracy with democratic embellishments.

American politics have been corrupted by money, civil rights are under assault, voter suppression is rife and distrust and social division are ubiquitous. In 2021, only 50 per cent of Americans said they believed they live in a democracy.

Russia has used social media to interfere in elections around the world. China has tried to influence diaspora communities. But theres not much evidence these activities are co-ordinated and they pale compared to the ubiquity and influence of American interference.

The U.S. has not been defending democracy. Its been defending its power and privileges in an unequal global system.

This is not the only way the concept of democracy has been misused by the United States and other western nations.

Many countries in the West provide their citizens with the highest living standards and freedoms in the world. How they got there is something many conveniently forget.

The western worlds tendency to see itself as the pinnacle of civilization and morality has been used to justify global domination and intervention in the rest of the world.

The contemporary successes of some of the most powerful democracies are the result of the subjugation and exploitation of other people both within and beyond their borders. The U.S. was built on genocide and slavery.

Canada is only starting to acknowledge its history of cultural genocide. Every European state that practised colonialism profited from that brutality.

The British extracted more than $45 trillion of wealth from India between 1765 and 1938 and destroyed the countrys economy.

The U.K.s industrial revolution was financed by Indian plunder. Tens of millions of Indians died as the result of Britains economic policies. During the Second World War, Winston Churchill deliberately implemented policies that created and exacerbated the Bengal Famine that killed more than three million Indians.

Western amnesia about its brutal history is deliberate. As the British Empire ended, it launched Operation Legacy, the destruction of millions of documents detailing the full extent of British atrocities in its colonies.

Belgium hid the truth of King Leopolds vicious exploitation of the Belgian Congo that involved the murder of 10 million people.

In the U.S., the political rights campaign against critical race theory stifles the historical reality and legacy of American racism.

Democracy is not a cure-all for human misery and inequity. For impoverished states, democracy can actually exacerbate social divisions.

Exactly what makes a democracy successful is unclear, though it seems to lie in good governance. What is clear is that democracies cannot simply be wished into existence. Most western states can only offer examples of democracy-building that have relied upon extreme military, political and social violence.

Democracy in principle is a desirable goal. Most of the world supports the responsibility to protect doctrine the idea that states bear basic obligations to their citizens. However, most do not support military interventions to further those ostensible goals. They are aware of the great difficulties involved in making democracy work.

Western states argue that only democracies are legitimate states because they are supported by the consent of their citizens. That isnt the case for most authoritarian states.

However, China the primary target of the American democracy versus authoritarianism campaign complicates the democratic narrative. A meticulous, long-term Harvard study found that the vast majority of Chinese citizens support their national government. Other surveys have reached the same general conclusion.

This support may reflect, in part, Chinas cultural and historical norms and experiences but it is mostly attributable to how much the lives of the Chinese people have improved.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has overseen 40 years of economic growth and technological development unprecedented in world history. Chinese GDP per capita increased from US$195 in 1980 to US$12,556 in 2021. As many as 800 million people have risen out of poverty. Like any government, democratic or not, the CCPs legitimacy reflects its performance.

China is not, however, aggressively promoting its political model around the world, unlike the Wests often violent, coercive and selective push for liberal democracy.

Western democracies can best help the world by doing more to live up to their highest ideals and approach their relations with the rest of the world with humility borne from historical awareness.

The one existential threat the entire planet faces is climate change. Co-operation within the entire international community is more important than ever and will require global economic and political transformation.

The American and western strategy of fomenting global division to maintain a harmful status quo is counterproductive at best.

Read more from the original source:
The world's most powerful democracies were built on the suffering of others - The Conversation Indonesia

In the long annals of the republic, the White House has seen its share of perfidy and scandal, presidents who cheated on their wives and cheated the taxpayers, who abused their power and abused the public trust.

But not since the framers emerged from Independence Hall on that clear, cool day in Philadelphia 236 years ago has any president who was voted out of office been accused of plotting to hold onto power in an elaborate scheme of deception and intimidation that would lead to violence in the halls of Congress.

What makes the indictment against Donald J. Trump on Tuesday so breathtaking is not that it is the first time a president has been charged with a crime or even the second. Mr. Trump already holds those records. But as serious as hush money and classified documents may be, this third indictment in four months gets to the heart of the matter, the issue that will define the future of American democracy.

At the core of the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump is no less than the viability of the system constructed during that summer in Philadelphia. Can a sitting president spread lies about an election and try to employ the authority of the government to overturn the will of the voters without consequence? The question would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, but the Trump case raises the kind of specter more familiar in countries with histories of coups and juntas and dictators.

In effect, Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the case, charged Mr. Trump with one of the most sensational frauds in the history of the United States, one fueled by lies and animated by the basest of motives, the thirst for power. In a 45-page, four-count indictment, Mr. Smith dispensed with the notion that Mr. Trump believed his claims of election fraud. The defendant knew that they were false, it said, and made them anyway to create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger and erode public faith in the administration of the election.

The elements of the alleged conspiracy laid out in the indictment were for the most part well known since the congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol wrapped up seven months ago and many of them long before that. In that sense, the unsealing of the document had a bizarrely anti-climactic feel to it, given the stakes.

But if long delayed, the indictment wove together all the intrigue between the Nov. 3, 2020, election and the Jan. 20, 2021, inauguration into a damning tale of a president who pushed in seemingly every possible way to stop the handover of the White House to the challenger who beat him.

The framers considered the peaceful transfer of power fundamental to the new form of government they were devising. It was a fairly radical innovation in its day, an era when kings and emperors generally gave up power only upon natural death or at the point of a weapon. In the newborn republic, by contrast, the framers set limits on power through four-year presidential terms renewable only by the voters through the Electoral College.

George Washington established the precedent of voluntarily stepping down after two of those terms, a restraint later incorporated into the Constitution through the 22nd Amendment. John Adams established the precedent of peacefully surrendering power after losing an election. Ever since, every defeated president accepted the verdict of the voters and stepped down. As Ronald Reagan once put it, what we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.

Until Mr. Trump came along.

For all of the many, many allegations made against him on all sorts of subjects during his time on the public stage, everything else feels small by comparison. Unlike the indictment by New York State for allegedly covering up a payment to a porn actress and Mr. Smiths previous indictment for allegedly jeopardizing national secrets after leaving the White House, the new charges are the first to deal with actions taken by a president while in office.

While he failed to keep his grip on power, Mr. Trump has undermined the credibility of elections in the United States by persuading three in 10 Americans that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him, even though it was not and many of his own advisers and family members know it was not.

Bringing the case to court, of course, may not restore that public faith in the system. Millions of Mr. Trumps supporters and many Republican leaders have embraced his narrative of victimization, dismissing the prosecution without waiting to read the indictment as merely part of a far-reaching, multi-jurisdictional and sometimes even bipartisan witch hunt against him.

Mr. Trump has been laying the ground for the eventual indictment for months, making clear to his backers that they should not trust anything prosecutors tell them. Why didnt they do this 2.5 years ago? Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site on Tuesday afternoon. Why did they wait so long? Because they wanted to put it right in the middle of my campaign. Prosecutorial Misconduct!

A statement issued by his campaign went further, equating prosecutors with fascists and communists. The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes, it said. President Trump has always followed the law and the Constitution, with advice from many highly accomplished attorneys.

Name-calling is a political defense, not a legal one, but one that so far has succeeded in preserving his electoral standing in his comeback campaign for the White House. Despite prognostications to the contrary, the last two indictments succeeded only in enhancing his appeal among Republicans in the contest for the party nomination to challenge President Biden next year.

In a court of law, however, the challenge for Mr. Trump will be different, especially with a jury selected from residents of Washington, a predominantly Democratic city where he won just 5 percent of the vote in 2020. Mr. Trumps strategy may be to try to delay a trial until after the 2024 election and hope that he wins so that he can short-circuit the prosecution or even try to pardon himself.

The most essential facts of the case, after all, are not in dispute, nor did he deny any of the assertions made in the indictment on Tuesday. Mr. Trump was astonishingly open at the time in declaring that he wanted to overturn the election. Since leaving office, he has even called for the termination of the Constitution to reinstall him in the White House immediately.

The question is whether the facts add up to crimes as alleged by a federal grand jury at Mr. Smiths behest. Just as no president ever tried to reverse his defeat at the ballot box before, no prosecutor has brought charges for doing so, meaning there is no precedent for applying the statutes on the books to such a circumstance.

Mr. Trumps defenders argue that he had good-faith reasons for contesting the election results in multiple states and that he did nothing more than pursue his legitimate, legal options, a view shared by 74 percent of Republicans in a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College. What Mr. Smith is doing, they maintain, is criminalizing a political dispute in what amounts to victors justice Mr. Bidens administration punishing his vanquished foe.

But as the indictment methodically documented, Mr. Trump was told over and over again by his own advisers, allies and administration officials that the allegations he was making were not true, yet he publicly continued to make them, sometimes just hours later.

He was told they were not true by not one but two attorneys general, multiple other Justice Department officials and the governments election security chief all his appointees. He was told by his own vice president, campaign officials and the investigators they hired. He was told by Republican governors and secretaries of state and legislators. As one senior campaign adviser put it at the time, it was all just conspiracy garbage beamed down from the mothership.

Despite all that, Mr. Trump has never backed down in the two and a half years since, even as assertion after assertion has been debunked. Not a single independent authority who was not allied with or paid by Mr. Trump no judge, no prosecutor, no election agency, no governor has ever validated any substantial election fraud that would have come close to reversing the results in any of the battleground states, much less the three or four that would have been necessary to change the winner.

The one who tried to defraud the United States, Mr. Smith charged, was Mr. Trump, with bogus claims that he knew or had every reason to know were bogus, all in a bid for power. The former president will argue that this is all politics and that he should be returned to office in next years election, and so far millions of Americans have taken his side.

Now the justice system and the electoral system will engage in a 15-month race to see which will decide his fate first and the countrys. The real verdict on the Trump presidency is still to come.

Here is the original post:
Trumps Third Indictment Has Broad Implications for U.S. Democracy - The New York Times

On Thursday, Tennessee state Reps. Justin J. Pearson and Justin Jones, both Democrats, will vie for their seats in special general elections that civil rights advocates say serve as a reminder of the fragile state of U.S. democracy.

Pearson and Jones were quickly reinstated in April after the largely white, Republican-led House of Representatives expelled the two young Black lawmakers for joining gun reform protests on the chamber floor after a deadly shooting. Even so, the episode exposed a bigger concern: the GOP pattern of preserving power by stifling the voices of marginalized people.

Across the South, organizers are pushing back against Republican lawmakers attempts to racially gerrymander state legislative and congressional districts and prevent Black voters from affecting election outcomes. (Alabamas GOP-controlled legislature in July outright defied a U.S. Supreme Court directive to redraw the states congressional map with another majority-Black district.)

And the same month Pearson and Jones were reinstated, Montana Republicans silenced state Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a transgender Democrat. She had criticized her GOP colleagues for their support of prohibiting gender-affirming care for youth, saying that theyd have blood on their hands. When Zephyr refused to apologize, House Republicans blocked her from voting and in-person debates for the rest of the legislative session.

Sign up for our newsletter and get more news and analysis from our reporters weekly.

In a May interview with Capital B, Pearson articulated his fears about the future of democracy in Tennessee and beyond.

Im deeply concerned that were losing our democracy, he said, because people in positions of power are abusing their power, and turning our democracy into a mobocracy, where the mob rules, where they abuse their authority and censure and expel voices they disagree with rather than do the hard work of creating more just legislation that reflects the interests of the people most impacted by policies.

To further explore the significance of Thursdays elections and the young leaders shaping present-day political movements, Capital B spoke with Brandon Jones, the communications director of CivicTN, a nonpartisan civic engagement organization based in Tennessee.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

We should keep in mind that itd be a win, yes, but itd also be a wake-up call a reminder of why these elections are happening in the first place.

The assault on democracy is still a huge concern. What happened to the Tennessee Three [Pearson, Jones, and Gloria Johnson, the white state representative who also led protests but wasnt expelled] wasnt a one-off. It was a very strategic move, representative of the kinds of attacks on democracy we see in the South, and we [organizers] have to make sure that were just as strategic with the work we do. At CivicTN, the past few months have been an opportunity for us to come together with other groups for a common cause.

In this work, I think a lot about the Civil Rights Movement, gerrymandering, and the misrepresentation of people in the South. And my philosophy goes back to the individual to the importance of empowering even one person to learn about democracy issues and other issues affecting people around them, and then spread that knowledge in their communities.

This is a pattern. We can see that members of younger generations arent backing down. Theyre making sure that their communities are equipped with the knowledge they need to protect themselves, to protect their rights.

And this is a really important moment. Young leaders are voicing their concerns and putting themselves out there and fighting for what they know is right. But theyre not just talking about themselves. Theyre talking about the generations theyre a part of, as well as the generations coming after them. They want these future generations to be represented equally, too.

We know that these issues are affecting many different parts of the country. I think that when we see that and can pinpoint which leaders are voicing younger generations concerns, people can find pathways to take to confront the challenges facing their communities. Earlier I mentioned the importance of empowering individuals. But empowering generations is also important.

There are a number of elections coming up including for Pearson and Jones seats and were mobilizing our partners. Were canvassing and having poll parties and phone-banking. We really want to give people opportunities to engage in the political process, especially on Election Day.

For instance, one of our partners, the Equity Alliance, recently hosted a party at the polls at one of the Nashville Public Library branches. Whats especially important about all of this is just giving people the information and knowledge they need before they actually head to the polls on Aug. 3.

If people arent aware of the issues facing their communities, they wont necessarily see that theres a need for change change they can fuel. And this is where CivicTN and our dozens of coalition partners plug in and make sure that people know about their rights and are voicing community concerns.

Capital B is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to uncovering important stories like this one about how Black people experience America today. As more and more important information disappears behind paywalls, its crucial that we keep our journalismaccessibleandfree for all. But we cant publish pieces like this without your help. If you support our mission, please consider becoming a member by making a tax-deductible donation.Thank you!

Read more from the original source:
Tennessee, the South, and the Fragility of U.S. Democracy - Capital B

Bill Would Take A Comprehensive Approach To Make Voting More Accessible, Fair, And Secure

WASHINGTON, DC U.S. Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) helped introduce the Freedom to Vote Act to protect voting rights and strengthen democracy. This comprehensive legislation would make it easier for eligible voters to cast a ballot, help bolster election security, and strengthen campaign finance laws, including by requiring dark money groups to disclose their donors.

The right to vote is the bedrock of our democracy, which is why we need to stand up to protect this fundamental right in light of threats from lawmakers working to restrict access to the ballot, said Senator Rosen. Thats why Im proud to help introduce comprehensive legislation to protect Americans right to vote and strengthen our democracy.

The Freedom to Vote Act would:

Senator Rosen has been a staunch supporter of the right to vote and American democracy. Last Congress, Senator Rosen supported the bipartisan John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act that would restore and strengthen the landmark Voting Rights Act to combat voter suppression.

###

Read the original:
Rosen Helps Introduce Comprehensive Legislation to Protect Voting ... - Jacky Rosen

News item | 03-08-2023 | 16:03

We are thrilled to share the success of the 4th 'A.E. Priyono Democracy Forum: Quo Vadis Legal Protection for Pro-Democracy Defenders', organised by Public Virtue Research Institute (PVRI) and the Embassy of the Kingdom of The Netherlands, which was held in the mid-June.

This gathering brought together esteemed speakers, passionate students and young professional both in person at Erasmus Huis Jakarta and virtually from various locations. The event served as a platform for the exchange of ideas, focusing on the critical topic of legal protection for pro-democracy defenders.

Before the 'Democracy Forum', youth representatives from various universities had an open discussion about their views and activities on social issues during a lunch with Embassy staff and PVRI. Later, they were able to interact with panelists from the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, LPSK, KontraS and UGM on democratic participation and the role of activism in society.

Thanks to the active participation of panelists, students and young professionals attending the forum, the event served as a space for open dialogue in which different ideas and viewpoints could be presented. We look forward to seeing you at the next 'Democracy Forum', keep an eye on our socials for the details!

Go here to see the original:
Reflecting on the 4th A.E. Priyono Democracy Forum - The Netherlands and You