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There are three basic problems with the army. The first has to do with the political authorities weakness in controlling the armed forces. There has been a seditious, conspiratorial culture in the armed forces since the nineteenth century. Bolivia is the Latin American country that has had the most coups. The armed forces believe they are meant to stand above public authority.

But there is also a weakness in society. The population pays its taxes to support the military but has absolutely no knowledge of the military, its doctrine, its weapons, its mentality, and its history. In our fourteen years in office, we [MAS] failed to fill political offices with defense personnel who would democratize knowledge of the armed forces. This left the armed forces exempt from accountability to society.

Second, there is a colonial culture in Bolivia. This has to do with the consequences of more than a hundred years of military service. Rural farming communities assume that their sons have to pay a blood toll to become citizens. Abolishing compulsory military service is unthinkable, because, as a society, we have not created any alternative spaces for exercising citizenship.

The army believes that it has a license to be the guardian of society. How come? Its contact with society is contact with the indigenous, rural world. There is no contact with the middle class, with the sons of the oligarchy, because the sons of the oligarchy do not go into the barracks. Those who do go are the indios, the peasants, the workers. The armed forces contact with marginalized layers gives them a feeling of cultural superiority. Still today, they have not understood the concept of the plurinational state. So it is necessary to work on decolonizing the armed forces. They must understand that ours is a state that recognizes diversity among nations, coexisting in a complementary way.

The third problem is foreign interference. For seventy years, Bolivias armed forces were ideologically ruled by the United States. The appearance of their uniforms, their weapons, their doctrine, their training, their trips to the United States made the armed forces lose its identity as an institution dependent on the Bolivian state. You are proud to be an ally of the most powerful army in the world, even though the relations between you are colonial. According to the colonial armed forces, local criollos are an invincible power.

Today, they realize that the US armed forces can be defeated. The US empire is in decline and suffering historic defeats. It left Afghanistan in worse conditions than it left Saigon in 1975. So the idea is starting to arise in the armed forces that they dont automatically have to be aligned with the worlds greatest military power.

What war will you win with an army that has a colonial mentality? The only battle it has won in the last seventy years is the war against the Bolivian people. The armed forces doctrine stems from US anti-communist ideology: the people are the enemy, we cannot be a modern country because most Bolivians are miserable, ignorant, indigenous people, and so on. In this idea of modernity, indigenous peoples can only achieve social value if they meet the conditions for living in a civilized society: They have to speak Spanish. They have to have Western urban customs. They have to mimic the US way of life.

Thats why we have to change this nineteenth-century defense model to a twenty-first-century one.

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How the US War on Drugs Subverted Bolivian Democracy - Jacobin magazine

Bowdoin Presents is available here.

This audio offering will tap into the array of talent available within the Bowdoin community, says producer Lisa Bartfai.

The first season, which runs throughout the semester, will examine the broad issue of democracy from several different angles, she adds.

Well be featuring in-depth one-on-one conversations with people who have thought long and hard about our democracy, adds Bartfai, who also hosts the podcast.

The episodes range in length from twenty to forty minutes and feature guests who approach the subject from a number of different perspectives, including a tech entrepreneur, a conservation advocate, and someone with direct experience as a political representative.

The first season contains six episodes, she explains, and the opening one features a conversation with Associate Professor of Government and Asian Studies Henry Laurence.

He and Bartfai discuss the politics behind public broadcasting, which is also the subject of Laurences latest book project.

We talk, among other things, about the role of public broadcasting in laying the groundwork for civic discourse and countering the spread of misinformation and so-called fake news, she says.

Well be featuring in-depth one-on-one conversations with people who have thought long and hard about our democracy.

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New Bowdoin Podcast to Tackle Issues of Democracy - Bowdoin News

At a time when democratic institutions are under pressure and the University of Michigan community is looking to engage, U-M will continue Democracy & Debate, its universitywide collaboration on democratic engagement, through the 2021-22 academic year.

The announcement of the programs continuation was made by Michael Barr, dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and Anne Curzan dean of LSA, along with other Ann Arbor deans and directors.

I am delighted to be partnering with Anne Curzan and our fellow deans and directors across campus to continue the important work of Democracy & Debate, Barr said.

Our democracy is strong when we nurture and protect it every day, not simply in election season. Our programming this year will help to engage students, faculty, staff and alumni, and educate the broader public on critical local, state, national and global issues.

A multidisciplinary faculty Steering Committee and a Core Team of faculty, staff and students will shape unique engagement opportunities in five focal areas: arts and democracy, civics education in democracies, climate change and democracy, democracy and racial and social justice, and democracies in peril.

From the arts to engineering, the School of Information to the Ford School, and in partnership with the National Center for Institutional Diversity and the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the offerings will touch all students and U-M community members.

Democracy & Debate 2021-22 builds on the success of last years campuswide theme semester in which thousands of students, faculty, staff and alumni engaged with programming to enhance voter education and increase voter participation during the tumultuous 2020 election season.

Throughout the academic year, Democracy & Debate will offer programs and engagement opportunities, including events with national experts, student competitions to expand understanding of participation in the democratic process, and partnerships to galvanize voter participation and civic engagement.

It also includes a suite of self-directed learning resources, including Michigan Onlines Democracy and Debate Collection, a portfolio of learning experiences curated to address the complexities of democratic systems, and Michigan Publishings, Dialogues in Democracy, an interdisciplinary collection of University of Michigan Press books that explore the core tensions in American political culture.

More information about events, programming and learning resources can be found on the Democracy & Debate website.

We enthusiastically endorse the mission of the Democracy & Debate effort because it is strongly aligned with our values and beliefs, said Thomas Finholt, dean of the School of Information. We welcome the opportunity to continue to engage U-M students, faculty and staff in conversations about what it means to be a member of a democratic society and how this has changed in the face of new modes of interaction and communication.

NCID Director Tabbye Chavous said the programs impact has been felt across the campus.

Democracy & Debate has mobilized our communities to think more critically about movement towards a more diverse and inclusive society, she said. The contributions this year from expert diversity scholars will continue to help us all better understand and further examine the history of democracy and leverage this opportunity to engage with students, faculty and staff to envision a more just campus, community and society.

Democracy & Debate underscores the deans and directors commitment to the universitys future-enriching mission and aligns with U-M core values as it develops leaders and citizens who will challenge our present for the better, Curzan said.

It feels essential that we as an institution sustain our focus on what it means to be a member of a democratic society, in the U.S. and globally, she said. We are committed to open, informed dialogue about key issues, from free speech to voting access to structural inequalities, as part of our mission to contribute to the common good and create more sustainable and just societies.

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Democracy & Debate project to continue through 2021-22 | The University Record - The University Record

On Oct. 13, hearing the case of United States v. Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, the Supreme Courts conservative justices signalled that they will reverse a soundly reasoned federal Court of Appeals ruling and reinstate Dzhokhar Tsarnaevs death sentence. The case not only challenges our legal process, it also tests President BidenJoe BidenJan. 6 panel lays out criminal contempt case against Bannon Overnight Energy & Environment Presented by the American Petroleum Institute Democrats address reports that clean energy program will be axed Two House Democrats to retire ahead of challenging midterms MOREs promise to work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level.

It is no great surprise that conservative justices favor the death penalty and appear unreceptive to Tsarnaevs appeal. But it is surprising and disappointing when Bidens Justice Department asks the court to reinstate Tsarnaevs sentence.

The stakes go beyond his life. Underlying every death case is the vibrancy of our form of government. The challenge that capital punishment poses to democracy is an underappreciated underpinning of efforts to end it in the United States.

Capital punishment is a vestige of monarchical prerogatives which allow a single person to decide who lives or dies. In todays world, autocrats love capital punishment and use it to crush and intimidate political opponents.

Visiting it upon so-called enemies of the state demonstrates their dominance. According to French philosopher Michel Foucault, the ultimate expression of sovereign power is the right to take life or let live. For would-be dictators, merging the death penalty with unconstrained executive power is a marriage of considerable convenience.

Check out national leaders around the world who crave the power to kill their enemies.

Hungary abolished the death penalty in 1990. But its current strongman, Viktor Orban, wants to restore it in the European Union, currently a death penalty-free zone. Orbans the guy who cracks down on a free press, rails against LGBT people, and blames George Soros for flooding Christian Hungary with Muslims.

Rodrigo Duterte, the autocratic Philippines president, also wants to bring back the death penalty as part of his brutal war on drugs. Capital punishment ended there in 2006. China, Iran, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia none paragons of democracy lead the world in death sentences and executions.

At home, Donald TrumpDonald TrumpTrump goes after Cassidy after saying he wouldn't support him for president in 2024 Jan. 6 panel lays out criminal contempt case against Bannon Hillicon Valley Presented by Xerox Agencies sound alarm over ransomware targeting agriculture groups MORE, this nations most autocratic president, was also a death penalty enthusiast. He rushed to kill 13 death row inmates on his way out the White House door.

Weve seen dictators love affair with the death penalty before.

On Feb. 27, 1933, four weeks after becoming German Chancellor and the day after the Reichstaag fire, Adolph Hitler had the death penalty authorized for arson. A month later, he had that decree applied retroactively to cover the date of the fire.

In the 1934 Soviet Union, dictator Josef Stalin, made the number of official executions a state secret in an effort to hide the full scope of his purges. With letat, cest moi absolutism, transparency about such things is unnecessary because neither it, nor life itself, is of value.

By contrast, in a country like ours, built on the principles of philosopher John Locke, individual life and liberty along with rationality, are ideals. Hence, from the start, there was something not quite right about the death penalty in America.

Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, described the death penalty as the natural offspring of monarchical governments . . . An execution in a republic is like a human sacrifice in a religion.

The finality of the death penalty has always made it seem anomalous in a society whose checks-and-balances constitution acknowledges human susceptibility to error. Capital punishment is the ultimate assertion of righteous indignation and undemocratic infallibility.

Today, those like Bryan Stevenson and Equal Justice Initiative, dramatized in the film Just Mercy, have shown that our court system makes more mistakes than it cares to admit. They also teach that death sentences fall unequally on people of color and deny dignity to executioners and executed alike.

To date, strongmen like Orban and Duterte have been unable to overcome abolition and use the death penalty on opponents. In years to come, were an autocrat to take power here, we would need multiple barriers to governments control over life and limb.

That is why our first openly abolitionist president needs to act as he said he would. Regrettably, Biden has both found himself on the wrong side of the Tsarnaev case and failed to end federal capital punishment.

As former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan once observed [W]hen the state punishes with death, it denies the humanity and dignity of the victim and transgresses the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Ending capital punishment, Brennan continued, would be a great day for our country, and also for our Constitution.

It is time for Biden to heed Brennans admonition and to turn federal death row prisoners into lifers. Doing so would advance his agenda to restore and revitalize our democracy.

Austin Sarat (@ljstprof) is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is author of numerous bookson America's death penalty, includingGruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty. The views expressed here do not represent Amherst College.

Dennis Aftergutis a former federal prosecutor.

More here:
Ending the federal death penalty would bolster our democracy | TheHill - The Hill

With the whistle blown on Facebook, Congress must allocate ownership of personal data to the personnot the platformto allow competitive providers to emerge.

According to its former employee Frances Haugen, Facebook algorithms consciously amplify dangerous misinformation and privilege the most divisive content posted on the network. Such content is more frequently shared by users and foregrounding it maximises traffic on the platformand so turnover.

This modus operandi, which became still more aggressive from 2018, is generating perverse incentives pushing even relatively moderate users to sharpen and polarise their content to obtain visibility. It is a Darwinian struggle for prominence which, given the rules of the game, leads to the survival of those users most fit for division and risks skewing public opinion and altering political outcomes. A recent working paper I co-authored shows that exposure to political information through social media has been closely associated with the diffusion of divisive ideas in Europe in the last decade.

Haugen also revealed that, as the volume of divisive content circulating on the platform grows, it becomes more difficult, and more expensive, to monitor, especially in marginal areas where the economic return is not sufficient to justify the associated expense. This is a very dangerous short-circuit, especially in times when co-ordination via web platforms could issue in last Januarys siege of Capitol Hill in Washington.

What is worse, and what dramatically exposes democratic societies to the consequences of the algorithms deployed in Menlo Park in California, is that Facebook and its Big Tech peers, mostly also located in Silicon Valley, occupy dominant positions in extremely concentrated markets. A few firms control the information and communications technologies sector, acounting for increasing shares of physical assets, revenues and market capitalisation. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Googles Alphabet (with Saudi Arabias Aramco) lead the ranks of the top 100 companies in the world.

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As for social media specifically, a few platforms account for most of the traffic of opinions and information they colonise on the web. Facebook, which took over Instagram and WhatsApp, is certainly the biggest, coming next in the PwC ranking.

Why such an impressive push for scale in the digital world? Recognise first that public goods are those that are non-rival and non-exclusive (such as the air we breathe). Unlike most private goods and services, data are non-rivalrous and can be reproduced at no or minimal costas with ideas and knowledge more generally. But they are excludable and can thus be a source of monopoly.

An expanding system could facilitate the entry of new participants. But firms involved in the production of non-rivalrous goods will tend to seek ways to build fences around them, to engender scarcity artificiallyand, in the process, generate rents from the assets they own.

In contrast to true public goods, exclusion is possible in the digital ecosystem through a combination of scale effects, strengthened property rights, first-mover advantages and other anti-competitive practices. The network effects through which everyone gains by sharing the use of a service or resourcenowhere more evident than on content platformshave given rise to demand-side economies of scale, which allow the largest firm in an industry to increase and lock in its attractiveness to consumers and gain market share. This makes it almost impossible for competitors to become attractive and challenge market dominance.

Digital mononopolies are made more dangerous by the fact that most people do not see them as a problem. The perceived price for using a platform such as Facebook or the services provided by Google is zero, even if of course this is not the case. Operating on multi-sided markets, these giants can cross-subsidise, sacrificing profit by constraining one side to enhance the attractiveness of (and recoup losses on) the other.

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Google and Facebook offer their products free in exchange for personal data, which makes them more attractive to advertisers. Ultimately, Facebooks or Googles market power in advertising increases and so does the average cost of advertising, which will be eventually reflected in the price of goods.

One way to address monopoly in a digital world and pave the way for a more pluralist and efficient market would be to break up the large firms responsible for market concentration. This takes literally the frequent comparison between, respectively, oil in the analogue and data in the digital economies. Standard Oil, which controlled 95 per cent of US refineries and had deals with the railways which restricted the ability of others to compete, was broken up in 1911 and required by law to split into many pieces.

The tendency of the market to generate monoplies, however, would make the new configuration inherently unstable. Another approach would be to change the structure of the market in a more profound way, so to avoid the risk of any future such agglomeration.

In this sense the proposal advanced a few years ago by Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik, to reconfigure data ownership, is today more relevant than ever. In a nutshell, the University of Chicago economists propose a legislative reallocation of property rights akin to what has been done on the mobile market, where some countries have established that a phone number belongs to the customernot the provider. This redefinition of property rights, or number portability, has made it easier to switch provider and so has fostered competition.

Along the same lines, in the social-network space, it would suffice to reassign to each customer the ownership of all the digital connections they created, a social graph. This way customers could sign into a Facebook competitor and instantly reroute all their Facebook friends messages to the new platform. By guaranteeing the latter access to new customers data and contacts, social graph portability would reduce the positive network externalities favouring the existing platforms and ensure the benefits of competition.

The US domination of social media and other content platformswith the top seven such firms all originating thereis evident. Any solution will therefore require legislation by Congress. The White House knows that the momentum generated by the Facebook scandal will fade and that the window of popular support for major changes to the technology landscape will close. The time for action is now.

Piergiuseppe Fortunato is an economist at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, where he leads projects on global value chains and economic integration, and an external professor of political economics at the Universit de Neuchtel.

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'Social media', market power and the health of democracy - Social Europe