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Ukraine's ambassador told the world that if his country is crushed, international peace and democracy are in peril, as the United Nations General Assembly held a rare emergency session in a day of frenzied diplomacy at the UN about the days-old war.

Ukraine is paying now the ultimate price for freedom and security of itself and all the world," Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya said at the assemblys first emergency meeting in decades.

If Ukraine does not survive... international peace will not survive. If Ukraine does not survive, the United Nations will not survive," he said. Have no illusions. If Ukraine does not survive, we cannot be surprised if democracy fails next.

Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia reiterated his country's assertions that what it calls a special military operation in defense of two breakaway areas in Ukraine is being misrepresented.Russian actions are being distorted and thwarted," he said.

As Russian and Ukrainian officials held talks on the Belarus border, the UNs two major bodies the 193-nation General Assembly and the more powerful 15-member Security Council both scheduled meetings Monday on the war. In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council voted to hold its own urgent session.

The assembly session will give all UN members an opportunity to speak about the war and to vote on a resolution later in the week. U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Sunday the measure would hold Russia to account for its indefensible actions and for its violations of the UN Charter.

Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, voiced his support for his Ukrainian counterpart, Sergiy Kyslytsya, at the opening of the emergency session. Kyslytsya visited Israel last year and assisted in gaining support for the successful passage of an Israeli-initiated resolution against Holocaust denial last month.

"The guns are talking now, but the path of dialogue must always remain open, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the assembly. We need peace now.

The Security Council meeting, set for later Monday, was focused on the humanitarian impact of Russias invasion. French President Emmanuel Macron sought the session to ensure the delivery of aid to growing numbers of those in need in Ukraine.

French Ambassador Nicolas de Riviere said Sunday that France and Mexico would propose a resolution to demand the end of hostilities, protection of civilians, and safe and unhindered humanitarian access to meet the urgent needs of the population. He said it would probably be put to a vote Tuesday.

Both meetings follow Russias veto Friday of a Security Council resolution demanding that Moscow immediately stop its attack on Ukraine and withdraw all troops. The vote was 11-1, with China, India and the United Arab Emirates abstaining.

Last week, Ukraine asked for a special session of the General Assembly to be held under the so-called Uniting for Peace resolution. It was initiated by the United States and adopted in November 1950 to circumvent vetoes by the Soviet Union during the 1950-53 Korean War.

That resolution gives the General Assembly the power to call an emergency session to consider matters of international peace and security when the Security Council is unable to act because of the lack of unanimity among its five veto-wielding permanent members -- the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France.

The U.S. ambassador told the council after Sundays vote that members had taken an important step forward in holding Russia accountable for its unjustifiable assault, fabricated out of lies and the rewriting of history, and now all nations can be heard in the General Assembly.

Albanian Ambassador Ferit Hoxha called Sundays resolution historic because it opens the big doors of the place where the world meets -- the UN General Assembly -- to speak out and condemn an unprovoked and unjustified pure act of aggression.

Russia must be stopped in its attempt to break the international rules-based order to replace it with its will, he said. All member states, especially the small ones like mine which constitute the majority of the UN, must remember that international law rules and the UN Charter are their best friend, their best army, their best defense, their best insurance.

During the council meeting, many speakers called for diplomatic efforts to peacefully settle the crisis, and said they would be watching Ukraine-Russia meeting expected to take place on the Belarus border Monday.

Jonathan Lis contributed to this report.

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Democracy will not survive if Ukraine falls, envoy tells UN ahead of Russia vote - Haaretz

Starbucks workers to unionize workplaces in Seattle and all over the country.

Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York were the first to certify a union through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and their success has inspired workers across the country to follow suit. Founded over 50 years ago, Starbucks turned Seattle into the caffeine capital of the United States, becoming the largest coffee chain in the world. It generates more than 10 times the revenue of its closest competitor. Today, its workers are taking matters into their own hands, organizing for living wages and the provision of health insurance.

As we all know, essential workers are the real heroes of this pandemic. The only reason the economy hasnt ground to a halt is because they keep showing up for work. We applaud them for making a living, but their bosses are making a killing. As of 2020, CEOs average earnings are 351 times that of their employees but it's the baristas who keep the money moving and the coffee flowing.

60 stores in 19 states have organized their workplaces for unionization. Starbucks Workers United, the new Starbucks labor union, is fighting an uphill battle unions have been on the decline for decades, and real wages have gone down with them. Organized labor creates inclusive growth in the economy and fortifies the health of American democracy.

Rachel Ybarra is a Starbucks worker and union organizer. She recalled her excitement upon learning that the Starbucks in Buffalo had filed for a union.

It was kind of like finding out that they had done something that a lot of us had presented to one another as a joke, Ybarra said, describing how forming a union was something that almost everyone in her workplace favored, but considered an impossibility.

Seeing Buffalo win their union election prompted Ybarra and a coworker to meet with Starbucks Workers United in the days following.

We had that meeting on Friday, and over that weekend, we got all of our [union] cards signed and were able to get them filed by Monday, Ybarra said.

The National Labor Relations board requires 30% support to file for an election, where 50% support is needed to certify a union.

At their small coffeehouse, it only took three days to gain a majority, proof of the common desire for improved working conditions. Ybarra was ready for managements attempt to break their organizing efforts.

We had a couple of meetings with managers, Ybarra said. I had a three-on-one with my store manager, my [general manager], and another store manager that I had never met I decided to be maliciously compliant. They responded with a lot of hostility My district manager offered for me to leave three times during the meeting.

Why do corporations hire union-busting specialists, pay for costly legal battles, or spend money on anti-union campaigns? Because its cheaper than paying workers more than what is absolutely necessary. Unionized workplaces grant workers the ability to collectively bargain, allowing them to negotiate the terms of a union contract. With Starbucks Workers United, Ybarra expects increased pay and healthcare coverage.

Unionizing a workplace is difficult, and there are huge, huge advantages for employers who can make vague threats to punish workers for unionizing. Jake Grumbach, assistant professor of political science, said. Emerging moments of unionization in a place like Starbucks can show that it is possible even in difficult situations.

The recent organizing push is the result of a long term slowdown in the social mobility and economic outlook for low wage workers. When a business generates immense profit and chooses to not compensate the employees, low wage workers are left with no choice but to bargain for better wages through unionization.

Establishing living wages through labor union collective bargaining provides huge benefits for raising children, lowering crime, having a strong middle class with living wages for workers across education levels, across geography and industry, Grumbach said. That is absolutely crucial for an economy to work, and it can supercharge economic growth by having ordinary people have more money to spend in the economy stimulating demand by reducing inequality.

When labor unions are strong, they can drive up wages for both non-union and union members by offering better wages, creating competition for employers to attract employees. Moreover, private sector unions represent their workers politically by endorsing pro-worker candidates.

[Labor unions] serve to organize the working class politically and thats actually really crucial for democracy, Grumbach said. Imagine you live in some place where all the manufacturing is being outsourced and offshored, your town is changing, and there's an opioid crisis and things seem really bleak People in those positions are very susceptible to politics based in fear of immigrants or racial conflict, and labor unions are a way to organize mass politics in a more democratic way, so people have control over policies that affect their material lives, rather than just culture war politics.

When workers unite on the basis of shared interests, they can win and win big. Starbucks workers in Seattle are proving that labor unions are still possible in the most unlikely of places.

A union is just what happens when your team comes together and decides to take control of their workplace, Ybarra said.

The national labor struggle is ongoing, sending shockwaves from coast to coast. Ybarra hopes for a successful result in their union election next month. Our community must support essential workers like Ybarra and labor unions like Starbucks Workers United in their fight for fair wages and representation.

The old union song rings true: Oh miner, wont you organize wherever you may be, and make this a land of freedom for workers like you and me.

Reach writer Thomas DuBeau at opinion@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @thomas_dubeau

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Democracy starts in the workplace | Critical Conversations | dailyuw.com - Dailyuw

The following is an excerpt from a longer piece offering perspectives from various authors on multiple fronts of United States foreign policy ahead of President Joe Biden's State of the Union address on March 1, 2022.

By comparison with the dismal performance of former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden refreshingly promised a foreign policy guided by human rights. But despite some positive steps, Bidens approach has been disappointingly conventional.

For starters, we can be thankful no longer to have a president who embraces every friendly autocrat under the sun even Russian President Vladimir Putin. In addition, reversing Trumps moves, Biden rejoined the United Nations Human Rights Council, re-engaged with the World Health Organization, supported global efforts to fight climate change, and cancelled sanctions against the International Criminal Court prosecutor for examining torture by U.S. personnel in Afghanistan and war crimes by Israeli officials. Biden also has continued the longstanding practice of pressing U.S. adversaries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba to curb their abuses, including by imposing targeted sanctions.

On China, Biden signed into law the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which presumptively bars imports from Xinjiang. After labeling atrocities targeting Uyghurs as genocide and crimes against humanity, Biden joined a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics to undermine President Xi Jinpings efforts to sportswash his repression. Yet despite these important discrete steps, Biden has yet to put forward a comprehensive strategy, with clear goals, to curb Beijings oppression at home and its efforts to undermine international human rights institutions.

When it comes to relations with abusive allies, Biden showed little sign of a human rights-guided approach. Apart from modest tweaks, he continued large-scale U.S. arms sales or military aid to Egypt despite the worst repression in the countrys modern history, to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates despite their devastating airstrikes and other atrocities against Yemeni civilians (casualties surged after Saudi arm-twisting succeeded in lifting U.N. scrutiny in October), and to Israel despite its attacks on large civilian apartment and office buildings in Gaza and its crime against humanity of apartheid affecting millions of Palestinians. Silence from the White House matched Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modis silence before his supporters increasingly virulent attacks on Muslims.

Even some of Bidens positive steps have been half-hearted. After his summits with key leaders such as Russias Putin, Chinas Xi, and Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdoan, the White House said human rights were discussed but provided no details, leaving in the dark the persecuted people from those countries the primary agents for change and missing an opportunity to use the moral influence of the presidents office to support them. Just days after Bidens Summit for Democracy, the administration invited autocratic leaders from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand to a U.S.-ASEAN summit. The administration implemented economic restrictions on Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover that are severely harming the Afghan population, which now faces a looming humanitarian crisis and large-scale starvation. And while some migrants at the U.S.-Mexican border have been allowed to seek asylum, many are still summarily turned back despite the considerable danger of violent attack.

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US State of the Union: Democracy and Human Rights - Human Rights Watch

While defending Confederate statues, Marjorie Taylor Greene said she is opposed to taking any down, even one of Hitler, because: Our history is our lessons and our lessons is how we learn to make our choices going forward. ... Its so that I could tell my children and teach others about who these people are, what they did and what they may be about.

This may explain why Greene and so many others in my Republican Party have drawn ugly parallels relating to Hitler from mask mandates to the education of our children.

Unfortunately, Greene and many of her congressional colleagues have either learned very little of Hitlers history or, worse yet, they choose to ignore it.

They should be reminded that Hitler was a narcissistic demagogue who, when he lost a presidential election to Otto Von Hindenburg, claimed that he was stabbed in the back by a conspiracy of his political enemies and began a course of sedition and insurrection. Not long after Hitler lost the election, the Reichstag building, which housed the German congress, was burned to the ground. It was the Reichstag fire which gave Hitler and his Nazi Party the excuse they needed to take the power that the voters had denied him.

His rationale for taking complete power was to bring security to the German people.

The day after the fire, February 28, 1933, Hitler embarked on a course of enacting decrees and urging executive orders that eliminated all political opposition and began the merciless purge of his political enemies. The following month he opened his first concentration camp at Dachau, and in the years that followed he pursued his genocidal rampage.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler spoke of the big lie ( Der groe Lge) the use of a lie so breathtaking that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Hitler used the big lie to not only blame Jews and communists for every ill, real or imaginary, that beset Germany including the Reichstag fire, but also as a device to frighten and divide the German people.

You cannot reflect on this history without remembering the message delivered by George Washington in his farewell address. He warned of the demagogue who agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms to foment riot and insurrection. Our first president realized that this agitation and disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Our second president, John Adams, was also worried about the rise of a demagogue in this country. Shortly after the British burned down our Capitol building in 1814, Adams, responding to a letter that criticized him for not patriotically applauding the virtues of democracy, cautioned that vanity, pride, avarice or ambition were irresistible temptations to individuals that led to the subversion of democracy. In his words: Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.

Sol Wachtler, a former chief judge of the New York state Court of Appeals, is a distinguished adjunct professor at Touro Law School.

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Commentary: The main dangers to our democracy come from within - Albany Times Union

Day one of the two-day Democracy and Constitutionalism: Civic Education Series kicked off at Constitution Hill on Monday with the terrible reality of democracy under threat from a Medusa.

Top of mind for the gathering of more than 30 global speakers turned inevitably to the Russian invasion of sovereign Ukraine that the world has witnessed in the past week. But attention to conflicts 8,500km from Joburg circled quickly back to the room at the womens jail at Constitution Hill where the topics to be covered throughout the course of the day showed that South Africa, like the rest of the world, is in urgent need of confronting the many ways democracy and constitutionalism are coming under threat.

Panellists outlined that current-day threats to democracy have manifested in a variety of ways, including the rise of populism designed to create divides of us and them; racism still untamed, but put on the back burner of issues; pressures arising from a shrinking reliable media thats also up against a machinery of fast replicating false facts and fake news.

Its also grassroots movements not getting their voices into the room and essentially shut out without resources or access. Its weakened and captured state security apparatus, evident during the July 2021 riots in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, and unchecked abuse of power.

Underpinning it all is the mounting pressure of climate change with the reality that it will be the poorest and most vulnerable who will face the worst of the impacts of a world getting hotter. The climate justice movement, panellists said, is therefore entwined with the social justice movements aims to undo the economic structures that keep society deeply unequal and the corporate might of polluting industries that still dominate and pull political strings.

The lecture series hosted by Section27 and Casac (Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution) in partnership with Constitution Hill has at its chief aim reinvigorating broad public interest in strengthening constitutional democracy and the rule of law.

In her opening remarks, Faranaaz Veriava, head of education at Section27, spoke of a backsliding of civil society gains made in the past few years.

The grassroots activism and civic education programmes that characterised much of the struggle against apartheid, and the early days of our democracy and constitution-making all but disappeared from the South African landscape.

While the core work of Section27 has been to advocate for health and education rights in pursuit of socio-economic equality, we are concerned that our rights-based campaigns and many of our cases that we have successfully led will not be effective if government at all levels is riddled by corruption and dysfunctionality.

We now believe that it is equally important for all of us to focus on education in human rights, she said.

The disconnect between the ideals of the Constitution and the ultimate hope of creating a better life for all was also highlighted in the keynote address of Justice Jody Kollapen, who is newly appointed to the apex court.

The question arises on how the peoples struggle deeply rooted in the lived reality of the millions who drove it and gave it sustenance and legitimacy relate to the new institutional framing of the Constitution that was meant to deliver on the expectations of that struggle. But we may well have fallen short, he said.

Kollapen called the Constitution supreme, but said it was unable to provide all the answers that we need all of the time and said that parallel processes that harmonise and live in synergy with the Constitution [are] necessary in ensuring that the oxygen of a democracy is always maintained and sustained.

The first days session bought together a strong mix of panellists with the hope of being able to find more connecting points between social movements around the world and also to incorporate global perspectives with home-grown realities as a way to cover more angles, see past blind spots and start to find the strategies of growing awareness, sharing information and resources, strategic collaboration, better organising, stronger analysis and effective mobilising.

The global threats to democracy, civil liberties and freedoms from across the world have terrifyingly similar impacts despite varying mechanisms of execution and implementation.

Speakers raised alarms from their countries, including increasingly militaristic and undemocratic practices and policies under the presidency of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, including his denial of Covid-19 at the cost of many Brazilian lives.

In India, its a Hindu populist democracy marked by minority exclusion under Narendra Modi. Modi has severely limited the rights and freedoms of Muslims including through an exclusionary citizenship law and has defended his actions within a framework of democratic politics and within the framework of a constitution.

Closer to home, the absolute monarchy of eSwatini continues to curb political freedoms including the appointment of judges by the king. For nearly half a century the people have been denied the right to elect their leaders or just be recognised as citizens, not the kings subjects. Last years pro-democracy protests in that kingdom left at least 29 people dead and dozens of others injured and maimed.

Bringing the days session to a close was a focus on strengthening institutional democracy. This session homed in on the July 2021 riots in South Africa and insights from information that had since emerged.

It raised red flags on power struggles within state security agencies, including this past week, with the exodus of the national police commissioner from the South African Police Service, ostensibly at loggerheads with the minister of police.

The fingers now being pointed at Cabinet ministers also showed up whose power bases were weakening and it left questions on why there were not more legislative measures to push back against political power and to demand transparency. This included how budgets were used, the operational direction of departments and even which cases for investigation were prioritised.

The full recording of the first days sessions are available on YouTube, under Democracy and Constitutionalism: Civic Education Series. Day twos session will continue at Constitution Hill and will also be live-streamed on the same platform. DM/MC

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