Mediaboss Marketing

The political history of the world can be described as a narrative of political events, ideas and movements that bring about a drastic shift in world systems. From bartering trade system to today's capitalistic system, everything has over the course of centuries evolved through the cognitive evolution of mankind. Before conferring about coexistence between capitalism and democracy we must have a vivid idea about both systems since they are drastically different from one another.

A democratic system deals with equality; where people are recognised in an equal manner of their 'rights and dignity'. On the other hand, capitalism is devoid of any form of equality. Instead it focuses on the idea of profit maximisation, which can only be achieved through the exploitation of those that are vulnerable and in need. Furthermore, in a democratic system people make the laws and practices of their land together as equal citizens. But under capitalism, capitalists make laws and policies by using their money and power. According to a recent survey conducted in 27 countries, 51% of the people are dissatisfied with how democracy is working. Many experts have voiced their opinions against a demo-capitalistic approach while some go as far as to say that they dont acknowledge its coexistence.

Capitalism is the right way to organise an economy but proves to be counterproductive when organising a society; And while market do a good job of allocating resources, fostering dynamism and preserving individual choice, they cannot solve the ills of society.

Shahjahan Baloch

Ahmedpur

Published in The Express Tribune, July 5, 2020.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.

Here is the original post:
Capitalism and democracy - The Express Tribune

Brave judges, a feisty press and plucky civil society boost a hopeful trend in Africa

THERE IS A blueprint for presidents keen to rig elections. First, use state resources to bribe, fool and bully people before the poll. Once voting starts, stuff the ballot boxes or fiddle the tallies. Afterwards, make sure the army and judges are on your side in case opponents take their case to the streets or to the courts.

When Peter Mutharika, the incumbent, was declared the winner of Malawis presidential election in May 2019, it seemed a textbook case of rigging. Voting sheets had been altered with Tipp-Ex, a correction fluid. International observers complained only half-heartedly. But Malawians fought back. Activists organised peaceful protests. Opposition parties went to the Constitutional Court. In February its judges, apparently after turning down bribes, granted a re-run, which was held on June 23rd.

The result, announced on June 27th, was a victory for Lazarus Chakwera of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) and his opposition alliance. He won 59% of the 4.4m votes cast; Mr Mutharika took just 40%. The margin of defeat was such that the now former president had no grounds to question the outcome.

Lazarus is a deliciously appropriate name for a politician whose career seemed to have died a year ago. It also marks his religiosity, since his father, a subsistence farmer who had already seen two sons perish in infancy, named the future president after a man whom Jesus is said to have raised from the dead. Mr Chakwera became a theologian, leading the Malawian branch of the Assemblies of God church, part of a global Pentecostal network. In 2013 he swapped the cloth for the campaign trail. He became head of the MCP, which had struggled to shake off its legacy as the political vehicle of Hastings Banda, the dictator who ruled Malawi from 1964 to 1994.

Malawi is one of the most devout countries in Africa. Fully 81% of Malawians say they trust religious leaders, compared with an average of 69% in the 34 countries recently surveyed by Afrobarometer, a pan-African pollster. That made it easier for Mr Chakwera to present himself as a clean alternative to Mr Mutharika, whose regime was widely seen as filthy.

It will, however, take more than preaching to improve Malawians lot. Mr Chakwera has promised 1m new jobs and a universal subsidy for fertilisera tempting pledge in a mostly agrarian economy. But it will be hard to pay for these promises. The country is one of the poorest in the world: 70% of its people live on less than $1.90 a day (at purchasing-power parity). Many public services depend on foreign aid. GDP per person is forecast to fall this year and next, thanks to covid-19.

In any event, Malawi deserves to savour its victory. It has shown the importance of strong institutions in fragile democracies. Independent judges, a vibrant civil society, a feisty press, a strong parliamentthey all make it harder for a dodgy incumbent to cling to power. Their steady if uneven rise across the continent is one reason why there have been 32 peaceful changes of power in Africa since 2015and why 19 of these have involved an incumbent having to stand aside. Malawi is a sign that African politics is becoming more competitive. And politicians and parties that have to compete have more of an incentive to deliver improvements to voters lives, in Africa as anywhere else.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "A lesson in democracy"

More here:
Malawis re-run election is a victory for democracy - The Economist

Discussions on disinformation mostly focus on the external sources of disinformation: Russia and China. If we focus exclusively on disinformation as a foreign challenge, we are simply ignoring the elephant in the room. Democratically-elected leaders are increasingly fuelling the spread of disinformation.

Contemporary disinformation is distinct from propaganda. It is neither based on ideologies nor facts. In many ways, it is predicated on a much more pessimistic and cynical worldview where, as Peter Pomerantsev writes about the disinformation of the Putin-regime, Nothing is true and everything is possible.

The goal of disinformation is not to persuade the audience with one message. Rather, disinformation is intended to confuse people with multiple messages. As a result, it does not need ideology or to be fact-based at all. It can be almost anything, which is why it is so much more dangerous than propaganda.

Without the pesky requirement of being beholden to facts or ideas, one can simply throw out any sort of (false or strange) information to confuse the public. And it is increasingly being exploited for political gain. We live in an era where political campaigns are less focused on winning hearts and minds; rather, campaigns in now tend to gain traction by sowing division and engendering tribalism.

Disinformation creates chaos. The public finds itself confused about what is true and reality suddenly becomes murky. Without clear and reliable information, people revert to visceral tribalism based on the narrative they like the most. Cleavages deepen. The mission of the disinformation campaign is accomplished.

The pandemic has given a dangerous boost to domestic disinformation narratives in the democratic world.

In Hungary, a NATO and EU member state), Viktor Orbn has created the most centralised media empire ever within the European Union, with more than 400 media outlets all parroting similar political messages. The Hungarian government and its media have also successfully blamed Iranian students in Hungary for the onset of the pandemic, falsely claiming that the primary source of the pandemic is illegal migration. Orban and his media have also blamed George Soros for the tanking Hungarian currency and claimed that a vocal critic of Orbans anti-democratic tactics was descended from Nazis. These narratives are not only for domestic use: Orbn is spreading them throughout the Ango-Saxon world through his news agency V4NA and throughout the Western Balkans via media acquisitions.

Russia Today, the state-financed disinformation outlet planned to open a branch in Budapest a few years ago. Russias foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov announced the plan and the editor-in-chief was selected. Ultimately, RT abandoned the idea. Why? Most probably because they felt there was no need for such an outlet in Hungary, as the state-owned media is misinforming voluntarily for free. As a study by Political Capital - in association with Euronews - found, Euroskeptic narratives representing Moscows interests are present in the Hungarian media space without any efforts being made by the Kremlin (for instance, the messaging that only Russia and China help, the EU does not).

Meanwhile, in Poland, state-owned media have been claiming that opposition mayors have enacted policies that are contributing to the spread of the virus. At the same time, Central European governments like Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria in order to silence critical voices - have passed harsher criminal punishment for media outlets that they claim are spreading fake news.

Even the United States once a respected global beacon of democratic principles and a trusted ally of other like-minded democratic states is spearheading massive disinformation campaigns, especially related to COVID-19. During the pandemic, which has seen a hugely disproportionate death toll in the US (relative to its percentage of the global population), we have seen democratically-elected political leaders flood the public discourse with disinformation.

President Trump is attempting to alter the narrative of the pandemic and its effects and to achieve particular political ends and kickstart his re-election campaign. Rather than providing the public with clear and digestible facts, he touts wild and unproven medical treatments and puts forward man-made sources of COVID-19 without evidence, often contradicting scientists and American intelligence agencies. Trump lies repeatedly about US testing capabilities, and regularly fabricates data regarding the scope of US infections and deaths. When a journalist deigns to question him on the information he puts forth in his press briefings, he becomes agitated, casts doubt on the credibility of the journalist or media outlet, and cries fake news!

Trump also promotes notable conspiracy theorists in his Twitter feed. He recently accused an MSNBC anchor, Joe Scarborough, of murder and has been claiming that young children interfere with mail-in voting in an effort to call into question its efficacy and to discourage voters. Trump has also publicly retweeted conspiracy theories about coronavirus espoused by Diamond & Silk, two celebrities whose Twitter feed was suspended for disinformation, and recently argued that a 75-year old protestor in Buffalo was a member of Antifa.

President Trump will likely continue his disinformation campaign with the purpose of creating chaos and dividing constituents, as tribal politics can always benefit from more division and polarisation. The public confusion and division it breeds may just be enough to save him.

Historically, dictatorships and authoritarians have effectively utilised state-sponsored disinformation tactics and the politically-elected leaders of Western democracies have aggressively condemned them. In fact, the US government and the European Union have proactively opposed the use of such flagrant authoritarian tactics, as they pose a fundamental and profound threat to well-established democratic principles. Western democratic leaders generally oppose authoritarians who deliberately deceived their citizens to create and sustain a virtual reality: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and in the 21st century, Kim Jung-Un and Vladimir Putin.

But suddenly, state-sponsored disinformation is no longer reserved for authoritarians and dictators. It has infiltrated the Western democratic world, catching us all off guard.

In the last general election campaign in the UK, the incumbent Tories deployed a flood of fake news regarding Brexit and their political opponents until tech giants (including Google) had to step in and remove some of their misleading ads.

We must now recognise the painful truth that - even in a Western democracy - there is almost no way to stop disinformation, especially when it comes from the top. Viritually all of the funds and institutions in the Anglo-Saxon world are aimed exclusively at targeting disinformation coming from the outside - from foreign sources.

Because such extensive disinformation campaigns are a relatively new phenomenon in the West, we do not yet have adequate norms and/or institutional practices in place to combat this new challenge. There are no institutions ready to deal with domestic, homegrown politically-charged disinformation - neither in the US, nor in the UK or in the EU. As a result, we are no longer simply ignoring the elephant in the room. We have allowed the elephant to take over the room.

_____________

Are you a recognised expert in your field? At Euronews, we believe all views matter. Contact us at view@euronews.com to send pitches or submissions and be part of the conversation.

View post:
State-sponsored disinformation in Western democracies is the elephant in the room View - Euronews

One of the biggest developments in politics last week had nothing to do with the coronavirus pandemic, or the collapse of the economy, or protests for racial justice, but it could have a profound impact on the resolution of all threeand on the larger question of whether America will be a democracy or autocracy in the long run. It was a response from Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), who sits in Joe Bidens old Senate seat, to a question about what Democrats will do if Republicans remain bent on scorched-earth opposition to Democratic governance.

I will not stand idly by for four years and watch the Biden administrations initiatives blocked at every turn, Coons said. I am gonna try really hard to find a path forward that doesnt require removing whats left of the structural guardrails, but if theres a Biden administration, it will be inheriting a mess, at home and abroad. It requires urgent and effective action.

The blocking mechanism at issue is the Senate filibuster rule, which allows the minority to impose a three-fifths supermajority requirement on nearly all legislation. If, optimistically, Democrats enter the new year with control of the presidency, the House, and 53 Senate seats, after winning the election in a landslide, Republicans would still have easy veto power over basically every Biden initiative, whether to suppress epidemic disease, revive the economy, or reform policing. The catch is that Democrats could eliminate this antidemocratic rule, so that a simple majority of senators can pass legislation, with just 50 votes. On the first day of the new Congress, before Biden has even been sworn in, his Senate allies could dramatically expand the horizons of his presidency, giving him (and themselves) the power to govern around Republican obstruction, rather than be confined by it.

There should be no dilemma here, and many Democrats have advocated abolishing or reforming the legislative filibuster for a long time. Coonss statement is meaningful because hes a reluctant convert. Senate Democrats are divided over the filibuster question less along lines of political vulnerability (Coons won his last election by over 13 points) than between those who see the world as it is and those who see it as they wish it was. His change of heart, and his explanation for softening, suggest the latter category of Democrats has begun to accept reality: Leaving the filibuster intact wont generate bipartisan consensus where none exists, but it will make the difference between Bidens presidency failing, with all the collateral damage that would create, and standing a real chance of success.

The challenge now is to convince these same Democrats that abolishing the filibuster is necessary, but insufficientits a key that will unlock a world of new possibilities, but wont on its own protect Biden from right-wing sabotage, or rescue Americas endangered democracy. Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos wrote recently that, When Trump loses in November, America needs to grapple with the fact that it was not our constitutional system, but Trumps own incompetence that preserved our democracy. We might not be so lucky with the next would-be authoritarian. This sentiment is widespread in liberal circles, mostly as a prompt for discussing civil service, ethics, campaign-finance, and other reforms that would better insulate the government from authoritarian corruption. These kinds of reforms are important, and may even receive bipartisan support in an environment where the president is a Democrat and Republicans are trying to cleanse the Trump taint from their party. But they are only second-layer protections, tools better suited to protecting the country should another authoritarian come to power than to closing avenues of power to authoritarians in the first place.

Trump has exploited weaknesses in our laws, but he is more importantly a product of minoritarian powers that should be illegitimate in an advanced democracy. Trump broke the law to win the 2016 election, but he was only successful because our system allows the popular-vote loser to ascend to the presidency, and the same story is likely to be true if he somehow wins re-election. But beyond the well-understood anomaly of the electoral college, Trump also benefited from a high background level of antidemocracy in the years leading up to his election. Trump is the second Republican president in a row to win the presidency while losing the popular vote, and is on pace to be the second Republican president in a row to bequeath his successor a nation on its knees, pseudo-governed by a rearguard of judges who never should have been appointed, legislatures gerrymandered to preserve Republican-minority rule, and Republican senators who represent a minority of the population.

Under more democratic conditions, Trump wouldnt have won even with a structural advantage in the electoral college. Absent the filibuster, President Obama would have been able to secure as much stimulus as the economy needed in 2009, instead of having to outsource that determination to swing-state Republicans. A rapidly improving economy would have limited Democratic losses in the fateful 2010 midterm, which allowed Republicans to gerrymander Democrats out of legislative power for the better part of the decade. It might even have left material conditions in November 2016 stronger than they were, which would have generated political dividends for the incumbent party.

Trumps electoral college margin was extremely narrow and thus overdetermined. Trump critics typically cite this fact to assign significance to oddities unique to the 2016 electionJames Comey, Russian interference, the press obsession with Hillary Clintons emails. But we can extend that very logic to the ambient conditions our roiling crisis of democracy created. A Supreme Court that should not have been under conservative control gutted the Voting Rights Act and left millions of disaffected people stuck in a health-care coverage gap. Gerrymandered swing states exploited right-wing control of the court to pass a variety of voter-suppression laws. Had the citizens of Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, and other American protectorates been granted political representation, it would have diluted the extraordinary overrepresentation rural whites enjoy in Congress, and, thus, Republican power to sabotage Obama.

The easiest path to authoritarian power after Trump wont be for Republicans to reprise corrupt alliances with foreign autocrats, but to use these same antidemocratic powersnow more deeply entrenchedto create conditions that mobilize the electorate against Democrats. And the way for Democrats to stop them is to take the antidemocratic powers away.

That cant be done without abolishing the filibusters supermajority requirement, but it also cant be done unless Democrats commit to passing a broader pro-democracy agenda once the filibuster is gone. They can grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, at least for starters, they can pass voting-rights and anticorruption reforms, similar to the ones that House Democrats included in H.R. 1. Perhaps most importantly, they can add seats to the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court.

Court reformers have recently appealed to Democrats to expand the judiciary as a matter of basic institutional maintenance. Because judgeships are lifetime appointments, the judiciary lags the elected branches in terms of representational fairness, and unless Congress grows their ranks, disproportionately white, male judges become swamped by growing caseloads making equal justice a demographic and logistical impossibility. These are perfectly valid bases for adding seats to federal courts, but Democrats shouldnt hide from the fact that expanding the courts is the only way to undo the corruption that allowed Republicans to seize control of them in the first place. Senate Republicans refused to confirm Obama nominees for the final two years of his presidency, and stole a Supreme Court vacancy outright. The president who filled all of those vacancies lost the popular vote and is only president by dint of crimes that allowed him to sneak through the backdoor of the electoral college. Republicans have been amazingly open about the fact that they embraced mass-scale corruption and depravity as a price to pay for stacking the courts for a generation. Apart from the fact that democracy cant exist without consent of the governed, Democrats should add seats to the courts to complete the morality play: The only fitting end is to prove to them it was all illusorythat they sold their souls for nothing. That would be poetic justice, but it would also serve as a reminder to future autocratic parties that illegitimate power grabs can and will be undone.

The fact that Trump has made fixing these interlocking injustices all the more urgent might even make the politics easier. Republicans will raise holy hell about any unilateral Democratic effort to make American democracy more democratic. But if Trump leaves office after one term, widely loathed and a historical failure, they will also be cross pressured by a desire to make a persuasive break from him. They will have an easier time convincing the public that Democrats have cooked up shady pretexts to grab power if Democrats pretend they arent motivated in part by diluting the power of Trump loyalists who should never have been seated in the first place. De-Trumpifying a regime that the country overwhelmingly regrets might actually be an easier proposition to sell than the abstract democratic principles that will be advanced in the process.

Only after taking steps like these will Bidens substantive agenda stand any chance of becoming and remaining law. If Democrats dont reclaim control of the Senate, Biden will be at the mercy of Republicans from day one, and they will leave the country smoldering as a political strategy. If Democrats win a governing trifecta, but dont abolish the filibuster, the story will be little different. If they abolish the filibuster but dont offer statehood to all citizens, centrist Democrats will water down Bidens agenda. If they pass an agenda of any kind, watered down or not, but dont fix the courts, his legislative and regulatory accomplishments will only survive until the Roberts Five strike them down. It took two short years after the abysmal failure of the George W. Bush administration for a Republican Party that should have been discredited for a generation to roar back to power, and it was only possible thanks to a campaign of lockstep resistance to Democratic efforts to fix the damaged country the Obama administration inherited. Preventing history from repeating itself, but with a more militantly antidemocratic Republican Party lying in wait, will require Democrats to do whatever it takes to give voters a reason to continue denying Republicans power. At the same time, our collective ability to fight climate change, coronavirus, economic and racial inequalityto do anything big, together, on a national scalewill grow in proportion to the steps Democrats take to flatten the playing field of our system of government. We should expect them to take every step they can.

View original post here:
Democracy or Autocracy? Democrats May Have the Final Say - Crooked

Much of the world is likely wondering, What is going on in America?

The other day, as I walked down 16th Street toward the newly christened Black Lives Matter Plaza next to the White House to check out the peaceful demonstrators, I had this strange dj vu feeling. Who can see the demonstrations in Americas streets without thinking about the late Sixties, when young people took to the streets to protest against the Vietnam War and social injustices, demanding civil rights.

But in 1968, I wasnt in Washington not even close. I was watching from afar, from the other side, behind the Iron Curtain in Budapest, where we were flooded with anti-American, negative propaganda written in Moscow. Still, we youths of Eastern Europe did not buy into the Marxist dream that was force fed to us and wasnt true. The agitprop department could not change our view of America as the country of inspiration and hope. We loved the hippies, and we felt sorry for Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy upon their assassinations, and for Americas Black community in general. But we also loved the countrys skyscrapers, Coca-Cola and Levi jeans. We loved America and we most certainly did not want America to fail.

Those epoch-changing events in the U.S. coincided with our own elevated hope for change in Budapest, Warsaw and across the Eastern bloc, for the chance to loosen the oppressive system, with a temporary pause in the harshness of the regime. The Prague Spring, as we called it, promised the embrace of human rights, more freedom for artistic expression and closeness to the West, where we felt we belonged. Sadly, our hopes were soon crushed when Soviet-Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia on Aug. 21, 1968. Yet we were inspired to keep resisting, to remain hopeful. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall finally opened us to freedom.

The Memorial Day death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and its horrible display of police brutality, on the heels of many other such deaths, sparked demonstrations across the world in solidarity with Americans, including Europe. These demonstrations also bring forth and highlight problems and issues in these other countries. Ironically, yet again, America is showing the way how democracies need to better themselves. Perhaps it is not obvious, but when young people in Europe are angry about the America they see today, it is very much driven by fear that America might slide back, that the America they love to admire is slipping away. When they worry about the U.S., they are scared for their own future.

Like my generation 50 years ago, todays European youths want America to succeed.

It is perhaps a twist of fate that the first American I ever met was a Black man musicianPaul Robeson. As a 12-year-old, my best friend was Billy Hanson, the son of a pastor from Minneapolis, whose brother fled to Sweden to avoid the draft. So, I had plenty of firsthand experience and was never nave about America being perfect. Like many others, I have always understood that it is a work in progress.

No, America is not perfect will never be. Even from our observation point behind the barbed wire in Eastern Europe, we suspected that the America of our imaginations and dreams never existed. We were well aware that at times the ugly face of America rears itself. But the American idea driving this great country is alive and well, attractive and inspiring as ever. Lets keep it that way. Like then, today where many see failure, we also can see strength. Americas immune system is kicking in.

Critics say, But its a different world. For sure, it is that, thanks to U.S. leadership in the past. But the present is always a different world from the past, and we should be driven by our belief that the future of our democracies will be different too. Allowing the U.S. and Europe to drift apart is not an option. That our common values of freedom and democracy create the conditions for a life worth living is not just a throw-away slogan.

In the 1960s, rock-and-roll music helped to provide the message of hope and shaped our worldview, on both sides of the Atlantic. In Eastern Europe, when we listened to our favorite bands on our transistor radios, by way of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, we could imagine ourselves in New York, Boston, San Francisco. We could pull on a pair of tattered Levi jeans and be one with the demonstrators in those cities. Where is that American soft power today? Where are the messengers of hope?

Do not be mistaken, most Europeans look for leadership, and inspiration, from America. This is important, because they know if American democracy goes down, European democracy will go down with it. That is why, in the end, Europeans are rooting for America.

Andras Simonyi is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and now lives in America. He is the author of the book, Rocking Toward a Free World: When the Stratocaster beat the Kalashnikov. Follow him on Twitter @AndrasSimonyi.

See the original post:
Here's why Europe, in the end, is rooting for US democracy | TheHill - The Hill