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The hallmark of a healthy democracy is civil debate, protest, civic engagement, and an unwavering right to voice ones beliefs even when there is disagreement especially when there is disagreement. Free speech and assembly are fundamental to a functioning democracy. Their placement in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution implies their importance. It comes as a surprise then to see that the Missouri House is poised to pass a bill that would silence the voices of those rising in defense of Black lives by enacting criminal penalties on the right to protest.

Not only that, but it is particularly targeted at protests that we led in St. Louis this past summer as leaders of the protest group #ExpectUS.

We serve in the General Assembly and the United States House of Representatives. Yet, we have been called terrorists, thugs, and monsters for affirming what should be clear: Black lives matter. Theyve always mattered, but time and time again, generation after generation, Black folks have had to take to acts of protest to affirm our humanity and civil rights. Like our ancestors before us, we are both products of mass protests, taking to the streets demanding that our communities be heard and our lives protected. Our protest has always been an act of love.

We have organized together in a protest group that begins each protest with a giant circle of love, people dancing and clapping. A protest group that cares for one another and brings snacks and water for one another. One that is rooted in the Ferguson Uprising and one that continues to grow. In our ranks are public officials, clergy, local leaders, business owners, students, parents, and people of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds. Our protest is an act of love, but it is also a demand that elected leaders do more to ensure we no longer need to take to the streets. To absolve us of the fear that our loved ones will leave home and will not make it safely back. Both of us ran for office because the policies coming out of Jefferson City and Washington, D.C., not only fell short but failed to center the reality on the ground faced by so many people in our community so many people who look like us and share our pain.

SB 26 is a continuation of policies that fail to protect Black and brown communities. It must not pass the Missouri House of Representatives or be signed into law by Gov. Mike Parson. Rather than take up this bill, lawmakers should play a critical role in supporting and encouraging robust speech and protest. Ultimately, what gets lost in the consideration of this anti-democratic, anti-protest legislation is why we protest in the first place.

We protest because the St. Louis Police Department leads the nation in police killings per capita, disproportionately killing Black people. Year after year after year. Weve seen none of our demands met by our government.

We protest because Black lives are not safe in Missouri. They werent safe in 2014 when an officer in Ferguson murdered Mike Brown, Jr. They werent safe in 2015 in Mississippi County when Tory Sanders got lost, ran out of gas, and was effectively tortured to death in a jail cell hours later. They werent safe in 2018 when Black people were 91 percent more likely to be pulled over by the police across the state a number that has increased over the years. They werent safe in 2020 when police killed Donnie Sanders in Kansas City. They have never been safe under the violence of starvation wages that we disproportionately receive wages that must be increased to at least $15.

Some proponents of this legislation have said that it would keep protesters and the general public safe. But silencing dissent cements the status quo. And for Black people in Missouri, there is nothing more dangerous to our livelihoods than the status quo. If public safety is truly at the heart of this legislation, then the Missouri State Legislature must waste no time addressing the series of initiatives protesters and activists have proposed to remedy the cycles of violence that are so rampant in our state and in our communities.

We invite members of the state legislature to engage with us and our communities in a good faith effort to build a better Missouri. We appeal to the fundamental constitutional values of free speech and free assembly as we implore our leaders and Missourians everywhere to reject SB 26 and, instead, focus on building a more robust and inclusive democracy that meets the needs of Black Missourians who are ready and eager for a chance to build strong communities and enact policies that will truly keep our families safe. The right to assemble is the bedrock of any healthy democracy, and it must be protected at all costs, not rolled back.

Rep. Rasheen Aldridge represents HD 78 in the Missouri House; Congresswoman Cori Bush serves Missouris 1st congressional district.

Read this article:
Opinion: The right to assemble is the bedrock of our democracy Vote NO on SB 26 - The Missouri Times

Different groups unite

Belew divided the people who forced their way into the Capitol on January 6 into three broad groups:

First, there were what she called the garden variety President Trump faithful the MAGA stop the steal ralliers. A lot of those people, she said, were there simply to demonstrate their support for Donald Trump to exercise their right of assembly and free speech and to peaceably demonstrate.

Second, there were the far-right conspiracy theorists who follow the QAnon movement. These people have been recently radicalized, said Belew, most of them being only one or two years into radical activity. QAnon, as a whole, represents a somewhat new phenomenon in many ways.

The third strand of this crowd, she said, is one that poses a substantial threat to democratic institutions and to the nation as a whole, and that is the organized white power movement, which comprises several different groups. We know that many of these groups preplanned their attack. We also know that they made a deliberate plan to work together. There was communication about setting aside group differences and banding together to deliberately attack the workings of democracy.

Belew stressed that the behavior witnessed on January 6 is not new. Its part of a movement thats been in our public life since the late 1970s. It's a movement that is well organized, includes people in every region of the country, and in all ways but race is quite diverse and opportunistic, willing to incorporate a broad array of people and beliefs, bringing them together through this shared sense of emergency.

Its also a movement that has already carried out mass casualty attacks, most notably the 1995 attack on a federal building in Oklahama City that killed 168 people, including nineteen children. The attack was perpetrated by extremists Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, but Belew said its wrong to attribute the atrocity to a few bad apples or lone wolves. The attack was the culmination of decades of organizing. The movement that carried it out, the white power movement, brought together a bunch of different currents of activity. It united Klansmen, neo Nazis, radical tax resistors, and later on skinheads and parts of the militia movement. Worryingly, said Belew, this kind of collaboration within the white power movement could also be seen on January 6.

The next event in the Conversations on Democracy series will be on April 13, when US Senator Susan Collins (R) will talk about The State of Our Democracy and Political System.

Continue reading here:
Conversations on Democracy: White Power and the Capitol Riots - Bowdoin News

Some EU member states have bolstered their existing authoritarian tendencies, as leaders strengthened their grip on power under the cover of Covid-19 curbs, according to the EU-focused human rights watchdog organisation, Civil Liberties Union for Europe.

Their report this month singles out Hungary, Poland and Slovenia as the member states most prone to take advantage of Covid-19 responses in order to thwart democracy and weaken the rule of law.

If Hungary's government used the country's Covid-19 regulations to cloak abuses, hinder oversight and access to vaccine documentation for medical professionals, Poland limited freedom of information and assembly to impact protests against the controversial abortion law.

Following the report, the European Commission's top rule-of-law official, Vera Jourova, came out in a parliamentary debate to warn against sliding media freedoms, in addition to other democratic principles.

Most recently, Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orban took an opposition radio station off air. In Poland the government decided a new media tax that threatens the industry's independence.

And Slovenia's prime minister is waging an online and offline battle against critical journalists in his country, accusing them of lying and spreading fake news.

The report, co-sponsored by 14 human rights groups, warns that media freedoms are at risk, and limitations to public information present, even in developed democracies such as France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

The report mentions the limited access of Spanish media during early government safety briefings in March 2020, but also how activists and artists in Spain have been prosecuted for publishing satirical cartoons, burning a flag or making a provocative use of religious symbols during a protest.

Pressure on media companies has also been observed in Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, Slovenia and Croatia.

The accelerated law-making process enabled by Covid-19 restrictions also makes it difficult for citizens to take part in democratic public debate.

Such speeding-up, which lacks transparency and does not allow for consultations with the public or NGOs, has also occurred in well-established democracies such as Ireland, Germany and Sweden, the report says.

Fast-tracking bills through parliament, together with limits on free speech, judicial transparency, limits to media reporting, disproportionate restrictions on the right to protest happened in established democracies too.

Yet it is the youngest of democracies, the ex-communist states in central and eastern Europe that are at peril.

The report highlights that in addition to the governments with authoritarian tendencies in Budapest and Warsaw which are systematically weakening the judiciary and civil society, Bulgaria and Romania, with long standing issues regarding rule of law and independence of the judicial system, have been shaken further.

New rules on court fees in Bulgaria and poor legal aid systems in Romania make it difficult to access justice and get a fair trial.

Even though some EU member states have used the pandemic as a pretext to erode democratic standards, the process is not irreversible.

"There's a thin line between protecting our democracies and protecting public health. Both national and EU institutions need to make sure that all member states respect the law and that our democracies come out stronger not weaker after the Covid-19 pandemic ends", Radu Mihail, member of Romanian Senate's Foreign Affairs Committee, told EUobserver.

Civil Liberties Union for Europe recommends that continuing reforms as well as digitalising judicial proceedings are solutions to improve the situation in countries where judicial systems have long been subjected to pressure.

The report concludes that the EU needs to play a crucial role in protecting the rule of law and democracy in all member states. The EU needs to make sure that clear recommendations are made to each member state and that those breaking the rule of law are sanctioned.

Read more here:
Covid-19: Democracy and rule of law under pressure in EU - EUobserver

Jeanine ez, the former interim Bolivian president, was arrested by President Luis Arces administration on March 13. ez governed for a year, during which she presided over massacres of protestors and a crackdown on journalists. When election season came, she also postponed elections and purged voter rolls. However, this has hardly been mentioned in mainstream U.S. coverage of the arrest. Instead of focusing on the controversial actions of ez, mainstream media outlets have focused on the optics of her ousting.

The roots of this favorable narrative lie in ezs ascent to power. In October 2019, her predecessor Evo Morales a leftist who sought a fourth term as president was accused of electoral fraud by the opposition after winning re-election by a narrow margin. These accusations were lent undeserved credibility by the US-funded Organization of American States (OAS), which claimed irregularities in the election. The OAS was founded as a multilateral regional body designed to lead decisions and policy analysis in western hemisphere affairs, and now focuses on election monitoring. The OASs analysis was challenged by the Center for Economic and Policy Research for its misunderstanding of the Bolivian vote-counting system and its failure to account for the impact of votes from rural, predominantly left-leaning areas. However, by the time these criticisms came to light, the damage had already been done.

Protests against Morales erupted and quickly turned violent, prompting the Bolivian military to call for Morales resignation. Morales and his allies labeled this as a coup, but the U.S. media was more hesitant. Morales subsequently fled the country and many politicians in his party resigned in protest, unintentionally clearing the path to the presidency for ez, a conservative evangelical senator who was fifth in line for succession.

By this point, a democratically elected president had been forcibly replaced with an unelected opposition leader based on unproven voter fraud allegations. However, this was heralded by American pundits as one of the few big victories democracy has won in recent years, while Morales was said to have an insatiable appetite for power. When similar events occurred in the United States on Jan. 6, these same columnists unambiguously labeled it a coup and denounced Donald Trump (who had also supported Morales ouster) as a grave threat to U.S. democracy since it was his supporters that stormed the Capitol.

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The blatant hypocrisy of these publications, many of which never admitted wrongdoing, casts the coverage of ezs arrest in a new light. The Bolivian people chose a government and leader who are attempting to hold accountable a tyrant whose numerous crimes were well-documented. However, the media focus is placed on the OAS and the right-wing protesters as it was during Bolivias 2019 election. To this end, ezs abuses of power have been downplayed, with no mention of her own attempt to arrest her predecessor mentioned in either The New York Times or The Washington Post articles on the subject. Instead, these articles restate the debunked allegations of voter fraud from 2019 and frame ezs arrest as a betrayal of Bolivian democracy.

Americas corporate media has a long history of supporting the United States as it interferes with Latin American governance. There is a clear pattern of the press failing to hold the United States accountable as it sabotages its southern neighbors. This can be seen from blaming the late Chilean president Salvador Allende for a US-backed coup to celebrating the ouster of the Venezuelan president in a US-enabled coup to calling for US intervention in South American countries with democratically elected presidents.

Now, as evidence surfaces that the United States funded right-wing groups in Bolivia and has given asylum to the Bolivian minister of justice who accused Morales of terrorism, it becomes clear that there is a similar dynamic at work here. The 2019 ouster of Morales, whose politics were decidedly anti-American, was justified in U.S. coverage. On the other hand, mainstream outlets portray ez as a pro-American whose arrest is a threat to Bolivias stability.

Given the presss past inaccuracies in covering Bolivia and South America in general, their alarmist descriptions of these new developments should be treated with skepticism by the American public. Prosecuting ez is comparable to Trumps impeachment trial, and until the evidence against her is presented in court, any judgments made will be premature. It is a double standard for the media to depict ezs capture as a destabilizing act of partisan tyranny as they applaud the arrests of Jan. 6 rioters. Our media cannot demand accountability in the United States only to insist that the same thing in other countries is a harmful development. Condemning injustice at home is meaningless unless we condemn it abroad as well.

Opinions expressed on the editorial pages are not necessarily those of WSN, and our publication of opinions is not an endorsement of them.

Email Max Tiefer at [emailprotected]

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America's press should not be the arbiter of Bolivian democracy - NYU Washington Square News

Employees who are allowed to have a say at work are more likely to participate in the democratic process outside the office. But new trends in the labour market are a threat to democracy, warns a Swiss expert.

As an economist, Im interested in how the Swiss economy ticks, from the founding of innovative startups to the interest rate decisions of the National Bank. Before coming to swissinfo.ch, I worked as an economics journalist for the Der Bund and Finanz und Wirtschaft newspapers.

More about the author| German Department

In 1970, British political scientist Carole Pateman was the first to mention a link between participation at work and democratic participation. She argued that giving employees a say at work can generate positive feelings. These motivates employees to participate more in democratic processes in other ways. Later research found that people who experience democracy at work learn additional skills which can in turn be used outside the office. And these lead to greater participation.

A number of studies, especially in the US, have confirmed the connection between participation in the workplace and democratic participation. For example, research teams have found a positive correlation between union representation and voting participation.

I think democracy in companies is a prerequisite for democracy to be alive at the state level," philosophy professor Rahel Jaeggi told SWI swissinfo.ch.

For democracies to thrive they require more than just citizens turning out regularly at the ballot box. They also depend on people participating in public tasks on a voluntary or part-time basis. For example, in Switzerland, democratic participation can take many other forms: from joining demonstrations and collecting signatures to hanging flags and banners outside homes.

But democracy has to be learned, according to Joachim Blatter, professor of political theory at the University of Lucerne.

You have to learn to be active and to get involved. At the same time, you have to realise that the system requires perseverance and that it's not enough to just shout out loud, he said.

But how does this democratic tradition link to the workplace?

Socio-economic issues and interest groups such as trade unions have been central to the formation of political parties especially centre-left Social Democratic parties - and the associated democratic participation and mobilisation in many countries, says Blatter.

The situation is different in Switzerland where there has never been a particularly strong trade union movement. Can we conclude that the Swiss workplace has been less important as a training ground for democratic processes than in other countries?

Yes, I would say so, says Blatter. But the big differences between countries have blurred over the past 10-15 years.

In 2017, three economists from the US and Australia published a comprehensive study on having a voice in the workplace and its impact on democratic participation. They analysed data from the 2010/2011 European Social Survey of over 14,000 employees from 27 European countries - including Switzerland. Nine indicators describe the extent of political participation - for example, whether someone voted in the last national election, took part in a demonstration or signed a petition. Four indicators define how much say the respondent has at work - for example, whether they are allowed to determine their own place of work and working hours.

The researchers found that having more say at work increased the likelihood that a person would participate more in democratic processes outside the office. They also found that this relationship was similar across all countries studied.

Despite this connection between work and politics, Blatter says he has observed several worrying changes in the labour market.

In the past, it was possible to have a career and still be active in politics or be a member of an association. Today, international competition is much stiffer, he says.

If you want to get ahead professionally, you have to put in the hours at work and you hardly have time left for politics, said Blatter.

As a result, he said, people tend to be more individualistic and focus on themselves and lose sight of common goals - either within a firm or outside the office. His other concern is that people seem to leave jobs if they are unhappy much more readily rather than using their voice to resolve issues.

Dynamism helps to move people; stability helps to find compromises and a functioning democracy needs both, he said.

But Blatter also notes positive developments at work.

Many companies have moved away from paying bonuses based on individual goals, he said. This allows employees to develop a stronger sense of community, something central to democracy.

Representing your own interests is not enough. You also have to be able to think of others and thus win over majorities, he said.

The Lucerne professor also believes it is positive that workplaces have become less hierarchical and fewer employees are required to blindly follow orders.

Today, most people have to decide much more independently how to do their jobs and achieve their goals. In that respect, the working world has become more stimulating for the masses.

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Share your opinions at the workplace - for the sake of democracy - swissinfo.ch