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At that time, the community was focused on the priests from the Community Centre, who usually accompanied food security programs and guided the indigenous people in the elaboration of their life plan (a route to recover their knowledge and community organization). It was precisely the appeal made by the priests that made the engineer respect the inhabitants, their collective rights and leave the hut.

The community started making claims against Rubn and other leaders.

They pointed me out. They told me that I sold the territory for money, that I received thirty million, fifteen million. That's false," the Captain says.

In Timb de Betania they think that the right to prior consultation was not respected because they did not dialogue with all the inhabitants of the three communities, Bogot Cachivera, Murutinga and Timb themselves. Apparently, there was a meeting with some indigenous people where they signed an agreement.

Jos Ernesto Uribe Surez, who was a captain between 2005 and 2014, says that he learned that the miners held a meeting in Murutinga and an engineer came to the area to take coordinates, but at the time he did not know what these people were working on.

"They came with an engineer, as they negotiated. They had a big meeting and I think that's where they signed the document. According to people, most of them signed the document, which means that they are going to mine, so after five years, or six, this problem started to appear (...). From then on, a year later, they returned by force, they came with a big project, which was already done, already signed," says the former captain, calling for clarification of what happened.

The indigenous people are talking about their fears again. They fear that the arrival of the mining company will contaminate their rivers and, in a worst case scenario, force them out of their homes.

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Defenders of the Colombian Amazon scared hills: the mining concession - Open Democracy

We applaud Ronald J. Daniels Washington Post op-ed (December 31, 2019) on the shortcomings of American tertiary education. As professionals with a deep commitment to educating next-generation citizens and leaders, we concur with his critique of American education and join his call to universities to enable young people to participate in the daily business of our democracy and redress our educational systems longstanding failures.

President Daniels op-ed has special meaning in the context of our missions. We work closely with young people to fill in critical gaps between classroom learning and the skills and knowledge they will need to serve as independent agents in the real world, and not pawns of a (broken) business system. For indeed, American tertiary education has become Big Business. American universities were the original source of technology for defense at the outset of the Cold War. Following its end, they morphed into a vital source of capital formation. American tertiary education is the centerpiece of what former President Eisenhower famously called the military industrial complexas historican Margaret OMara painstakingly documented in her 2005 book, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley.

Alas, the financial model by and through which higher education functions today contributes directly to the breakdown of democracy. Finance is the elephant in the ivory tower. The search for yield is undermining the process by which education forms good citizens.

Quite literally the search for yield is outstripping social good. Massive defunding of higher education beginning in the early 1980s has pushed universities into raising tuition to levels unaffordable to middle class Americans. Universities have redirected their investment priorities away from educating people towards hard assets (real estate) and facilities development to justify the higher tuition levels.

Civic participation, like the American dream itself, has devolved to a question of finance, and of money. Universities today are unwitting vectors of the problem. With each new graduating class, the democratic freedoms of America are becoming increasely fragilized. Some universities have responded with an overt production line mentality. Those universities of longstanding reputation are able to preserve educational quality and cultivate individual talent in line with the authentic mission of education thanks to large endowments, and the daily efforts of dedicated career educators and administrators.

But a lot of young Americans who must take on the massive investment in education without the means to pay for it are being forced into insurmountable debt that depletes their economic choices. The causal connection to the student loan crisisover $1.5 Trillion in loans with a runrate default incidence above 10%is there for all to see.

And tragically, but ironically, finance and money basics are not even part of our educational curriculum. Even in universities where finance is taught to undergraduates or graduates, the theory is so alienated from financial practice that the markets for repackaging consumer loans, lstudent debt and mortgages, are not part of the mainstream finance curriculum.

To address the crisis of American democracy so boldly raised by President Daniels, we propose two modest ways forward.

First, young people need access to universities that offer a genuine alternative: a debt-free operating model without sacrifice to educational quality. The Global Center for Advanced Studies and GCAS College Dublin founded by Creston Davis is such a model. It was specifically designed to build global citizens on the economic, social and pedagogical levels. Its financial model is an embodiment of the idea that the true value of education is what people pay for: knowledge and enablement, not hard assets. In the coming years, GCAS business model will add value to university administrators seeking alternative ideas and solutions.

Second, administrators at American universities that offer MBA programs may wish to take a long, hard look at their finance curriculums. Did they guide your universitys investment managers when the ARS (auction rate securities) market froze in 2008? Are they currently responsive to the policy concerns of your candidates who aspire to become model citizens and thought leaders of tomorrow? As the yield curve flattens further and student debt levels rise above 12%, are you attracting and rewarding scholars who want to address 21st Century financial system challenges, who can inspire your students by bringing thought leadership into classroom?

Creston Davis, PhD is the founder and chancellor of The Global Center for Advanced Studies and GCAS College Dublin.

Ann Rutledge is the CEO of CreditSpectrum and Adjunct Associate Professor at SIPA, Columbia University

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Education and the Breakdown of Democracy - CounterPunch

Torcello is an associate professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Plato, one of the earliest thinkers and writers about democracy, predicted that letting people govern themselves would eventually lead the masses to support the rule of tyrants.

When I tell my college-level philosophy students that in about 380 B.C. he asked "does not tyranny spring from democracy," they're sometimes surprised, thinking it's a shocking connection.

But looking at the modern political world, it seems much less far-fetched to me now. In democratic nations like Turkey, Great Britain, Hungary, Brazil and the United States, anti-elite demagogues are riding a wave of populism fueled by nationalist pride. It is a sign that liberal constraints on democracy are weakening.

To philosophers, the term "liberalism" means something different than it does in partisan U.S. politics. Liberalism as a philosophy prioritizes the protection of individual rights, including freedom of thought, religion and lifestyle, against mass opinion and abuses of government power.

In classical Athens, the birthplace of democracy, the democratic assembly was an arena filled with rhetoric unconstrained by any commitment to facts or truth. So far, so familiar.

Aristotle and his students had not yet formalized the basic concepts and principles of logic, so those who sought influence learned from sophists, teachers of rhetoric who focused on controlling the audience's emotions rather than influencing their logical thinking.

There lay the trap: Power belonged to anyone who could harness the collective will of the citizens directly by appealing to their emotions rather than using evidence and facts to change their minds.

In his "History of the Peloponnesian War," the Greek historian Thucydides provides an example of how the Athenian statesman Pericles, who was elected democratically and not considered a tyrant, was nonetheless able to manipulate the Athenian citizenry:

"Whenever he sensed that arrogance was making them more confident than the situation merited, he would say something to strike fear into their hearts; and when on the other hand he saw them fearful without good reason, he restored their confidence again. So it came about that what was in name a democracy was in practice government by the foremost man."

Misleading speech is the essential element of despots, because despots need the support of the people. Demagogues' manipulation of the Athenian people left a legacy of instability, bloodshed and genocidal warfare, described in Thucydides' history.

That record is why Socrates before being sentenced to death by democratic vote chastised the Athenian democracy for its elevation of popular opinion at the expense of truth. Greece's bloody history is also why Plato associated democracy with tyranny in Book VIII of "The Republic." It was a democracy without constraint against the worst impulses of the majority.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Click here to read the original article.

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Why tyranny could be the inevitable outcome of democracy - The Fulcrum

It does not need a committee to determine the reasons for Labours election defeat: a divided party, an unpopular leader too sympathetic to leftwing autocrats, dithering over Brexit, failure to deal with the charge of antisemitism, an ill-thought-out manifesto. The list goes on (Defeated MPs call for unflinching Labour review, News).

The need is for action and I fear diagnosis will be a comforting substitute for doing something. Doing something will be up to the next leader. He or she must be personable, intelligent, articulate, diligent, pragmatic and a master of detail. Their primary job will be to oppose a populist government. Labour needs to develop plans to deal with the perennial problems: housing, transport, the NHS, care for the old, drugs. Then there are more recent and more intractable problems: climate crisis, automation, globalisation, fake news and internet intrusion.

The choice of leader will determine the future of Labour and, indeed, whether it has a future. It is not just Labour that is at risk but democracy. The members of the party must get this right.Philip SymmonsGillingham, Dorset

After much thought, I have decided to join the Labour party so that I can cast a vote in the election of a new leader. I read that Barbara Ellen is considering doing the same (Should I rejoin Labour to vote for a new leader? Tricky..., Comment). Dont hesitate, Barbara.

Indeed, why doesnt the Observer, which has printed much excellent commentary on the lamentable state of the party under Jeremy Corbyn, mount a campaign to encourage all who believe in the need for a moderate leader to do likewise? The party needs an influx of new members to help bring this about.Claire CoxheadBasildon, Essex

Michael Savages piece on the four ex-Tories who paid the electoral price for opposing Brexit only goes part of the way, (Out but not down: Tory anti-Brexiters tell where the next battle will be fought, News). The MPs from both major parties who took a stand on principle should all be recognised. Their enforced exit from the Commons is a sharp commentary on the state of British politics and the inadequacy of its electoral system. Whether or not one agrees with their politics, there needs to be some way of keeping these brave MPs in politics.

At a time when intellectual rigour is in desperately short supply across the political spectrum, they represented an important corner of political depth and bravery. They must not be lost to politics.Michael MeadowcroftLeeds

What is the matter with our nation over prisoners and their treatment? (Prisons chaos fuels massive legal bill as violence surges, News.) Throughout the lives of one unheeding government after another, the consensus of those steeped in experience and knowledge has been disregarded to our grave cost. Too often, the focus has been on reinforcing the long-disproved premise that prison works, rather than reserving that costly last resort for those relatively few offenders where public safety demands it. On 20 July 1910, then home secretary Winston Churchill clearsightedly spoke of the need for a constant heart-searching and an eagerness to rehabilitate representing the mark and measure... and virtue of a nation.

Practitioners confronting these realities daily have long recognised that early, measured and skilled non-custodial interventions are the more effective strategy rather than over-reliance on an incarceration likely to result in a more deeply ingrained criminality on release. The longer we fail to act on this truism the greater the societal and economic damage.Malcolm FowlerSolicitor and higher court advocate (retired)Kings Heath, Birmingham

Among the social chaos that once was public services the most scandalous is the neglect of children. Sonia Sodha rightly draws attention to the governments disgraceful complicity in outsourcing its responsibility for the care of vulnerable youngsters to privatised childrens homes (How did childrens homes become centres of profit-making and abuse?, Comment).

At one time, local authorities, under democratic control, provided and ran childrens care homes. There is no justification for, or such a thing as, modest profit-making out of vulnerable people, be it children in care, the elderly or prisoners. The responsibility for caring and providing for the vulnerable is a moral imperative that lies with all of us in the form of the state. Commerce and markets are not interested in care, which involves the exercise of values, kindness integrity, justice, safeguarding and the professional capabilities and development of staff. Commerce is only interested in the minimum at the greatest profit.Dr Robin C RichmondBromyard, Herefordshire

With reference to flight-shame, Rowan Moore writes: One persons return flight from London to Edinburgh generates more carbon emissions than an average Somalian or Ugandan produces in a whole year (The airport as a flight of fantasy, The New Review).

Targeting passengers misses the point. The factors determining the carbon footprint of a flight include the weight of the aircraft, fuel, contents of the hold and the passengers. To achieve a significant reduction in carbon emissions, we need fewer flights rather than fewer people on each flight. Clive CoenProfessor of neuroscience, Faculty of Life Sciences & MedicineKings College London

Does the moral case for veganism consider the wellbeing of the smallest, most crucial, life forms in our food production systems? (The man who could make history in a crucial case for ethical vegans, News)

The synergy between livestock and crop production farming fosters biologically rich, fertile soils through grazing and application of farmyard manure and reduces the need for agrichemicals on croplands.

Globally, soils have been depleted of organic matter, biological life and carbon stores by intensive, agrichemical-dependent agriculture. Much plant-based food is produced this way: grains, pulses, plant oils, nuts, fruit and vegetables. Many of the key vegan sources of protein, fats and oils are unsuitable for UK production and imports significantly increased in Veganuary last year. By choosing food produced close to home to high environmental and ethical standards, and high animal welfare standards, we can make a difference. Healthy soils that store carbon and support biodiversity are vital. Specific dietary exclusions may not be the answer.Rosalind EdwardsFreshford, Bath

Although I can just about forgive Euan Ferguson (Television, The New Review) because at least he mentions Spiral (the most consistently brilliant cop series ever), he is nevertheless at least two fine series short of a full review. Where on earth is Pose (bold, beautiful, brilliant) and Giri/Haji (the most stunningly different cop drama to grace the small screen)?Bryan RatcliffWorcester

Original post:
Letters: democracy is at risk, as well as Labour - The Guardian

Finally, 2020 and a few days respite from the seemingly endless onslaught of year-end emails from political parties and Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart.

Even though I have never made a political contribution, my inbox was stuffed over the holidays with urgent pleas to donate and qualify for a 2019 tax deduction.

It wasnt quite 11th hour when the last one arrived. Almost certainly delivered via party bot, it arrived at 8:02 p.m. on Dec. 31 from Team Stewart. Twelve hours earlier, Id been told that with only 16 hours left to reach a goal of $6,500, the campaign has raised $3,900 from close to 120 small donors. Each of them gave between $5 and $100, can you?

On Christmas Eve, I got two requests from Team Stewart. The final one was sent at 11:52 p.m. when most normal people were asleep or spending time with loved ones.

Nothing arrived on Christmas Day. For this year at least, political operatives and their bots took the day off.

Its no surprise that federal parties were trying to winkle out every last donation before the clock started ticking on a new year filled with the promise of more donations and tax credits.

With a minority government in Ottawa and no guarantee of how long this Parliament will last, theyre all scrambling to pay off election debts and restock their war chests.

More curious is Stewarts aggressive fundraising that began almost the moment he announced in November that he would be seeking re-election. But that election isnt until Oct. 15, 2022.

The rules set by the B.C. government for municipal elections limit donations to $1,200 per year for independent candidates like Stewart or $1,200 to either a single candidate running with a political party or the party itself.

But there are no limits on how much money municipal candidates can raise, only on how much can be spent in election year and during the 28-day campaign period.

Spending limits are unique to each municipality based on population and the positions for which the candidates are running. In 2018, the limit for Vancouver mayoralty candidates was $210,175 and $107,793 for council candidates.

But Stewart raised $320,228, according to his amended disclosure statement.

Kennedy also had the benefit of four campaign volunteers employees of unions seconded to the campaign who continued to receive their salaries. That prompted the citys Independent Election Task Force to recommend in its June 2019 report that those salaries be reported as candidates spending.

Because the B.C. legislation doesnt have contribution limits, the task forces recommendations focus on spending.

Among its four priority recommendations is extending the 28-day campaign period and having it start immediately after Labour Day in order to reduce the influence of unlimited spending in the pre-campaign period.

Its not just the holiday bots and begging that I have a problem with. I resent that the tax credits for federal and provincial political donations are more attractive than for other charitable donations. Donations to municipal candidates or parties are not eligible for tax credits, despite the Union of B.C. Municipalities efforts to them included.

Donate $1,275 to federal or provincial political parties and the tax credit is $650. Donate to a charity and the maximum tax credit amounts to less than a third of the value. So, if some Scrooges only make donations to write down their income, the choice is unequivocal. Political donations are the big winners.

Most charitable organizations also dont have anywhere near the money to do the sophisticated outreach that larger political organizations do. Even if they did, many donors carefully scrutinize what percentage charities spend on administration and fundraising. Most want their money spent on the cause theyre passionate about, not spent on raising more money.

I understand that democracy comes at a price and that running election campaigns cost money. But how much is too much to spend on getting elected or on getting your favourites elected? And does it affect voter turnout?

Municipal spending limits that came into effect in 2018 drastically reduced the amount parties spent in Vancouver. But voter turnout remained above its historic average.

In the 2019 general election, the Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats and Greens could have spent just over $29.06 million, while the Peoples Party of Canada could have spent $27.6 million. Of course, to spend it, they had to raise it.

Those amounts are a drop in the bucket compared to the United States where Bernie Saunders recently bragged that if he becomes Democrats presidential candidate he could raise $1 billion, while Michael Bloombergs self-financed campaign spent more than $155 million on advertising in 2019 and Bloomberg didnt even enter the Democratic race until mid-November.

Still, as the Vancouver task force pointed out, Canadas campaign financing rules arent perfect. Despite recent changes to municipal, provincial and federal laws, more could be done to ensure that money isnt a barrier to candidacy and wealthy contributors dont exert disproportionate influence.

Of course, I would also like someone to sneak in an amendment banning party bots during the holiday celebrations.

Not that it will happen because I suspect it must be at least as lucrative as it is annoying.

dbramham@postmedia.com

Twitter: @bramham_daphne

View original post here:
Daphne Bramham: Party bots and holiday begging are an annoying cost of democracy - Vancouver Sun