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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has ordered his department to redefine its mission and issue a new statement of purpose to the world. The draft statements under review right now are similar to the old mission statement, except for one thing any mention of promoting democracyis being eliminated.

According to an internal email that went out Friday, which I obtained, the State Departments Executive Steering Committee convened a meeting of leaders to draft new statements on the departments purpose, mission and ambition, as part of the overall reorganization of the State Department and USAID. (The draft statements were being circulated for comment Friday and could change before being finalized.)

Compare that to the State Department Mission Statement that is currently on the books, as laid out in the departments fiscal year 2016 financial report:

The Departments mission is to shape and sustain a peaceful, prosperous, just, and democratic world and foster conditions for stability and progress for the benefit of the American people and people everywhere. This mission is shared with the USAID, ensuring we have a common path forward in partnership as we invest in the shared security and prosperity that will ultimately better prepare us for the challenges of tomorrow.

Former senior State Department officials from both parties told me that eliminating just and democraticfrom the State Departments list of desired outcomes is neither accidental nor inconsequential.

The only significant difference is the deletion of justice and democracy, said Elliott Abrams, who served as deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy during the George W. Bush administration. We used to want a just and democratic word, and now apparently we dont.

The mission statement is important because it sends a signal about American priorities and intentions to foreign governments and people around the world, said Abrams, who was considered by Tillerson for the job of deputy secretary of state but rejected by President Trump.

That change is a serious mistake that ought to be corrected, he said. If not, the message being sent will be a great comfort to every dictator in the world.

Tom Malinowski, who served as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor for the Obama administration, said the new proposed mission statement brings U.S. foreign policy into closer alignment with that of some of Americas chief adversaries, including Russia.

Its a worldview similar to that of Putin, who also thinks that great powers should focus exclusively on self protection and enrichment, rather than promoting democracy, he said. By removing all reference to universal values and the common good it removes any reason for people outside the United States to support our foreign-policy. That said, I appreciate the honesty with which Tillerson projects his cynicism.

Malinowski also predicted that the change, if it becomes permanent, would sow confusion throughout the ranks of the State Departments civil and foreign service because hundreds of State Department officials workon congressionally funded programs every day that are meant to promote democracy and justice abroad.

Adding to the confusion, Trump occasionally trumpets democracy promotion, for example when it comes to Cuba or Venezuela. But in his inauguration speech, Trump made clear that democracy promotion would not be a feature of his foreign policy.

We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow, Trump said.

The changes in the State Department mission statement may not seem very significant viewed in isolation. But Tillerson has made several statements and decisions that indicate he plans to lower the priority of democracy and human rights in U.S. foreign policy.

In his first speech to his State Department employees, he said promoting American values creates obstacles to pursuing Americas national security interests. In March, he broke tradition by declining to appear personally to unveil the State Departments annual human rights report.

In another example, the State Department will soon eliminate thewww.humanrights.govwebsite and move its content to an alternative web address,www.state.gov/j/drl, a State Department official told me.

Its just so gratuitous. What efficiency is achieved or money is saved by taking something that is prominent on the Internet and hiding it? said Malinowski. The consequence is that its the 9,456th signal sent by the administration that they dont care about promoting American values.

The State Department declined to comment.

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State Department considers scrubbing democracy promotion from its mission - Washington Post

The demise of the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act is hardly the end of the story. Donald Trump will not let this loss stand.

Since its inception in 2010, Republicans have made the Affordable Care Act a symbol of Obama-Clinton overreach part of a supposed plot by liberal elites to expand government, burden the white working class, and transfer benefits to poor blacks and Latinos.

Ever the political opportunist, Trump poured his own poisonous salt into this conjured-up wound. Although he never really understood the Affordable Care Act, Trump used it to prey upon resentments of class, race, ethnicity and religiosity that propelled him into the White House.

Repealing Obamacare has remained one of Trumps central rallying cries to his increasingly angry base.

The question for every senator, Democrat or Republican, is whether they will side with Obamacares architects, which have been so destructive to our country, or with its forgotten victims, Trump said on July 24, adding that any senator who failed to vote against it is telling America that you are fine with the Obamacare nightmare.

Now, having lost that fight, Trump will try to subvert the Affordable Care Act by delaying subsidies so some insurers wont have time to participate, failing to enforce the individual mandate so funding wont be adequate, not informing those who are eligible about when to sign up and how to do so, and looking the other way when states dont comply.

But thats not all. Trump doesnt want his base to perceive him as a loser.

So be prepared for scorched-earth politics from the Oval Office, including more savage verbal attacks on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, more baseless charges of voter fraud in the 2016 election, more specific threats to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, and further escalation of the culture wars.

Most Americans wont be swayed by these pyrotechnics because theyve become inured to our unhinged president.

But thats not the point. The rantings are intended to shore up Trumps base the third of the country that continues to support him, those who still believe theyre victims of Obamacare and who are willing to believe that Trump himself is the victim of a liberal conspiracy to unseat him.

Trump wants his base to become increasingly angry and politically mobilized so that it will continue to exert an outsized influence on the Republican Party.

There is a deeper danger here. As Harvard political scientist Archon Fung has argued, stable democracies require that citizens be committed to the rule of law even if they fail to achieve their preferred policies.

Settling our differences through ballots and agreed-upon processes rather than through force is what separates democracy from authoritarianism.

But Trump has never been committed to the rule of law. For him, its all about winning. If he cant win through established democratic processes, hell mobilize his base to change them.

Trump is already demanding that Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans obliterate the filibuster, thereby allowing anything to be passed with a bare majority.

On Saturday, Trump tweeted that Republican Senate must get rid of 60 vote NOW! He added that the filibuster allows 8 Dems to control country, and, Republicans in the Senate will NEVER win if they dont go to a 51 vote majority NOW. They look like fools and are just wasting time.

Whats particularly worrisome about Trumps attack on the processes of our democracy is that the assault comes at a time when the percentage of Americans who regard the other party as a fundamental threat is growing.

In 2014, even before Trumps incendiary presidential campaign, 36 percent of Republicans saw the Democratic Party as a threat to the nations well-being and 27 percent of Democrats regarded Republicans the same way, according to the Pew Research Center.

Those percentages are undoubtedly higher today. If Trump has his way, theyll be higher still.

Anyone who regards the other party as a threat to the nations well-being is less apt to accept outcomes in which the other side is perceived to prevail whether its a decision not to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or a special counsels conclusion that Trump did in fact collude with Russians, or even the outcome of the next presidential election.

As a practical matter, when large numbers of citizens arent willing to accept such outcomes, were no longer part of the same democracy.

I fear this is where Trump intends to take his followers, along with as much of the Republican Party as he can: toward a rejection of political outcomes they regard as illegitimate and therefore a rejection of democracy as we know it.

That way, Trump will always win.

2017 By Robert Reich

Robert Reich, a former U.S. Secretary of Labor, is professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. He blogs daily at http://www.facebook.com/RBReich/. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.

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Trump's a big loser now expect new attacks on democracy - San Francisco Chronicle

Appointing family members to powerful jobs theyre not qualified to hold. Firing officials investigating scandals. Musing about prosecuting a defeated rival. Entangling his business empire with the presidency to such a degree that hell literally profit from his time in the White House.

The early months of the Trump presidency dont look like what you normally see in a democracy. But theyre everyday occurrences in corrupt, undemocratic countries like Azerbaijan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or even Vladimir Putins Russia. And academics who study such countries increasingly worry that President Donald Trump is governing like the leader of the kind of nation Washington has long condemned not like a president of the United States.

His refusal to fully divest himself from his business, the linkages between finances and the levers of power those are the classic symptoms of kleptocracy, Seva Gunitsky, a University of Toronto scholar who studies post-Soviet states, says. Its probably the greatest long-term threat maybe even short-term threat to American institutions.

To Gunitsky and other experts on authoritarian states, Trumps behavior is setting off a lot of alarm bells. Thats not just because of clear examples of petty wrongdoing, like having his daughter Ivanka sit in for him at the G20 summit of world leaders. Rather, its because the thinking behind such moves is far more fundamental to the early months of his administration than it would first appear.

The academics say that Trumps instincts like those of strongmen such as Mobutu Sese Seko and Putin is to see the state as a personal fiefdom and a vehicle for dispensing favors to family and political allies, rather than as something that needs to follow neutral rules. They point to his appointment of son-in-law Jared Kushner to a top-level White House post despite his lack of qualifications, reports of administration threats to punish CNN and the Washington Post financially for critical coverage, and the naked attempts by foreign diplomats to buy influence by staying at the Trump Hotel in Washington.

The issue raised by these scholars is not that the US under Trump is sliding toward true authoritarianism, where elections cease to be competitive, the media is muzzled, and opponents and journalists routinely disappear. Its vital to stress all the ways Trump isnt governing like an authoritarian: He hasnt done anything to formally outlaw dissent or acquire dictatorial powers for the executive branch. There is no Trump plan to stop Americans from replacing him, if they so choose, in the 2020 election.

Instead, these experts worry that Trump is normalizing a set of practices that are typically seen in authoritarian countries and, by doing so, threatening to slowly and steadily hollow out American democracy. His actions are not a series of individual stories of petty wrongdoing, but rather an overall pattern that threatens the rule of law itself.

Whats striking in the US is that he gets away with stuff that would have been considered completely inconceivable five years ago, Nicolas van de Walle, an expert on authoritarianism in Africa at Cornell University, says.

Americans dont understand the risks posed by Trumps elevation of family and crony capitalism because they do not have a model for it in modern US history. Only when one looks abroad to countries where corruption and plunder are the norm rather than the exception does the danger truly become clear.

Citizens of democratic countries tend to divide the political world into two big categories: democracies like the US or Canada and autocracies like Russia and Egypt. But there are lots of ways to run states where people dont choose their own leaders. Saudi Arabias theocratic monarchy is as different from Singapores secular one-party state as it is from the United States.

For this reason, many scholars have tried to sort authoritarian regimes into more specific categories. Van de Walle and his co-author, Michigan State Universitys Michael Bratton, have focused on what they call neopatrimonial regimes a type of government that flowered in Africa after the fall of colonialism. Neopatrimonialism, they argue, is defined by the centrality of corruption to ordinary politics.

The essence of neopatrimonialism is the award by public officials of personal favors, both within the state (notably public sector jobs) and in society (for instance, licenses, contracts, and projects), they write in an influential 1994 article. The chief executive maintains authority through personal patronage rather than through ideology or law.

Neopatrimonial leaders rise or fall based on their ability to plunder their own country, to staff the government with loyal operatives, and to literally buy off groups that might otherwise mount a challenge to their rule. The end goal of all of this is to allow the dictator and his favored few to live as well and securely as possible. Relatives are raised to top positions in government both so they can have secure jobs and because, in a system so thoroughly corrupt, the only people the leader feels like he can truly trust is his family members and close friends.

Van de Walle sees real similarities between the neopatrimonial African regimes he studies like Mobutu Sese Sekos 32-year reign in whats now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which he spent about $400 million worth of state money building a personal palace that served champagne on conveyor belts and Trumps lack of interest in keeping government affairs and personal interests separate.

Theres a [neopatrimonial] dimension to the current president, a kind of monarchical instinct, Van de Walle tells me in an interview.

Perhaps the most nakedly neopatrimonial regimes in the world today are clustered together in Eurasia. Many former Soviet republics were expected to transition to democracy after communisms fall in the 1990s but have, instead, been taken over by a coterie of strongmen who see the country they rule as a combination of a piggybank and playground.

Uzbekistans longtime dictator, Islam Karimov, was actually elected in 1991 but consolidated power and ran the Uzbek government as a fiefdom: his daughter Gulnara was reportedly able to extract $114 million in bribes from a single telecom company in exchange for granting them licenses to operate in the country.

When Karimov died in 2016, one of his cronies Shavkat Mirziyoyev took over the presidency. Mirziyoyev won a sham reelection vote in December with 88.6 percent of the vote.

Uzbekistan is by no means unique among post-Soviet states. Azerbaijan, an oil-producing country on the Caspian Sea, is another good example: Its current president, Ilham Aliyev, is the son of its last president, Heydar Aliyev. The Aliyevs run it very much like a family business.

Azerbaijan is the clearest template you get, Gunitsky says. You have this guy Aliyev as the president; his wife is the vice president. You cant get any more government-as-a-family-business than that.

Like these neopatrimonial leaders, Trump has long seen fit to elevate family members to top positions. During his time in Atlantic City in the 1980s, for example, Trump hired his then-wife, Ivana, to run the Trump Castle casino even though her business experience was largely limited to working as a model. He hired his brother Robert to develop the Trump Taj Mahal, then the largest casino in the world, despite Roberts complete lack of experience building casinos. It went bankrupt.

When a president applies the same approach to staffing political organizations, you get Ivanka Trump in the White House, Middle East envoy Jared Kushner, and top campaign adviser Donald Trump Jr. (all elevated to positions that exceed their experience or qualifications).

Presidents have elevated family members in the past: JFK famously appointed his brother Robert to be attorney general. But that move was controversial at the time, and the degree to which Trump relies on family members reminds American experts on Central Asia more of the countries they study than of their homeland.

We shouldnt overblow the comparison, says Alexander Cooley, a professor at Barnard College in New York. But I do think that the inclination Trump seems to show is to trust family members in matters in which they might not actually have expertise or advanced education.

Trump, of course, cant be as flamboyantly nepotistic as an actual dictator. The legal and political climate in the United States simply makes it impossible for Trump to loot the state coffers in the style of a Mobutu or replace Vice President Mike Pence with Vice President Melania Trump. He also isnt killing dissidents or shuttering opposition newspapers as these leaders do nor does he show the slightest interest in doing so.

The issue, instead, is the appearance of a particular type of mindset between Trump and these authoritarian leaders when it comes to the relationship between state and ruler. They both seem to have no problem with blurring the lines between personal and policy affairs, using the power and the prestige of their position for their own financial and political gain.

All of this gets back to not having walls of separation between the family business or businesses and their role in government, Cooley says. Its a mode of governing.

The consequences of this kind of politics can be quite severe.

Authoritarians cant rely solely on family members to maintain control, much as theyd like to; there just arent enough of them. So many of these leaders use their control over the state to manufacture loyalty disbursing funds in such a way to make it in the interests of as many powerful factions as possible to support the regime.

In modern Russia, Putin maintains his own power by privileging friendly oligarchs and security service officials, basically linking the interests of Russias elite with the survival of Putins government. The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi had a budget of $50 billion; more than half of that went to paying off various different Putin allies, according to Russia scholar Karen Dawisha.

This sort of corruption goes hand in hand with the more intimate kind: looting state coffers for your own benefit and that of your friends and family. Mobutus family used the countrys state-owned industries and central bank as personal checking accounts, taking $71 million from the national bank for personal use in 1977 alone. The famous Panama Papers revealed that Putin and his close associates have more than $2 billion squirreled away in offshore accounts, much of which was taken from state coffers in the form of impossibly low-interest loans from state-owned banks.

The United States is very far from that level of systemic corruption. But Trump shares the same basic way of thinking about the US governments relationship to his personal interests. He has no issue with the many ways in which his administration has already entangled state power and his own personal financial/political interests, and in fact seems to want to expand it.

What is really striking is how strong these patrimonial instincts can be [in an American leader], Van de Walle says.

The most obvious example is Trumps refusal to seriously divest from his private interests. When Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, he gave his familys small peanut farm and warehouse to an independent trustee to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. The Trump Organization a multibillion-dollar corporation whose profits are far from peanuts is currently run by Trumps adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric.

This is the opposite of a blind trust: Trump cannot avoid talking to his children, making it impossible to believe hes truly separated from the business. Moreover, Trump promised that his company wouldnt make any new foreign deals in office, but the way he travels around the world and meets with foreign leaders makes it exceptionally easy for them to offer his organization a lucrative deal in exchange for favors in a private meeting (as it would be with any president whose family ran their business).

This blending of the personal and the political extends to the way he manages the states relationship with corporations.

To show that he was serious about keeping jobs in America, Trump offered the Carrier corporation $7 million in tax breaks in exchange for keeping a manufacturing plant in Indiana open rather than moving it Mexico. The deal was announced, with great public fanfare, in December. Since then, it has become clear that Carrier will move nearly half of the jobs to Mexico anyway. But since Trump already got his PR stunt, it seemed not to matter: Carrier kept its tax breaks.

When companies cross Trump, by contrast, they risk being punished financially. Time Warner, which owns CNN, is currently trying to work out a merger with AT&T. The New York Timess Michael Grynbaum reports that the Trump administration is thinking about blocking the merger if CNNs coverage continues to be critical.

This is such a clear blending of political motives and economic institutions that is totally inappropriate in a rule-governed society, Gunitsky says. This is the kind of thing you see in broken states.

Whether Trump follows through on his merger threat is an open question. But the fact that the White House would even consider punishing a media organization using the federal governments regulatory powers testifies to the degree to which the states role in the economy is seen as a tool for securing the presidents personal interests.

In the long run, these experts warn, this kind of politically motivated crony capitalism is a serious threat to the health of American society.

When nobody stops leaders from doing these kinds of things, they start to become normal, routine. If Trump gets away with staffing the White House with his children, using tax breaks to reward corporations that do him a solid, and creating systemic conflicts of interests, then the incentives for how to act, for both politicians and large corporations, becomes badly distorted. Politicians feel free to act in a pettily corrupt fashion; corporations learn to succeed by flattering the president and getting handouts from the federal government as a result.

These kinds of erosions of institutions happens in a subtle way, Gunitsky says. Theres no takeover of a TV station with guards. Theres no crackdown and curfew. Its the steady, gradual erosion of the almost invisible lines of separation between institutions that are supposed to independent.

The consequences are impossible to predict in any detail, because developed countries almost never see anything like this systemic level of personalistic behavior in their leaders. But they could be wide-ranging: When the president sees the powers of the state as something he can manipulate for his personal benefit, then the possibilities for abuse are practically limitless.

In late July, for example, Trump gave a speech at a Navy ceremony where he urged the assembled sailors to call that congressman and call that senator about health care and other Trump-backed legislation. It sounded a lot like the president using his power to order the military to gin up support for his political agenda a no-no in any advanced democracy.

Trumps verbal command in Norfolk, Virginia, incites the assembled troops to discard centuries of U.S. military ethics and break long-standing military rules, Phillip Carter, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, writes at Slate. This is what leaders do in banana republics: Instruct the people with guns to join the political fray.

The issue isnt just that what were seeing is bad. Its that things could get a whole lot worse.

One of the many, many problems with neopatrimonialism is that it breeds mismanagement. When you staff the security services and Cabinet with cronies and grant economic favors to companies based on their political loyalties, your government tends not to work very well. The military gets weak, economic growth slows, diplomatic missions are less effective, and the like.

Trumps interests have suffered from the same kind of problem generated by his neopatrimonial interests. His Atlantic City casino empire collapsed, in part, because he elevated his unqualified brother to a key management position. These instincts also helped lead to one of the biggest crises for the Trump administration to date: Donald Trump Jr.s emails about trying to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.

Remember, Trump Jr.s meeting with the Russians only happened because he, a man with zero political experience, was in a position to speak for the campaign and influence his father. My colleague Dylan Matthews described Trump Jr. as a staggeringly incompetent political operative and conspirator, and its hard to argue with his case.

If Trump Jr. had wanted to get the materials being offered but cover himself, he wouldve emailed back to say he was appalled at the suggestion, but then used a more secure means of communication to contact Rob Goldstone, who was offering the files, and set up a meeting, Matthews writes. Trump Jr. didnt do that. He just conducted business over email. Easily hackable, subpoena-able email, during a campaign that centered on his fathers opponents poor email management skills.

Keeping notes on a criminal conspiracy is exactly the kind of mistake you would expect from someone who has no experience with either election law or political strategy. Its no surprise that a neophyte like Trump Jr. made it. But he never would have had the opportunity to commit such a fatal error if his father hadnt empowered him to do it.

Neopatrimonial mismanagement can often sow the seeds of the regimes collapse. Mobutus plundering of the state created widespread misery among his citizens, fueling support for an uprising that would eventually topple him. Corruption is currently one of the most vulnerable points for Vladimir Putins regime: In June, tens of thousands of Russians turned out to protest Putin allies systemic corruption. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny is making anti-corruption a central part of his bid to oust Putin in the 2018 election.

Trump is now reaping a similar kind of whirlwind the kind of problems you would expect someone with his impulses to face when trying to operate in a democratic system. His sons meeting with Russia, according to legal experts, is incriminating not just for Trump Jr. but also for Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort. Both of them were copied on the emails, so both may face potential criminal prosecution. Kushner has already appeared before two congressional committees, and the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Manafort to testify in late July.

This all raises the question that brought down President Nixon during Watergate: What did he know, and when did he know it? If Trump knew that his son and top advisers were trying to acquire information about Clinton from the Russians, and explicitly directed them to use that to help him win the White House, the political pressure to impeach him could become irresistible even for his fellow Republicans.

We cant yet know if things will get that bad for Trump. Maybe the email scandal wont escalate beyond what were already seeing.

But the point is very clear: Trumps kleptocratic instincts are creating the same kinds of vulnerabilities to his regime that autocrats regularly face. His obsession with loyalty and willingness to play fast and loose with basic norms against corruption might well defeat him.

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How Donald Trump's kleptocracy is undermining American democracy - Vox

The fetters on Myanmar's democracy are many. The 2008 constitution gives the military 25% of seats in parliament; it gives the military control over three of the most powerful ministries; it forbids Aung San Suu Kyi from becoming President. The military is prosecuting wars in the north and the Rohingya are suffering massive human rights abuses in the west. A clause in the2013 Telecommunications Act is being used to silence criticism and debate.

One of these things is not like the others. The first five are entirely in the hands of the military, an organisation deeply ambivalent about democracy and generally opposed to devolution of powers to ethnic minorities. Amending the 2008 constitution requires a 75% majority in other words, military support. Internal security, including dealing with restive regions, is entirely under military control. Conversely, Article 66(d) of the 2013 Telecommunications Act could be eliminated by Aung San Suu Kyi's partytomorrow.

Article 66(d)is a clause that allows up to three years in prison for 'extorting, coercing, restraining wrongfully, defaming, disturbing, causing undue influence or threatening any person using a telecommunications network'. Since it was passed, and with much of Myanmar now hooked on Facebook, ithas been used to prosecute over 70 individualsfor defamation butonly seven of these cases took place between 2013 and 2015. Since the National League for Democracy came to power in April 2016, there has been an explosion of defamation lawsuits.

This uptick in cases has led to modest street protests in Yangon as well as online campaigning. A coalition of some 22 civil organisations launched a campaignin early Julyto encourage citizens to voice opposition to the law, perhaps increasing pressure on the government to do something. Parliament began debating the act later that month. Some lawmakers support a full repeal, though as it appears only amendments are on the table for now.

There are three key problems with the law, besides the main fact that it criminalises defamation. First, the language is far too vague. 'Disturbing' someone? 'Causing undue influence'? It is not clear what these mean. Moreover, 'use of a telecommunications network' has come to be interpreted as any use of the internet, such that merely sharing a Facebook post that casts someone in a negative light can be grounds for prosecution. This occurred again this monthwhen two NLD executives from Lewe Township shared a photograph of another local administrator, Tin Htay, as he underwent trial for misappropriation of public funds. It doesn't appear to matter that Tin Htay actuallywasin court proceedings under those charges.

That suit was apparentlyfiled by Tin Htay's uncle, bringing us to a second problem with 66(d) it allows for third-party charges to be filed. So, for example, in MarchMyanmar Now Chief Correspondent Ko Swe Winwrote a Facebook post-criticising the nationalist monk Wirathu, who praised the assassins of prominent lawyer Ko Ni. One of Wirathu's followers opened a suit under 66(d). This suit was dropped soon thereafter, but it illustrates how public persons can avoid reproach for suppressing freedom of speech by passing the buck to affiliates or surrogates.

Finally, had that suit gone ahead, Ko Swe Win would have faced imprisonment without bail, as do others charged under the law. This is the fate of two other journalists: Than Htut Aung, Chief Executive Officer of Eleven Media Group, and Wai Phyo, Chief Editor of the Daily Eleven newspaper.They have been in jail since 11 December2016while they await trial overa column that suggested Yangon Chief Minister Phyo Min Thein received a designer watch in exchange for approving a development project.

Making 66(d) violations a bailable offense is one of the major issuesbeing debated in parliament right now; even then it doesn't mandate the granting of bail. Other slight modifications to the language are being discussed, as is the right to bring lawsuits by third parties. Most activists agree the moves won't fix the problem and in some cases might even make things worse. Moreover, the process has been slow a parliamentary commission on the matter submitted recommendations in November.

This state of affairs seems surprising, given that the NLD and its leader Aung San Suu Kyi were global icons of democracy for so long. With control of the parliament and party discipline so strong no whipping is needed, why not push through a change to the 2013 Telecommunications Law? Why not remove this obvious constraint on freedom of speech and democracy?

There are likely two reasons. First, the military enjoys having the law on the books, as made clear by military lawmaker Major Thet Min Oo this week.He said that'amending the law to allow bail for offencestends to suggest that the legislative branch is exerting influence over the judiciary'. He may be muddled on what legislatures are supposed to do in a democracy, but the message couldn't be clearer: the military wants this law left alone.

Aung San Suu Kyi has been extremely cautious since the 2015 election to not antagonise the military. It's partially why she has been quiet on the Rohingya issue, seems to be on the military's side in the peace process, and no longer talks much about constitutional reform. For a number of reasons, she may have felt the need to not pick a fight over 66(d) with the military.

The second possible reason for this tepid debate in parliament is more disturbing. Many 66(d) suits involve criticising or poking fun at the military, but other suits have involved criticism of prominent NLD members, such as President Htin Kyaw,Win Hteinand Phyo Min Thein.

In April,a man was sentenced to six monthsfor sharing a graphic that had the NLD logo and said Win Htein was retiring because of health problems. In September 2016a man received nine monthsfor calling Htin Kyaw an 'idiot' and 'crazy'.Phyo Min Thein and Win Hteinhave also explicitly rebukedjournalist activists over their focus on 66(d).

The sad fact is that the civilian leadership of Myanmar are perhaps also enjoying the protection from criticism that 66(d) affords. Given that much of the shine has come off the NLD since they took power(particularly over the Rohingya issue)eliminating 66(d) would be a quick and easy way to win some foreign accolades again. Its effect on domestic journalism and dialogue would be far more profound.

Andray Abrahamian

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Article 66(d): A menace to Myanmar's democracy - The Interpreter

In Caracas on Sunday Venezuelan Assassin in Chief Nicolas Maduro abandoned his last pretense of legitimacy and commenced open warfare on democracy. Ignoring the heavy losses of his legislative allies in the December 2015 legislative elections (which transpired despite corrupt rulings by the electoral commission and Maduros best efforts at committing election fraud), ignoring widespread protests, and a massive vote (an estimated 7.2 million people participated) against his continued lawless rule in a July 16 plebiscite called by Venezuelas Congress, Maduro staged a sham election on July 30 for a Constituent Assembly, consisting of lackeys, apologists, and hangers on.

Even the rules for his unconstitutional Constituent Assembly are undemocratic, the fiction being that it represents sectors of society rather than individuals. Under this guise supporters were given multiple votes, cast under their various guises as citizen, farmer, so forth, and just for good measure districts containing supporters were vastly overrepresented. As it transpired, Maduro was able to hustle, bully, and cajole an estimated 2.3 million people to the polls, though the lackey Maduro put in charge of the National Election Council, Tibisay Lucena, claimed a much higher turnout. Maduros ersatz vote has been denounced by governments across the region, including Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Panama, which issued sanctions. The European Union? It questions the results. For its part, the United States Treasury Department hit Maduro with sanctions on Monday and national security adviser H.R. McMaster said in a statement, Maduro is not just a bad leader, he is now a dictator.

The Venezuelan people are a courageous lot, committed to government of the people, by the people and for the people, but they are now fighting a man who holds power at gunpoint: More than 100 Venezuelans have died in anti-Maduro demonstrations over the past months, mostly at the hands of Venezuelan police and army sharp shooters, yes Army General and Maduro lackey Jose Rafael Torrealba Perez ordered the use of snipers against protesters, and at least 10 more people died the day of Maduros sham vote. Maduro has effectively declared war on democracy, and it is now time for the regions democracies to bring this wretched criminal to heel.

How did matters reach such an extreme? In the late 1990s, temporarily low oil prices and endemically corrupt political parties left the public both cynical and exasperated. In their frustration they elected a charismatic outsider as president: former coup participant and former Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chavez. In that case the medicine turned out to be worse than the disease.

Chavez adopted increasingly heavy-handed and repressive measures, all in the name of bringing the supposed marvels of socialism to the people of Venezuela. It is the habit of totalitarian leaders to rename their countries, Burma became Myanmar, China the Peoples Republic of China, and in short order Chavez rechristened his country The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. More than just a quaint conceit, the Bolivarian label is part of a made-in-Cuba version of the Monroe Doctrine. In the early 19th century as the countries of Spanish America became independent, Simon Bolivar sought to unite them into one republic. Todaythe Cubans and their allies in Venezuela and elsewhere use the Bolivarian label to justify Cuban intervention in other Latin American countries, while they use the same framework to denounce the regions defenders of freedom when seek help from their democratic allies in the US, Spain, and other countries outside Latin America on the grounds that it invites foreign meddling in the region.

Not only was Chavez heavy handed, he was also as incompetent at wielding power as he was effective at seizing it. In the march of but a few years Chavez managed to run the state oil company PDVSA into insolvencybereft of the chemical engineers and managers Chavez had fired for their political beliefs, the company was plagued by refinery explosions, fires, and general mismanagement. Production fell. Meanwhile, Chavez hounded entrepreneurs into bankruptcy with selective enforcement, taxes, regulations and outright seizures. The economy cratered.

As the economy faltered the attentions of Venezuelan President for Life Hugo Chavez were focused elsewhere. He managed to rewrite the constitution, and to subvert the courts by appointing jurisprudential lackeys to key posts. Where he fell short was in his attempts to win over the legislature: Despite Chavezs best efforts to quash the count, the public continued to elect opposition figures to Congress, and to vote them in as mayors as well. While members of Venezuelas Congress enjoy immunity from prosecution, mayors do not. With the judiciary in his back pocket, Chavez set about imprisoning as many mayors as he could on trumped up charges. He also subverted the elections commission and set them to the task of disqualifying as many elected opposition legislators as possible. In April 2002 the former coup plotter was himself the target of a failed military uprising, during which he was briefly detained by the coup plotters. The uprising failed and Chavez used the occasion to remove his remaining enemies and to consolidate his hold over the military which until recently has been exceedingly docile despite the ongoing collapse of Venezuelan society.

Chavez also sought to bankrupt the opposition media through a variety of subterfuges, such as not placing government ads in newspapers he disliked. One particularly outrageous abuse took advantage of a provision in the broadcast lawsin those days Chavez still needed to work around the lawsthat required the television networks to cover the president without commercial interruption when he addressed the nation. Of course, few people are as fond of talking as was Chavez. At a summit meeting in 2007 it took the king of Spain asking him why he didnt quiet down to make him stop talking. Alas King Juan Carlos wasnt there to stop Chavez as he turned his television prerogative into a daily occurrence, converting his addresses into a regular, commercial free, television program, Alo Presidente, that had to be carried commercial free during prime time, thereby starving the independent television networks of their primary source of advertising revenue, and driving them into bankruptcy. When he got tired of talking, hed play his guitar or invite viewers to call in.

Just as totalitarians like to rename their countries, so too it is their wont to find a particular stupid underling with exceptionally weak leadership skills to appoint as their potential successor. Dictators who ignore this rule often find themselves being succeeded ahead of time by the bright energetic underling they had inadvertently chosen to take their place, and the retirement package for dictators can involve being shot at close range, as Libyas Ghadaffi discovered to his brief but very intense chagrin. Chavez was certainly evil, but he was not stupid, and so he picked someone who was as his vice president: Nicolas Maduro. This might not have been such as problem if, after contracting cancer while he was still in his 50s, Chavez had not placed himself under the care of Cuban doctorsimagine taking the people running the NTSB security post at a small U.S. airport and handing them scalpels and surgical glovesand so in short order, Chavez died of his cancer and Nicolas Maduro became Venezuelas not very competent, not terribly bright authoritarian ruler.

Maduro turned out to be even worse than Chavez at running the economy. After imposing currency controls, and fixing prices he accused businesses that could not operate at the controlled prices of hoarding, and had them taken over and their owners jailed. Worst of all are the food shortages that are endemic to Maduros Bolivarian republic and have stunted the growth and cognitive development of a generation of Venezuelan children. To be sure, the list of particulars against Maduro is very long indeed, and his criminal state seems to have reached its tentacles into narcotics trafficking and a connection with Iranian terror as well.

By December 2015 even some of Chavezs most fanatical followers had had enough, and the opposition won a veto-proof majority in Congress, a majority that Maduros National Election Council went to work shrinking by blocking the seating of enough legislators to restore Maduros veto. The public became increasingly frustrated with Venezuelas enforced poverty, and with Maduros obstruction, while Maduro made an increasingly bald sequence of attempts to dissolve Congress. The number of political prisoners mounted, in a particularly barbaric move, Maduro dispatched 100 policemen in riot gear to City Hall to arrest Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma on trumped-up charges. He joined dozens of other mayors held behind bars under appalling conditions. Soon after his fellow political prisoners Leopoldo Lopez and Daniel Ceballos began a hunger strike demanding freedom for the political prisoners, and a free election for a new government. The hunger strike ended with the physical collapse of Ceballos and a government promise of elections.

In March 2017 Maduros puppet Supreme Court declared that the National Assembly was dissolved, and that it would take over the legislative functions of the assembly. The streets erupted in protest, and a long list of military officers issued a public statement of disapproval. Even Maduros chief public prosecutor, Luisa Ortega, who had participated in some of Maduros worst travesties of justice, publicly objected to the measure. Maduro backed down, but the street protests did not stop and have continued to this day. Despite violent mistreatment by the police, and the death of more thanthan 100 demonstrators, the protests have become a regular occurrence.

Of course, not all of the Venezuelan military have been as trigger happy as Maduro stooge Jose Rafael Torrealba Perez, and so as many as 85 military officers have been imprisoned by the Maduro regime for refusing to join in the brutal repression. Confronted by an unstoppable wave of protest Maduro celebrated May Day by calling a non-democratic July 30 election for a corporatist convention empowered to ratify the replacement of Chavezs constitution with a dictatorship led by Nicolas Maduro. This convention, which Maduro calls a Constituent Assembly, has no basis in the Venezuelan constitution, and even the basis for voting, which does not treat all citizens equally, is nondemocratic.

The international community has been slow to condemn Maduros authoritarian abuses, but the outrages have reached such an extent that even the community of nations has perked up. In principle the Treaty of San Jose and the charter of the Organization of American States (OAS) establishes Latin America as a region of mutually supporting democracies, with articles obliging countries to come to the aid of people afflicted by authoritarian rulethis was part of the basis for the boycott of Cuba. Secretary General of the OAS Luis Amalgro has worked hard to extract a resolution from the OAS general assembly condemning Maduros dictatorial moves in general and the Constituent Assembly in particular, and in May the organization considered a motion from Canada, Mexico, Panama Peru, and the United States to do just that.

To carry the motion needed a super-majority, which it barely failed to achieveonly Nicaragua is reported to have voted against, but enough nations abstained to block the measure. Those abstaining included the ALBA states, a small group of countries whose governments support Maduros anti-democratic orientation. The ALBA includes not just Nicaragua and Venezuela but also Bolivia and Ecuador. Also abstaining were many of the Caribbean micro states which depend on Venezuela for petroleum, and perhaps also for bribe money. Amalgro has continued his principled campaign against the Maduro regime, recently announcing that he will file charges against Maduro in the International Criminal Court for human rights violations against the Venezuelan people.

On the eve of the fraudulent July 30 vote former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe called upon the Venezuelan army to overthrow Maduro and act as a caretaker government, holding quickly free and fair elections, and then stepping down. ALBA is the Spanish acronym for the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America. And so we arrive at the end of July with Nicolas Maduro in open violation of the Venezuelan constitution, and the laws of human decency, openly mocking the democratic charter, which he dismisses obscenelybathroom humor being the one literary avenue open to this man of little intellect and even less moral stature. What comes next? Will Venezuela become another Cuba, with other countries in the region disapproving the brutal actions of its government, while taking only token measures to intervene? Will what is left of the Venezuelan military join the public to put an end to Maduro and to restore democracy? Will the other countries provide more than a show of disapprobation? One thing is clear, the criminal Nicolas Maduro negotiates in bad faith, and he will not cease his usurpation save at gunpoint. Meanwhile everyone seems ready for someone else to act, wringing our hands and paraphrasing Henry II of England: Will no one rid me of this nettlesome beast? Alas, the latter day versions of Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton appear to be otherwise engaged.

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Maduro's War on Democracy - The Weekly Standard