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Former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela has lashed out at state capture and corruption, saying it is such issues that "pervert" democracy.

Madonsela was speaking at the Democracy Defenders Dialogue at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg on Monday evening.

Former finance minister Pravin Gordhan also delivered the closing remarks at the event.

Here's what Madonsela and Gordhan said:

1. Madonsela said activists have to make it easy for people to understand how state capture perverts democracy, especially in terms of social justice. "Someone should make sure the Gupta leaks are accessible to the person on the street... Once you delete people from democracy, democracy falls apart."

2. Giving advice to prospective public servants, Madonsela urged to "serve the best where you can". "The majority of public servants are decent human beings who serve beyond the call of duty. If you find something that has done wrong, you have to be strategic. You have to look at who is involved. Don't go to the media," she said.

3. She urged ordinary citizens to confront corruption. "What I would like to see more is ordinary people writing to parliament and the president in terms of the access to information act... Let's stop the divide and rule."

4. Gordhan also spoke of a citizen-focused movement against state capture. He said citizens need to be better informed of what is going on. "At the end of the day, we can be activists, leaders, catalysts for the revitalization of democracy, but it is the masses that make history," he said.

5. He also hit out at Black First Land First members. "We have fake narratives, fake twitter accounts... but now we have stormtroopers of the corrupt. Hired guns, it may not be the physical gun, but the word of mouth."

Link:
Thuli Madonsela: State Capture 'Perverts' Our Democracy - Huffington Post South Africa (blog)

The vote was boycotted by the opposition, which says the election is fraudulent and designed to secure a dictatorship by socialist President Nicolas Maduro.

The president said the new Constituent Assembly wouldend the country's debilitating political and economic crises.

But the vote has been overshadowed by deadly protests and the shooting deaths of a leading candidate and of a youth opposition leader.

Prosecutors believe multiple assailants broke into the house of Jose Felix Pineda, a 39-year-old lawyer, overnight and fired several shots at the candidate, killing him.

Read: What are Venezuela's proposed constitutional changes?

A regional secretary for the youth opposition party Democratic Action, Ricardo Campos, was also shot dead during a protest against the election in the northeastern town of Cumana, prosecutors said on Sunday.

In a statement released Sunday night, the US State Department said the new assembly appeared to have beendesigned to "undermine the Venezuelan people's right to self-determination."

"We will continue to take strong and swift actions against the architects of authoritarianism in Venezuela, including those who participate in the National Constituent Assembly as a result of todays flawed election," the US State Departmentsaid.

Gunmen on motorbikes

Protesterswearing hoods andmasks erected street barricades, whichsecurity forces quickly removed. Authorities said seven people diedin the various protests and the opposition said the true death toll was around a dozen people. That would make Sunday the deadliest day of protests since they broke out in April.

Prosecutors said a Venezuelan soldier was shot dead at a protest in the western state of Tachira, andtwo teenagers were killed at different protests in the same region.

In Caracas abomb exploded and injured seven police officers.

Losing legitimacy?

In what could be a sign of increasingly violent tactics, a makeshift bomb injured nine police officers.

The opposition estimated participation in the vote was just 7 percent by mid-afternoon, but warned that the government would likely announce that 8.5 million people had voted.

There are widespread reports Maduro and his loyalists had coerced the country's 2.8 million state workers into voting. Some two dozen sources told Reuters they were being threatened with dismissal andwere being blasted with text messages and phone calls asking them to vote and report back after doing so.

Only 23 percent of Venezuelans favor the new assembly plans, according to a June survey by polling firm Datanalisis.

State television showed Maduro casting the first vote in a west Caracas polling station."I'm the first voter in the country. I ask God for his blessings so the people can freely exercise their democratic right to vote," Maduro said alongside his wife, who is a candidate for the constituent assembly.

The power to dissolve Congress

The 545-member citizens' assembly will be tasked with rewriting the constitution and be empowered to dissolve the opposition-controlled Congress.

Congress has already been severely weakened by the Maduro-loyalist electoral commission and supreme court. The turnout result will be a key factor in giving the vote a facade of legitimacy.

The US, the EU, the Organization of American States, as well as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico opposed the election, warning it could decapitate Venezuela's democracy and lead to further unrest.

aw/jm(AFP, AP, dpa, Reuters)

See the rest here:
Venezuela votes in election that opposition says will end democracy - Deutsche Welle

Proponents of taxpayer-funded democracy vouchers and Initiative 122 declared they would get big money out of politics in Seattle. It doesnt quite look that way as we approach the Aug. 1 primary election.

After Seattle voters approved first-in-the-nation taxpayer-funded democracy vouchers for city candidates, Honest Elections Seattle declared that the program launched this year would get big money out of politics.

No question, Initiative 122 did create a pool of vouchers for candidates who agreed to certain limits, lowered the maximum contribution to candidates to $500, and barred contractors from writing checks to city candidates.

But get the big money out?

Four Seattle candidates qualified for democracy vouchers as of July 28: City Attorney Pete Holmes and City Council Position 8 candidates Hisam Goueli, Jon Grant and Teresa Mosqueda.

Goueli: 591 vouchers worth $14,775

Grant: 6,000 vouchers worth $150,000

Mosqueda: 4,193 vouchers worth $104,825

Holmes: 1,842 vouchers worth $46,050

Source: Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission

Amazon dumped $250,000 into the political action committee (PAC) of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce this month, part of the $667,728 the PAC has amassed in advance of Tuesdays primary election.

Unlike candidates, PACs can collect unlimited amounts. And 50 corporations, business groups and individuals account for the vast majority of the chambers political arsenal.

The PAC has already started spending on newspaper and social-media ads through so-called independent expenditure (IE) campaigns in City Council and mayoral races. Those IE campaigns cant coordinate with candidates and they dont face spending caps like candidates who take democracy vouchers.

Alan Durning, who helped author I-122, said hes pleased with how its working so far on its shakedown cruise in City Council races, which for the primary means Positions 8 and 9. It has helped a couple of candidates compete with well-funded rivals, said Durning, executive director of the nonprofit Sightline Institute.

As for the chambers bulging kitty, Durning said he doesnt think it has much to do with the four $25 vouchers sent to every registered voter in Seattle. He sees it as part of a national trend in elections flowing from a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision barring restrictions on independent political expenditures by corporations, unions and other groups.

Bob Mahon, a former chairman of the watchdog Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, disagrees. Mahon said its not likely money will be squeezed out of politics by I-122, but will be driven to less transparent forms of expenditures including IEs.

There isnt enough evidence to show democracy vouchers are causing this, Mahon said. But there is a correlation developing, he said, that increased IEs are occurring after limits were lowered on contributions to candidates. The chamber PAC already has raised more than it did for the 2013 and 2015 city elections combined.

Theres another issue: Just three of 15 City Council candidates have qualified for vouchers at this point all in Position 8 and not all are happy about the hurdles theyve faced.

As of Friday, less than 1 percent of the 2.1 million vouchers mailed to voters have been available for use by candidates. To qualify, they had to collect contributions from 400 Seattle residents whose signatures have been verified by elections officials.

Vouchers arent being used in this years mayoral election. Proponents wanted to allow time for voucher funds, infused with $3 million a year in property taxes, to stockpile and give them a trial run before applying the experiment to the citys highest office, Durning said.

Vouchers and IEs have been most prominent in the primary for City Council Position 8.

Moneywise, three candidates stand out in a deep field (the top two vote-getters on Tuesday, as in all primary races, advance to the Nov. 7 general election).

Jon Grant, an affordable-housing activist, set out in the winter to start gathering vouchers. Grant accumulated the maximum amount in voucher-contributions, $150,000, allowed in the primary under the agreed-upon spending cap.

Teresa Mosqueda, a labor-movement leader, was the second council candidate to qualify. As of Friday, Mosqueda had $104,825 in vouchers.

Sara Nelson, a business owner and former City Council aide, chose not to use vouchers, so she is not tied to a spending cap or lower maximum contributions ($250 as opposed to $500).

Nelson has received $130,335 in contributions, with nearly half coming from $500-maximum contributions.

An IE campaign supporting her, People for Sara Nelson, has reported $120,696 in contributions and spending obligations. The chief donors are the chambers PAC whose biggest contributors are Amazon, Vulcan and developer Richard Hedreen and a hotel and restaurant group, Seattle Hospitality for Progress.

Under I-122 rules, when the IE backing Nelson and her own campaign contributions exceeded the primary spending cap that Grant and Mosqueda had agreed to, it triggered a sort of fairness doctrine: Those two were then free to collect and spend contributions above the cap.

During the 2015 campaign for democracy vouchers, critics including Mahon predicted I-122 would lead to such a double-dip with candidates raising the full amount of vouchers, then opting out of spending caps and raising unlimited additional campaign cash.

Two labor-funded IEs popped up to support Mosqueda. One has $108,519 in contributions and spending obligations. The other has spent $9,882 for Mosqueda.

Grant is backed by an IE called Affordable Seattle that has reported spending $1,627. Its top contribution has come as in-kind labor from the Socialist Alternative organization.

Although outnumbered on the IE front, Grant remains one of the best-funded candidates, said his campaign manager John Wyble. That wouldnt have happened before vouchers, Wyble said. When Grant ran for council in 2015, losing to incumbent Tim Burgess, he raised less than $75,000 through the November election.

Democracy vouchers aim to give candidates a path to a competitive campaign for city office without spending half their time dialing for dollars, Durning said. It doesnt try to create a level playing field where theyll have the exact same support as everyone else. And on that criterion Id say it has succeeded.

Its worth questioning, though, Durning said, whether the bar to qualify for vouchers is too high.

Hisam Goueli seems to be the kind of candidate democracy-voucher proponents were thinking about when they said in the 2015 Voters Pamphlet that I-122 would encourage more women, people of color and young people to run for office.

Goueli, 39, says he would be the first openly gay Muslim elected to office in the U.S. if he won his bid for council Position 8. He was the candidate closest, but still short of qualifying for democracy vouchers on Friday morning when he said he stood two short of the 400 qualifying contributions and signatures.

As time to use vouchers in the primary was running out, Goueli was waiting for city officials to verify more signatures with King County Elections, a process that takes about two weeks, according to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission.

His experience with democracy vouchers has been tragic and heartbreaking, he said.

Goueli, a doctor, said he couldve financed his campaign with contributions from medical-profession friends outside Seattle and Washington. But he opted for democracy vouchers instead.

He said collecting signatures for his Seattle contributors took an exorbitant amount of time. Its the opposite of how democracy vouchers are supposed to work, he said. Instead of getting my message out, Im trying to get democracy vouchers.

Late Friday afternoon Goueli received an email from the city elections commission saying, You are in! He would get $14,775 in vouchers he had collected.

The news was bittersweet. He would have almost no time to use his vouchers to reach voters, many of whom had already marked their mail-in ballots by that time.

He said he thinks qualifying signatures should not have to come from contributors. Rather, the two processes should be separate, with signature gathering not requiring a financial commitment.

If you dont have a machine backing you its very difficult to do, he said of qualifying.

But the voucher rules require signatures from contributors as a safeguard against fraud, which occurred in Portlands public-financing system when a volunteer forged qualifying signatures for a City Council candidate.

The city elections commission is empowered to change elements of the voucher program between election cycles, Durning said.

Durning said his biggest fear about democracy vouchers is that IEs would try to push vouchers to favored candidates. If the American Plastic Manufacturers Association wanted to come in and set up a door-to-door canvass to overturn our plastic-bag fee, legally they could do that, and urge people to give vouchers to candidates they want, he said.

I regard this year as something of a relief because we havent had anyone try to subvert the system, he said.

At least not yet.

Its too early to tell, said Wayne Barnett, executive director of the city elections commission, about the overall impact of vouchers and I-122. We havent had a single vote counted in an election where democracy vouchers have been used.

View original post here:
Seattle's democracy vouchers haven't kept big money out of primary election - The Seattle Times

Round table discussion at the Israel Democracy Institute.. (photo credit:JONKLINGER/ WIKIMIEDA COMMONS)

Hebrew University law professor emeritus Mordechai Kremnitzer is stepping down as vice president of research at the Israel Democracy Institute. He will be replaced in January by the dean of the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Prof. Yuval Shany, IDI announced Sunday morning.

Kremnitzer served as IDIs vice president for a decade and has been part of the institute for 24 years. He is a former dean of the Hebrew University Faculty of Law and once served as director of the Israeli Press Council.

Since 2011, Kremnitzer has been part of the Public Council of BTselem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. A source at IDI said Kremnitzer taking a lesser role had nothing to do with his views or those of the organizations with which he is involved. The groups executive director, Hagai El-Ad, appeared before the UN Security Council to call for the UN to take action against Israels settlements in October. Kremnitzer said he was leaving the IDI post during a challenging time for Israeli democracy.

I believe the struggle to defend Israeli democracy requires changing the guard and new consideration of how to approach this struggle, said Kremnitzer. There is no one more fit than Professor Yuval Shany to full this role.

Shany is a fellow at IDIs Center for Security and Democracy. He holds the Hersch Lauterpacht Chair in International Law at Hebrew University and has been a member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee since 2013.

Mordechai Kremnitzer is a man of principles, IDI president Yohanan Plesner said. His practical wisdom, integrity, and intellectual courage created a wonderful combination of professional abilities while serving as a guiding light of values for many.

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Originally posted here:
Israel Democracy Institute VP leaves post - The Jerusalem Post

Were not big fans of citizen initiatives. They are end runs around what, in a perfect world, should be a legislative process carried out byelected representatives in a deliberative and bipartisan fashion.

But its not a perfect world far from it, as John McCain so eloquently pointed out Thursday on the floor of the U.S. Senate. He then put his money where his mouth was by casting the deciding Republican vote against yet another repeal/replace bill on Obamacare.

McCain and the Senate dont have to worry about citizen initiatives unless enough states agree to call a Constitutional Convention. Faced with gridlock within their own party, Republicans inside the Beltway will now have to sit down with Democrats, craft bipartisan health reform, then hold hearings and floor debates. It might be messier than Mitch McConnells My way or the highway dictum, but were pretty certain its what most voters expect of Congress even if they dont agree with the ultimate results.

In Arizona, where the citizen initiative is baked into the state constitution, the entrenched interests have not been able to fend off grassroots reform of what had become a closed, self-perpetuating system. Citizens have endorsed public financing for statewide and legislative candidates, an independent commission to redraw legislative and congressional districts rather than politicians, and a statewide minimum wage. They even passed a law prohibiting lawmakers from undoing citizen initiatives by legislative fiat.

Its this last initiative that has given legislative leaders fits, even though the courts have said any initiative must come with its own funding source. Voters,the leaderssay, are too easily swayed by special interests mounting self-serving campaigns for things like medical marijuana and casino gaming. If you want mob rule, why not do away with the Legislature altogether, they ask?

We might have been more sympathetic to this argument before Citizens United unleashed a torrent of campaign cash on behalf of hardline primary candidates who adopt the same tunnel vision as their funders. In Arizona,the mantrais no new taxes even if it starves the schools, as little regulation of the free market as possible and tighter voting rules that fall hardest on minorities and the poor the very groups least likely to vote for entrenched interests. Redistricting even by a citizen commission ran afoul of federal civil rights protections for minorities that concentrated Democrats in too few competitive districts, and public campaign financing has been overwhelmed by independent spending committees that use wedge issues to drive out substance. Even in the U.S. Senate, the filibuster is the tactic not of last resort but everyday strategy, so polarized have the sides become.

And now, the Republicans have decided that if they cant undo citizen initiatives in the Legislature, they will just deny petitioners access to the ballot altogether. The majority passed and the governor signed bills outlawing paying initiative and referendum petition circulators by the signature (too much temptation to forge signatures, they said) and holding petitions to a strict compliance standard every name and address must match the voter rolls exactly and conform precisely to the petition form.

As we noted above, were not enamored of citizen petitions. But when political inequality on the campaign trail, at the polling place and in the Legislature has become so tilted, we can see why an end run around representative democracy and an appeal to the grassroots seems like the only course left. The alternative, as several commentators have noted, is a vote for someone like Trump, who plays upon the unfairness of the new economy and its job insecurity, wage stagnation and wealth gap to appeal not to more open voting and representation but closed borders, withdrawing from trade agreements and restricting security alliances. The bad guys are not the captains of industry and finance seeking economic advantage through self-serving donations but the little guys immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and journalists who historically are easy prey for demagogues.

We dont know what the cure is nationally for the growing closed system as long as Citizens United stands. But in Arizona, we already have term limits and public funding of campaigns the latter, however, needs more money, not less. And why not try open primaries, as have the states of Washington and California, in the interest of more middle-ground candidates? Lawmakers who devalue the constitutional right to the initiative arent likely to be convinced to change their minds at a legislative or court hearing. They need to be replaced and the initiative protections restored.

Ideally, those rights would need to be used only sparingly. But knowing theyhave been restored wouldmean that we are back on the road to a political equality that is the only way to begin to address widening economic inequality. Given how wide that gap has already become, its a process that cant start too soon.

Link:
Our View: Protect direct democracy amid closed politics - Arizona Daily Sun