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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.

Continued here:
Maduro's War on Democracy - The Weekly Standard

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