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On March 29, the Venezuelan Supreme Court effectively shut down Congress, the only key government institution that remained independent of executive control, making the incredible announcement that it would assume all legislative powers itself or choose some other institution to delegate them to. This ruling is the end of Maduro administrations faade of democracy.

Venezuela'sSupreme CourtPresident Maikel Moreno (C) talks to the media during a news conference, next toVenezuela'sSupreme CourtFirst Vice President Indira Alfonzo (L) andVenezuela'sSupreme CourtSecond Vice President Juan Mendoza, in Caracas,Venezuela onMarch 27, 2017.

2017 Reuters

This was not an isolated event that occurred out of the blue. Over the years the Maduro administration has steadily and very deliberately rolled back checks on its own power while running roughshod over Venezuelans fundamental human rights.

Holding periodic, free, and fair elections.The National Electoral Councilwith its majority of government supportershas deliberately stalled a recall referendum on President Nicols Maduro. It has not organized municipal and state governor elections that, under the Constitution, were supposed to take place in 2016.

Separation of powers.None of Venezuelas government institutions have maintained any ability to act as a check on executive power. Former president Hugo Chveztook overthe Supreme Court in 2004, and both Chvez and Maduro havere-packedit since then, destroying its watchdog function. Since Venezuelans overwhelmingly gave the opposition a majority in the National Assembly in 2015, President Maduro has used the court to undermine it. After months in which the court nullified every law that threatened the governments interests, itdeclaredthat Congress was in contempt of the courts decisions and took over all legislative functions, effectively shutting down the legislature.

Repression of Political Opponents and Critics.The Venezuelan Penal Forum, a non-profit group that provides legal counsel to detainees, counts more than100 political prisoners, including LeopoldoLpez, an opposition leaderwho has been behind bars for over three years. Some political prisoners were arrested on the basis of information provided by anonymous patrioticinformants. The government has been using its intelligence services to detain and prosecute political opponents and critics.

But the Supreme Courtruledthat opposition legislators support for the ongoing debate at the Organization of American States (OAS) on the Venezuela crisis may constitute treason and warned that the lawmakers responsible would not have parliamentary immunity.

Respect for freedom of expression.Very few independent media outlets remain. Security forces have detained and interrogated journalists and confiscated their equipment. International journalists have beenstoppedfrom entering the country to cover the crisis, ordetainedfor doing so. News channels have beenforcedoff the air. The government has adopted measures to restrict international funding of non-profit organizations whose work exposes abuseson the unsubstantiated grounds that they undermine Venezuelan democracy. Ordinary citizens who criticized the government have been criminallyprosecuted. The media have reported that hundreds of people werefiredfrom government jobs for supporting the recall referendum.

Respect for other civil and political rights.Venezuelan security forces have repeatedly usedbrutal forceagainst bystanders and demonstrators at anti-government protests. In some cases, they have used torture. A series of police and militaryraidsin 2015 in low-income and immigrant communities has led to widespread allegations of abuse: extrajudicial executions, mass detentions, arbitrary deportations and evictions, and the bulldozing of homes.

Respect for economic, social, and cultural rights.Venezuela is facing a dramatichumanitarian crisis. Severe shortages of medicine, medical supplies, and food have undermined the ability of many Venezuelans to get adequate nutrition and health care. The government has denied that the crisis exists, failed to alleviate the shortages, and made only limited efforts to obtain readily available international humanitarian assistance.

For years, Venezuela has been run by a government with a deplorable human rights record that has taken advantage of a tremendous concentration of power to gradually erode human rights guarantees and checks on its own power. The latest Supreme Court ruling is a turning point. Faced with something that looks more and more like a full-fledged dictatorship, the international community should reactstrong and decisive multilateral pressure on the Maduro administration is more important and urgent than ever.

JosMiguel Vivanco is Americas director at Human Rights Watch.

Read more from the original source:
Venezuela's crumbling faade of democracy - Human Rights Watch

In late February, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg published an essay that laid out the social networks vision for the coming years.

The 5,700-word document, immediately dubbed a manifesto, was his most extensive discussion of Facebooks place in the social world since it went public in 2012. Although it reads to me in places like a senior honors thesis in sociology, with broad-brush claims about the evolution of society and heavy reliance on terms like social infrastructure, it makes some crucial points.

In particular, Zuckerberg outlined five domains where Facebook intended to develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us. This included making communities supportive, safe, informed, civically engaged and inclusive.

Silicon Valley has long been mocked for this kind of our products make the world a better place rhetoric, so much so that some companies are asking their employees to rein it in. Still, while apps for sending disappearing selfies or summoning on-street valet parking may not exactly advance civilization, Facebook and a handful of other social media platforms are undoubtedly influential in shaping political engagement.

A case in point is the Egyptian revolution in 2011. One of the leaders of the uprising created a Facebook page that became a focal point for organizing opposition to ousted leader Hosni Mubaraks regime. He later told CNN:

I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him This revolution started on Facebook.

As I have written elsewhere, Facebook and Twitter have become essential tools in mobilizing contemporary social movements, from changing the corporate world to challenging national governments. Zuckerbergs manifesto suggests he aims to harness Facebook in this way and empower the kind of openness and widespread participation necessary to strengthen democracy.

But while hes right that social media platforms could reinvigorate the democratic process, I believe Facebook and its Silicon Valley brethren are the wrong ones to spearhead such an effort.

The HBO show Silicon Valley focuses on skewering the industrys inflated sense of itself.

The initial reaction to Zuckerbergs manifesto was largely negative.

The Atlantic described it as a blueprint for destroying journalism by turning Facebook into a news organization without journalists. Bloomberg View referred to it as a scary, dystopian document to transform Facebook into an extraterritorial state run by a small, unelected government that relies extensively on privately held algorithms for social engineering.

Whatever the merits of these critiques, Zuckerberg is correct about one central issue: Internet and mobile technology could and should be used to enable far more extensive participation in democracy than most of us encounter.

In the United States, democracy can feel remote and intermittent, and sees only limited participation. The 2016 election, which pitted radically different visions for the future of democracy against each other, attracted only 60 percent of eligible voters. In the midterm elections between presidential campaigns, turnout drops sharply, even though the consequences can be equally profound.

Moreover, whereas voting is compulsory and nearly universal in countries such as Brazil and Australia, legislators in the U.S. are actively trying to discourage voting by raising barriers to participation through voter ID laws, sometimes targeted very precisely at depressing black turnout.

Democratic participation in the U.S. could use some help, and online technologies could be part of the solution.

The social infrastructure for our democracy was designed at a time when the basic logistics of debating issues and voting were costly.

Compare the massive effort it took to gather and tabulate paper ballots for national elections during the time of Abraham Lincoln with the instantaneous global participation that takes place every day on social media. The transaction costs for political mobilization have never been lower. If appropriately designed, social media could make democracy more vibrant by facilitating debate and action.

Consider how one Facebook post germinated one of the largest political protests in American history, the Jan. 21 Womens March in Washington and many other cities around the world. But getting people to show up at a demonstration is different from enabling people to deliberate and make collective decisions that is, to participate in democracy.

Todays information and communication technologies (ICTs) could make it possible for democracy to happen on a daily basis, not just in matters of public policy but at work or at school. Democracy is strengthened through participation, and ICTs dramatically lower the cost of participation at all levels. Research on shared capitalism demonstrates the value of democracy at work, for workers and organizations.

Participation in collective decision making need not be limited to desultory visits to the voting booth every two to four years. The pervasiveness of ICTs means that citizens could participate in the decisions that affect them in a much more democratic way than we typically do.

Loomio provides a platform for group decision-making that allows people to share information, debate and come to conclusions, encouraging broad and democratic participation. OpaVote allows people to vote online and includes a variety of alternative voting methods for different situations. (You could use it to decide where your team is going to lunch today.) BudgetAllocator enables participatory budgeting for local governments.

As Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler points out, the past few years have greatly expanded the range of ways we can work together collaboratively. Democracy can be part of our daily experience.

This ICT-enabled democratic future is unlikely to come from the corporate world of Silicon Valley, however.

Zuckerbergs own kingdom is one of the most autocratic public companies in the world when it comes to corporate governance. When Facebook went public in 2012, Zuckerberg held a class of stock that allotted him 10 votes per share, giving him an absolute majority of roughly 60 percent of the voting rights. The companys IPO prospectus was clear about what this means:

Mr. Zuckerberg has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets.

In other words, Zuckerberg could buy WhatsApp for $19 billion and Oculus a few weeks later for $2 billion (after just a weekend of due diligence). Or, a more troubling scenario, he could legally sell his entire company (and all the data on its 1.86 billion users) to, lets say, a Russian oligarch with ties to President Vladimir Putin, who might use the info for nefarious purposes. While these actions technically require board approval, directors are beholden to the shareholder(s) who elect them that is, in this case, Zuckerberg.

It is not just Facebook that has this autocratic voting structure. Googles founders also have dominant voting control, as do leaders in countless tech firms that have gone public since 2010, including Zillow, Groupon, Zynga, GoPro, Tableau, Box and LinkedIn (before its acquisition by Microsoft).

Most recently, Snaps public offering on March 2 took this trend to its logical conclusion, giving new shareholders no voting rights at all.

We place a lot of trust in our online platforms, sharing intimate personal information that we imagine will be kept private. Yet after Facebook acquired WhatsApp, which was beloved for its rigorous protection of user privacy, many were dismayed to discover that some of their personal data would be shared across the Facebook family of companies unless they actively chose to opt out.

For its part, Facebook has made over 60 acquisitions and, along with Google, controls eight of the 10 most popular smartphone apps.

The idea that founders know best and need to be protected from too many checks and balances (e.g., by their shareholders) fits a particular cultural narrative that is popular in Silicon Valley. We might call it the strongman theory of corporate governance.

Perhaps Zuckerberg is the Lee Kuan Yew of the web, a benevolent autocrat with our best interests at heart. Yew became the founding father of modern-day Singapore after turning it from a poor British outpost into one of the wealthiest countries in the world in a few decades.

But that may not be the best qualification for ensuring democracy for users.

ICTs offer the promise of greater democracy on a day-to-day level. But private for-profit companies are unlikely to be the ones to help build it. Silicon Valleys elites run some of the least democratic institutions in contemporary capitalism. It is hard to imagine that they would provide us with neutral tools for self-governance.

The scholar and activist Audre Lorde famously said that the masters tools will never dismantle the masters house. By the same token, I doubt nondemocratic corporations will provide the tools to build a more vibrant democracy. For that, we might look to organizations that are themselves democratic.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Can Silicon Valley's Autocrats Save Democracy? - Honolulu Civil Beat

The country faces profound political disunity, a concept I learned from historian Michael Grant, whose slim but insightful volume The Fall of the Roman Empire I have been recommending since 2009.

As I noted in my 2009 book Survival+, this was a key feature of the Roman Empire in its final slide to collapse.

The shared values and consensus which had held the Empires core together dissolved, leaving petty fiefdoms to war among themselves for what power and swag remained.

A funny thing happens when a nation allows itself to be ruled by Imperial kleptocrats: such rule is intrinsically destabilizing, as there is no longer any moral or political center to bind the nation together.

The public sees the value system at the top is maximize my personal profit by whatever means are available, i.e. complicity, corruption, monopoly and rentier rackets, and they follow suit by pursuing whatever petty frauds and rackets are within reach: tax avoidance, cheating on entrance exams, gaming the disability system, lying on mortgage and job applications, and so on.

But the scope of the rentier rackets is so large, the bottom 95% cannot possibly keep up with the expanding wealth and income of the top .1% and their army of technocrats and enablers, so a rising sense of injustice widens the already yawning fissures in the body politic.

Meanwhile, diverting the national income into a few power centers is also destabilizing, as Central Planning and Market Manipulation (a.k.a. the Federal Reserve) are intrinsically unstable as price can no longer be discovered by unfettered markets.

As a result, imbalances grow until some seemingly tiny incident or disruption triggers a cascading collapse, a.k.a. a phase shift or system re-set.

As the Power Elites squabble over the dwindling crumbs left by the various rentier rackets, theres no one left to fight for the national interest because the entire Status Quo of self-interested fiefdoms and cartels has been co-opted and is now wedded to the Imperial Oligarchy as their guarantor of financial security.

When the system is rigged, democracy is just another public-relations screen to mask the unsavory reality of Oligarchy.

Democracy in America has become a hollow shell.

The conventional markers of democracy elections and elected representatives exist, but they are mere facades; the mechanisms of setting the course of the nation are corrupt, and the power lies outside the publics reach.

History has shown that democratic elections dont guarantee an uncorrupt, functional government. Rather, democracy has become the public-relations stamp of approval for corrupt governance that runs roughshod over individual liberty while centralizing the power to enforce consent, silence critics and maintain the status quo.

If the citizenry cannot replace a dysfunctional government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

In other words, if the citizenry changes the elected representation but the financial Aristocracy and the Deep State remain in charge, then the democracy is nothing but a PR facade for an oppressive oligarchy.

If the erosion of civil liberties and rising inequality characterize the state of the nation, democracy is both dysfunctional and illiberal. A state that strips away the civil liberties of its citizens via civil forfeiture, a war-on-drugs Gulag and unlimited surveillance may be a democracy in name, but it is at heart an oppressive oligarchy.

If the super-wealthy continue to become ever wealthier while the bottom 95% of the citizenry struggle in various stages of debt-serfdom, the state may be a democracy in name, but it is at heart an oppressive oligarchy.

Author/commentator Fareed Zakaria recently addressed the illiberal aspects of Americas faded democracy in an article Americas democracy has become illiberal.

Zakars prettified critique avoided the real worm at the heart of our democracy: the state exists to enforce cartels. Some might be private, some might be state-run, and others might be hybrids, such as our failed Sickcare system and our military industrial complex.

The ultimate role of democracy isnt to give the people a voice; the only meaningful role of democracy is to protect the liberties of individuals from state encroachment, break up cartels and monopolies and limit the corruption of private/public money.

Americas democracy has failed on all counts.

Civil liberties in a nation of ubiquitous central-state surveillance, a quasi-political Gulag (that nickel bag will earn you a tenner in Americas drug-war Gulag) and civil forfeiture (we suspect youre up to no good, so we have the right to steal your car and cash) are eroding fast.

In America, the central governments primary job is enforcing and funding cartels. A mere $10 million in lobbying, revolving-door graft (getting paid $250,000 for a speech or for a couple of board meetings) and bribes (cough-cough, I mean campaign contributions) can secure $100 million in profits either by erecting regulatory/legal barriers or by direct federal funding of the cartels racket (healthcare, defense, National Security, etc.).

The fact that the corruption is veiled does not mean it isnt corruption. In the sort of nations Americans mock as fake democracies, the wealthy protect their wealth and incomes with bags of cash delivered at night to politicians.

In theory, democracy enables advocacy by a variety of groups in order to reach a consensual solution to problems shared by everyone. In practice, the advocacy is limited to a select group of insiders, donors and the various fronts of the wealthy: foundations, think-tanks, lobbyists, etc.

Does anyone think Americas democracy is still capable of solving the truly major long-term problems threatening the nation? Based on what evidence?

What we see is a corrupt machine of governance that kicks every can down the road rather than suffer the blowback of honestly facing problems that will require deep sacrifices and changes in the status quo.

We see a dysfunctional machine of governance that changes the name of legislation and proposes policy tweaks, while leaving the rapacious cartels untouched. (See the current sickcare debate for examples.)

We see an Imperial Project setting the states agenda to suit its own desires, and a corporate media that is quivering with rage now that the public no longer believes its tainted swill of news and reporting.

The divide between the haves and the have-nots is not limited to money its also widening between the few with political power and the teeming serfs with effectively zero political power.

When the system is rigged, democracy is just another public-relations screen to mask the unsavory reality of oligarchy.

Regards,

Charles Hugh Smith for The Daily Reckoning

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Our Hopelessly Dysfunctional Democracy - Daily Reckoning

NEW DELHI: Describing democracy as the "true essence of Jan Bhagidari", Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Saturday that together all the problems can be resolved.

"The true essence of democracy is Jan Bhagidari. Together we will solve all the issues that are affecting the nation. This will be done through Jan Bhagidari," Modi said while addressing the Smart India Hackathon through video conferencing.

The Prime Minister said that there was a perception about democracy and it was restricted to voting only but this is not the reality.

"Democracy is not only giving contract to one government for five years. In reality it is Jan Bhagidari," Modi said.

"A series of issues have been placed before our youth to work on. The issues are challenging but this is also an opportunity. There is a need to use technology more and innovate more. We live in a technology driven era," he added.

Modi said that the youth of India is blessed with phenomenal energy and this energy will bring very good results for the nation.

"India is a youthful nation. The youth of India has come together with enthusiasm for this programme. I am confident the outcomes of what my young friends are doing will lead to very positive results," the Prime Minister said.

Highlights of PM's address:

1. India is a youthful nation. The youth of India has come together with enthusiasm for this programme

2. The youth of India is blessed with phenomenal energy and this energy will bring very good results for the nation

3. There is a need to use technology more and innovate more. We live in a technology driven era

4. A series of issues have been placed before our youth to work on. The issues are challenging but this is also an opportunity

5. The true essence of democracy is 'Jan Bhagidari'

6. Together we will solve all the issues that are affecting the nation. This will be done through 'Jan Bhagidari'

7. I am confident the outcomes of what my young friends are doing will lead to very positive results

8. Artificial intelligence, 3D technology...see how the world is undergoing changes. This is an era of 'Internet of Things'

9. Technology and innovation are powering so many changes. Things like floppies, tape recorders and walkmen are history

10. Technology has made things so much simpler

11. When you are innovating you may face setbacks but do not let those setbacks lower your morale or dampen your spirits

12. When you are innovating remember that quality is key. Good quality products will bring changes in the lives of many people

13. People say today's youngsters ask so many questions and I see that as a very good thing

14. Youth of India wants to find solutions to the nation's problems. They want results that are quick and credible

15. Today, the youngsters of India want to be job creators

16. Application and sharpening of knowledge translates into skills. Both skills and knowledge are important

The rest is here:
True essence of democracy is 'Jan Bhagidari': PM Modi - Economic Times

Slide: 1 / of 1. Caption: Then One/WIRED

On the surface, bitcoin is having a very good year. The price of the digital currency reached record highs well over $1,000 after years of stagnation following a major crash. But if you pull back the curtain, the civil war rages.

The global community of companies, coders, and opportunists who control the bitcoin network is now on the verge of revolt after more than two years of infighting. Basically, the bitcoin network is moving data at a painfully slow pace, and the community cant agree on how to fix it. So, one increasingly powerful group is threatening to hard fork the project. In other words: They could split bitcoin into two separate digital currencies.

The ongoing battle represents a fundamental flaw not only with bitcoin, but with so many other projects based on the idea of a blockchain, the underlying technology that makes bitcoin possible. A blockchain is designed to operate without a central authority, securely verifying and recording transactions through a network machines rather a single government, bank, or company. Across Silicon Valley and beyond, many see this big idea as a way of significantly streamlining the exchange of moneymaybe even changing what it means to build a business. But at the same time, the decentralized nature of these projects is a burden. Theres no good way for the many participants to readily change the underlying technology.

If we have a process for dealing with disagreement we wont have all the collateral damage we see with bitcoin. Arthur Breitman, Tezos

The community behind Ethereum, another influential part of this movement, recently forked its project after hackers exploited a bug in its code. That was their best option. And now, bitcoin is facing much the same conundrum. Its a flaw that could ultimately bring the digital currency crashing down.

But Arthur and Kathleen Breitman are working to eliminate this flaw. Theyre building a new blockchain where the stakeholders can change the underlying technology through a kind of online voting systema blockchain that can evolve according to the will of its community. If we have a process for dealing with disagreement, for being constructive and moving on, we wont have all the collateral damage we see with bitcoin, says Arthur Brietman, 35, a French-born financial trader and technologist who spent several years with big-name banks like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. The biggest risk to bitcoin is a split in the community. That would harm the network. This is the kind of thing were trying to avoid.

The project may indeed provide a better way of building this kind of vastly distributed systemand possibly create a new kind of business. But it also raises questions about the fundamental nature of these projects and, indeed, the fundamental nature of democracy.

The Brietmans are husband-and-wife entrepreneurs based in Silicon Valley. Part of the vibrant, idealistic, and sometimes strange community of young free thinkers working to build a new kind of company using blockchain technologies, they call their creation Tezos. Under the cheeky pseudonym LM Goodmana thinly veiled reference to the Newsweek journalist who incorrectly identified the creator of bitcointhey first released a paper describing the project in 2014. Now, as they prepare to unveil the technology amid the battle over bitcoin, it carries a new significance.

On the bitcoin blockchain, transactions are processed and recorded by a vast network of miners, specialized machines that lend their computing power to the operation. In exchange for their participation, the miners receive bitcoin. But Tezos doesnt work that way. It will sell its tokens to the world at large, and then the token holders will help process and record the transactions. Basically, in recording each transaction, the system asks for help from a random token holder.

Whats more, these token holders will have the right to suggest and vote on changes to the network itself. The more tokens you hold, the more voting power you have. In other words, the token holders control the system in full. In this way, Tezos becomes a working democracy. Everyone can vote, and the vote decides outcomes. Some blockchain veterans believe Tezos could fundamentally change the dynamics of blockchain technology, helping to move projects closer to the grand ideals they espouse.

Its like the American democratic system, says Olaf Carlson-Wee, the first employee at Coinbase, Silicon Valleys most important bitcoin company, who has invested in Tezos through his hedge fund, Polychain. When you vote, even if your candidate doesnt win, you accept that democracy was in action. When people participate in a Tezos network, theyre accepting that the democratic vote of the other coin holders will govern the way the protocol moves.

Bitcoin, you could argue, is also a democracy. But the system operates in an ad hoc way. Participants must individually and manually upgrade the software running on miners and other machines, and this leads to the kind of thing you now see with the digital currency: months of people arguing, both online and off, about how the network should evolve. Tezos removes this unorganized in-fightingand then some. Through the Tezos voting system, stakeholders can also change the voting system. We are not necessarily beholden to voting as a governance mechanism, Breitman says. Every part of the system can evolve, including the governance system itself. He compares this means of self-correction to a constitutional amendmentanother powerful idea in light of the conflict over bitcoin.

If Tezos works, the knock-on effect is potentially enormous. Like Ethereum, the Tezos blockchain is designed to run smart contracts, online agreements built with computer code that can be used to bootstrap all sorts of other businesses and applications. (Ethereum, for instance, is now driving everything from hedge funds to distributed supercomputers.)

Tezos could extend this growing trend. But its also another invitation to completely start over. Though Bitcoin and Ethereum have the momentum, Tezos is asking coders and companies to move onto yet another blockchain. And how that will play out is anyones guess. Breitman argues that bitcoin and Ethereum are still relatively smalland in the future, distributed networks will be significantly larger. If you compare them to any other industry, their capitalization is very small and the amount of programming work is still tiny, he says. It is still early in this game.

Over the next several weeks, Breitman and his company will put this stance to the test. First, they will launch an ICO, or initial coin offering, letting anyone buy a digital token tied directly into the operation of the Tezos network. Such offerings are now common practice in the blockchain world, a new way of funding online companies, but also a new way of running them. Those who hold the tokens actually own and control the operation, something thats particularly true with Tezos.

But Breitmans and their idealism may run into reality. It will work crytopgraphically, just in terms of programming language theory, says Zooko Wilcox, who created the bitcoin alternative ZCash. But it is an experiment. Naturally, Wilcox mentions the DAO, an effort to create a kind of automated venture capital fund atop Ethereum.

The DAO was the largest crowdfunded project ever, and thanks to a bug in its smart contract, it was hacked to the tune of $50 million. This catastrophe is what eventually led to the Ethereum fork. Imagine that there is a bug in the version you have all upgraded to, he says, imagining one potential future for Tezos. What if thats a bug prevents future upgrades?

Brietman admits that his democracy could go wrong. But he also points out that this is true of any democracy, including the one here in the US of A. Democracy isnt necessarily about making good choices, he says. Its about avoiding conflict. Of course, there are other ways of avoiding conflict, and in the online agethe post-Trump ageits worth asking whether a true democracy is the best method. The crowds dont always get things right. The hope is that at the very least, democracy will eventually produce more good than bad.

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A Plan to Save Blockchain Democracy From Bitcoin's Civil War - Wired - WIRED