Monthly Archives: August 2021

Protesting seems to be in vogue in the world. Cubans are protesting their deteriorating infrastructure, Peruvians are rising up against electoral fraud, Haitis protests culminated in the murder of their president.

Targeted disinformation is complicating the wave of instability and creating a new form of populism where, absent a popular demagogue, attention is hyper focused on distrust and conspiracy theories. Thats the case in Colombia, where social media usage is among the highest globally.

Since April 28, thousands have marched in Colombia in protest of their government. Complaints have ranged from a (now-withdrawn) tax overhaul, to police brutality, systemic and endemic corruption, the extra-judicial killings of community activists, fracking and renewed demands by the U.S Government to fumigate vast swathes of coca plantations with glyphosate (Round-Up).

Violent factions have wreaked havoc during the protests and reduced Bogots much lauded transportation infrastructure to rubble. The June 26 assassination attempt against President Ivn Duque proved to a majority of Colombians that criminal factions, from frontline vandals financed by crowd funding, to urban militias, pushed Colombia to the brinkbut not over.

The complaints of the self-professed strike committee, however, ignore the progress Colombia has made, including the Nobel prize-winning peace agreement with FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in 2016, which has indirectly made Bogot safer than cities like Detroit or New Orleans.

A comparative look at Colombias sophisticated system, where proportional representationis required in the Senate, reveals stunning discrepancies. The World Health Organization in 2020 ranked Colombian healthcare system 22nd out of 191 countries, beating those of many developed and richer nations including Canada. The lower threshold for income tax is two million pesos monthly (approximately US$557), well above the average Colombian salary. The literacy rate is 95% reflecting a robust education system. And a quick calculation places Bogots homeless rate below 1%; for context, that of Seattle in 2020, was 1.65%.

The administration of Colombian President Ivan Duque, defined by the World Bank as democratic center, was one of the first to create a pandemic relief package for the education sector. While the first edition didnt adequately address the challenges of distance learning, it was certainly one of the fastest pandemic responses of a world leader. The U.S. did not follow suit until December of 2020.

Recently 548 people in the Cali region were reported missing, allegedly at the hands of the police. According to the Deputy Attorney General Martha Yaneth Mancera, most of the reports were false. The majority were found immediately, reported twice, or away on vacation. Of the remaining 91 names on the list, none had any known family. I have a hard time believing that 91 people dont have one friend, mother, brother, wife or anybody who can confirm they are missing, she stated during a news conference.

Who could be behind this false information?

In an interview with the respected Colombian journalist Mara Isabel Rueda, vice-president Marta Luca Ramrez believes that the countrys democracy was the target of a coordinated strategy, financed, planned and well-supported by social media, in order to create chaos, destruction, all acts which have endangered the lives of millions of Colombians.

It is no secret that narco-terrorists and other illegal armed groups receive backing by Venezuelas Nicols Maduro and regime strongman who has been denounced as an illegitimate leader by over 50 countries. Maduros leading foreign policy objective towards Colombia is maintaining the porous border as safe passage for the Marxist ELN and FARC dissidents. Colombian president Duque stated at the UN General Assembly: My government has irrefutable and conclusive proof that corroborates the support of the dictatorship for criminal and narco-terrorist groups that operate in Venezuela to try and attack Colombia.

It is also clear that Colombia has multiple enemies making use of soft cyberwarfare with impunity, to destroy Colombias democracy and preserve their own anonymity. Such disinformation and populism are a toxic duo, comprising a terrifying new global threat affecting us all.

To support an ally such as Colombia, whose democracy has been refined through the crucible of years of conflict, the most effective tool is communication through human presence. As part of its anti-drug interventions in Colombia, the U.S. should encourage initiatives to identify and call out online misinformation by supporting non-governmental organizations and professional outlets that can build a frontline in the battle between truth and falsehoods. And its time for us all to pay attention.

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Op-Ed: Colombia's falling prey to populism and nobody's paying attention. - The City Paper Bogot

Conservative Party leader Erin O'Toole speaks at the Westin hotel after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called an early election, in Ottawa, on Aug. 15, 2021.

LARS HAGBERG/Reuters

When suburban voters side with people who live downtown, as they did in the past two federal elections, Liberals win government. When they side with their country cousins, as they did in 2011, Conservatives win. The platform that the Tories released Monday is designed to make 2011 happen again.

Conservative Leader Erin OToole and his advisers have crafted a dense mix of measures that might best be described as thoughtful populism. Some of those measures, such as allowing foreign telecoms to compete with Canadian providers for your cellphone business, are long overdue. Some of them, such as the one-month GST holiday, are gimmicks.

But all of them aim to attract suburban voters, especially those who are less economically secure, while painting the Liberals as the party of fat-cat Corporate Canada. Will it work? Well soon see.

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The first thing that the Conservatives want you to know is that their plan is serious 83 pages as a PDF, with tiny type but also with many pictures of Mr. OToole, who is looking very fit these days.

Tax credits underpin Conservative plan to spur hiring, growth

The second thing they want you to know is that the Tories are anti-big business. The manifesto is chock full of promises to stand up to Corporate Canada by targeting uncompetitive practices, to make foreign tech companies pay their fair share of taxes, to go after wealthy tax evaders and big corporations, to close tax loopholes for rich, big corporations and those with connections in Ottawa, to stop kowtowing to the wealthy, big U.S. tech companies, and large multinationals, and to stand up for those who dont have a voice.

They would even amend the Labour Code to make it easier for unions to organize, especially against large employers with a history of anti-labour activity.

Third, Canadas Conservatives are anti-downtown. We cant just have a recovery for the downtowns of a few big cities. ... We cant just have a recovery for downtown Toronto. ... Too many politicians and journalists who live in our big cities ignore, dont understand or simply dont care about what is happening outside the major urban areas. And so on.

Canadian federal election 2021: Latest updates and essential reading ahead of Sept. 20 vote

The plan has a distinct bias against well-educated, affluent families with progressive views, and a distinct bias toward people who are less economically secure and more socially conservative. So as well as promising many billions of dollars to create jobs, the Conservatives plan to scrap the Liberals $10-a-day child-care program, which advantages those who can already afford child care, and send the money directly to parents, to use as they wish. People who work nights and rely on unconventional child care sources would appreciate that.

In related news, the Conservatives would counter wokeness on campus by ensuring that public postsecondary institutions accommodate the range of perspectives that make up Canada through a commitment to free speech and academic freedom. And CBC News would be subjected to a not-very-friendly review to ensure it no longer competes with private Canadian broadcasters and digital providers.

Fourth, Canadas Conservatives are tough. They plan harsher penalties for interference with an infrastructure facility or a public transportation system. The Tories are betting suburban voters dont approve of blockades by Indigenous and environmental protesters.

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They plan to be tough on China. They want tariffs on products from countries like China that emit high levels of carbon. They want to reduce dependence on trade from China. They would strengthen alliances to combat Chinas growing authoritarianism, regional influence, and military expansionism.

But they would encourage students from Hong Kong to come to Canada, and are generally favourable to robust immigration. A new program would permit direct private sponsorship of persecuted religious and sexual minorities.

There is plenty in the plan for core supporters, such as lifting the ban on tanker traffic off B.Cs north coast, and improving the tax treatment of family farms.

But Mr. OToole has angered many core supporters by committing his party to pricing carbon, with revenue going into personal low carbon savings accounts that people could draw from to buy cool green things, such as e-bikes. Suburban voters care about climate change.

Over all, the plan is comprehensive, detailed and uncosted. (The Parliamentary Budget Officer is reviewing the document.) But in one sense, the numbers dont matter as much as the intent: to shore up the Conservatives Western and rural base, while attracting suburban voters who work at Walmart.

Now its up to Mr. OToole to sell it.

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Erin O'Toole's Conservatives target suburban voters in election platform of thoughtful populism - The Globe and Mail

Representational image. Elections, Princeton Professor Mller explains in his new book 'Democracy Rules', dont automatically make a democracy.

A few years before he joined the Nazi Party, political theorist Carl Schmitt wrote about why he believed that liberal democracy was an oxymoron. The liberals, in his definition, were keen on incorporating all points of view, which only led to endless discussion and compromise.

In a democratic state, on the other hand, the task is to identify allies and opponents and be hard-headed about making decisions. The influence of his argument still prevails, with shades of majoritarianism and rule by executive decree.

Thats not how everyone sees it. Democracy and its discontents have been the subject of a vast number of books, especially in the recent past. How similar is our concept of it from the Athenians, how participatory should it be, how much equality should it guarantee: these and more have been covered at length.

Now, Jan-WernerMller, author of the earlier What is Populism?, adds another volume to the shelf. In Democracy Rules, Mller, a professor of politics at Princeton, continues his argument by asserting that democracy is about freedom and equality for all. Populism has to be kept in check for it to prevail.

His definition of populists is the one in common parlance today. That is, not those who genuinely engage with peoples aspirations to challenge power structures, but those who claim to be the voice of the people for their own ends.

As he says in his earlier book, this is inherently hostile to the mechanisms and, ultimately, the values commonly associated with constitutionalism: constraints on the will of the majority, checks and balances, protections for minorities, and even fundamental rights.

He emphasises a current sense of crisis because of the actions of several regimes, in which he includes those of Orbn, Erdoan, Kaczyski, Modi, and Bolsonaro. The family resemblances arise because of a shared authoritarian-populist art of governance.

Once populists assert that only they can represent the people, writes Mller, they can also claim that all other contenders are illegitimate. Thus, civil society protests are labelled as having nothing to do with the real people, and activists are portrayed as tools of external agents.

An example is Turkeys 2013 Gezi Park protests which, an Erdoan adviser explained, was the doing of Lufthansa. The German airline allegedly feared increased competition from Turkish Airlines after the opening of Istanbuls new airport. Imagine that.

The point is that in a society of free and equal citizens, differences are not going to magically disappear. They need to be assessed, managed, and incorporated. Mller is also clear that elections dont automatically make a democracy: It depends on how exactly they are understood and on what happens before and, especially, after votes for representatives are cast.

What, then, are the characteristics of a desired democracy? For Mller, two stand out: losing and uncertainty.

The assumption that a losing party is irrelevant because it has been rejected by the majority doesnt wash in a democracy. For a start, such parties can force the winners into concessions, either during an election campaign, or as a result of a strong showing at the polls, or because of later circumstances.

This is the art of turning a loss into a demonstration of integrity. A loyal opposition shows a commitment to democracy, a key contrast with the ancient Athenian type of rule.

Of course, the other side of the coin is all-important. A governing party must recognise the oppositions special role and engage with it. Ideally there is a running discussion between majority and minority, in parliament and beyond, with arguments circling in an ongoing (yet also contained) political conflict. Losers should remain at liberty to make their case; they are not excluded or systematically disadvantaged (as they are under the rule of authoritarian populists).

The uncertainty aspect is to do with the notion that political outcomes such as election results have to be undetermined at the start. The alternatives: North Korea, where official candidates literally receive 100 percent of the vote; or other dictatorships such as Azerbaijan, where election results were accidentally released on an iPhone app the day before the vote in 2013.

Uncertainty also respects the possibility that people sometimes change their minds. A functioning democracy protects members of a one-time majority who might want to shift their ground. These could be legislators or citizens. Mllers case is that elections are based on a census, but they are not like a census: a dynamic political process might lead citizens to prioritise aspects of their identity in surprising ways.

How should one safeguard these principles and political rights to speak and assemble freely? Importantly, what he calls hard borders must be protected, such as not denying the standing of particular citizens as free and equal members of the polity.

Mller highlights democracys critical infrastructure, by which he means associations, political parties, and the media. Its not just about the ballot box; these are sites for the continuous formation of opinions and political judgments in society at large: anybody can have a say, at more or less any time.

As Habermas put it, this is a public sphere which can be a space for wild cacophonies. Thats a good thing, feels Mller: multiple voices clash, opinions get tweaked and fine-tuned; people pick up cues as to what they should think, even if they cant spend hours on the finer details of policy. In his timely metaphor, its like a mass Zoom meeting, with some people talking at us, unsure whether anyone is listening, others off in group chats on the side, and some engaged in private one-on-one exchanges.

Mller suggests ways to prevent the decay of democratic norms and institutions, so vividly highlighted by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their earlier How Democracies Die. Democracy isnt free, he writes, and we could consider asking citizens themselves to maintain it. Candidates, for example, could be supported by schemes such as Seattles democracy vouchers funded by property taxes, through which citizens contribute to electoral campaigns.

It hardly bears repeating that both misinformation and disinformation have become easier to spread. A system of legitimate checks apart, one solution is to allow an even greater diversification of media outlets and public funding of non-profit media groups. The media should also be allowed to report within a frame of values they pursue as long as that frame is transparently acknowledged.

Mullers book doesnt dig deep into the reasons legitimate or not -- for the acceptance of populists in the first place. And it offers few pointers on what to do about bad-faith actors, who now seem to be everywhere.

Nevertheless, he offers reasons for hope. For a start, the ranks of those disappointed by democracy, but not ready to ditch it, include millennials, who have been suspected of caring less about democracy than they should.

Despite dismaying polarisation, what politics has created, politics can undo. The underlying message throughout is that democracy thrives when theres more: more discussion, more participation, more media, more parties, and more arenas for disagreement.

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How democracy is about losing and uncertainty - Moneycontrol.com