democracy – praag.org

3rd presidential terms: ‘African leaders don’t hold elections to lose them’

Attempts by African leaders to circumvent constitutional term limits so they could stay in power longer had become a major source of conflict on the continent, analysts said on Tuesday.

These attempts to cling to power – which have been dubbed “third-termism” – had become the “new coups” on the continent, a seminar on the margins of this week’s African Union (AU) summit in Sandton heard.

The summit was expected to address the crisis in Burundi, provoked by President Pierre Nkurunziza’s announcement in April that he would run for a third term in office, despite the two-term limit in the country’s constitution. Similar attempts by other leaders were threatening stability in a few other countries.

David Zenmenou, of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) said at the seminar that Africa had made significant progress towards stability and democracy since independence.

The high frequency of military coups in the first decades of independence had diminished. “That’s progress.” Democracy had become “the new language in town.”

But most of the continent’s leaders still saw democracy as a threat to their interests and their manoeuvres to stay in power had become a major source of instability and conflict.

This included the collapse of governments into chaos when leaders clung to power until they died, leaving no succession plans.

“African leaders don’t hold elections to lose them,” he said, adding that they used whatever instruments they could to win, including manipulating electoral commissions and voters rolls.

Between 2000 and 2015, 15 African leaders had tried to remain in power by changing their countries’ constitutions to remove presidential term limits. Eleven had succeeded and four had failed. – ANA (shortened)

US, UK and NATO up the infowar

Documents posted on the web reveal a high-level anti-Russian propaganda war being waged in south and eastern Ukraine by the US, the UK and NATO on behalf of the Kiev Government, using non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as agents.

According to the Drakula blog, the West is raising its game in its campaign against Russian President Vladimir Putin. While it is — on the one hand — pumping up the military volume by moving NATO and US hardware nearer to the Ukraine and Russian borders, it is also playing a hybrid war by pumping funds into an anti-Russian propaganda war.

NATO documents show that a “co-ordination meeting on StratCom training for Ukraine” was held in Riga, Latvia on February 19, 2015 as part of its “on-going capacity building programme”.

StratCom stands for Strategic Communication, which means dealing with the “inability of Ukrainian media to provide sufficient reach for the south/east of the country; vast reach of media originating from Russia; lack of strong Public Broadcaster; lack of success stories; [and] lack of trust of the population of the south/eastern regions in the central government”.

The NATO document reveals the Kiev Government has a “weak Public Affairs capacity” and sets out proposals to counter Russian influence and tackling what it describes as a lack of cross-government work and co-ordination as well as a lack of understanding of the importance of “national narrative”.

Further documents reveal a project run by the UK Foreign Office, the Department for International Development and the Ministry of Defence worth $360,500 with the purpose of: “National reconciliation in Ukraine through effective communication for restoring public trust and empowering of the participatory democracy mechanisms using regional media coverage, counteraction to Russian information influence”.

It outlines a pro-Kiev propaganda battle using Ukrainian agencies including the Ukrainian Institute for International Politics (UIIP); the Analytical Center for Geopolitical Studies ‘Borysfen Intel’ (BI); and the Department of the civil-military cooperation, HQ of the armed forces.

The program involves “resuming the communication and community dialog in Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine using international experience shared by UIIP and BI foreign partners; informational support of national reconciliation ideas through broadcasting and media coverage of Eastern and Southern Ukraine regions by new alternative regional mass-media and Internet resources; and decreasing the Russian information influence in Ukraine, discredit of the Russian political and military leaders.”

The revelations will embarrass the US, NATO and UK who have been at pains to denounce Russia for promoting what they call a ‘hybrid war’ in Ukraine.

Source: Sputniknews

How America became an Oligarchy

American democracy no longer exists

According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites.

“Making the world safe for democracy” was President Woodrow Wilson’s rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American military intervention ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home?

The Magna Carta, considered the first Bill of Rights in the Western world, established the rights of nobles as against the king. But the doctrine that “all men are created equal” – that all people have “certain inalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – is an American original. And those rights, supposedly insured by the Bill of Rights, have the right to vote at their core. We have the right to vote but the voters’ collective will no longer prevails.

In Greece, the left-wing populist Syriza Party came out of nowhere to take the presidential election by storm; and in Spain, the populist Podemos Party appears poised to do the same. But for over a century, no third-party candidate has had any chance of winning a US presidential election. We have a two-party winner-take-all system, in which our choice is between two candidates, both of whom necessarily cater to big money. It takes big money just to put on the mass media campaigns required to win an election involving 240 million people of voting age.

In state and local elections, third party candidates have sometimes won. In a modest-sized city, candidates can actually influence the vote by going door to door, passing out flyers and bumper stickers, giving local presentations, and getting on local radio and TV. But in a national election, those efforts are easily trumped by the mass media. And local governments too are beholden to big money.

When governments of any size need to borrow money, the megabanks in a position to supply it can generally dictate the terms. Even in Greece, where the populist Syriza Party managed to prevail in January, the anti-austerity platform of the new government is being throttled by the moneylenders who have the government in a chokehold.

How did we lose our democracy? Were the Founding Fathers remiss in leaving something out of the Constitution? Or have we simply gotten too big to be governed by majority vote?

Democracy’s Rise and Fall

The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called “The Collapse of Democratic Nation States” by theologian and environmentalist Dr. John Cobb. Going back several centuries, he points to the rise of private banking, which usurped the power to create money from governments:

The influence of money was greatly enhanced by the emergence of private banking. The banks are able to create money and so to lend amounts far in excess of their actual wealth. This control of money-creation . . . has given banks overwhelming control over human affairs. In the United States, Wall Street makes most of the truly important decisions that are directly attributed to Washington.

Today the vast majority of the money supply in Western countries is created by private bankers. That tradition goes back to the 17th century, when the privately-owned Bank of England, the mother of all central banks, negotiated the right to print England’s money after Parliament stripped that power from the Crown. When King William needed money to fight a war, he had to borrow. The government as borrower then became servant of the lender.

In America, however, the colonists defied the Bank of England and issued their own paper scrip; and they thrived. When King George forbade that practice, the colonists rebelled.

They won the Revolution but lost the power to create their own money supply, when they opted for gold rather than paper money as their official means of exchange. Gold was in limited supply and was controlled by the bankers, who surreptitiously expanded the money supply by issuing multiple banknotes against a limited supply of gold.

This was the system euphemistically called “fractional reserve” banking, meaning only a fraction of the gold necessary to back the banks’ privately-issued notes was actually held in their vaults. These notes were lent at interest, putting citizens and the government in debt to bankers who created the notes with a printing press. It was something the government could have done itself debt-free, and the American colonies had done with great success until England went to war to stop them.

President Abraham Lincoln revived the colonists’ paper money system when he issued the Treasury notes called “Greenbacks” that helped the Union win the Civil War. But Lincoln was assassinated, and the Greenback issues were discontinued.

In every presidential election between 1872 and 1896, there was a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. Typically organized under the auspices of labor or farmer organizations, these were parties of the people rather than the banks. They included the Populist Party, the Greenback and Greenback Labor Parties, the Labor Reform Party, the Antimonopolist Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and democratic control of the financial system.

The Populist movement of the 1890s represented the last serious challenge to the bankers’ monopoly over the right to create the nation’s money. According to monetary historian Murray Rothbard, politics after the turn of the century became a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties sometimes changed hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players.

In All the Presidents’ Bankers, Nomi Prins names six banking giants and associated banking families that have dominated politics for over a century. No popular third party candidates have a real chance of prevailing, because they have to compete with two entrenched parties funded by these massively powerful Wall Street banks.

Democracy Succumbs to Globalization

In an earlier era, notes Dr. Cobb, wealthy landowners were able to control democracies by restricting government participation to the propertied class. When those restrictions were removed, big money controlled elections by other means:

First, running for office became expensive, so that those who seek office require wealthy sponsors to whom they are then beholden. Second, the great majority of voters have little independent knowledge of those for whom they vote or of the issues to be dealt with. Their judgments are, accordingly, dependent on what they learn from the mass media. These media, in turn, are controlled by moneyed interests.

Control of the media and financial leverage over elected officials then enabled those other curbs on democracy we know today, including high barriers to ballot placement for third parties and their elimination from presidential debates, vote suppression, registration restrictions, identification laws, voter roll purges, gerrymandering, computer voting, and secrecy in government.

The final blow to democracy, says Dr. Cobb, was “globalization” – an expanding global market that overrides national interests:

[T]oday’s global economy is fully transnational. The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their influence on markets and investments. . . . Thus transnational corporations inherently work to undermine nation states, whether they are democratic or not.

The most glaring example today is the secret twelve-country trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If it goes through, the TPP will dramatically expand the power of multinational corporations to use closed-door tribunals to challenge and supersede domestic laws, including environmental, labor, health and other protections.

Looking at Alternatives

Some critics ask whether our system of making decisions by a mass popular vote easily manipulated by the paid-for media is the most effective way of governing on behalf of the people. In an interesting Ted Talk, political scientist Eric Li makes a compelling case for the system of “meritocracy” that has been quite successful in China.

In America Beyond Capitalism, Prof. Gar Alperovitz argues that the US is simply too big to operate as a democracy at the national level. Excluding Canada and Australia, which have large empty landmasses, the United States is larger geographically than all the other advanced industrial countries of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) combined. He proposes what he calls “The Pluralist Commonwealth”: a system anchored in the reconstruction of communities and the democratization of wealth. It involves plural forms of cooperative and common ownership beginning with decentralization and moving to higher levels of regional and national coordination when necessary. He is co-chair along with James Gustav Speth of an initiative called The Next System Project, which seeks to help open a far-ranging discussion of how to move beyond the failing traditional political-economic systems of both left and Right..

Dr. Alperovitz quotes Prof. Donald Livingston, who asked in 2002:

What value is there in continuing to prop up a union of this monstrous size? . . . [T]here are ample resources in the American federal tradition to justify states’ and local communities’ recalling, out of their own sovereignty, powers they have allowed the central government to usurp.

Taking Back Our Power

If governments are recalling their sovereign powers, they might start with the power to create money, which was usurped by private interests while the people were asleep at the wheel. State and local governments are not allowed to print their own currencies; but they can own banks, and all depository banks create money when they make loans, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged.

The federal government could take back the power to create the national money supply by issuing its own Treasury notes as Abraham Lincoln did. Alternatively, it could issue some very large denomination coins as authorized in the Constitution; or it could nationalize the central bank and use quantitative easing to fund infrastructure, education, job creation, and social services, responding to the needs of the people rather than the banks.

The freedom to vote carries little weight without economic freedom – the freedom to work and to have food, shelter, education, medical care and a decent retirement. President Franklin Roosevelt maintained that we need an Economic Bill of Rights. If our elected representatives were not beholden to the moneylenders, they might be able both to pass such a bill and to come up with the money to fund it.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores successful public banking models historically and globally.

Tutu salutes uprising in Hong Kong

The purple cleric, archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has called on “all who believe in democracy” to support the protests in Hong Kong his foundation said on Wednesday.

“I salute the courage of the hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong citizens who have participated in mass demonstrations in the territory in recent days to assert peacefully their right to have a say in the election of their leaders,” Tutu said in a statement.

“Their struggle is one that all who believe in the principles of democracy and justice should support.”

Thousands of demonstrators were blocking major roads in various districts of Hong Kong, continuing yet another colour protest that began Sunday.

Protesters are demanding reforms ahead of the 2017 elections, including the public nomination of candidates for next chief executive.

Tutu suggested that demonstrations were peaceful. He slammed the “attack on protesters” by law enforcement agencies.

“The firing of teargas at demonstrators, as happened on Sunday, was a bitter blow to what many still hope will be a peaceful, inclusive and dignified transformation process. I pray that the voices of the people of Hong Kong will never be stifled,” he said.

China said it would not intervene in the protests. The chaos could harm Hong Kong as a money destination to favour Singapore.

Why I hate South Africa, part 1

by Dan Roodt

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South Africa is a land of great natural beauty. Its unique flora and fauna attract tourists from all over the world. Due to geological accident, we also have buried beneath our soil and rock the biggest or second biggest mineral bonanza of all time, including 80% of the world’s platinum. Since 1886 when gold was discovered, various fortunes have been made in mining those mineral deposits.

The weather, at least where I live in the north of Johannesburg, is more than ideal; it is perfect. We have three hundred days of sunshine per year or thereabouts and it is never too hot or too cold. Visitors from the northern hemisphere mistake our winters for summer as midday temperatures go above twenty Centigrade.

When the Voortrekkers, our nineteenth-century pioneers crossed the Drakensberg in their ox-wagons and arrived in the Transvaal, they stumbled upon a pristine land of sunshine, savannah and plentiful game, a true paradise.

South Africa could have been utopia, if it had not been for her people. Even using such a possessive pronoun in the feminine gender implies some kind of connection between the land and its inhabitants, if not patriotism. Now, patriotism and a sense of belonging would be the last thing the average interloper strutting and stomping about this fair land could be suspected of. Rather, he or she regards this bountiful place as the forty thieves did the cave of Ali Baba, simply a source of loot!

The turning point in South African history came in the nineteenth century when the gold rush drew like a magnet a horde of crazed would-be capitalists and criminals to these shores. For a few decades during the twentieth century we had managed to staunch the mayhem, the cold, unscrupulous greed venting itself upon us. Alas, for a variety of reasons – not least the utter cowardice and stupidity of the former Afrikaner leadership – that time of growth and hope for the future is long past. All that we may look forward to is more decadent dissolution, more crime and venality that will rage unabatedly. It is as if the land itself has been wounded, stung and, like a predator sensing its own demise, lashes out at every living being within the arc of its claws and fangs.

The floodgates of hell have been opened, in the name of “democracy”, that exalted term. It has become, in our context, comical, ironic and even absurd. It reminds me of the GDR, the German “Democratic” Republic which was equally lacking in real democracy. But let me not insult that erstwhile “farmers’ and workers’ state”, the GDR, by comparing contemporary South Africa to it. At least in the GDR there were still some principles held by a few people, communists at that, whereas South Africa has descended to the level of delinquent insouciance in which values or principles only exist to be mocked or sneered at.

Normally I would write these words in our noble local language, Afrikaans, which washed up on the shores of the Cape from Northern Europe. A spoken language, a patois of Dutch and Low German, we have lovingly preserved and standardised it to become one of the world’s great cultural languages. Yet, in recent times and under the influence of the ambient nihilism of South Africa, many of our people have discarded this age-old tongue, full of mysterious words and expressions that formed that “bridge between Europe and Africa” that NP van Wyk Louw, perhaps our greatest poet, spoke of.

South Africa has become a dump in every sense of the word. And I say that not only because garbage or litter is literally strewn all over, but because its inhabitants have no real sense of value. Money is proverbially “easy”, obtained through corruption or simple robbery and theft. So like all parvenus the “South Africans” do not know what it means to save, invest or work for money. However, in a more fundamental sense, things of great value – cultural, historical, linguistic, architectural, artistic – are simply thrown away, dumped. Some of our greatest buildings, monuments to a past of taste and a strong national identity, have been demolished without so much as a second thought.

Afrikaans too, has been dumped, with everything else, including by many Afrikaners who have become caught up in the general decay, the loss of societal moorings that have come to characterise this entity which we still mistakenly call a “republic”. To say that I feel alienated from South Africa represents an understatement. However, I feel almost equally alienated from my fellow Afrikaners, these new, obsequious, treacherous and venal people who are but a pale shadow of their patriotic and pioneering forebears. Apart from a tiny minority of proud and civilised Afrikaners who still honour their culture, language and traditions, the rest have become almost mimic men in the sense given to that term by V.S. Naipaul, a second-hand, quasi-British people and as rootless as the illegal African immigrants that wander over our borders on a daily basis.

Perhaps predictably, the Afrikaner has become ashamed of himself. Taunted and vilified by the invective and propaganda of his enemies, he has lacked the courage and the intelligence to respond in any meaningful way. The abjectness of the Afrikaner’s spiritual surrender is painful to behold. That is why this text would be simply lost on the vast majority of Afrikaners, milling about in their confusion, self-doubt and self-hatred. The glib clichés of their journalists and pundits, imitating American-liberal or politically correct discourse, are quite beyond any form of serious discussion or reflection. Like Captain Ahab confronting Moby Dick, I have to face up to this monstrous entity with the bland geographical name, South Africa, casting this message appositely to sea like a message in a bottle that might be read somewhere on the other side of the globe, or not read at all.

Apparently the first Roodt came to South Africa in the early 1700s, so despite what Afrocentric blacks proclaim to the contrary, that “Africa belongs to the Africans”, I may consider myself to some extent naturalised. I hold no other passport. Yet I am also very aware of the murderous xenophobia at the heart of contemporary South Africa which holds that both the white man and the foreign African are unwanted, “foreign”, fit only to be expelled or to be killed.

Like any sensible person of European descent has to admit, South Africa hates us. We are despised for many reasons, some more atavistic and preposterous than others, but in no other country has pure, unadulterated ethnic hatred been so mythologised and so obfuscated by largely spurious interpretations of history as here. Lest I be accused of lapsing into the commonplace black-white rhetoric representing analysis or thinking in South Africa, I am accutely aware that much of what passes for racial feeling in South Africa has always been stirred up from outside or been a handy way for the oligarchy currently looting us to justify its domination and ludicrously discriminatory policies, however much they may be clothed in US-style, politically correct jargon.

Sooner or later, one has to confront the salient fact: South Africa, or the gathering mob on the way to another necklace killing, that symbol of “liberation”, hates me. In turn, and increasingly so, I have come to hate South Africa. With a passion.

I may still love boerewors and biltong, and soaking up the winter sun through my window, but I have only contempt for this failed-state-in-the-making, this pseudo-democracy, this Little England, Little America and everything little, belittling and petty that one may imagine.

South Africa has no reason for existing. It is not the name of a country, but of a pathology. It possesses no identity to speak of. It is just a big parasite preying on the labours of the few who are still, against all odds, pursuing a normal existence under the Southern Cross.

I think I could write a book about why I hate South Africa. However, immediately I have to concede that writing books in South Africa is generally a waste of time. The few people who are still able to read, after umpteen educational experiments, the advent of cellphones and the ambient degeneracy, do not constitute a market for books. There is no literary society. Like everything else in South Africa, the book industry is controlled by a few colonial souls who make money out of importing British books. What is known as the local book, especially the so-called non-fiction book, is merely the endless repetition of baseless clichés and idées reçues. Otherwise there are various talking heads from radio and TV who somehow think that they should also bestow upon themselves the imprimatur of “author” by having their usual vacuous sayings coagulated into print.

The notion of “debate” and especially a debate by means of an argument that might span two or three hundred pages of a book, is so foreign to South Africa that it would make me even more of an outsider than I already am if I had to attempt anything like it. It would appear to be some foreign activity, like playing pétanque on a rugby field.

It remains therefore for me to sum up the very good and multifarious reasons why I hate South Africa.

(To be continued)

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Battle for Hong Kong intensifies as thousands take to the streets

Leading the pack against Beijing, — Leading the pack against Beijing

Thousands protested in Hong Kong on Wednesday pressing China to allow full democracy in the city as a battle intensifies over Beijing’s attempts to control the outcome of a planned direct election for the city’s leader in 2017.

Beijing had promised direct elections in the former British colony as the goal for 2017, but the devil is in the details of the rules governing who can run.

Pressure has been building between democratic forces in the financial hub, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997, and China’s stability-obsessed Communist Party leaders who fear a rival democrat being voted into office.

Protesters at the annual New Year’s Day democracy rally shouted slogans demanding full democracy in 2017, with a key condition being the open nominations of candidates so that anyone, including China critics, can run for office.

In March 2013 organisers of the “Occupy Central” movement, Benny Tai, Reverend Chu Yiu-ming and Chinese University’s Sociology professor Chan Kin-man officially announced at a news conference that they will start promoting the protest in 2014 if the government’s proposals for universal suffrage fail to meet international standards

But Chinese officials and leftist newspapers have rejected that, citing the city’s mini-constitution that states all nominees must be endorsed by a 1,200-strong election committee, which is stacked with Beijing loyalists. – Reuters

Turkish PM: Israel behind Egypt coup

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims Ankara has proof Israel was behind the July 3 military “coup” that toppled Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, Turkish media report.

Erdogan said the West was beginning to redefine democracy as a process that is not solely determined at the ballot box, although the poll represents “the people’s will.”

“This is what has been implemented in Egypt. Who is behind this? Israel. We have evidence,” Erdogan said, as quoted by the Hurriyet daily, during a meeting with provincial chairs of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Erdogan spoke of a meeting between Turkey’s justice minister and a “Jewish” intellectual in France before Egypt’s 2011 elections.

“The Muslim Brotherhood will not be in power even if they win the elections. Because democracy is not the ballot box’: This is what [the intellectual] said at that time,” the PM continued.

Erdogan did not clarify what connection the unidentified intellectual had to the Israeli government or how his alleged opinion proved Israel played any part in the recent ouster of Morsi.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry declined to respond to Erdogan’s accusation. “This is a statement well worth not commenting on,” said ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor.

In March, Israel attempted rapprochement with Turkey after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Erdogan to apologize for the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid that resulted in the deaths of eight Turks and one Turkish-American.

Erdogan accepted the apology and both sides agreed to carry out further discussions. The PM, however, said that normalization of bilateral ties would take time, insinuating that Turkey wanted to ensure victims of the raid were compensated and that Israel remained committed to easing the restriction of goods to Gaza before restoring relations.

The Turkish PM, an outspoken supporter of Morsi and his Islamist government, lashed out at the West for failing to act in light of last week’s bloody crackdown against Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Having previously condemned the coup, Erdogan insisted that Morsi be reinstated through a democratic process.

Erdogan’s ruling AKP, which has Islamic roots, had developed ties with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and aimed to boost Turkey’s regional clout by bolstering its relationship with the North African state. – RT

Mugabe understands democracy well

by Dan Roodt

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Is it not astounding that so many people are criticising the outcome of the Zimbabwean elections, when that country went through an official poll in which Zanu (PF) won a clear majority?

In addition, Robert Mugabe’s view of democracy is entirely commensurate with that of most western leaders, especially those of Britain and the US. There exists a dichotomy between the spectacle of campaigning and voting – the soap opera of elections – and the real business of power that is normally settled outside of public scrutiny, in proverbial smoke-filled rooms.

Democracy is what follows a “state of exception” (Carl Schmitt) during which one regime is replaced by another. Both the American and French revolutions were examples of such states of exception. In the case of Zimbabwe, Britain virtually appointed Mugabe as permanent president during the state of exception known as the Lancaster House Conference of 1979. Every election since in Zimbabwe has merely confirmed Britain’s support for revolutionary change in the ex-Rhodesia, hence the hypocrisy of complaints about largely minor deficiencies in the Zimbabwean electoral process.

Writing in the UK Daily Mail two days ago, columnist Stephen Glover said:

“Instead of expressing his anxieties, the Foreign Secretary could offer the Zimbabwean people a heartfelt apology on behalf of the British Government for inflicting Robert Mugabe on them in the first place, and then standing aside as he pillaged his country, murdered his enemies and ruined the economy… What has happened in Zimbabwe is to Britain’s eternal shame.”

Mr Mugabe is a self-styled “strong leader”. In so doing, he is simply displaying the “leadership” that everyone talks about, and that they even teach in business schools.

Modern democracy is indeed a process whereby the voter surrenders his freedom of action to members of the elite who may act on his behalf, tax him and even impoverish him to their heart’s content. During the banking crisis, we have seen how Western governments did the same and have burdened future generations with mountains of debt, simply to save their sponsors and cronies among members of the corrupt banking fraternity.

In most third-world countries, including Zimbabwe, you first queue to vote and then you stand in line for bread or some or other hand-out. The one is good practice for the other.

In South Africa, of course, those who queue to vote are rewarded with poverty, joblessness and grants of R250 a month, enough to buy beer and air time. Just look at the 10 biggest companies by market capitalisation on the JSE, and you will notice that smoking and drinking beer dwarf all other forms of economic activity, followed by mobile telephony.

Democracy is all about talking, drinking, smoking and making babies, for which you get child-support grants. The notion of freedom as defined by the philosophers of the western enlightenment is, of course, slightly more complex and subtle than subsisting for the sake of a pay-as-you-go cellphone connection.

Sadly, such classical ideas of freedom and what some people refer to as “higher ideals” have been derided by so-called “liberals” and Marxists as being tantamount to fascism. Taking pride in one’s language or culture, showing patriotism or constructing a society where people are not sheep to be lorded over by professional politicians, are all very suspect notions that are regularly denounced as “right-wing extremism”.

Aspiring to be one’s own master, holding one’s leaders accountable for public expenditure and the quality of their decision-making is reminiscent of the Tea Party programme in the US.

As the New York Times has assured us, the Tea Party is a racist movement of soon-to-be-outnumbered white Americans who hanker after the halcyon days of the Ku Klux Klan.

Private property, too, is a decidedly reactionary concept, which Mr Mugabe has “democratically” dispensed with. Most white-owned farms in Zimbabwe were bought after 1990 and after ZANU (PF)’s accession to power, yet the rights of these property owners were forfeited in favour of a revolutionary “land-reform programme”.

Most university professors in the West and in SA probably applauded him for trampling upon private property. Not to mention the nongovernmental organisations for whom starvation is big business and whose customers, the voters, will queue up again for hand-outs.

The destiny of man is to be a shopper. Everything else is Nazism, even though German Chancellor Angela Merkel still attends the annual Wagner Festival in Bayreuth.

No doubt the professors and media pundits will soon have Wagner banned worldwide and then everybody will just listen to Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. Democracy entails the lowering of intellectual and aesthetic standards down to the basest level.

The verbiage of Barack Obama on “democracy” resembles the kitsch of fast food, wearing track suits and sports caps in public and the obsessive, banal voyeurism of most TV programmes. We are living through a modern version of Nero’s mob rule whereby a few powerful political and financial dictators occupy the minds of the masses with “bread and circuses”, an election being the ultimate circus, of course.

As Pat Buchanan has said somewhere, democracy cannot be foisted on people by carpet-bombing them from 40 000 feet. Zimbabwe is but one among a number of societies that have been destabilised by so-called democracy. In North Africa and the Middle East, the West has not balked at supporting Al-Qaeda and related fundamentalist movements in a kind of anti-modern fervour. The paradox is that modern democracy so often leads to fundamentalism, mayhem and even primitivism.

Systems of ethnic domination whereby one group is victimised by another are routinely approved as “democratic”. In fact, there is an element of sadism in South African democracy with its endemic violence, torture and persecution of ethnic minorities about which international silence is maintained. Far from making people free, democracy often leads to greater coercion and oppression than more traditional forms of rule. It seems that democracy may only be established through terror, coercion and war, while the most democratic countries, such as the U.S. and the U.K., are also the most aggressive when it comes to foreign military adventures and attacking other countries.

Not for nothing did the Russian leader Mr. Vladimir Putin state that he was revolted by the “pro-democracy rebels” of Syria who devoured the organs of their enemies. Under democracy, more and more such cannibalistic incidents are also occurring in South Africa.

Not only does Mr Mugabe understand democracy and its empty theatrics well, but his wife Grace has mastered the art of shopping better than any New York socialite.

Surely the elected leader of Zimbabwe deserves a better press?

This is an extended version of a letter published today in Business Day.

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When a coup is not a coup, and democracy not about elections

The Egyptian military’s overthrow of elected President Mohamed Morsi left United States President Barack Obama grappling with a difficult question of diplomacy and language in dealing with the Arab world’s most populous nation: was it a coup?

At stake as Obama and his aides wrestle with that question in the coming days is the $1.5-billion in aid the US sends to Cairo each year – almost all of it for the military – as well as the president’s views on how best to promote Arab democracy.

If the United States formally declares Morsi’s ousting a coup, US law mandates that most aid for its longtime ally must stop. And that could weaken the Egyptian military, one of the country’s most stable institutions with long-standing ties to US authorities.

Further complicating Obama’s calculus is the fact that millions of Egyptians rallied in favour of Morsi’s departure, and that the military announced a road map for return to civilian rule that was blessed by Egypt’s Muslim and Christian religious leaders.

But Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood retain backing from a broad swath of Egyptian society, even as he alienated many of his countrymen.

Obama, after meeting top advisors at the White House, said in a statement that he was “deeply concerned” by the army’s actions and had directed the relevant US agencies to review the implications for US assistance to Egypt.

But he did not use the word “coup” and stopped well short of advocating for Morsi’s reinstatement, suggesting Washington might be willing to accept the military’s move as a way to end a political crisis in a nation of 83 million people struggling with severe economic difficulties.

Recent history suggests Obama might take his time on deciding the future of US aid to Egypt, and by extension, Washington’s relations with the country.

US law bars “any assistance to the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup d’etat or decree”.

When Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in June 2009, Washington temporarily suspended aid, but did not cut about $30-million in assistance until more than two months later.

Even then, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not determine as a matter of law that a coup had taken place.

Eric Trager, an expert on Egyptian politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Obama should not label Morsi’s ouster a coup, nor cut off US aid.

“The Obama administration should recognise that as undemocratic as a coup is, it was the result of the basic fact that President Morsi had completely lost control of the Egyptian state,” Trager said by telephone from Egypt.

“Democracy was not the primary thing at stake in Egypt these last few months,” but rather Morsi’s mismanagement and fears of collapse of the Egyptian state, he said.

In announcing Morsi had been deposed and the Egyptian constitution suspended, Egypt’s army commander promised a quick political transition. The military laid out plans for elections and a constitutional review.

The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Martin Dempsey, warned Egyptian military leaders of consequences if Morsi’s overthrow were viewed as a coup.

“At the end of the day it’s their country and they will find their way, but there will be consequences if it is badly handled,” Dempsey told CNN.

Obama also warned against further violence, indicating that Washington’s ultimate decision on aid to Egypt will depend on how Egypt’s armed forces handle the transition in coming weeks.

Morsi, in power for a year, was widely blamed for presiding over a steady decline in Egypt’s economy and for failing to form a broad-based government that included other groups that had joined in the 2011 revolution that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak.

US lawmakers also welcomed Morsi’s departure but called for a quick transition back to democratic rule – with a close look at the aid budget.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, who heads the Senate subcommittee that oversees foreign aid, on Wednesday promised a review of the $1.3-billion in military aid and $250-million in economic aid sent to Cairo each year.

Washington has cut off aid following military coups several times before. In April 2012, the United States suspended at least $13-million of its $140-million in annual aid to Mali following a coup in the West African nation.

Programmes that did not go directly through government ministries were not affected.

Any Obama support for Egypt’s new government is unlikely to face opposition from Republicans in Congress, who had been sceptical of Morsi’s Islamist government.

“Morsi was an obstacle to the constitutional democracy most Egyptians wanted,” said Republican Representative Ed Royce, the chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.

Republicans also voiced strong support for Egypt’s military, whose close ties to Washington stretch back to the 1979 Israeli-Egypt peace accords.

“The Egyptian military has long been a key partner of the United States and a stabilising force in the region, and is perhaps the only trusted national institution in Egypt today,” said US Representative Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House.

“Democracy is about more than elections,” he said. – Reuters

Zombie democracy, or crass majoritarianism

This opinion piece from the British Economist deals with the ‘zombie democracy’ of Turkey, but it might as well have been written about South Africa since 1994 where huge majorities entitle rulers to trample upon the basic rights of minorities, such as whites and Afrikaners.

“BUT I’ve won three elections!” Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s embattled prime minister, growls at his critics. On the face of it, his case is compelling: surely, many people in Turkey and beyond would agree, popularly elected leaders can govern as they please? That’s what democracy means.

Well, no. Majoritarianism—the credo of an expanding group of elected but autocratic rulers around the world, which holds that electoral might always makes you right—is not true democracy, even if, on the face of it, the two things look alike. It is worth explaining why.

To begin with, democratic legitimacy isn’t merely a correlative of a ruler’s share of the vote. Few candidates in the West nowadays win more than half of the votes, still less a majority of the electorate. Most are obliged to govern with slim electoral mandates.

If broad support does not automatically qualify a leader as a democrat, nor does strong opposition disqualify him. Margaret Thatcher’s reforms were contentious, to say the least. The heat and vitriol of politics have intensified in the Fox News, shock-jock, bile-blogging era: Barack Obama is often lambasted as tyrannical or traitorous. Tough decisions, such as spending cuts or tax rises, can provoke widespread anger, as the past few years have demonstrated. Bold reforms, which The Economist applauds, often do the same. That doesn’t make the leaders who impose them undemocratic, either.

The issue is how the relationship between supporters and opponents is managed. In part this is a matter of rules and institutions to constrain a leader’s power and to allow the aggrieved to find redress. These should include a robust account of citizens’ basic rights, independent courts to enforce them and free media to monitor them.

Beyond documents and institutions, the difference between crass majoritarianism and democracy resides in the heads of the mighty. Democrats have a bedrock understanding that the minority (or often majority) who did not vote for them are as much citizens of their country as those who did, and are entitled to a respectful hearing; and that a leader’s job is to deliberate and act in the national interests, not just those of his supporters. Turkey’s protesters took to the streets because they believed Mr Erdogan was not just hostile to their interests but deaf to their complaints. By demonising them as terrorists and foreign agents, and pulverising them with tear gas and water cannon, he has vindicated this belief. The contrast with Brazil, where Dilma Rousseff has insisted that demonstrators have a right to protest, is striking.

Heartless

The basic idea of a democracy is that the voters should pick a government, which rules as it chooses until they see fit to chuck it out. But although voting is an important democratic right, it is not the only one. And winning an election does not entitle a leader to disregard all checks on his power. The majoritarian world view espoused by Mr Erdogan and leaders of his ilk is a kind of zombie democracy. It has the outward shape of the real thing, but it lacks the heart.

Read the whole article in The Economist.

The failure of South African democracy

Let’s face it: South African democracy has failed. There may still be the trappings of people voting every five years and the annual ritual of parliament being opened, but it has turned out to be just a white elephant.

Every election is a racial census. The average “voter” is answering to a vague ethnic calling of voting ANC in order “to show those goddamn whites”, but has no inkling what the economy, foreign policy or the myriad laws streaming out of parliament are all about. You might as well ask him to vote on the latest theory in astrophysics. He is voting on the colour of the document’s cover, not on the contents thereof.

But the ignorance of the electorate is only the start of the problem. This system of government, the so-called Westminster system, was designed in Britain to suit British people. South Africa is a jumble of languages, races and ethnic groups, a real multiethnic society that has nothing in common with the British isles except that we use British spelling conventions. If anything, we should have had the Swiss cantonal system as Leon Louw and others have suggested, where each district could rule itself and even secede from itself if it no longer found the cantonal policies to its liking.

It is true that the National Party was stupid. But the stupidest thing it ever did was to concede to this insane political system that is destroying our country and leading to massive waste, corruption, genocidal violence, books in rivers or rubbish dumps and a small number of politically connected people living like the mediaeval Pope while the rest of us only scrape by.

Both Aristotle and Plato were skeptical of democracy and considered it even outright dangerous. There are other ways of deciding issues than having a bunch of would-be parasites put their faces on placards and making a cross next to their names, knowing full well that these people are going to steal from the very parliament where they are making laws that we are supposed to obey. I am here referring to the parliamentary travel scandal, of course. But the constant stream of scandals around South Africa’s “leaders” reads like a report from some pirates’ island in the Caribbean, in the days when being a buccaneer was nothing to be frowned upon.

There is no moral principle like “democracy”. An elected leader is no better than a king or an aristocrat or a dictator, unless he behaves better of course. Evidently, South Africa’s elected representatives comport themselves like robbers and the state is their Cave of Ali Baba.

Democracy, at least in theory, should lead to good government. With all the apartheid revisionism going on at the moment, most thinking, honest people are starting to agree that we actually had better government, education and health services when the Afrikaner minority governed South Africa from 1948 to 1994. A Canadian political scientist, Heribert Adam, actually called the thing by its name, an oligarchy. It would have warmed Aristotle’s heart. Or that of Nietzsche, who saw in democracy the most degenerate system ever devised by man.

The old system was an oligarchy and it served us fairly well, a lot better than the current, criminal free-for-all. Of course, in some respects it was slightly feudal and unfair. But no more unfair than the present system, with its “modern”, liberated appearance but dark, primitive underbelly.

The only concept that adequately describes the South African political system is sadism, or taking pleasure in hurting people. It is the rule of people over others who are aware that such rule will cause the others pain. You have to take the punishment and follow ever more complex rules, while they, being sadists, are above the rules.

Our South African rulers are a law unto themselves. Who could disagree with that statement?

Democracy, like any system, is a means to an end. It is not end in itself. To make it more understandable: a political system is like the operating system of your computer. You choose the most functional one that gives you the least problems. If Windows had to crash every second day, then you would change to a Mac or Linux or whatever. Ultimately, you need the system that will run the most smoothly. It must be there in the background and not bother you with constant error messages or sudden freezes, slowness and mood swings.

In the ancient Greek city of Athens democracy existed for less than 200 years before it was done away with under the Macedonians Phillip and Alexander. Even in modern Europe, democracy has not been universal. In Africa, as in South Africa, it remains an experiment and has caused more wars and problems than it has solved.

Apparently one third of all our taxes get lost due to corruption, “tenderpreneurs” and the like. Financially, democracy therefore costs us a third of the annual budget or about R330 billion. This must be the most expensive system we could ever think of, which is destroying the country bit by bit. Even a dictator like Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe would be cheaper as no dictator could possibly embezzle such a large amount every year. In a certain sense, South African democracy means having 5000 dictators raping the country all at once.

Democracy has failed us utterly. Whosoever would deny that, is either stupid or dishonest. Or both.