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What Democracy Looks Like: Packed Town Halls and Demands to Be Heard Common Dreams What Democracy Looks Like: Packed Town Halls and Demands to Be Heard. 'I look out into an audience like this, I just kind of think to myself, the founding fathers would say this is what we worked so hard for,' says Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon. by. Senator Wyden: Trump's Attacks On Media Threaten DemocracyKLCC FM Public Radio all 4 news articles »

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What Democracy Looks Like: Packed Town Halls and Demands to Be Heard - Common Dreams

Were toldthat the story of Stoke and other similar working-class constituencies is the advance of Ukip; yet more important is the advance of none of the above. Turnout in by-elections is notoriously low, and Thursday will be no exception, but even at the last general election fewer than half the electorate voted in Stoke. This was not always the case. Turnout in Stoke was barely six per cent below the national average in 1987, yet in 2015 it was 16 per cent lower. This is just a weak reflection of the growing divide in political participation among people in different social classes. While differences in turnout between rich and poor were fairly minimal 30 years ago, today the middle classes are much more likely to vote than the working class. This is what has caused large falls in turnout in working-class constituencies like Stoke.

This growing class gap in turnout is not due to changing voters, but changing parties. While differences among social classes in political attitudes have remained very constant over the last fifty years to put it crudely, poorer people still want more redistribution and less immigration than richer people the parties, especially Labour, have changed enormously. Labour in the 1960s was a party with leaders who spoke about representing a working class from which the partys MPs were drawn and Labourspolicies were aimed at helping. Much of that was still the case by the end of the 1980s, but over the course of the 1990s that all changed. Labour adopted policies that were aimed at middle-class voters and started speaking not to workers but families. All parties are also now represented in Parliament by people drawn largely from middle-class professional jobs. Predictably, these changes have affected who votes for different parties. While over 60 per cent of the working class voted Labour in the 1960s, at the last election Labour actually did better among middle-class professional voters than among manual working-class voters.

Where did those working-class voters go? In recent years, some have decamped to Ukip, often via other parties in between. But many have turned their backs on democracy altogether. Up until the 1992 election, differences in turnout among social classes were fairly small a few percentage points at most. This changed rapidly between 1997 and 2001: New Labour in the 1990s may have been very effective at attracting middle-class voters, but what was attractive to the middle classes was unappealing to the working class. With no other working-class parties in view, working-class voters chose to exit the system. In fact, the proportion of 1997 Labour voters who stopped voting in 2001 was twice as great among the working class as among the middle class.

By 2001 there was a growing gap in turnout between the classes, which has now turned into achasm. In 2015, over half of people with low levels of education in working-class jobs did not vote. The comparable figure for degree educated professionals was one in five. The new party of the working class is not Ukip, but no party at all. This should be worrying because parties only care about people who vote, and people who stop voting are difficult to entice back into electoral politics. This leads to a spiral of exclusion: parties do not represent certain types of people, those people do not vote and parties become even less likely to represent those non-voting groups. No matter what the result is in Stoke on Thursday, without some radical change to the party system, which might include a more credible Ukip, this new class divide in British politics will continue.

James Tilley is a Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. He is the author of The New Politics of Class: The political exclusion of the working class

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The working-class vote is fed up with democracy - Spectator.co.uk (blog)

Prime Minister Hun Sen signs in to Monday's parliamentary session which turned his strongman regime into virtually a one-party state. (Reuters photo)

PHNOM PENH - Cambodia's parliament amended a law on Monday to stop anyone convicted of an offence from running for office, effectively barring long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen's main rival.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations Parliamentarians for Human Rights group called the measure the "death knell for democracy" in Cambodia. New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch said it marked the consolidation of absolute power.

The US embassy said it was deeply concerned about that and the other changes adopted. Some critics said they were a step to turning the Southeast Asian country of 16 million into a de facto one-party state.

Opponents accuse Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge guerrilla, of unfair manoeuvring to try to keep his three-decade grip on power at local elections in June and a general election next year.

The ruling Cambodian People's Party voted to change the 1998 election law to ban parties that engage in activities that include incitement, promoting secession or anything that could harm national security.

Politicians convicted by a court are banned from standing for election and their parties can be dissolved.

That would exclude veteran opposition leader Sam Rainsy, who has been convicted of a series of defamation charges and has lived in exile in France since 2015 to avoid them.

He resigned from the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) this month, saying he wanted to save his party in the face of the potential ban. He rejects the charges against him as politically motivated.

In comments emailed to media, Rainsy said the passage of the bill marked one of Cambodia's darkest days since 1991 peace accords, which drew a line under decades of conflict that had left Cambodia a failed state.

"The international community must address the fact that they have funded a democratic system which is now lurching dangerously towards a one-party state," he said.

The CNRP's 55 lawmakers boycotted the National Assembly vote on Monday, saying it had targeted them. But Hun Sen's party has a slim majority in parliament, so it was able to pass the change.

Welcoming the change to the election rules, ruling party lawmaker Chheang Vun said it would allow the interior ministry to start closing some of Cambodia's 76 political parties. He said only 45 were properly registered.

The US embassy in Phnom Penh said it was concerned at amendments passed with little consultation or public debate and called on the government to ensure fair elections.

"The amendments give the government broad authority to restrict freedom of expression and the legitimate activities of political parties and, under vaguely defined circumstances, to dissolve them," it said.

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Hun Sen shepherds new 'death to democracy' law - Bangkok Post

One hundred people traveled to Brunswick from as far as Rockland, Boothbay Harbor, Portland, and Bowdoinham to gather for the second of 10 Actions in the First 100 Days. The group, calling themselves Midcoast Voices for Democracy, is working to build a community of support and to define a set of actions and strategies to pursue during the first 100 days of the current administration and beyond.

The effort is part of a movement launched after the recent Womens March on Washington that saw 10,000 rally in Augusta and Portland, along with hundreds in Brunswick and other communities throughout Maine. Using the energy generated by the march, organizers aim to mobilize millions of people around the country to demand accountability from elected officials.

Brunswick organizers Lynn Ellis and Debbie Atwood wanted to ensure that area residents have an opportunity to take action in their own communities. We wanted to continue momentum started by Rev. Stocker, minister of UUChurch Brunswick who organized a Vigil in Solidarity with the Womens March on Washington on January 21, said Lynn Ellis, co-Chair of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Brunswicks Working for Justice committee. UUs Fifth Principle affirms the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large. We embrace the opportunity to engage in an ongoing action to make a difference in our community and in our country through issue-oriented and respectful action.

Atwood has experienced the power of citizen engagement both as a community organizer and former Brunswick Town Councilor. Holding elected officials accountable for their votes, demanding that they lead with a positive vision, is the job of every citizen in a democracy, Atwood said, and the reality that 100 people chose to spend their Saturday afternoon working together to build a local movement is very encouraging. The momentum is building.

The group meets next on March 1 at 6 p.m. the Brunswick UU Church and all are invited to attend. For more information, email midcoastvoicesfordemocracy@gmail.com.

For additional information about 10 Actions in the First 100 Days, visit https://www.womensmarch.com/hearourvoice/.

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Midcoast Voices for Democracy meets in Brunswick - Wiscasset Newspaper

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZLEZ: Seventy-five years ago yesterday, on February 19th, 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, that forced more than 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese descent into internment camps. This included nearly 70,000 who were American citizens.

PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan. As commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense.

JUAN GONZLEZ: Over the weekend, Day of Remembrance events were held across the country to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the internment of Japanese Americans. Many people are asking if history can repeat itself. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump explicitly called for a Muslim registry. And as president, he has attempted to ban refugees and travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations. In an interview with ABC in 2015, Trump defended his proposal for a total and complete ban on Muslims entering the United States and compared it to the actions of FDR.

DONALD TRUMP: What Im doing is no different than what FDRFDRs solution for Germans, Italians, Japanese, you know, many years ago.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So youre for internment camps?

DONALD TRUMP: This is a president who was highly respected by all. He did the same thing. If you look at what he was doing, it was far worse. I mean, he was talking about the Germans because were at war. We are now at war.

JUAN GONZLEZ: Well, our next guest says one of the darkest chapters in American history has begun to repeat itself. Were joined by George Takei, the legendary actor and gay rights activist, who grew up in an internment camp. He is best known for playing Hikaru Sulu on Star Trek. Takeis Broadway show Allegiance screened in cinemas across the United States on Sunday, the Day of Remembrance. It is about the internment of Japanese Americans, inspired by the true story of Takei and his familys experience.

George Takei, welcome to Democracy Now!

GEORGE TAKEI: Good to be here.

JUAN GONZLEZ: Well, weve had you on the show before, but could you talk about your own familys experience and what you went through as a young child as a result of the internment policies that FDR brought into effect?

GEORGE TAKEI: Well, as a matter of fact, yesterday, which we, as you said, consider the Day of Remembrance, I remembered my childhood imprisonment at the home of the man who put us behind those barbed wire fences, Franklin Delano Roosevelts home at Hyde Park. I spoke on my memories there. And I spoke about that morning, when my parents got me up very early on that morning, together with my brother, a year younger, and my baby sister, still an infant, dressed us hurriedly. And my brother and I were told to wait in the living room while they did some packing back in the bedroom. And so, the two of us were just gazing out the front living room window, and we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway carrying rifles with shiny bayonets on them. They stomped up the front porch.

JUAN GONZLEZ: And this was where? In?

GEORGE TAKEI: This was in Los Angeles.

JUAN GONZLEZ: Los Angeles, mm-hmm.

GEORGE TAKEI: On Gardner Street, a two-bedroom house. And they began pounding at the front door with their fists. It was a terrifying sound. My father came out, answered the door. And literally at gunpoint, we were ordered out of our home. My father gave my brother and me little packages to carry, and we followed him out onto the driveway and waited for our mother to come out. And when she came out, she had our baby sister in one arm and a huge duffel bag in the other, and tears were streaming down her face. And this I told to a packed house audience at the Roosevelt Library on the thousand-plus-acre estate of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was a strange feeling.

JUAN GONZLEZ: And your family was eventually interned where?

GEORGE TAKEI: Well, we were first taken to the horse stables at Santa Anita race track. We were taken there in a truck with other families that had been rounded up. And there, they herded us over to the stable area, and each family was assigned a horse stall, still pungent with the stink of horse manure, to sleep in. For my parents, it was a degrading, humiliating experience to take their three children and arrange the cots for us to sleep in. I was a 5-year-old kid then, and for me, the perspective was totally different. I thought it was kind of fun to sleep where the horses sleep. So, my childhood experiences were quite different from my parents pain and anguish and the humiliation and the degradation and enragement that they went through for over four years.

JUAN GONZLEZ: And I seem to recall it was not only theobviously, the liberal president, Roosevelt, who backed this policy, but also wasnt Earl Warren, who was then the attorney general, the famous later Supreme Court justicehe was also very much stoking anti-Japanese phobia throughout California, wasnt he?

GEORGE TAKEI: Earl Warren was an ambitious man. He wanted to run for governor. And he saw that the single most popular political issue in California at that time was the "lock up the Japanese" movement. And Im using the long word for Japanese; it was an ugly three-letter word. And he made an astonishing statement as the attorney general, the top lawyer of the state. He said, "We have no reports of spying or sabotage or fifth column activities by Japanese Americans, and that is ominous," the fact that there was no report. He said the Japanese are "inscrutable." You cant tell what theyre thinking behind that placid face. And so it would be prudent to lock them up, before they do anything. So, for this attorney general, the absence of evidence was the evidence. And he fed into the hysteria, the war hysteria of that time, and reached all the way to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

JUAN GONZLEZ: And so how long was your family interned?

GEORGE TAKEI: For over four years. We were taken from the horse stables to the swamps of Arkansas, and we were imprisoned therebarbed wire fence, sentry towers, guns pointed at usfor about a year. And then, you know, initially, after Pearl Harbor, young Japanese Americans rushed to their recruitment centers to volunteer to serve in the military. This act of patriotism was answered with a slap on the face. They were denied military service and categorized as enemy aliens. We were neither. We werent the enemy, and we werent aliens. We were born, raised, educated in the United States, mostly on the West Coast. And so, with that outrage, we were put into these barbed wired prison camps.

But a year after imprisonment, after they completely took everything away from us, they realized there is a wartime manpower shortage. And here are these young people that they categorized as enemy aliens. How to justify drafting them? So they came down with, of all things, a loyalty questionnaire. And it was put together in the most sloppy, ignorant way. The most egregious question was question 28. It was one sentence with two conflicting ideas. In essence, it asked, "Will you swear your loyalty to the United States of America and forswear your loyalty to the emperor of Japan?"

JUAN GONZLEZ: Well, this issue of loyalty, obviously, is now front and center, in terms of some of the Trump administration policies. And I wantedin November, a Trump PAC spokesperson defended the proposed Muslim registry by citing the Japanese internment camps.

GEORGE TAKEI: Japanese-American, Japanese-American.

JUAN GONZLEZ: Japanese-American, yes. This is Carl Higbie of Great America PAC speaking with Fox Newss Megyn Kelly.

CARL HIGBIE: We did it during World War II with Japanese, which, you know, call it what you will

MEGYN KELLY: Come on. Youre not

CARL HIGBIE: Maybe wrong, but

MEGYN KELLY: Youre not proposing we go back to the days of internment camps, I hope.

CARL HIGBIE: No, no, no. Im not proposing that at all, Megyn.

MEGYN KELLY: You know better than to suggest that.

CARL HIGBIE: But what I am saying is that we need to protect America first.

MEGYN KELLY: I mean, thats the kind of stuff that gets people scared, Carl.

CARL HIGBIE: Right, but itsIm just saying, there is precedent for it. And Im not saying I agree with it. But in this case, I absolutely believe that a regional-based

MEGYN KELLY: You cant be citing Japanese internment camps as precedent for anything the president-elect is going to do.

CARL HIGBIE: Look, the president needs to protect America first. And if that means having people that are not protected under our Constitution have some sort of registry, so we can understanduntil we can identify the true threat and where its coming from, I support it.

JUAN GONZLEZ: That was Carl Higbie of the Great America PAC, a pro-Trump PAC. The correlation between some of thewhat happened then, and, as youre saying, this was against many Japanese Americans, andbut of whats happening now with Trump and the Muslim ban?

GEORGE TAKEI: The very fact that he brought that up to justify whatever plans that they have for Muslim people isshows that hes not learned the lesson of the internment of Japanese Americans, because if hes really learned that lesson, if he has studied that, he would know that the lesson is we must never do that again. Ronald Reagan apologized for it in 1988 and pledged a $20,000 token redress for that$20,000, which totaled up to $1.6 billion. This man, Higbie, is totally ignorant of that. We must not do it again. And the fact that he brought it up shows his ignorance.

JUAN GONZLEZ: But there werethere were some people who were targeted for internment who resisted. Could you talk about the Korematsu case and what that meant and how the courts reacted at that time?

GEORGE TAKEI: Well, they did challenge it after they were imprisoned, and not just Korematsu, but Gordon Hirabayashi and an attorney named Min Yasui. They challenged it all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1944, the middle of the war, they were denied justice. They failed. But after the war, in the '70s, they challenged it again, the finding of the Supreme Court. They went all the way up to the federal court, and the federal judge found that there was a fault in the original ruling. But they covered up those words by calling it by its Latin name, coram nobis, fault in the original ruling. And the government didn't appeal that to the Supreme Court, so it ended there. But it was a fault in the Supreme Courts original ruling, and it should never happen again.

JUAN GONZLEZ: And then it took an act of Congress later on, in terms of reparations for the Japanese Americans?

GEORGE TAKEI: Well, that was when Reagan apologized. In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act. And there was this $20,000 token redress paid. They went in the order of the age of the recipient, and I didnt get mine until 1991. And it wasthe letter of apology was signed by George H.W. Bush, with "George H.W. Bush" on the $20,000 check.

JUAN GONZLEZ: And talk about your decisionI mean, youve been very much of an activist much of your life, but your stance now in terms of whats going on with the Trump administration and why you feel its so important to speak up now?

GEORGE TAKEI: Well, on so many issues, not just the Muslim travel ban, but issue after issue has been a failure. But this president is delusional. He just made that statement last week that his administration is operating like a finely tuned machine. He doesnt realize the disaster that his administration is, the failure of the attack in Yemen and the series of failures that heshe is a danger. You know, the real terrorist is Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the terrorist president of the United States. And his rating is going down, down, down, and he still talks about the fantastic support that hes been getting. We are going through an incredible time in American history.

JUAN GONZLEZ: Well, I want to thank you, George Takei, legendary actor and activist. Thank you for joining us.

And when we come back, Robert Weissman of Public Citizen on corporate Trump.

[break]

JUAN GONZLEZ: "Say It LoudIm Black and Im Proud," James Brown with Clyde Stubblefield on drums. Stubblefield passed away Saturday. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. Im Juan Gonzlez.

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George Takei on 75th Anniv. of Internment of Japanese Americans & Why Trump is "The Real Terrorist" - Democracy Now!