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Just A Summary | Democracy And Legal Change By Melissa Schwartzberg
JUST A SUMMARY - THE SUMMARY YOUR FAVORITE BOOK =--- Where to buy this book? ISBN: 9780521866521 Book Review of Democracy and Legal Change by Melissa Schwartzberg If you want.
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Just A Summary | Democracy And Legal Change By Melissa Schwartzberg - Video
More than two months of pro-democracy protests have failed to sway the Chinese government's decision to put limitations on the way residents of Hong Kong can elect the region's leader and legislative council.
More than 210 protesters have been arrested by Hong Kong police, amid warnings of further arrests as police tore down the protest camp in the city's financial district, after a High Court made an order in early December that the site be cleared.
Protesters say during Britain's negotiations before handing Hong Kong back to China in 1997, an understanding was reached that China would allow Hong Kong to progress towards democracy, despite the rest of China remaining under communist rule.
Martin Lee, a lawyer who helped draft Hong Kong's constitution told ABC's 7.30: "The people of Hong Kong have come out demanding democracy from Beijing. We are not asking for anything new. It was promised to us..."
ABC Fact Check looks at whether China has ever explicitly promised democracy for Hong Kong, and if the protesters are asking for anything new.
On August 31, the Chinese government released new rules to govern the 2017 Hong Kong elections. The decision of the National People's Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) includes a rule that Hong Kong voters must elect their chief executive from two or three candidates selected by a 1200-person "nomination committee", and those candidates must "love the country and love Hong Kong".
The pro-democratic organisation "Occupy Central with Love and Peace" said China's ruling to limit the number of candidates who can stand for election, and veto candidates it deems unsuitable "stifles genuine universal suffrage".
The NPCSC decision "has deprived people with different political views of the right to run for election and be elected by imposing unreasonable restrictions, thereby perpetuating 'handpicked politics'," according to an Occupy Central media release.
Macquarie Dictionary defines universal suffrage as the right to vote provided to all, or the principle that the right to vote for one's government should be extended to everyone above a specified age, usually eighteen.
In 1984 China's premier Zhao Ziyang told a Hong Kong University student body that: "In the future, it is of course a sure thing, that Hong Kong will implement the democratisation of the political system, that is what you called the 'democratic ruling of Hong Kong'."
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Fact check: Was Hong Kong ever promised democracy?
The evidence from Thomas Piketty, the United Nations, and other sources is quite conclusive: Current rates of global inequality are simply unprecedented.
In his celebrated book Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty marshals a massive amount of data to show that rising inequality has been the norm since capitalist growth took off in the 18th century. Now, he says, things are likely to become even worse.
The dynamics of contemporary capital accumulation, he warns, can lead to excessive and lasting concentration of capital: no matter how justified inequalities of wealth may be initially, fortunes can grow and perpetuate themselves beyond all reasonable limits and beyond any possible rational justification in terms of social utility.
The only period when there was a reversal of this flow, Piketty writes, occurred in the middle decades of the 20th century, when what he calls exogenous shocks such as wars and the social revolutions they triggered forced capitalist elites to make economic concessions. These social compromises were largely mediated by Keynesian or social democratic political regimes. By the last quarter of the 20th century, however, inequality resumed its onward march under democratic regimes implementing neoliberal policies.
Pikettys remarks are unsettling to believers in democracy, which most of us are.
One of the things he seems to be saying, at least implicitly, is that democratic regimes whose rise in the Global South paralleled the rise of neoliberalism in the North dont really work when it comes to containing economic inequality. They of course enshrine formal political equality and institutionalize majority rule. But they are ineffective at bringing about greater economic equality.
My generation came of age from the 1970s to the 1990s fighting to oust dictatorships and bring about democracy in the Third World. One of our potent arguments against authoritarianism was that it promoted concentration of income in dictatorial cliques allied with transnational capital. We said that democracy would reverse this process of impoverishment and inequality. From Chile to Brazil to South Korea to the Philippines, fighting against dictatorship was a fight for both democratic choice and greater equality.
Yet the evidence now seems clear that we were wrong. What Samuel Huntington called the Third Wave of democracy in the Global South went hand-in-hand with the spread of global economic policies that hobbled the fight for greater economic equality from the outset.
So what does this mean?
Democracy and Land Reform
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Does Liberal Democracy Promote Inequality?
Social Theory of Hoppe, Week 2 Types of Socialism and the Origine of the State TQXwm67zLXQ
Socialising.
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Social Theory of Hoppe, Week 2 Types of Socialism and the Origine of the State TQXwm67zLXQ - Video