banking services chronicle academy

 banking services chronicle academy

banking services chronicle academy Published this article page no   Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful concerned individuals can precipitate change in the world ... indeed it is the only thing that ever has Margaret Mead Democracy is not the rule of the people. It is government by periodically vetted representatives of the people. Democracy is not tantamount to a continuous expression of the popular will as it pertains to a range of issues. Functioning and fair democracy is representative and not participatory. Participatory people power is mob rule not democracy. Granted people power is often required in order to establish democracy where it is unprecedented. Revolutions  velvet rose and orange  recently introduced democracy in Eastern Europe for instance. People power  mass street demonstrations  toppled obnoxious dictatorships from Iran to the Philippines and from Peru to Indonesia. But once the institutions of democracy are in place and more or less functional the people can and must rest. They should let their chosen delegates do the job they were elected to do. And they must hold their emissaries responsible and accountable in fair and free ballots once every two or four or five years. As heads of the state in Latin America Africa Asia and East Europe can attest these vital lessons are lost on the dozens of new democracies the world over. Many of these presidents and prime ministers though democratically elected multiply in some cases have fallen prey to enraged and vigorous people power movements in their countries. And these breaches of the democratic tradition are not the only or most egregious ones. The West boasts of the three waves of democratization that swept across the world 1975. Yet in most developing countries and nations in transition democracy is an empty word. Granted the hallmarks of democracy are there candidate lists parties election propaganda and voting. But its quiddity is absent. It is being consistently hollowed out and rendered mock by election fraud exclusionary policies cronyism corruption intimidation and collusion with Western interests both commercial and political. The new democracies are thinlydisguised and criminalized plutocracies recall the Russian oligarchs authoritarian regimes Central Asia and the Caucasus or Vichylike heterarchies Macedonia Bosnia and Iraq to mention three recent examples. The new democracies suffer from many of the same ills that afflict their veteran role models murky campaign finances venal revolving doors between state administration and private enterprise endemic corruption selfcensoring media socially economically and politically excluded minorities and so on. But while this malaise does not threaten the foundations of the United States and France  it does imperil the stability and future of the likes of Ukraine Serbia and Moldova Indonesia Mexico and Bolivia. Worse still the West has transformed the ideal of democracy into an ideology at the service of imposing a new colonial regime on its former colonies. Spearheaded by the United States the white and Christian nations of the West embarked with missionary zeal on a transformation willynilly of their erstwhile charges into paragons of democracy and good governance. And not for the first time. Napoleon justified his gory campaigns by claiming that they served to spread French ideals throughout a barbarous world. Kipling bemoaned the White Mans civilizing burden referring specifically to Britains role in India. Hitler believed himself to be the last remaining barrier between the hordes of Bolshevism and the West. The Vatican concurred with him. This selfrighteousness would have been more tolerable had the West actually meant and practiced what it preached however selfdelusionally. Yet in dozens of cases in the last 60 years alone Western countries intervened often by force of arms to reverse and nullify the outcomes of perfectly legal and legitimate popular and democratic elections. banking services chronicle april 2021 pdf