Why empowr (part 8)
Hello everyone,
Together, we've been reading the Why empowr book, written by one of the empowr founders. If you're interested in why empowr was created, or want to know where it's headed, this is a good way to find out. Just joining the conversation? You can read the earlier parts here:
Part 1: Here
Part 2: Here
Part 3: Here
Part 4: Here
Part 5: Here
Part 6: Here
Part 7: Here As always, many thanks for your thoughtful comments that you left in the earlier parts; we're all reading your comments very carefully (and deleting spam and unrelated comments).
Thank you!
Around the world, democracy is in greater danger
than any time in recent history The news from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1990’s, the fall of the Berlin Wall, those were a time when the march of democracy and freedom in the world seemed inevitable. Every time you opened up a newspaper, you expected to see another country opening its arms to freedom. And today? The trend is leaning in the opposite direction. Recently the watchdog group Freedom House released its annual report on freedom and democracy around the world. It analyzed nearly 200 countries, based on the United Nation's declaration of human rights. They concluded that democracy is in greater danger than anytime in the last 25 years, with 36% of the world’s population not being free, 24% partly free, and 40% free. According to their report, democracy has been declining for the last decade. In 2014, 61 countries saw their freedom decline and 33 saw their freedom improve, the worse showing in over ten years. If you look at the 21st century overall, freedom has peaked, according to Freedom House. The least free area of the world is Africa and the Middle East, where 85% of the population is not free. The exception is Tunisia—which just a decade ago, had one of the most tyrannical governments in the world. Dictatorship is on the rise, and its nature is changing—they’re no longer even pretending to be democratic. Russia’s invasion of Crimea is the most noticeable example. China is arresting activists more than ever and now even televising their confessions. In Egypt the military has taken over and the courts sentenced hundreds of political prisoners to be executed in fake trials. There are a good number of dictatorships such as Ethiopia, Azerbaijan and Vietnam, which have managed to avoid the Western media’s attention but are just as oppressive. It’s not all bad news, with the Ukrainians revolting against their government despite Russian efforts—and we’ve also seen some very interesting resistance to oppression in Hong Kong. The bottom line is that at the end of the cold war, it appeared for a moment that freedom was an unstoppable force, but every force has an undercurrent and perhaps that’s what we’re seeing these days. *** At empowr, we are huge believers in the power of democracy. Even though it has some serious challenges, it absolutely can be fixed. In the fifteen years that we’ve been working on empowr, hardly a few days passed where we weren’t thinking about and discussing the news, the issues as we saw them and what we could do, as concerned citizens and technologists, to make a difference. More importantly, we have spent all of those years designing, coding, and integrating dozens of interconnected technologies with the objective of making a difference in the direction and future of democracy. If we don’t try to help in the only way we can, then we, too, can’t do a damned thing other than complain. One critical way we can make peaceful revolutions possible again is by helping voters understand that their democracy is dying and that its only hope for survival is to impose limits on how many terms any politician may serve, as well as on how much money any single person or entity can give them or spend directly or indirectly on their election campaigns. The most successful way this has been done in the past is by enabling every citizen to have affordable access to a world-class education—an absolutely essential part of ensuring that democracy endures.
In the next part, we'll get right into that... (more) ►
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