how could we reduce corruption and prevent another dictatorship?

/ mvlcontent

Well, it’s an open question and I don’t have all the answers. These are just a handful of possible suggestions drawn from our earlier crowdsourced manifesto, attempting to create enough fallbacks and checks and balances and devolution to prevent a dictatorship from happening again and again. Please send in any feedback and suggestions.

 

Transparency of finances for members of government

The public has the right to see whether those in power receive financial benefits for their actions, and to see which conflicts of interests may be held by those in power.

1. Elected officials, cabinet members, and heads of major independent government bodies having to declare assets at the beginning of each term, and will have to be audited once a year.

2. All transactions in or out of over 50,000 Rufiyaa by any elected official, cabinet member, or judge having to be put on the public record within one month of the transaction happening, and financial institutions will be required to disclose information for such transactions.

3. Non-home assets of the President, Vice President, and Supreme Court Justices having to be placed in a blind trust for the duration of their term.

 

Transparency of the activities of government

1. An open government portal with information at the island level, with updates on the progress of any development in every island mandated on at least a quarterly basis, so that every citizen in the Maldives can monitor what the government is doing anywhere in the country.

2. Protections for whistle-blowers. A fully anonymous system, vetted by international authorities to ensure security, for whistle-blowers.

3. An independent public inquiry into major crimes with suspected government culpability, such as disappearances, murders, and theft of public resources, for fact-finding and restorative justice.

 

Devolution of powers from central authority

Decentralization of political authority, both to other branches of government and to other physical locations in the Maldives, reduces the possible amount of power held by any one individual from Male’.

1. A biannual citizens’ council as an upper house of parliament that consists of a demographically representative panel of citizens drawn randomly twice a year, in a deliberative democratic model. Citizens meet with stakeholders and experts over days of deliberation, similar to a jury, and come to a verdict. The citizens’ council would have veto power for major legislation and propose recommendations to parliament so that politicians can no longer override the wishes of ordinary citizens. A new set of citizens are drawn for each biannual council, which is immediately dissolved after each session. Unlike career politicians, these citizens have no need to kowtow to the rich to hold on to power. The biannual citizens’ council will alternate between a major Southern and Northern island.

2. A non-governmental organization consisting of experts who evaluate government policies, budgets, financial disclosures, and all other activities of government and publish simple reports for ordinary citizens, will be established by a government endowment. This organization will be established in Addu City, physically and politically insulated from the powers in Male’.

3. Some taxation and spending autonomy for atolls. While the central government would still be the major taxation and spending authority, atolls having municipal authority to collect some forms of taxes and to spend those as it sees fit would make them less dependent on the largesse of the central government in Male’. With spending more localized, those in charge of local budgets would have much closer relationships with the citizens whose tax money is being spent, and so have an incentive to spend well and avoid the anger of their fellow residents.

 

Prevent a dictatorship from happening again

Reduce the powers of the Presidency and ensure independence of government bodies.

1. A firewall legally preventing the executive or legislative branch from interference in independent government bodies such as those overseeing the media, elections, judicial oversight, anti-corruption activities, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

2. An independent government body to administer military benefits, such as housing and pay, from a budget allocated by parliament, with the President or executive branch no longer having any influence over military benefits and no politicians able to secure military support by promising increased benefits.

3. The President’s Office would no longer have the power to unilaterally appoint or remove appointees to any independent government bodies. Instead, heads of these bodies can only be removed by vote from a majority of its members.

4. The President’s Office would not be allowed access to internal information on the operations of those bodies aside from what is officially required.

5. To prevent coercion, the heads of independent oversight bodies would have immunity from a certain list of charges such as terrorism or sedition during their terms, and cannot be restricted from freely leaving or entering the country.

 

simple english communist manifesto pt. 1 – marx & engels

/ mvlcontent

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is one of the most famous essays in history. Like Marx and Engels’ other work, it discusses the power imbalance between the capital owning class, such as landlords and corporate employers, and the working class, whose labor they exploit for rents and profits. Individual workers have little power against capital owners, who would merely replace them with another worker desperate for sustenance enough to accept exploitation. The Communist movement called for the working class to unite and use their power as the majority to bring about a Communist society. It was first published in 1848 and is pretty long, so this is a simple modern English version of just the first section of the Communist Manifesto. The second section is here.

 

Introduction

A demon is haunting Europe — the demon of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have formed an alliance to chase out this demon. Where is the underdog political party that has not been labeled Communistic by its rivals in power? Where the opposition that has not thrown back the name-calling of Communism, against its own competitors?

Two things happen as a result.

  1. Communism is already treated and realized by all European Powers as itself a Power.
  2. It is time that Communists should openly, in front of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this fairytale of the Demon of Communism with a manifesto of the Communist movement itself.

To do this, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and made a draft of the following Manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

 

Part I. Capital Owners and the Working Class

The history of societies up until now is the history of struggles between social classes.

Free man and slave, lord and serf, ruler and the ruled, in a word: oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant fighting against each another, carried on an uninterrupted, sometimes hidden, sometimes open fight – a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reorganization of society, or in everyone losing.

In earlier periods of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into several sections, all sorts of divisions in wealth and power. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, even more specific categories.

The modern capitalist society that has grown out of the ruins of feudal society has not gotten rid of class rivalry. It has simply established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our time period, the era of the capital owners, has, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class enemies. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two huge hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: capital owners and the working class.

From the peasants of the Middle Ages came the contract workers of the earliest towns. From these towns the first elements of the capital owners were developed.

The discovery of America and the first sailing around the Cape opened up fresh ground for the rising capital owners. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the ways to go about exchanging goods and services, and in goods in general, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The medieval system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished when faced with division of labor in each single workshop.

Meanwhile the markets kept growing, the demand always rising. Even the assembly line was no longer enough. As a result, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern capitalist.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America made possible. This market has given a huge development to trade, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, depended on industry expanding; and has grown in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended – in the same proportion the capital owners developed, increased its resources, and pushed into the background every social class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern capital owning class is itself the product of a long history of development, of a series of revolutions in the methods of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the capital owning class was accompanied by a connected political advance of that class. Having been an oppressed class under the rule of the medieval nobility, an armed and self-governing group in the medieval town; afterwards, in the actual period of manufacture, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a balance against the nobility, and as an essential part of the great monarchies, capital owners have at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political control. The executive branch of the modern State is simply a committee for managing the shared business of the whole capital owners.

The capital owners, historically, has played a very revolutionary part.

The capital owners, wherever it has gotten the advantage, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has without mercy torn apart the various feudal ties that connected man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other connection between man and man than basic self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the heavenly joys of religious enthusiasm, of chivalry, of sentiment, in the icy water of self-interested calculation. It has turned personal worth into exchange value. And in place of the numberless and doable freedoms that were once considered sacred, has set up that single, impossible freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, poorly hidden by religious and political illusions: naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The capital owners have stripped of its halo every occupation once honored and looked up to with reverent respect. It has turned the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The capital owners has torn away from the family its emotional layer, and has reduced the family relation to just a money relation. Capitalist society sees women in the family as a mere instrument of production to be exploited for unpaid labor.

The capital owners have revealed how it happened that the brutal display of energy in the Middle Ages, which Conservatives admire so much, found its suitable partner in the worst laziness. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can make happen. It has accomplished wonders even more amazing than Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has sent out expeditions that are even more impressive than all former exoduses of nations and crusades.

The capital owners cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the tools of production, and therefore the processes of production, and with them the whole processes of society. Preserving the old method of production in unaltered form, was, instead, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, eternal uncertainty and unrest – these distinguish the capitalist period from all earlier ones. All fixed, frozen relations, with their associations of ancient and esteemed prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all newly formed ones become old-fashioned before they can fossilize. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is made unclean, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the capital owners over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The capital owners have through their exploitation of the world market given a urban character to production and consumption in every country. To the great distress of Conservatives, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old, established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are pushed aside by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life-and-death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up local raw material, but raw material drawn from most faraway places; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every portion of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climates. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have interaction in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the  many national and local literatures, there comes a world literature.

The capital owners, by the rapid improvement of all tools of production, by the methods of communication being made so much easier, brings all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its products are the heavy artillery it uses to batter down all Chinese walls, with which it forces their intense hatred of foreigners to give in. It requires all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the capitalist mode of production; it requires them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become capitalist themselves. In short, it creates a world after its own image.

The capital owners have put the country under the rule of the cities. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has in this way taken a considerable part of the population away from rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made poorer countries dependent on the wealthy ones, nations of peasants on nations of capitalist, the East on the West.

Continue reading →

crowdsourcing a manifesto

/ mvlcontent

This post is inspired by many of the responses to this post about what people would like to see from a government, as well as from over Twitter. What do we really want from a government? This is our compilation of both Twitter’s and our ideas, edited and written up in manifesto form. You can add comments and suggestions here.

 

CREATE AN EQUAL SOCIETY

Equitable sharing of our natural resources

We believe the resources of the Maldives belong collectively to all citizens, not just the rich. We would assign a 30% ownership stake to every resort for citizens of that atoll, with the profit dividend paid out too all atoll citizens as a starting point for a Universal Basic Income. Local citizens would have a say in decisions, and would be able to attend Annual General Meetings of resort companies and receive the annual financial statements of the resort.

Biannual citizens’ council as an upper house

Career politicians have too strong an incentive to kowtow to the rich and powerful to keep their power, and are vulnerable to corruption. We will establish an upper house of parliament that consists of a demographically representative panel of citizens drawn randomly twice a year, in a deliberative democratic model. Citizens meet with stakeholders and experts over days of deliberation, similar to a jury, and come to a verdict. A new set of citizens are drawn for each biannual council, which is immediately dissolved after each session. This reduces corruption and gives power back to the people. The citizens’ council will have veto power for major legislation and propose recommendations to parliament so that politicians can no longer override the wishes of ordinary citizens. [x]

Progressive income tax and land tax

We need a wider revenue base to continue development in the country. We would establish an annual land tax on registered plots for 2% of the market value of that land. We would also implement a progressive income tax for all earners with an income above 25,000 Rufiyaa, with a higher marginal tax for the highest income bracket. Land tax rebates will be given for productive uses of land such as rental housing or high-tech agriculture.

Build social housing to push down market rent

Rent is unaffordable for most citizens. We will build social housing to push down market rents, with a target of providing enough housing supply for the market rent to reach levels affordable to working adults.

Justice for women

We will criminalize street harassment, update the legal definition of sexual assault to international standards, and instate harsher penalties for domestic abuse, sexual assault, “revenge porn”, and other forms of violence against women. As the current justice system is inadequate on issues of violence against women or sexual violence, we will create a judicial oversight body staffed entirely by women to provide oversight, recommendations, and appeals on cases to do with gender discrimination or violence against women. Company boards will be required to reserve at least one-third of their seats for exclusively women, and at least one-third of the slate of candidates any party registers for elections must be women. We will also eliminate the Massaru Tax. Education for school students on consent, sexual safety, and reproductive health will be required.

Workers’ rights

We will require half of the board to be assigned to worker representatives for companies with 50+ employees. We will legally enshrine regulations for minimum standards of wages, working conditions, and hours for private companies as well as public. Companies will be required to provide workers’ compensation for injuries on the job. [x]

Expatriate rights

Expatriate workers from other South Asian countries should not have to live in squalor while facing exploitation and discrimination. Workers’ rights will apply equally to expatriate workers, not just citizens. We will instate punishments and fines for employers found to have exploitative working conditions. Expatriate workers will be entitled to holiday periods to be able to visit their families without losing their jobs. The practice of employers holding on to deposits, passports, or documents of expatriate workers to restrict their free movement will be criminalized.

Treat drugs as a public health issue

Our current way of dealing with the drug crisis hasn’t worked. We should learn from the Portuguese model, which eased their heroin crisis, by focusing on rehabilitation for non-dealing drug users instead of imprisonment with hardened criminals. [x]

Proactive mental health care

Aasandha will be expanded to include mental health care. An official mental health hotline will be created and awareness campaigns about mental health will be held. All school students will be assigned five appointments with a mental health professional over each year. The government will also fund visits by a team of mental health professionals to schools in every island at least annually.

Public health monitoring

Large parts of the population have deficiencies in basic minerals such as iron or zinc, especially in the atolls where fresh produce is less easily available than in Male’. Citizens also face exposure to environmental toxins, such as dioxins from the burning of plastic waste. We will monitor levels of environmental toxins, lead, and nutrient deficiencies across the country with every island monitored at least once a year. In regions with micronutrient deficiencies, the government will provide supplementation. Increased levels of lead or environmental toxins will be met with immediate action to reduce exposure and remove sources. [x]

 

SUSTAINABLY DEVELOP THE ECONOMY

Meaningful decentralization

The development of Kulhudhuffushi and Hithadhoo ports will promote local commerce and industry, the land tax will incentivize moves away from costly Male’ land and towards development in the atolls, local ownership in resorts will provide an income source for atoll residents, and the government microfinance body will focus on investment in the atolls. In addition, we will open provincial offices for ministries in a major Northern and Southern island, and require at least 25% of ministry staff operations to be based in the provincial office.

The government will offer young people incentives to move to communities in regional capitals that can absorb and integrate an influx of youth– this could be offers of free government-built housing (usually free with conditions, for example a ten year rent-free period upon moving), business startup funds, loan forgiveness, or scholarship money. [x]

Partial taxation and spending autonomy for atolls

While the central government would still be the major taxation and spending authority, we will entrust atolls with authority to collect some forms taxes and to spend those as it sees fit, making the atolls less dependent on the largesse of the central government in Male’. With spending more localized, those in charge of local budgets would have closer relationships with the citizens whose tax money is being spent.

Diversify the economy with high tech industry and renewables

We will build an ICT services outsourcing center like those fueling the ICT industry in India, to employ local coders and technical workers. Cutting-edge vertical farming, aquaculture, and solar power firms will be invited to develop in the Maldives with promise of contract for commercially viable developments, employing and training young workers. We will also develop our national infrastructure in an efficient and sustainable way by fully digitizing the public sector and beginning a rapid transition to using renewable energy sources.

Microfinance body funded by small-scale foreign investment

We will establish a government microfinance body to lend to listed small projects throughout the country. To fund this, the microfinance body will issue no-dividend securities marketed to luxury resort tourists by appealing to current trends of socially conscious tourism. For wealthy tourists able to spend thousands of dollars a night for resort stays, it provides a way of giving back to local communities. For us, it provides foreign direct investment on a microfinance scale. Projects from the islands will be given priority over those from the Male’ area.

Upgrade international ports in Male’, Kulhudhuffushi, and Hithadhoo

Male’ Port has a capacity well below what is needed, and operates slowly and inefficiently. Issues with ports can add up to 30% to the cost of imported goods. Currently, all imports to atolls first arrive to Male’ Port and then are shipped domestically to atolls, where the cost of shipping goods to islands from Male’ is even higher than shipping from Male’ to Singapore. Many goods also have to be shipped from Male’ on passenger boats, and the difficulty makes providing fresh imported produce difficult or impossible. Kulhudhuffushi and Hithadhoo have international ports, but those are currently only used for resort building material and not consumer goods. We will modernize Male’ Port to meet needs efficiently, reducing costs, and we will develop Kulhudhuffushi and Hithadhoo international ports to receive consumer goods for the atolls.

Environmental protections

We will designate the EPA as an independent body with oversight responsibilities. We will also ban single-use plastic products, and protect environmentally vulnerable ecosystems by creating special protected areas. The EPA will carry out a survey of lead and environmental toxin levels in the population of every island and take steps to minimize these levels. Thilafushi will be developed to minimize the exposure of  nearby inhabited islands to toxins from burning waste.

Getting out of the debt trap

We will reduce our dependence on China and Saudi Arabia, and its effect on our sovereignty, by looking to restructure our debt to a more diverse set of lenders. In the longer term, we will begin to use income tax and land tax revenue to reduce our debt burden and keep our public finances in check. [x]

 

HOLD GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABLE

Reduce corruption

We will create an open government portal with information at the island level, with updates on the progress of any development in every island mandated on at least a quarterly basis, so that every citizen in the Maldives can monitor what the government is doing anywhere in the country. A non-governmental organization consisting of experts who evaluate government policies, budgets, financial disclosures, and all other activities of government and publish simple reports for ordinary citizens, will be established by a government endowment. This organization will be established in Addu City, physically and politically insulated from the powers in Male’. A fully anonymous system, vetted by international authorities to ensure security, will be established for whistle-blowing, and protections will be provided for whistle-blowers.

Elected officials and cabinet members have to declare assets upon entering office, and will face an audit every year. Non-home assets of the President, Vice President, and Supreme Court Justices will be placed in a blind trust for the duration of their term. All transactions in or out of over 50,000 Rufiyaa by any elected official, cabinet member, or judge will have to be put on the public record within one month of the transaction happening, and financial institutions will be required to disclose information for such transactions. Rules allowing the sale of islands without bidding will be reversed. [x]

Prevent a dictatorship from happening again

The President’s Office will no longer have the power to unilaterally appoint or remove appointees to any independent government bodies. Instead, heads of these bodies can only be removed by vote from a majority of its members. Aside from what is officially required, the President’s Office will not be allowed access to internal information on the operations of those bodies. To prevent coercion, the heads of independent oversight bodies will have immunity from a narrow range of selected charges such as terrorism, sedition, or disrupting the peace during their terms and cannot legally be restricted from freely leaving or entering the country. Heads of the major independent bodies also have to declare all transactions in and out of over 50,000 Rufiyaa.

We will establish a “firewall” legally preventing the executive or legislative branch from interference in independent government bodies such as those overseeing the media, elections, judicial oversight, anti-corruption activities, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. One such body will carry out the administration of military benefits, such as housing and pay, from a budget allocated by parliament, with the President or executive branch no longer having any influence over military benefits and no politicians able to secure military support by promising increased benefits. Reforms will be carried out for law enforcement and military agencies.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission

We will hold an independent public inquiry into disappearances, murders, theft of public resources and other crimes for fact-finding and restorative justice.

Automatic voter registration

All voters who will turn 18 by polling date will be automatically registered to vote.

 

A shorter version as a much more shareable image:

prelim manif v2

 

This is a rough draft. Specific details, such as the 2% number for land tax or the details of which charges immunity would be given for heads of independent bodies during their terms, are placeholders for now.

 

 

a look at government policy, china, and our debt

/ mvlcontent

Under half a billion dollars (about $405 million) is allocated for the entire Public Sector Investment Program for the year. The Maldives does currently have a very high share of GDP going to health because the hospital mega-project is a large share of this small an economy, but mentioned are absolute numbers, not percentages, maybe because percentages are zero-sum and that makes it impossible to have high percentage numbers for every single sector of government expenditure.

According to the 2018 government budget booklet, 11% of our budget went to interest payments on our debt. Our total debt is more than half our GDP. Falling into a debt trap isn’t guaranteed, of course, but it’s silly to say that it’s not a risk.

obor debt trap

The Maldives’ external debt has gone from $790 million to almost $1.2 billion.

Our credit rating outlook* was recently downgraded because investors feel we might be unable to repay debt obligations. So, financial institutions don’t actually feel all that sure that we’ll be able to repay our debts.

There’s no need to panic, but saying default and the debt trap isn’t a risk is bullshit.

Going by minutes from their meeting with another Twitter user, YRY has argued that YAG managed to wrangle loans from China and that another leader wouldn’t be able to secure these loans. This is silly and intellectually dishonest. China started massive international investment around 2013 to achieve strategic and economic objectives with their One Belt One Road program. YAG didn’t inspire Xi Jinping to start a strategic investment of over a trillion dollars across Eurasia, including in the Maldives.

Some other projects (of hundreds) also happening over the past few years:

  • Khorgos, a massive “landlocked port” in a shared zone with Kazakhstan
  • A “new Dubai” near Colombo along with a massive port in Hambantota. To pay back debt, Sri Lanka gave the port to China on a long-term lease with promise they’d keep military out
  • Chinese overseas military base in Djibouti
  • Chinese port and presence in Gwadar, a small fishing village in Pakistan that is planned to be turned into major port on the maritime silk road

Over 60 countries receive loans from Chinese banks as part of the One Belt One Road initiative, which began massive spending in countries  all around Asia, Europe, and some of East Africa to build trade routes and to send some of China’s excess capacity in construction industry to other countries where those employees could continue to work and those companies could continue to make profits.

China doesn’t make investment decisions based on who happens to be the President of the Maldives. There’s power imbalance between the two nations is way too huge. Investment has happened across dozens of countries with very different political leadership, including many different policy, regulatory, and business environments. There are ways a government could dissuade investment, but realistically, China has a strong incentive to continue for economic, political, and strategic reasons.

China relies on rapid growth to maintain the popularity and legitimacy of the government. With their growth boom starting to slow down as they become more of a consumption-based instead of export-based economy, there remains a lot of Chinese industrial firms that were excess to current requirements of building within China. These firms and their workers are used productively to invest in infrastructure along routes of commerce around the world to keep firms employed and the growth rates going.

The Maldives, along with Sri Lanka, lies in a strategically vital part of maritime trade routes. The One and a Half Degree Channel in the Maldives and the narrow ocean path between us and Sri Lanka are key, and if China can secure one, they can ease the geopolitical risk of another government or military cutting off those routes with a blockade. If China can establish a military base, like they have in Djibouti on the coast of East Africa, they would also be able to project military power in the Indian Ocean and counterbalance India’s power in the region. (This clearly spooks India, which is why they’ve responded to the Maldives’ growing dependence on China with alarm).

Sri Lanka recently faced a debt trap with massive Chinese investments, in both a port and in building a flashy mega-project supposed to be a “new Dubai”. To settle their debt, they had to essentially hand over a port to China, leasing it out for 99 years. China has a clear strategic interest in getting a physical presence in the Maldives: we’re in an important location on ocean trading routes, we’re close to India and a Chinese presence here helps China counter its primary geopolitical rival, and Chinese influence over the One and a Half Degree Channel “choke point” would allow it to continue to trade with Europe and Africa while losing it would make China more vulnerable to a blockade by a rival power.

A lot of our recent economic growth has been driven by external factors, mostly in China. One is the Chinese infrastructure boom, where China is investing $1 trillion worldwide, mostly as part of the One Belt One Road project but also in general. Chinese investment and worries of neocolonialism has been a major issue across Africa for the past decade, for example. Another key factor is the Chinese middle class boom, with hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens entering the middle class over the past year with hundreds of millions more projected to reach those levels of wealth over coming years. The Chinese middle class has massive purchasing power and more upscale tastes, including in vacations. The number of Chinese tourists arriving in the Maldives has increased more than tenfold over the past decade and a half and is accelerating, and they’re bringing wealth with them. These factors would have happened regardless of who was President and will continue to happen regardless of who becomes President.

Something else stands out. If there’s been a consistent thread in recent Maldivian foreign policy, it’s acquiescing to China and Saudi Arabia. Let’s look at who we get the majority of our loans used to fund the investment policies of this government:

PSIP funders

That’s right: the flagship policies of this government, which it’s touting as reason for re-election, are funded with heavy backing from the China Export-Import Bank, which is a state-owned company that exists to further Chinese state policy, and the Saudi Fund, which is owned by the government of Saudi Arabia. I wonder if this government’s indebtedness to China and Saudi Arabia affected our sovereignty by, for example, making the government openly take sides in Saudi Arabia’s conflicts that have nothing to do with us?

 

*Corrected an error: it should have read “credit rating outlook” instead of “credit rating”, as supported by the accompanying image.

 

on YRY

/ mvlcontent / Leave a comment

What do I think of YRY?

I think they’re cynical sock-puppets for a repressive government that realizes a soft-spoken, agreeable brand does better at making increasingly dictatorial behavior more palatable.

I think that of all the possible branding they could’ve gone with for a pro-government campaign, they went with a play on “y?”, which is either tone-deaf or disgusting and callous.

I think they use academic credentials as a way to lend a sense of authority to calmly spoken bullshit, and their academic experience to know how best to frame bullshit in a way that sounds like it means something. There’s so many better uses of the skills you learn slapping together an essay for college without having done all the readings than using it to try prop up an authoritarian.

I think they’re the Dhivehi Ben Shapiro.

I think that labeling themselves Marxist or Socialist is as bad-faith as every other aspect of the YRY brand and a way to try brand authoritarian ideas as being somehow socialist to try get some of the left on board while discrediting socialist ideas. I’m not saying that they’re National Socialists, but it’s the same tactic.

I think that refusing to put their arguments online here in detail is a cowardly refusal to subject those arguments to scrutiny, and that their insistence on in-person debate is because they’re better at sounding like they’re making good points than they are at making good points.

I think they don’t have answers to any real questions, and are really good at evading them.

I think insisting on debating opposition in person and in public is a cowardly attempt to benefit from the fact that people opposed to the government have some fear for their safety if they’re too public and too vocal about it. Whether or not they insist there’s no reason for fear, the fact is that people do have reason to fear reprisal.

I think that they’re more style than substance, and that that style is just a cynical appeal to patriotism and religion.

I think that insisting only one ordinary mortal man can keep the country from becoming “laadheenee” is a demonstration of the same arrogance shown by politicians saying the same. The Maldives is a country full of devout Muslims. Who holds the presidency doesn’t dictate what lies within the hearts of our people, and what fate befalls us lies in the hands of Allah, not with any ordinary man. It’s not a serious argument and I think there’s no point in engaging with it.

I think them firmly saying that they have support from the statistics but their Statistics page just being links to the National Yearbook, Service Charges Update, and Tourism Update, not any detailed reports of supporting statistical evidence, is because that’s what their whole thing is: misdirection. Talk about your views as if they’re just obvious facts backed up by mountains of evidence and do so with enough confidence, and people might believe you.

I think that their insistence on separating the policy from the person is self-contradicting. If YAG really is responsible for all these policies, then what he is as a person has real policy implications. If the policies are separate from the person, why make a Faustian bargain to keep on an authoritarian to ensure they continue?

But let’s look at some of the points they’ve made on their Twitter. Normally I wouldn’t go through someone’s Twitter because I think it’s pretty rude and doesn’t give much insight into an individual, but I don’t think that applies to a political campaign social media account with the explicit purpose of making points to the public. Anyway, we’ll leave the stuff about debt, infrastructure, and China for later and look at a few of the others first:

Loans aren’t given to people who can’t pay them back, so there’s no reason to worry about our debt burden as a government (x, x)

Banks don’t have anything to gain geopolitically from debt holders struggling with payments or defaulting on them. Countries do. China in particular does, which we’ll outline below.

There’s also the little point that saying we don’t need to worry about defaults because lenders don’t give loans unless they’ll definitely be paid back is ridiculous. Many bank loans do end up unable to be paid back. This is the percentage of non-performing loans in the Maldives compared to other SAARC countries- we’re on the high end of average, and 10-15% of loans are non-performing. That’s over one in every ten.

Nothing good can be brought to a land without peace (x)

I have no idea how this is supposed to be a point for RY, because I don’t think disappearances, murders, massive corruption scandals, terror threats, states of emergency, and civil unrest due to crackdowns on opposition count as peace.

YAG has been good for our foreign relations

Well, aside from the Commonwealth, and major tourism market the EU, and any country an increasingly reckless Saudi Arabia decides to oppose on the day, including Qatar who were looking to invest here before we sided with Saudi Arabia against them instead of staying neutral, and an India increasingly spooked by Chinese presence here…

There’s also the question of how much of our sovereignty has been ceded to our two main sources of debt, China and Saudi Arabia. For example, do we jump into every conflict of the Saudi regime, whether it’s with Qatar or with Canada, for our national self-interest, or do we do so because the Saudi government has undue influence over ours?

Political freedoms given without economic freedoms benefit only the political class (x)

Firstly, there’s no reason the two should be mutually exclusive. It’s possible for people to have economic freedoms while also being politically free. Secondly, is it economic freedom if you’re pressured to show support to a party to be able to keep your government job and maintain a source of income? What if you’re an employee in a company that’s been given debilitating fines for speaking against the government? What if you’re unable to pursue your life, economic or otherwise, without fear or threat of harm?

Stability of the nation is more important than the political agenda of any individual faction (x)

… Is this gaslighting?

We’re focused on the long term development of the country (x)

It’s impossible to isolate questions of freedom, rights, the ability to live without fear, and equal justice and only discuss the economy as a way to measure development. Quoting Amartya Sen:

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The long-term deterioration of the democratic process and democratic institutions is part of it. Keeping someone who will only continue to suppress democracy and freedom in power is neglecting the long-term.

In conclusion…

I’m not convinced.

 

what do parties promise in other countries most like our own?

/ mvlcontent

What do we do differently in our politics? What do countries in similar situations and contexts as us have going on politically? What might a policy platform or manifesto look like in a country similar to ours? What might our politics look like, in some alternate universe? We’re gonna look at one possible comparison, the platform for the center-left Democratic Labor Party of Barbados.

Why Barbados? The Maldives and Barbados are both island nations heavily dependent on tourism, which accounts for about half of the Barbadian economy. Barbados is probably the closest match to the Maldives of any country in the world. They’re similarly sized (115 sq mi for the Maldives to 170 sq mi for Bahamas), have similar populations (430,000 to 280,000), and have a population density closer to the Maldives than most other nations on Earth (2900 per sq mi to 1700 per sq mi) that is ethnically quite homogeneous (over 90% belong to one ethnicity).

The two also have similarly sized economies at $4.8b and $4.4b respectively, similar GDP per capita accounted for purchasing power at roughly $20,200 to $16,700, a similar Human Development Index score at 0.706 to 0.796, and Barbados also has currency pegged to the US Dollar (exchange rate 2 BBD per USD).

Barbados has a two-party system with the two major parties, the Barbados Labor Party and the Democratic Labor Party, both relatively moderate parties without major ideological differences. Elections have a strong personal aspect and voter allegiance is often based on tradition. The major problems it faces are creating jobs, especially for youth, as well as economic diversification, supporting small business, and continuing to develop the tourism sector.

An important context going into this manifesto is that Barbados has a land tax, at rates ranging from 0.1% of the current market value of their property for units with smaller valuations up to 0.75% for more valuable properties, with over a hundred thousand units listed and paying land tax. Exemptions to the land tax are made for universities, religious institutions, charity organizations, cemeteries, and the like. In 2012, the revenue from the land tax was about US$60 million, of which $22m was from residential plots, $21m from non-residential, and $17m from land-only.

This post is just a look at the platform of a mainstream center-left party in another country like ours, for purpose of comparison. Some of these policies won’t apply to the Maldives, some are already being done here, and some might work in Barbados but wouldn’t in our context. Either way, it’s an interesting read. I haven’t included every single detailed policy proposal and I left out the obvious and generic ones, but this will be a pretty good look at their policy proposals.

 

Policy positions from the Democratic Labor Party Barbados manifesto

Develop the tourism industry:

  • 15% land tax rebate for tourism related entities that demonstrate at least a 25% increase in use of local inputs from local agriculture, cultural industries, and manufacturing and maintain that use.
  • Further 10% land rebate for tourism related entities that install systems for at least 50% of electricity generation requirements from renewable sources.
  • Tourism entities can claim corporate tax deductions of up to 150% of expenditures related to use of local inputs.
  • Fund a programs to link agricultural businesses and entertainers with tourism and hospitality industry businesses for partner relationships.

Promote entrepreneurship, small business, and innovation:

  • Promote SMEs in education, healthcare, tech, renewables, agriculture, and cultural industries.
  • Foster linkages/partnerships between SMEs and tourism industry.
  • Partner with credit union and co-op sector in SME financing
  • Double the budget of the Youth Entrepreneurship Scheme

Boost investment in local communities through credit unions and co-ops:

  • Reintroduce income tax deduction for credit union shares and deposits.
  • Remove asset tax on co-ops.
  • Provide deposit insurance on deposits at co-ops.
  • Include credit unions and co-ops in facilitating SME financing.
  • Incentivize development of crowd-funding platforms, mobile banking, and other fintech solutions.

Modernize the public sector:

  • Implement service charters and performance indicators for all government departments and statutory corporations to maintain accountability.
  • Create a youth-led project to digitize the entire records system of the public service to boost efficiency, employ youth, and improve the ease of doing business.

Improve public health:

  • Establish a program providing in-home and community based health checks and information along the lines of the Cuban model.
  • Provide mandatory health checks at schools.
  • Enhance the use of telemedicine and other digital technologies to reduce the cost of healthcare delivery and healthcare management.
  • Give tax credits for preventative health activities such as gym memberships.

Establish better mental health care:

  • Free counseling as primary care for all 16-25 year olds.
  • Mandate an additional training course for all GPs in mental health issues.
  • Establish a permanent mental health awareness and advertising program.
  • Build a registration and licensing system for mental health professionals.
  • Develop a new service to address addiction and mental health dual diagnoses.

Focus on harm reduction in the war on drugs:

  • Decriminalize possession of less than a minimum quantity of marijuana.
  • Ensure the resources of the criminal justice system are targeted at pushers and that medical supports are focused on the victims of drug abuse.
  • Create a drug court to direct drug users towards treatment and management instead of prison.

Create a disability friendly society:

  • Work with key stakeholders in the disabled community and in line with international best practices.
  • Develop international and private/public partnerships to provide wheelchair access to all public buildings and complete a wheelchair friendly sidewalk program.
  • Improve educational supports for children with special needs by expanding the number of educational psychologists in the Ministry of Education.
  • Develop and implement a Comprehensive Employment Strategy for People with Disabilities.

Take a community-based approach to crime:

  • Zero tolerance to domestic abuse.
  • Conduct community based anger management and dispute resolution cases.
  • Expand a national Youth Service and similar programs to provide young males in particular with viable alternatives to crime.
  • Enhance prison rehabilitation programs.
  • Partner with civil society to expand programs in parenting skills.

Support social renewal:

  • Carry out ongoing workshops on conflict resolution in schools from primary to secondary.
  • Teach civics in primary and secondary school.
  • Promote community policing and healthcare.
  • In-home community based health care and health checks by trained youth volunteers from the community.

Promote gender equality:

  • Mandate at least 50% female membership on all state boards by 2026.
  • Mandate at least 25% female membership on all private sector boards.
  • Compel all large companies to publish gender discrimination data publicly.

[note: we’ve argued before here that quotas mandating representation of women actually increases not just fairness but productivity]

Ensure national food security and developing agricultural capacity:

  • Build a new agricultural training institute that is among the best in the region and will attract local and international candidates.
  • Provide government-owned land for agricultural projects that are focused on youth and/or are scalable and commercially viable.
  • Facilitate foreign direct investment into high impact agricultural projects.
  • Promote widespread use of cutting edge agricultural technologies such as aquaponics or vertical farming, and remove all taxes related to import of equipment and supplies.
  • Provide a market for farmers’ products by offering long term purchase contracts to supply fresh food to government institutions and promoting Barbados in tourism as a fresh food destination.
  • Agri-business incentives:
    • 10 year tax holiday for new agri-business entities or for venture capital funds focusing on agricultural businesses.
    • Make up to 150% of loan interests, R&D research, staff training expenditures, and marketing expenditures for agri-businesses tax-deductible.
    • No withholding tax on interest earned by financial institutions for 10 years on agricultural investments, or dividends received by shareholders in agri-business entities

Develop cultural industries:

  • Create a permanent home for a National Cultural Foundation (NIFCA).
  • Provide scholarships and business financing for NIFCA winners.
  • Fund a programs to link artists and entertainers with tourism and hospitality industry businesses for partner relationships.

Bring about a renewable energy revolution:

  • Facilitate utility-scale renewable energy projects to get to 50% of peak demand by renewables by 2026.
  • Establish a green public transport fund to support the replacement of the state public transport fleet with greener vehicles or vessels.
  • Provide a 25% rebate on land taxes to households with vehicles not powered by fossil fuels.
  • Invite international investment into developing high-tech renewable energy.

Increase digital connectivity:

  • Equip schools for the digital age.
  • Promote free wi-fi access in public spaces.
  • Provide accelerated depreciation for capital costs of establishing an e-commerce or digital commerce platform.
  • Provide corporation tax credits for up to 150% of the costs of operating a digital commerce platform.
  • Direct capital investment in updating health, education, transport, energy, agriculture, tourism, and other sectors.
  • Promote Barbados as location of choice for ICT businesses in the region through Invest Barbados.
  • Develop and implement a National Broadband Plan.

the case for voting

/ mvlcontent / Leave a comment

You can look at the only realistic options presented to you and like none of them. In most majoritarian democracies, the choices on offer are often difficult to justify morally. In many majoritarian democracies, the policy proposals on offer are so vague and incoherent, and the system itself is so gummed up and dysfunctional, that it’s hard to argue that real change will happen through electoral politics instead of direct action, grassroots organizing, working outside the system to change the system.

That’s right. I agree. But here’s the case for voting strategically anyway.

I’m a leftist. The policies I want are things that electoral politics might not be equipped for, at least within the near-future. But electoral politics doesn’t have to be about endorsing a candidate or a platform. As a leftist, electoral politics to me is a vote on the environment I want to be organizing in. I want to do grassroots work. I want to get ideas and policy proposals out there. I want to be able to freely convince people about the value of my ideas and the advantages of my proposals.

The policies I want aren’t on offer. The policies we want are things we have to make happen, outside of the conventional electoral system. A repressive authoritarian government makes direct action, the spread of new ideas, grassroots organizing, and any behavior critical of the ruling establishment much, much harder.

You don’t have to work within the system. For real change, you might need to work outside it. But you want to ask- in what kind of external environment do you think you would best be able to bring about this real, outside-the-system change?

Will a government that regularly carries out heavy-handed crackdowns on opposition and changes the rules constantly to crush dissent, allow an environment where you would be able to best effect change? Even if you’re courageous and unfazed, would it allow those more vulnerable to participate freely in bringing about change?

Voting is a means to an end. The lesser of two evils doesn’t have to be something you endorse. The lesser of two evils just needs to be the option that makes tearing down those evils, bringing about real change, more likely to happen. The lesser of two evils as the establishment makes targeting the establishment an easier, safer, and more effective task. The lesser of two evils is taking the sting out of state power and its control over our every move. To bring about wholesale change, you want an easier target- one without a reckless authoritarian consolidating their power by the day, growing stronger and more repressive, pulling together more and more levers of power to keep the populace in check.

john rawls on making an objectively fair set of laws

/ mvlcontent

We probably can’t make a perfectly objective and perfectly fair set of laws, but the Veil of Ignorance thought experiment by John Rawls points a way towards coming close. Farnam Street has this explanation of the Veil of Ignorance, which is a really cool way to think about what fairness is and what kind of laws would exist in a fair society:

If you could redesign society from scratch, what would it look like? How would you distribute wealth and power? Would you make everyone equal or not? How would you define fairness and equality? And — here’s the kicker — what if you had to make those decisions without knowing who you would be in this new society?

Philosopher John Rawls asked just that in a thought experiment known as “the Veil of Ignorance” in his 1971 book, Theory of Justice. Like many thought experiments, the Veil of Ignorance could never be carried out in the literal sense, nor should it be. Its purpose is to explore ideas about justice, morality, equality, and social status in a structured manner.

The Veil of Ignorance, a component of social contract theory, allows us to test ideas for fairness. Behind the Veil of Ignorance, no one knows who they are. They lack clues as to their class, their privileges, their disadvantages, or even their personality. They exist as an impartial group, tasked with designing a new society with its own conception of justice.

Imagine that you have set for yourself the task of developing a totally new social contract for today’s society. How could you do so fairly?

Although you could never actually eliminate all of your personal biases and prejudices, you would need to take steps at least to minimize them. Rawls suggests that you imagine yourself in an original position behind a veil of ignorance. Behind this veil, you know nothing of yourself and your natural abilities, or your position in society. You know nothing of your sex, race, nationality, or individual tastes. Behind such a veil of ignorance all individuals are simply specified as rational, free, and morally equal beings. You do know that in the “real world,” however, there will be a wide variety in the natural distribution of natural assets and abilities, and that there will be differences of sex, race, and culture that will distinguish groups of people from each other. Without any knowledge of your current position in society, what laws would you want in that society?

As a thought experiment, the Veil of Ignorance is powerful because our usual opinions regarding what is just and unjust are informed by our own experiences. We are shaped by our race, gender, class, education, appearance, sexuality, career, family, and so on. On the other side of the Veil of Ignorance, none of that exists. Technically, the resulting society should be a fair one.

“The Fairness Principle: When contemplating a moral action, imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person.” — Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom

The Purpose of the Veil of Ignorance

Because people behind the Veil of Ignorance do not know who they will be in this new society, any choice they make in structuring that society could either harm them or benefit them.

If they decide men will be superior, for example, they must face the risk that they will be women. If they decide that 10% of the population will be slaves to the others, they cannot be surprised if they find themselves to be slaves. No one wants to be part of a disadvantaged group, so the logical belief is that the Veil of Ignorance would produce a fair, egalitarian society.

Behind the Veil of Ignorance, cognitive biases melt away. The hypothetical people are rational thinkers. They use probabilistic thinking to assess the likelihood of their being affected by any chosen measure. They possess no opinions for which to seek confirmation. Nor do they have any recently learned information to pay undue attention to. The sole incentive they are biased towards is their own self-preservation, which is equivalent to the preservation of the entire group. They cannot stereotype any particular group as they could be members of it. They lack commitment to their prior selves as they do not know who they are.

So, what would these people decide on? According to Rawls, in a fair society all individuals must possess the following:

  • Rights and liberties (including the right to vote, the right to hold public office, free speech, free thought, and fair legal treatment)
  • Power and opportunities
  • Income and wealth sufficient for a good quality of life (Not everyone needs to be rich, but everyone must have enough money to live a comfortable life.)
  • The conditions necessary for self-respect

For these conditions to occur, the people behind the Veil of Ignorance must figure out how to achieve what Rawls regards as the two key components of justice:

  • Everyone must have the best possible life which does not cause harm to others.
  • Everyone must be able to improve their position, and any inequalities must be present solely if they benefit everyone.

 

Ways of Understanding the Veil of Ignorance

One way to understand the Veil of Ignorance is to imagine that you are tasked with cutting up a pizza to share with friends. You will be the last person to take a slice. Being of sound mind, you want to get the largest possible share, and the only way to ensure this is to make all the slices the same size. You could cut one huge slice for yourself and a few tiny ones for your friends, but one of them might take the large slice and leave you with a meager share. (Not to mention, your friends won’t think very highly of you.)

We can also consider the Tragedy of the Commons. Introduced by ecologist Garrett Hardin, this mental model states that shared resources will be exploited if no system for fair distribution is implemented. Individuals have no incentive to leave a share of free resources for others. Hardin’s classic example is an area of land which everyone in a village is free to use for their cattle. Each person wants to maximize the usefulness of the land, so they put more and more cattle out to graze. Yet the land is finite and at some point will become too depleted to support livestock. If the people behind the Veil of Ignorance had to choose how the common land should be shared, the logical decision would be to give each person an equal part and forbid them from introducing too many cattle.

As N. Gregory Mankiw writes in Principles of Microeconomics:

“The Tragedy of the Commons is a story with a general lesson: when one person uses a common resource, he diminishes other people’s enjoyment of it. Because of this negative externality, common resources tend to be used excessively. The government can solve the problem by reducing use of the common resource through regulation or taxes. Alternatively, the government can sometimes turn the common resource into a private good.”

This lesson has been known for thousands of years. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out the problem with common resources: “What is common to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others.”

In The Case for Meritocracy, Michael Faust uses other thought experiments to support the Veil of Ignorance:

“Let’s imagine another version of the thought experiment. If inheritance is so inherently wonderful — such an intrinsic good — then let’s collect together all of the inheritable money in the world. We shall now distribute this money in exactly the same way it would be distributed in today’s world… but with one radical difference. We are going to distribute it by lottery rather than by family inheritance, i.e, anyone in the world can receive it. So, in these circumstances, how many people who support inheritance would go on supporting it? Note that the government wouldn’t be getting the money… just lucky strangers. Would the advocates of inheritance remain as fiercely committed to their cherished principle? Or would the entire concept instantly be exposed for the nonsense it is?”

If inheritance were treated as the lottery it is, no one would stand by it. In the world of the 1% versus the 99%, no one in the 1% would ever accept a lottery to decide inheritance because there would be a 99% chance they would end up as schmucks, exactly like the rest of us.

And a further surrealistic thought experiment:

Imagine that on a certain day of the year, each person in the world randomly swaps bodies with another person, living anywhere on earth. Well, for the 1%, there’s a 99% chance that they will be swapped from heaven to hell. For the 99%, 1% might be swapped from hell to heaven, while the other 98% will stay the same as before. What kind of constitution would the human race adopt if annual body swapping were a compulsory event?! They would of course choose a fair one.

 

How We Can Apply This Concept

We can use the Veil of Ignorance to test whether a certain issue is fair.

When my kids are fighting over the last cookie, which happens more often than you’d imagine, I ask them to determine who will split the cookie. The other person picks. This is the old playground rule, “you split, I pick.” Without this rule, one of them would surely give the other a smaller portion. With it, the halves are as equal as they would be with sensible adults.

When considering whether we should endorse a proposed law or policy, we can ask: if I did not know if this would affect me or not, would I still support it? Those who make big decisions that shape the lives of large numbers of people are almost always those in positions of power. And those in positions of power are almost always members of privileged groups. As Benjamin Franklin once wrote: “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”

When we have to make decisions that will affect other people, especially disadvantaged groups (such as when a politician decides to cut benefits or a CEO decides to outsource manufacturing to a low-income country), we can use the Veil of Ignorance as a tool for making fair choices.

As Robert F. Kennedy (the younger brother of John F. Kennedy) said in the 1960s:

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

When we choose to position ourselves behind the Veil of Ignorance, we have a better chance of creating one of those all-important ripples.

 

power, sociologically speaking – vincent roscigno

/ mvlcontent

Power dynamics matter. Insisting on viewing any instance of social confrontation as happening in a vacuum is ignoring that they happen in a society and are subject to the dynamics present in that society. It’s hard to sometimes explain how power works sociologically and how the concept of power isn’t limited to just direct political or military power. This is one of the best explainers of power I could find:

At the close of another hotly contested campaign season, politics seems to me like a sport. We have been inundated with commercials, bumper stickers, debates, and speeches. Fans have flaunted their allegiances while those at the top tried to carve out stances that would best appeal to particular demographics. Is it worth it? Does it really matter? What, if anything, really changes because of all this?

These, of course, are abstract, big-thinking, sociological kinds of questions. But if I remain uncertain about the answers, there is one thing that is clearly at stake in all of this: power. So, what is power? How is it achieved, exercised, and legitimated?

We in the social sciences typically think of power as persuasiveness, the ability to get what one wants—this is the essence of the classic definition attributed to Max Weber, and it’s commonly applied across a host of institutional spheres and interactions, from political parties to the power of consumers. But this view is a bit too simplistic—it obscures power’s fundamentally structural, cultural, and relational nature. This is to say, power is too often thought of as something that a particular leader or party has, rather than something rooted in institutional practices, cultural supports, and alternative pathways outside the usual political apparatus.

Sociology offers a unique glimpse through the myths that veil power’s resilience, uses, and limits.

The problem of power, then, is a prime blind spot; the core, lower-level topics of political science—like individual voting behavior, party politics and alignments, and election outcomes—can direct us away from larger questions about the ends toward which political influence is directed. Sociology is uniquely equipped to look beyond the usual veneer of power, unpack the myths that reinforce it, and see the relational foundations upon which it ultimately rests. A sociological view indeed provides a much-needed corrective, offering a unique glimpse through the myths that veil power’s resilience, uses, and limits.

 The Structured Nature of Power

Power can derive from historically and culturally proscribed statuses (such as race and gender) and organizational and institutional positioning (e.g., manager, politician, school administrator). Power is more complex than that, though, as institutional, organizational, and bureaucratic structures confer greater or lesser leverage depending on position. Those of lower status are constrained to playing by the rules much of the time, while those in higher positions might be able to create or use even seemingly neutral rules in self-beneficial ways. Consider how tax codes, exam criteria for college admissions, penalties for white-collar and blue-collar crimes, and a bifurcated health care system benefit the already powerful while creating vulnerabilities and diminishing the power of others. Such arrangements highlight a key sociological insight: Culturally proscribed statuses and positions shape power and how that power is enabled or constrained by structure.

Politics and elections, even in an ostensibly democratic system, are not impervious to the structural dynamics of power. One commonly hears, for instance, of the ways in which citizens wield their power through votes. Yet, voting is defined by the structural dictates of law and can be subject to legal or informational manipulation—for instance, gerrymandering might dissipate electoral power or misinformation might create real or perceived limitations to exercising the vote. Perhaps more importantly, the very political options we have—the candidates, parties, and political agendas we choose from—are considerably limited by, even beholden to, wider interests and influences. Structure clearly constrains access, choices, agendas, and actual political decision making and policy, regardless of citizens’ desires. Further, those in privileged positions will, by and large, hold the structural and institutional tools to reinforce prevailing power hierarchies.

The role of structure in bolstering power differentials is equally true of other institutional realms. Employees, for instance, are typically bound to procedural manuals, existing technological controls, or the speed of machinery, and they have fewer protections than they’ve had in the past. Supervisors can invoke (or not invoke) elements of authority and sanctioning like hiring, firing, demoting, and promoting, often with little repercussion. This is particularly true when shielded by legal precedence and financial advantage (that is, laws like corporate personhood protect many in powerful positions in the corporate world and, if they are challenged, money can allow for a great advantage in the courtroom). A similar case can be made for medical access, where power to obtain treatment is conditioned by resources, rules, and social safety nets dictated from by government officials, insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical industry. Even medical practitioners are increasingly constrained by structures leveraged by even more influential actors and entities. In these regards, power is vested in the system—or, to be more precise, in how social relations are structured and maintained within institutional and organizational contexts.

That powerful actors have the capacity to create or invoke structure in their own interests while the less powerful are more constrained is an important sociological point, yet it is typically hidden by our everyday understandings of how organizations and institutions operate. Indeed, we tend to see contemporary structures and rules as more or less bureaucratic, rational, and neutral. And, to be sure, they are presented that way. Yet, significant inequalities exist across most institutional domains, including politics. Consider, for instance, who is represented, who has voice, who benefits from policies, and which agendas reach the table.

In one clear example, in recent years, agents of large and powerful financial institutions manipulated the stock market and gambled on high-risk mortgages for the sake of massive personal and institutional financial gains. To prevent more devastating losses to shareholders and the public, these companies were “bailed out” by the federal government, with some bailout money going toward financial bonuses for CEOs. Few were prosecuted for mismanagement, and fewer still were characterized as criminals, to the outrage of an electorate that has seen its social safety nets evaporate, housing values deteriorate, retirement accounts dwindle, reproductive rights attacked, job prospects collapse, and the possibility of universal health care taken off the table. “Power begets power” rings apparent; the less powerful were left paying the bill.

Such a disconnect, I would submit, is due to the fact that we tend not to see large-scale abuses as unjust exercises of power so much as the unfortunate results of an amorphous “bad social system.” What we forget—or choose to overlook—is that this “unfortunately bad system” benefits those who constructed and control it in the first place. Equally misguided is a focus on the micro level: equating misconduct with “a few bad apples.” That view ascribes abuses of power to individual defect, obfuscating its structural and systemic character. Instead, we must return to the fact that structure bolsters power for some and mitigates it for others.

Cultural Scaffolding and the Legitimation of Power

Power relations and the structures that support them are typically buttressed by “cultural scaffolding”—that is, values and belief systems that portray power and its use as reasonable and legitimate. Popular portrayals, in fact, remain largely loyal to neutral assumptions about how power operates, rarely question the legitimacy of those in power or the cultural symbolism they invoke, and often seem unaware of the cultural foundations that reinforce unequal power relations in organizational, institutional, and political life. The sociological focus on cultural scaffolding forces attention toward the ways in which power differentials and the exercise of power itself are legitimated—made to seem reasonable, just, rational, and even natural.

Language and symbolism are important in these regards, especially when it comes to symbolic vilification. Symbolic vilification is the process whereby the powerful scapegoat opponents or less powerful actors by deeming them less worthy, problematic, or even dangerous. When this occurs, it is easier to maintain power by creating fear, reify inequality through exclusion, apply punitive sanctions and control policies, or even invoke violence toward subordinated groups. A second, often simultaneous process entails symbolic amplification, which occurs when actors imbue and elevate certain elements of cultural, institutional/organizational, and political life to a place of almost sacred reverence. One might consider broadly constructed cultural values (say, freedom, democracy, and equality) in this light, but also more institutionally and organizationally specific processes like educational choice, religious piety, or “family values.”

All actors, of course, can invoke such symbols. Social movements typically do so in an effort to galvanize commitment, participation, and public support, find scholars like David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford. Importantly, though, symbolic amplification is also commonly mobilized in defense of institutional power, practices, and privilege. That is, symbolic amplification can be used in conservative ways that defend the status quo.

Sociologists may seem unique in our emphasis on culture and the dynamics of “legitimation,” but political parties and candidates are well aware of the effects. They work incredibly hard to frame issues in a manner consistent with the identities and value systems of their targeted demographic voting groups. This is easily witnessed in, for example, the political use of the terms democracy and freedom relative to the vilification of immigrants, minorities, and labor unions.

In the years I spent examining workplace discrimination. In that research, I did find some examples of “bad apples” in otherwise good environments, yet in the vast majority of cases, employers used otherwise neutral bureaucratic rules and procedures to systematically fire, demote, not promote, and harass minority, female, and aging employees. These employers defended their actions by simultaneously amplifying claims of merit, business interest, and neutrality (often pointing to official bureaucratic rules) while also vilifying victims as unstable, unreliable, and problematic. The use of ostensibly neutral rules and structure by powerful actors was clear, as was the cultural scaffolding that legitimated their discriminatory conduct.

Culture and legitimation are undoubtedly elemental to understanding power within any institutional or organizational context. Cultural values and symbolism are invoked by those in power or vying for power, sometimes to manipulate, sometimes to blur complex issues, and certainly to bolster allegiance and an image of fairness, neutrality, and trustworthiness. Such processes also reduce the chances that less powerful actors, be they in politics or some other institutional domain, will recognize or act upon alternatives, abuses, or the inequalities that often result.

 

we should treat addiction as a public health issue

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Treating drug addiction like a criminal issue has failed. Everywhere. Not just here, but in every part of the world from the U.S. to South East Asia. It is as proven a failure as any policy worldwide, and there isn’t much of a public good case to be made for it.

People seem to feel that people who would use drugs deserve some form of punishment, but if your reasoning is punitive, you should be able to see whether that argument stands on its own instead of conflating it with the public good or well-designed public health policy. I personally don’t think that drug use should be punished: the whole problem with addiction, for those susceptible to it, is that it takes hold in the brain and makes quitting absolute hell, regardless of whether your original use was a mistake you now deeply regret.

Have some empathy: do you believe that there’s no possible path your life could have taken- not if you’d fallen in with the wrong people while young, not if you’d spiraled into horrible decisions during grief, not if you’d just been a dumbass kid and your adult self wishes you could scream at that kid to never do it? If you’d made any of those mistakes, you’d now be on the hook for it indefinitely, because that’s addiction. And instead of trying to help you get back on your feet, the state and society punishes you for the way your mistakes changed your body into something that craves a chemical like it craves food or water.

But let’s leave that aside for now. Where has drug policy worked? Portugal’s a good example. Portugal was hit by a drug epidemic in the 1980s that resulted in one of every ten people being heroin users. In 2001, Portugal decided to treat addiction seriously as a public health issue.

Portugal decriminalized the possession and use of drugs (to be clear, just possession and use, not dealing). Drug users were directed towards treatment, not into the prison system where they would only further excluded from common society, fall behind on getting work and rebuilding their lives, and fall in with hardened criminals. People caught with a small amount of drugs weren’t arrested. Instead, they had to meet with a small local commission made up of a doctor, lawyer, and social worker, who worked with them on treatment and provided support systems during recovery. Drop-in clinics in quiet and anonymous unmarked locations provided counseling, clean clothes and a shower, blood testing, and help with finding rehab, jobs, or re-integrating into society.

The drug crisis eased. Drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, and drug-related crime all dropped. HIV infection rates fell by 96%.

Portugal’s policy is guided by principles of compassion and empathy: a belief in treating everyone as individuals with human dignity, as thinking of the root causes that might lead an individual towards drugs. Without the risks of legal jeopardy, clinics, pharmacies, and NGOs were able to work together to provide a safety net of services for their communities. Government endorsement has powerful effects on social views of issues, and the cultural shift on how drug users were viewed helped create a climate where prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation could be the focus.

In the early days of the crisis, Portugal, which it is important to note is quite religiously conservative a country, responded by demonizing drug users as a stain on society and drugs as a manifestation of Satan. But that didn’t work, just like it hasn’t worked anywhere else.

It is important to note that most medical organizations describe addiction as a disease:

Like diabetes, cancer and heart disease, addiction is caused by a combination of behavioral, environmental and biological factors. Genetic risks factors account for about half of the likelihood that an individual will develop addiction.

Addiction involves changes in the functioning of the brain and body. These changes may be brought on by risky substance use or may pre-exist.

Why is willpower often not enough?

The initial and early decisions to use substances reflect a person’s free or conscious choice. However, once the brain has been changed by addiction, that choice or willpower becomes impaired. Perhaps the most defining symptom of addiction is a loss of control over substance use.

Are people with addiction responsible for their addiction?

People with addiction should not be blamed for suffering from the disease. All people make choices about whether to use substances. However, people do not choose how their brain and body respond to drugs and alcohol, which is why people with addiction cannot control their use while others can. People with addiction can still stop using – it’s just much harder than it is for someone who has not become addicted.

People with addiction are responsible for seeking treatment and maintaining recovery. Often they need the help and support of family, friends and peers to stay in treatment and increase their chances of survival and recovery.

Why some people say addiction isn’t a disease

Some people think addiction cannot be a disease because it is caused by the individual’s choice to use drugs or alcohol. While the first use (or early stage use) may be by choice, once the brain has been changed by addiction, most experts believe that the person loses control of their behavior.

Choice does not determine whether something is a disease. Heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer involve personal choices like diet, exercise, sun exposure, etc. A disease is what happens in the body as a result of those choices.

Others argue that addiction is not a disease because some people with addiction get better without treatment. People with a mild substance use disorder may recover with little or no treatment. People with the most serious form of addiction usually need intensive treatment followed by lifelong management of the disease. However, some people with severe addiction stop drinking or using drugs without treatment, usually after experiencing a serious family, social, occupational, physical, or spiritual crisis. Others achieve sobriety by attending self-help (12-step or AA) meetings without receiving much, if any, professional treatment. Because we do not understand why some people are able to stop on their own or through self-help meetings at certain points in their life, people with addiction should always seek treatment.

[Center on Addiction]

The real question: would decriminalizing drugs sell as a policy in the Maldives, or would the very phrase itself cause an uproar by people horrified at the prospect of some lawless Mad Max: Fury Road style situation? Yes, probably. It might be a step too far to start with. But I think that there are little steps we can take. In a remotely just society, drug users facing any kind of mandatory incarceration should at the very least do so exclusively in rehabilitation facilities, separate from violent offenders, where users will get treatment and have a chance at re-entering society ready to be a part of it instead of further isolated from it. I don’t think that’s enough, but it’s a start.