LUDMILA ANDRÉA

“It’s back to the streets” : Putin wins Russian Presidential Elections

And Putin wins again. The nagging sense of illegitimacy resonates in my brain as I read over the various headlines announcing Vladimir Putin’s re-election as the President of Russia. Having dominated Russia’s political sphere since the turn of the century, many members of the opposition have begun to question whether or not foul play was involved in the most recent elections. Winning roughly 65% of the votes, his win has been questioned by opposition activists as well as his rivals both of whom have spouted rumours of vote-rigging. “Russia witnessed popular protests on a scale unseen since the 1990s amid widespread allegations of fraud following last year’s parliamentary elections, and some are now hoping for a repeat of those scenes” (Aljazeera).

ROUGH Draft. (Very, Very Rough)

Sigh. Here’s my rough draft. Lacking a working definition of Democracy, needs way more analysis, and a conclusion. As well as better graphs. Basically it’s pretty bad. I have a lot of work to do on it. Feedback greatly appreciated.

Paper 1 – 1st Draft

Greek Austerity

I’m sure that many of us have gotten used to hearing about Greece’s economic problems as well as the possible implications a the European Union will be faced with if these problems persist. I definitely have grown slightly indifferent to Greece’s woes. However, reading an article on the passing of a Greek austerity plan reminded me of the importance of these issues.

Greek parliament voted on an austerity plan last week after receiving an enormous amount of pressure from the country’s foreign lenders, who required action to be taken before providing the struggling government with more loans. Heavily dependent on foreign investments and loans in order to keep from defaulting on its debt, the Greek state is hanging by a thread.  The new austerity plan includes a 22% cut in the benchmark minimum wage and thousands of government layoffs before 2015. Although this plan may assuage lenders, it is bound to have extreme implications on a country whose unemployment is already dangerously high after years of recession.

Ultimately, although I think this is a necessary evil in order to keep its foreign investors on board, I don’t know if this is going to be a huge problem in terms of keeping the country from falling apart economically. It is obvious that the citizens are not happy, as can be easily judged by the more than 80,000 people who protested in Athens today. At such a tumultuous time, it’s difficult to know what the future of the Greek nation will be as well as the possible consequences that have the potential to shake the European Union.

For a long time Greece’s exit from the E.U. was pretty much unfathomable. However, recently a shift to a philosophy of ‘preparing for the worst’ has taken place, as the E.U. begins to take steps to minimize disaster if Greek ends up having to leave the E.U. To be honest I think that letting Greece leave the E.U. would be a pretty bad idea. Although the situation is pretty sticky, I think that everything that can possibly be done must be done because letting Greece go would not only give the wrong idea, but it also has the potential to set a hazardous precedent for other countries in the union who may face similar economic pressures in the future. For now it seems that the international community will just have to wait and see what happens and hope that the situation improves with minimal mishaps.

Make It Better v. It Gets Better

Here is my article I wrote for the Ubyssey for UBC Pride/Outweek:

Upon first glance, it is difficult to see what would foster opposition to the It Gets Better campaign. The internet-based outreach program, created by Dan Savage, aims to prevent suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer (LGBTQ) youth by conveying the message that the difficult circumstances they may be experiencing will one day improve.

But there are many who wonder whether merely telling LGBTQ teens that “it gets better” will be enough to help them through their current struggles. Instead, should we be asking what can be done to lessen these struggles and consequently make it better now?

This year, UBC Outweek intends to bring this idea to the forefront, reminding individuals to be conscious and accountable in answering the call to make things better.

“I respect the effort,” explained Janice Stewart of the women’s and gender studies department. “I think the message of hope is often very significant. Does it make a significant difference?” That, she said, is “hard to tell at this point.”

Anne-Marie Long, creator of the Positive Space campaign at UBC, agrees that although the It Gets Better campaign “may have been noble in its intent…to reach out to youth who are struggling with bullying, identity development issues and suicidal thoughts, it is not good enough.”

Katherine Fobear, a Liu Institute scholar in women’s and gender studies, argued that “there remains a lack of discourse on other factors that cause violence and discrimination to happen to LGBTQ youth.”

The truth of the matter is that for many LGBTQ individuals who experience daily struggles, knowing that things may one day be better is simply not sufficient. For this reason, the UBC Outweek team has been somewhat disillusioned with the It Gets Better campaign. For one, it has no active agenda.

“[It] promotes complacency within LGBTQ youth in exchange for the prospect of a better future,” said Outweek’s coordinator Adrian Diaz. “Another name for the It Gets Better campaign could have been the ‘Deal With It’ campaign.”

Diaz said that the Outweek team “kept discussing this issue and asked ourselves, ‘What can we do?’”

They eventually settled on Make It Better, which focuses on addressing issues at hand and working actively to overcome them.

“There is a sense at UBC that it is a fairly safe place and I think that is overall pretty accurate,” said PhD student Hélène Frohard-Dourlent, whose doctoral work focuses on anti-homophobia practices in BC secondary schools. However, she said that there are many LGBTQ issues that still need to be addressed.

“Gender issues are still a big problem on this campus,” said Frohard-Dourlent, alluding specifically to issues for transgender students, such as the lack of gender-neutral washrooms on campus. “[We] like to think of ourselves as open-minded and liberal, yet we often lose sight of things that we do that actually reinforce sexual and gender stereotypes.”

Alongside Outweek’s efforts, there are other ways that UBC students can take part in addressing the problems that LGBTQ students face.

The Positive Space campaign is intended to help make UBC more receptive to LGBTQ individuals. Long, the creator of Positive Space, emphasizes the importance of “speaking up when you see injustice. Doing the self-work to address one’s own privilege to help better enable one to see these barriers is also key.”

“Making sexuality and gender education a part of the teacher-training program also goes a long way,” said Stewart.

Most importantly of all, Forbear said, “The message needs to be brought out that violence against sexual and gender minorities is a huge problem that implicates everyone, not just LGBTQ-identifying individuals.”

Region Choice

I’m going to be doing Central America because I am very interested in the politics of this region!

Let me know if any of you are doing Central America as well!

The 9-5 Experiment

Thinking about the degree to which school monopolizes my life never quite seemed odd to me. I thought that was just the way it was supposed to be. I’ve been in university for four years now, consumed by work, stress, and anxiety (bi-weekly stress-induced panic attacks are the norm for me). But last weekend while out to dinner with some friends, I realized that maybe I’ve just been going about this whole university thing in the wrong way.

I always believed university to be this thing that I had to be obsessed with and concerned about 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. My sleep pattern is perpetually out of whack, my eating habits basically boil down to yo-yo dieting based on time I have available to eat when not doing schoolwork (while studying for exams I survive on whatever food I can get at Ike’s cafe). So why do so many students choose to live this way? I’m not sure of the answer but my three friends Jonathan Paradis, Isabelle Plessis, Ting Kelly and I are determined to work to reject this lifestyle. Our solution? Treating school as a 9-5 job.

This may seem silly, but hear me out. One of the nicest things about working at a job with fixed hours is that when you are finished, you are (for the most part) finished. What I mean is, you don’t take your job home with you and continue working on it all through the night, mostly because you probably wouldn’t be getting paid for it and, to be honest, it just doesn’t make any sense. So, why can’t we use this approach for school work? The four of us intend to treat university as a 9-5 job, working Monday-Friday during contained 8-hour periods–without distraction (a.k.a. no Facebook)– and dedicate the rest of our free-time to living our lives. Plain and simple.

Now, 9-5 doesn’t work every day for me because I have quite a few evening classes, but it doesn’t have to be exactly at those specific times. The point is to give yourself a solid block of time during which you can fully dedicate yourself to doing your work, reading ahead, working through paper drafts, and the like. This way we are free on weekends and evenings to do whatever we want. I really think this idea has a really great potential to completely alter my perception of university as a 24/7 lifestyle.

The four of us are starting this ‘9-5 Project’ tomorrow (Monday, February 6^th 2012) and will be documenting the process. I’m going to update weekly, probably on this blog. Has anyone tried anything similar to this before? What do you guys think? Can students successfully treat school like a job?

The ‘story of my life’ no more!

Sold to the Highest Bidder:
Is American Democracy Broken?

Corporations are not people. Democracy is for people.

Yet, in 2010 the US supreme court decided in the Citizens United ruling that corporations are ‘people’ and are therefore allowed to use their profits to play a direct role in influencing American elections. In other words the ruling allows for limitless independent spending of corporations for political purposes. The creation of Independent expenditure political action committees, or Super PACs, was directly facilitated by this ruling. A super PAC is a political organization that has the ability to receive unlimited corporate contributions  to advocate for a candidate.The result? Billionaires are now able to essentially ‘buy democracy’ by spending as much as they want on their favourite candidates. But last time I checked, democracy was for people, not corporations.

In keeping a close watch on the road to the US elections, I have realized the huge problem the allowance of corporate funding has created. I feel that the manner through which decisions the United States, as a country, is making has been fundamentally corrupted through the allowance of  corporate personhood, secret money and so called ‘bought-and-paid for’ legislation. However, I feel that many people haven’t come to terms with the various possible ramifications of such systematic corruption. So what is the effect of corporate donations on US Politics?

I think that allowing corporations to act as people is so plainly wrong. Corporations are not people and therefore there is no question in my mind that they should never be given the same rights as people. In fact, substantial donations to a political campaign allows for special interests and effectively goes against the very concept of democracy. Special interest money is tipping the scale and the result is a democracy out of balance. Political complacency and low voter turnout are directly related to this notion of bought-and-paid for politics.This is a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed.  But how does the US increase visibility and use checks and balances to work to bring integrity and accountability back to American politics?

New York Times infographic outlining different ways to use campaign funding:

What steps do you think need to be taken to get money out of US politics? 

“What is Democracy, Anyway?”

To be honest as a fourth year political science student I still like to sometimes disregard this question simply because, as straightforward as it may seem, democracy is quite difficult to define. Despite being used (and often misused) by so many, there still does not seem to be any real consensus about what exactly this dubious term means.

When attempting to define democracy, one must ask which liberal features must be present in a certain state for it to be considered truly democratic? Some think that having somewhat representative elections is enough to constitute a democracy, and although I think this is most certainly an important factor, I don’t think that determining how democratic a country is depends on this factor alone. In relation to this, some view democracy as a strict dichotomy while others claim that it is a spectrum. Personally, I still have not decided which I think is the case.

Ultimately, to answer this question (although only partially, because as I said before I still do not have a full definition), I have to say that democracy means a country where every single individual has the opportunity to participate in free and fair elections, allowing each person to be directly involved in deciding the future of the country. Furthermore, I believe that another important element is the accountability of the elected government to the people. After all, it is undemocratic for a leader to dismiss the voices of his people once elected. In this sense, the views and needs of the country’s populace ought to be reflected in the actions of the government. A democracy, then, cannot merely be a country that that holds elections that are somewhat representative of the views of the people. Nor is it a country where the leader is able to disregard the will of the people. In order to be a functional democracy in light of these two factors, there must exist a system through which the legitimacy of the government is ensured. In other words, if a governing body is not fulfilling the needs of the people, there ought to exist a way to replace it.

Democracy means the freedom to choose as well as the freedom to change. Although democracy and freedom are rather entangled, I think it is important that one realize that they are not the same thing. There are so many states that claim they are a democracy yet systematically and continuously oppress their own people. This is what makes it so difficult to define democracy: setting specific standards of democracy is a nice idea, however the circumstances change so drastically from country to country that this becomes quite difficult. For example, many countries in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere are ‘democratic’ however have very little freedom because widespread vote fraud usually means that a small elite group will end up in control. Defining democracy on a case-by-case (country-by country) basis, however,  is also dangerous because it has the potential to become extremely subjective.

Defining democracy will always prove difficult. I know that this little word has real implications that impact the inner-workings of governments around the world. For now I will continue my attempts to come up with a working definition for myself. But perhaps it is just one of those abstract concepts that is simply destined to remain without a concrete answer.

What the 2012 U.S. Election is ‘Really About’ (According to Mitt Romney)

Not getting upset at some of the rhetoric being spouted by many of the republican candidates can sometimes prove to be difficult. Last week, Mitt Romney won the Florida GOP primary, yet despite not being Romney’s #1 fan, I did not have a real problem with this win until after hearing his commentary, post-victory. During his speech, one sentence in particular disturbed me: “While we celebrate this victory, we must not forget what this election is really about: defeating Barack Obama.”

I know that at the heart of it, the reason the GOP candidates are running is to replace the current Democrat in office. However, for Mitt Romney to verbalize this so crassly really made me think: what is going on here?

After hearing Romney’s speech, which focused heavily on beating Barack Obama in the 2012 elections, I really got to thinking about this question. Although I know that the Republicans will do everything they can do make sure they take over office in the fall, I can’t help but wonder when it became acceptable for candidates to voice their primary concern as beating the opposition party, not to improve the often grave circumstances in their country. With so many economic and social problems plaguing a vast amount of American citizens, I wonder how it can possibly be acceptable for a candidate to essentially disregard the real issue at hand and to claim that what the election is really about is the defeat of Barack Obama.

I know that Mitt Romney and the other GOP candidates have platforms which include a variety of social and economic issues, however to hear him say that this was what the election was really about rubbed me the wrong way, to say the very least. No need, to worry about getting the economy moving or improving people’s lives or anything like that, Romney. Let’s focus on the real issue here: Barack Obama…. (?)

Am I the only one who was extremely disturbed by this comment?

“Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

Recycle.