icitizen-admin's blog
The iCitizenForum is the online home of the discussion which began at the Dialogues in Democracy event in Williamsburg, Va.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a speech at Washington's Mayflower hotel that people influential in young people's lives don't encourage them to join the armed forces. Recruiting is down because of it, he said, and he also faulted the military for not doing a better job of attracting young men and women.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires...
Representative Tom Lantos accuses Yahoo! of lying to Congress about the Internet giant’s role in the arrest and imprisonment of Chinese journalist Shi Tao.
We spoke with Tala Dowlatshahi, the New York director of Reporters Without Borders about the position of United State’s Internet companies in China. A clip from the interview is posted below.
A United States Senate committee wants to stop the federal government from forcing journalists to reveal confidential sources. It has approved, and sent to the floor for a vote, a national shield law.
The crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Myanmar last week has given rise to the idea of sanctioning a regime.
Imposing sanctions on a country will affect its economy, which in turn affects its citizens. Some officials believe that progress toward democracy can actually be reversed by sanctions. Fareed Zakaria, writing in today's Washington Post, said that one of the lessons that we should have learned from Iraq was that "decades of sanctions destroy civil society and empower the worst elements of the country."
The debate sparked by Columbia University’s announcement of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s upcoming campus speaking engagement underlines Pakistani parliament member Tahmina Daultana’s recent comment about terrorists. At the 2007 World Forum on the Future of Democracy, she said "If you kill one, ten more appear; if you talk to them, you can handle them. "
Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve System, has been touring America promoting his biography. One little publicized argument in his book, found at the end of this blog, is that growing wealth inequality is a threat to democracy. Greenspan argues that the growing gap between rich and poor in the U.S. could bring civil disorder. His solution is to improve education so that people get higher paying jobs, thus eliminating the need for social welfare programs.
The World Forum on the Future of Democracy in Williamsburg, Va., was a great opportunity to reflect on the nature of democracy and what we have learned in the project so far. If I were to take one message away from the World Forum it would be that democracy is no spectator sport. Through the course of the three-day conference we were reminded that a successful democracy requires the active participation of its citizens. A vital question that we have to grapple with in the 21st century is how to ensure this participation in a world where voting and citizen participation is declining.
Tuesday morning focuses the discussion of democracy on current challenges to national security, “Terrorism and Security.” The panel, moderated by James Loy, former deputy secretary of Homeland Security, included: Ali Ansari, director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at St. Andrews University; Martha Crenshaw, senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University; Mitchell Reise, former U.S. envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process; and Charles Robb, a former Virginia Governor and Senator and Professor of Law at George Mason University.
The World Forum on the Future of Democracy panel on globalization, “Are America’s Founding Principles Relevant in a Global Age,” was moderated by Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute. The panelists were: Choi Young-Jin, the South Korean ambassador to the UN; Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; and Kumi Naidoo, secretary general of CIVICUS, a global coalition of civil society organizations based out of South Africa.
