One of the many things we learned from the Brexit/Trump revolt is that there are a lot of people out there who feel politically and economically dispossessed.
The complaint is that three decades of giddy globalisation has marginalised ordinary people. Instead of people owning money, these days money owns people – the land, housing and cities they live in, the ideas and political systems that govern them.
So this week we went looking for cases where the people are fighting back, trying to reclaim their land, their communities, their democracies.
In northern Brazil, Dominic Phillips found a happy story: after a 23-year struggle, 500 descendants of enslaved people were finally given title to their 220,000-hectare Amazon land. Half the world away, European tourism bosses in Berlin were debating new ideas to try to combat overtourism.
The two stories, though very different, touch on the same theme: how do you protect the rights of locals from the vast unaccountable force of global capital? It’s a theme we will return to.
There’s a certain feeling, post-Brexit/Trump that some people have fallen out of love with democracy too. Certainly both shock results were partly ascribed to protest votes by people who felt that democracy didn’t serve them well any more.
So it may be that it’s time for democracy to raise its game. That’s certainly what happened in Ireland, where a one-off assembly of 99 ordinary people broke the deadlock in the abortion debate and paved the way for a referendum this spring. In the week in which the terms of the plebiscite were set out, Patrick Chalmers looked back at what the assembly achieved – and what it promises for other democracies. Watch his video report here.
What we liked:
An ABC item about a journalist in Papua New Guinea who has made it his mission to highlight how hard work and a positive attitude could transform a much-maligned country. (Thanks to Peter Walton for pointing this out.)
A New York Times article about innovative ways to finance social work among drug abusers in Connecticut. We also smiled while reading about female trailblazers you’ve never heard of.
What we heard:
As the locals were saying in a meeting about tourism and tourists coming to an attractive wee village I know in Donegal in Ireland … ‘If we had any more tourists coming, we wouldn’t get any tourists at all.’
Commenter Tintina Hatt, writing below the line on overtourism
I would suggest [the Upside focus on] gentrification combined with massive speculative acquisitions of houses in cities. There seems no (social] building programme that can keep up with it?
Cees L van der Poel, Netherlands, by email
Where was the upside?
In Germany, where unions’ push for flexible working rights is gaining momentum. From January 2019, workers represented by the metalworkers union will have the option to reduce their working week to 28 hours for a total of two years – and claim the right to full-time employment afterwards.
The idea that flexible working is not just an inconvenience imposed on employers but a right that unions should demand for their workers is beginning to spread to other sectors of the German economy, and IG Metall has called on Germany’s new government to enshrine the right to return to full-time employment in law.
