The Progress Report: Pro-Democracy Protests

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Emma Varvaloucas: Welcome to What Could Go Right? I’m Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network, and this is our Friday news accompaniment called The Progress Report, where we go over some underreported, under told news stories about progress that might have been off your radar or might have been well within your radar if you’re in the progress community.

Usually I’m joined by Zachary, the founder of The Progress Network. He’s not with us today, but he’s going to be joining us next week. So I’m flying solo. Our first news story for today, we’re going to talk quickly about Bangladesh. This is actually something that the mainstream media has covered quite a bit.

It’s a really big pro democracy story, not an election story, in the year of Many, many, many big elections. But what had happened was that there is a prime minister there in Bangladesh, been in power since 2009, her name is Sheikh Hasina, and she has been becoming increasingly autocratic. Extraditional killings have been happening.

There’s been lots of jailing and punishment of opposition candidates and the like. So a few weeks ago, she announced that there would be quota positions for certain civil service jobs. That is what started the initial spark of protests, mainly student led protests, and because there was such a violent repression of these protests by Sheik Hasina, the protests really grew and they turned away from just a problem about quotas for civil service jobs.

In fact, the Supreme Court acknowledged the protesters demands about that and reversed. That law, but the protestors kept going. It turned into a big effort to oust the Prime Minister. And in fact, earlier this week, she did resign and flee the country.

News Clip: Breaking news that we’re getting from Bangladesh. We are hearing that the Bangladesh Prime Minister has resigned and left the country.

Her destination unknown.

This comes as thousands of people have stormed the Prime Minister’s residence.

Emma Varvaloucas: They have now appointed an interim president to form a new government. And the mood in Bangladesh, if we go by, you know, some English language outlets there in Bangladesh is sort of jubilant, but jittery.

These moments of new government formation are often uncertain, can be volatile. It’s not totally settled. peaceful, victorious conclusion quite yet. The protests also, you know, they were quite violent in terms of both the regime crackdown on protesters and towards the end they had gotten a bit out of control on the protesters end as well.

So this is a bit of a semi colon, not quite a period yet, but it is quite a big story coming out of Bangladesh with pro democracy forces, particularly students and young people. leading the way to form a government that they trust and really have faith and pride in. Moving away from Bangladesh and we’re hoping for a final good outcome.

Let’s talk a little bit about world population. There have been a lot of concerns in recent years about overpopulation, what that’s going to mean for the environment in particular, and whether or not the planet would be able to sustain The numbers that the United Nations have been projecting as far as the world population goes.

So they’ve just come out with new estimates and it’s good news in terms of the environment. They are expecting the population to peak much earlier than expected. Previously, they didn’t think that the world population would peak by the end of the century. Now they’re saying that they think it’s going to peak by the mid 2080s.

And it’s going to peak at 10. 3 billion. That’s what the new prediction is, which is lower than predictions in the past. So it’s going to peak at 10. 3 and then come down to 10. 2 fairly quickly after that. Actually, Zachary has written quite extensively about this, that conversations about population and overpopulation are going to be very different for future generations than they have been for us.

It really might be more of a conversation about underpopulation. The conversations that are starting already about immigration. Work labor shortages are only going to get stronger in the coming few decades. And if any of us are around in the 2080s and later, we’ll be able to see what kind of world we’re living in then and how the conversations develop.

But for now, especially for those of you that are concerned about sustaining such a large population in terms of resources and the environment, this is good news. So moving away from this big zoomed out perspective, the world, Bangladesh, we’re gonna zoom into the United States. We talk a lot on this podcast about how the states are laboratories for democracy, meaning that the states are free to try new things and experiment before things happen at a federal level or in fact, beyond.

Before they ever happen at all at a federal level. And this is very true for a couple of trends that I wanted to bring up. The first is deep fakes in election ads. The FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, is proposing a rule, which would be a federal rule, that would mandate disclosure of AI generated content in political ads.

And this was really spurred by a fake Joe Biden robocall. I think of A few weeks or months ago, I was calling people and telling people not to show up for certain elections. The FCC has proposed this rule. It’s probably not going to go into effect before the election. But from my earlier point, this is what is nice about the U.

S., that states can really take action on their own without waiting for the federal government to step in. And in fact, Almost half of states have already enacted legislation and bipartisan legislation at that about deepfakes and AI generated content in political ads. They’ve already passed legislation aimed at regulating that.

So we don’t have a 100 percent perfect coverage rate as far as that goes in the states right now, but we’re halfway there. And one other trend that I wanted to highlight in the U. S. and this one is not as widespread all over the country, but has definitely picked up steam in recent years, and those are pay transparency laws.

Right now, there are 11 states, including the District of Columbia, so 10 states and the District of Columbia, that have enacted pay transparency laws. They differ by state, but the one that’s probably the most popular and most known to people is that employers need to disclose salaries when they post.

Open positions. They have enacted this in New York and I’ve seen on job postings in New York how much better it is to see if a job is offering something that is worth your time. I think this is a really great step forward for workers. It’s exciting to see other states Join New York with this effort and hoping it’s going to, you know, catch on as years go by to other states as these trends tend to do, you know, cannabis is always a really easy one to point to.

That’s all the progress news that we have for this week. As I mentioned, Zachary is going to be with us again. next week, and hopefully you guys will be as well. Thank you so much for listening. As always, if there’s anything that you would like us to cover or hear more about, please send us an email at hello at theprogressnetwork.

org. I do monitor that email inbox. I read every email. So happy to hear from you. And of course, if you have critique or questions, feedback of any kinds, would love to hear from you as well. Thank you so much for listening.