Word: referenda
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Harvard, as a shareholder in many companies, frequently participates in proxy votes, which act as shareholder referenda on corporate policy. But recently, Harvard has failed to do its part in protecting the earth’s future. Earlier this year, the Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (CCSR), a Harvard body that votes in the referenda of the companies in which Harvard owns stock, abstained from six proxy votes to commission reports on curbing corporate greenhouse emissions...
...into the arcane and remote. As the Swedes showed last week, many Europeans aren't disposed to take the recommendations of their governments as gospel. They've got to be sure that a European constitution gives them room for their own aspirations. "Up until now all these referenda had no real cost against you for saying no," says John Palmer, political director of the European Policy Centre in Brussels. "This round over the constitution will be different: it's put up or shut up." The advocates of integration better make sure they have a big tent...
...Referenda are a product of political cowardice. Legislators shouldn't be asking voters to do their job for them. They are paid, usually decent salaries, to consider complex issues and vote on them. Because they devote all their time to government, they are supposed to understand all the subtleties and complexities of a proposal. By passing the buck to voters in the form of a referendum, they're asking you to do their job for them...
...While all this voting may sound like democracy, it actually undermines the entire point of our representative government. America is a democratic republic. If representatives don't do what voters ask, they get booted out of office. But all these referenda (and their cousin, the voter initiative), while they seem like the very heart of populism, are really a way of bypassing the splendid democracy our founding fathers created...
...Canadians discuss programs this time around? I am happy to say that while the American candidates were exchanging trumped-up numbers about the cost of prescription drugs, Canadians, thanks to a CBC television program's campaign to satirize the Alliansistas' belief in national referenda, were gathering signatures for a referendum that would require Stockwell Day to change his first name to Doris...