GPHC Blog 2020-2021

  One of the articles that I found most interesting was the one about US elections and how they compare to the rest of the democratic world. The main problem with our elections compared to those of other democratic nations is that our election administration is very decentralized, meaning that there isn’t one group that monitors our elections, rather many different groups for each state. A result of this is that in America we often have many different elections for different positions going on at the exact same time, all with different rules and procedures. Another problem that stems from having different groups in charge of managing elections is that they often make decisions based on partisan policy and try to further their own beliefs, rather than the will of the people. Our election system is in direct contrast to the one in Canada where all of the elections work the same, no matter where you live. (Ex. No counties have mail-in voting while others don’t have it) Another major d...

 Fabricio Guerra Mr. Zhou GPHC 5 November 2020 Over-Policing in Brazil's Favelas     Brazil is a very difficult country to understand in a historical context, especially if your views are euro-centric. To put it very, very briefly, the government has little care for the nation's poor, which mostly consists of black and mixed people. Slavery was abolished in a gradual process as the Catholic Church began to support its abolishment, and then was completely outlawed in 1888, freeing 700,000 slaves in the process. Now that about half of Brazil's population was freed, there had to be a huge amount of infrastructure built so that these freed people could have basic needs, such as housing. However, the government never started such operations, and left all freed people to their own will. So, they began to build slums, the first of which began in northern Rio de Janeiro (Fun Fact: Favelas started when soldiers coming back from rebel  suppression in the north had nowhere to g...