Democracy gone Astray: Monday, July 08, 2013

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Monday, July 08, 2013

Saskatchewan Party Votes to Abolish Senate

The Saskatchewan Party is now in favour of abolishing the Senate.

This morning the Saskatchewan Party announced the results of the party referendum on the Senate, 86% of the governing party's members having voted to change the party's position on the Senate from reform to abolition.

The party membership had previously defeated a resolution to abolish the Senate at the party's last convention in November, but the subsequent referendum yielded only 16 per cent of the vote, losing with 522 to 3205 votes.

TORONTO - Ottawa's move to tighten Canada's mortgage rules a year ago helped cool down the country's real estate market by forcing some first-time home buyers to delay their purchases, economists say.

A Bank of Montreal (TSX:BMO) study suggests roughly one in five potential first-time homebuyers have postponed their purchase since Finance Minister Jim Flaherty introduced his new lending rules a year ago Tuesday.

Ben Bernanke could stand to take some advice from Ricky Roma: You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is.

Roma, the smooth-talking salesman in David Mamet's play "Glengarry Glen Ross," was warning against saying too much when trying to hustle an unsuspecting victim. The same principle applies to the Federal Reserve -- which has accidentally stepped on its own bid to hustle the economy by saying too much and causing interest rates to skyrocket.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has broadened the definition of the word "relevant" to justify the National Security Agency's mass telephone and internet surveillance, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Reports on the court's rulings, which remain classified, seem to confirm the concerns of senators who are seeking to declassify the court's decisions. These senators allege that the FISC has interpreted the Patriot Act in unprecedented ways that Congress did not intend.

Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, said on Monday that he supports Edward Snowden's decision to flee the United States.

Ellsberg has sometimes been held up as an example of everything Snowden is not. Former Obama administration speechwriter Jon Favreau, for instance, called Ellsberg a "true whistleblower," unlike Snowden.

WAUKESHA, WIS.—Pour a bucket of water over this fretfully thirsty stretch of Wisconsin and gravity takes over, pulling it southwest, down the Mississippi River and, eventually, to the Gulf of Mexico.

Pull a bucket of water from underground and the real problem arrives: the city of Waukesha is getting down to the dregs of its deep aquifer. And those depleted waters are laced with rising concentrations of cancer-causing radium. Illegal levels, in fact, according to Washington.

Waukesha needs a water makeover. Soon.

WASHINGTON — The nation's top special operations commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public.

The secret move, described briefly in a draft report by the Pentagon's inspector general, set off no alarms within the Obama administration even though it appears to have sidestepped federal rules and perhaps also the Freedom of Information Act.

WASHINGTON -- The House Appropriations Committee approved an agriculture budgeting bill last month that would significantly restructure the U.S. bank regulatory regime as part of a GOP effort to protect Wall Street's offshore trading in derivatives -- the complex financial products at the heart of the 2008 economic meltdown.

Republicans in Congress have been pressuring regulators for years to exempt derivatives that U.S. companies sell overseas from the new rules set by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. For much of 2013, the deregulatory drive enjoyed bipartisan support in the House, with lawmakers casting their efforts as an attempt to harmonize U.S. law with international regulations. But financial reform advocates have attacked the initiative for padding Wall Street profits at the expense of important public protections, and Democratic support has eroded.

RIO DE JANEIRO, July 7 (Reuters) - Brazil will demand an explanation from the United States over report its citizens' electronic communications have been under surveillance by U.S. spy agencies for at least a decade, foreign minister Antonio Patriota said on Sunday.

Patriota's remarks were in response to a report in the Globo daily newspaper on Sunday saying that the U.S. National Security Agency has been monitoring the telephone and e-mail activity of Brazilian companies and individuals as part of U.S. espionage activities.

CAIRO — Egyptian soldiers and police clashed with Islamists protesting the military's ouster of the president in bloodshed that left at least 51 protesters and three members of the security forces dead, officials and witnesses said, and plunged the divided country deeper into crisis with calls by the Muslim Brotherhood's political party for all-out rebellion against the army.

Movie sequels are typically reserved for superhero franchises (and occasionally Michael Bay). Not scrappy social-issue documentaries. But director Josh Fox's 2010 documentary Gasland, which was nominated for an Academy Award, helped spark such an enormous national interest into the negative impacts of natural gas drilling that he decided to make a sequel.

"When we put the first movie out we were astounded," Fox recently told Mother Jones. "We…never figured that 'fracking' would become a household word."

If you watched President Obama's major speech on climate change, you may have noticed a recurrent phrase: "our children." The president said the word "children" 15 separate times in the speech. He also spoke repeatedly about "future generations" and how a sweltering planet imperils them. The threat of climate itself, meanwhile, garnered considerable scientific detail in the speech, replete with references to dangerous and destructive impacts that are already occurring—from rising seas to parched land and torched forests.

"I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that's beyond fixing," the president said.

OTTAWA - One of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's parliamentary secretaries looks to have run afoul of conflict-of-interest rules by lobbying on behalf of a man in her riding.

British Columbia Tory MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay wrote to Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose last year encouraging her to get her department to enter into talks to renew its lease on a building owned by a constituent.

Stephen Harper is betting the farm that he can save the puppet show that passes for government these days with new puppets.

It won’t work. Everyone knows who pulls the strings, no matter who is offering up the speaking points on television — and the puppet-master himself is not popular these days.

In fact, he is quite unpopular. According to a recent Ipsos-Reid poll, just 30 per cent of Canadians think the Conservatives should be re-elected — the other 70 per cent believe it’s time for a change. It must be dawning on even the most unctuous party lemmings that Harper is leading them towards a Mulroney-esque abyss.

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office won’t say whether two prime ministerial staffers accused of being in the know about Nigel Wright’s plan to personally give Sen. Mike Duffy a cheque for $90,000 will face any internal action as a result of the allegation.

The allegation that a circle of advisers in Harper’s office knew of his then-chief of staff Wright’s plan to provide funds to Duffy appears in court documents released last week, and challenges statements made by the prime minister on the subject.

In the wee hours of Saturday, July 6, just after midnight, a train hauling 73 cars of petroleum product derailed and exploded in the centre of the town of Lac Mégantic, Quebec.

A number of the rail cars caught fire and exploded in huge fireballs. The centre of the town was razed to the ground and the rail cars are still burning 36 hours later. By noontime on July 7, five people were declared dead and 40 are missing.

Lac Mégantic is a town of 6,000 people, located 150 km south of Quebec City, near the U.S. (Maine) border. The town and surrounding region draw tens of thousands of tourists from Canada and the U.S. every year.

The July 1 arrests of B.C. residents Amanda Korody and John Nuttall -- charged with planning to blow up a pressure cooker cluster bomb at the B.C. legislature -- raise many disturbing questions about the nature of the Canadian government's "counter-terrorism" operations. Equally troubling has been media coverage playing up hot-button themes that trigger fears of marginalized people, whether they be drug addiction and reliance on social assistance, to heavy metal music and the popular catch-all description for anyone who doesn't quite fit into a sick society: mental illness.

Summer was ushered in this year by a series of reports on violence against women around the world, perfectly designed to ruin anyone’s holiday. These papers, prepared by an international team of experts including the World Health Organization, are on the one hand predictable -- we know the situation is appalling -- but yet infinitely worse than anything many of us can have imagined.

It's not too much to say that everywhere on earth there is a war raging against women and girls and that it shows little sign of waning. While there are countless women and some men everywhere attempting to fight this scourge, with some success, the ugly truth is that we seem quite unable to make more than modest progress. In some cases we are actually regressing. It is a sad commentary on men everywhere.

I confess at the outset that I have a personal interest in this -- but so do you, for it affects a part of our province that ought to have had worldwide and local classification as a wildlife preserve long ago.

Burnco Rock Products proposes to build a large scale gravel mine at McNab Creek at the northern end of Howe Sound. It will be 77 hectares, include an onsite crushing and processing plant, and will produce a minimum of one million tonnes per year for 20 years. The plant will run 24 hours a day, every day of the year. It will employ 12 full-time and will, as is the habit, be built by the company's own crews from outside B.C.

On June 24, RCMP Corporal Greg Horton filed an affidavit in Ottawa. It is 28 pages of single-space text, his detailed reasons for requesting a "Production Order" that will give him the full story of Senator Mike Duffy's public life since late 2008.

It is also the greatest threat that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his government have faced, a threat they may not survive.

In saying that, I base my argument on what Corporal Horton's meticulous account says about him, the RCMP, and the Government of Canada -- and what it doesn't. As he himself says, "This is an ongoing investigation involving high-level political officials."

On May 9, 1992, deep in the coal seam of the Westray Mine beneath Plymouth, Nova Scotia, a spark ignited accumulated methane gas and triggered a huge explosion. By the time the resulting fireball had swept through the mine, fed to a murderous fury by choking clouds of coal dust, 26 workers were dead.

Critics and unions, including the United Steelworkers, which represented Westray miners after the tragedy, have for a long time insisted it's wrong to call what happened an accident. Management ignored safety warnings prior to the explosion, they argue, and should have been held accountable.

More than four in 10 Canadians have witnessed wrongdoing at work, including bribery, fraud and cooking of financial results, and nearly half didn’t report it, according to a poll on workplace ethics.

Nine per cent of those surveyed in the poll by Ipsos-Reid said they had witnessed “bribery and corruption,” while 11 per cent said they had witnessed “misrepresentation of company results,” including things such as cooking of financial books.

OTTAWA - The Harper government has received scores of letters and emails over government funding being provided to an organization that referred to homosexuality as a "perversion" and "sin."

The Prime Minister's Office and the office of the international development minister got about 170 letters and emails after The Canadian Press reported earlier this year on the $544,813 contract to Christian Crossroads Communications for humanitarian work in Uganda.

LAC-MEGANTIC, Que. - About 40 people were still considered missing on Sunday, a day after a blaze and explosions pulverized Lac-Megantic, increasing the likelihood that the number of fatalities could soar from the current official death toll of five.

"I can tell you that we have met a lot of people....and what I can tell you is that about 40 people are considered missing," Quebec provincial police Lt. Michel Brunet told a news conference.

Martin Dempsey: Edward Snowden Has Hurt U.S. Ties With Other Countries

WASHINGTON — The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman says NSA leaker Edward Snowden's disclosures about U.S. surveillance programs have undermined U.S. relationships with other countries and affected what he calls "the importance of trust."

Gen. Martin Dempsey tells CNN's "State of the Union" that the U.S. will "work our way back. But it has set us back temporarily."

'White History Month' Float Stirs Controversy At July 4th Parade

A small North Carolina town's Fourth of July parade was mired in controversy after a float touting "White History Month" drew a number of complaints from parade attendees.

The Fayetteville Observer reported Saturday that Hope Mills, N.C. parade included a float attached to a John Deere tractor, driven by local farmer Donnie Spell. The float included a large wagon filled with watermelons, and featured a sign that read "White History Month. Hug WTE PPL." A Confederate flag was also attached to the tractor.

A whopping 28,000 per cent increase in the amount of oil shipped by rail over the past five years is coming under the microscope following the deadly rail blast in Quebec.

Canada's railways have made a determined push to cash in on the country's crude-oil bonanza, painting themselves as a cost-effective alternative to politically unpopular pipelines like the proposed Keystone XL.

As oil leaking from a derailed train in Lac-Mégantic, Que., travels downstream, many are asking why dangerous cargo was being routed directly through a populated town centre.

About 80 kilometres downriver from the town of Lac-Mégantic is the community of Saint-Georges, a town that draws its drinking water from the same river that passes by the site of the deadly explosions.

Elderly couple evicted from their home after 407 extension battle

Andy Kapostins showed up at his parents’ home late Saturday morning to collect personal belongings from the home he grew up in.

Soon it will be a pile of rubble.

After a more than two-year fight by Antons Kapostins, 90, to save the home from demolition to make way for the Highway 407 extension the battle ended when he and his wife were evicted Friday.

The irate Ajax resident says he’ll survive the loss. His parents, however, are devastated after the frail elderly couple was removed from the home for good by police, hours after Antons refused to leave.

“This is the end,” an emotional Andy said after speaking to two Durham Regional Police officers. “They wanted to finish their last days here. This was there home.”

Police told the younger Kapostins that family members would be allowed entry only once to retrieve any personal belongings.

“You can’t keep coming in and out of the house one at a time,” a female officer told Andy, who became visibly upset during their five-minute conversation.

Escorted out on a stretcher Friday, the elder Kapostins, 90, was still in hospital Saturday when the Star spoke with his son. Kapostins wife Gaida, 88, who was led from the home by police using a walker, was staying at a nearby residence.

It took police hours to get the couple to leave the home. Antons wouldn’t leave the house and said he wanted $9 million to do so, shooting down the latest offer from the Ministry of Transportation of $600,000.

According to CTV News, police told Antons they had to leave. His response to officers was, “if you want to take me out without paying me $9 million, you shoot me here.”

Andy, a truck driver who had just returned from a work trip to find his parents without their home, doesn’t understand how they can evict his parents without having reached a settlement.

“We haven’t seen a red cent and they’re kicking us out?” he said, visibly emotional. “It’s wrong.”

Served with an eviction notice ordered by the Superior Court, the battle to save the bungalow Antons built with his bare hands on their 13-acre property after buying it in 1962 is almost over.

Reaching a settlement is the last step that will end the family’s legacy on the property. However, Andy said if they don’t get a fair offer from the government for the remaining land (nearly 13 acres) they’ll keep it despite being told they won’t have road access to it.

One offer was about $400,000 for the expropriated land and $15,000 per acre for the rest of the property, Andy added.

“I don’t care,” he said. “We’ll hold onto the land if we have to. They won’t sell until they get what they feel they deserve.”

The ministry has said previously it has made repeated buyout offers, based on three independent property appraisals, for the land needed to reconstruct an interchange at Lake Ridge Rd. and Highway 401.

The last of 342 properties needed for the first phase of construction, which began this spring and is expected to be completed by 2014

The Kapostins purchased it in 1962 for $4,300.

Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Andrew Livingstone

Elderly couple evicted from their home after 407 extension battle

'The real threat to our future is peak water'

Peak oil has generated headlines in recent years, but the real threat to our future is peak water. There are substitutes for oil, but not for water. We can produce food without oil, but not without water.

We drink on average four quarts (4.5 litres) of water per day, in one form or another, but the food we eat each day requires 2,000 quarts of water to produce, or 500 times as much. Getting enough water to drink is relatively easy, but finding enough to produce the ever-growing quantities of grain the world consumes is another matter.

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.

WASHINGTON — In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.

The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.

There is something seductive about a military coup. Maybe it’s the uniforms, or the idea that it will bring order to chaos. Liberals are not immune, as we can see from the reaction to the Egyptian military’s forced removal of Mohamed Morsi, the country’s freely elected President. They may be particularly susceptible to the romance of it all—to crowds in the street demanding change and getting it, with the help of a military deus ex machina (or deus ex Apache helicopter). Just as common is the dismay when violence follows. Military coups are the national-politics version of drone strikes: the allure is that of a clean sweep; the reality is too many people dead and reverberating anger.

Kurt Bardella is not a guy you can easily root for. He activates your radar and not in a good way. He laughs too much and too loud. He hangs out in cigar bars. When he talks with you, you suspect you are being worked.

I liked him instantly.

By that I mean Bardella gave me a headache, but I liked that he flouted the norms of the smooth Washington hustler. In a city where even the most rabid striving must be cloaked in nonchalance, Bardella never pulled this off or even tried. He was not shy about sharing — on his Facebook page — his ultimate ambition: to become the White House press secretary. He was not reticent in acknowledging a danger of his brash style: “I’m never that far away from blowing myself up completely,” he told me once. “It’s all part and parcel of my inferiority complex.” But generally, Bardella added, he was pretty good about channeling his demons in a way that benefited his boss, Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced what I would call a seismic proposition, one very likely to disturb the sleep of complacent politicians. Why, she asks, should the Federal Reserve lend money to banks at an interest rate of less than 1 percent when the government intends to charge students 6.8 percent interest on their college loans? The senator posted an amusing billboard on her official website: Want to borrow money from the government? Don’t be a student. Be a bank.

The United States has always ridden a roller coaster of bitter division regarding the meaning and status of our civil rights. It is the best of times! It is the worst of times! One study among several shows that a majority of white Americans now feel that “any gains made by members of minority groups necessarily come at [our] own expense.” The implications of this unfortunate tension go well beyond racial politics, however; and during the month of June, a veritable arpeggio of Supreme Court holdings highlighted a perceptual chasm whose address will have to be the next leg of a civil rights movement embracing all Americans.

As the Harper government braces itself for a steady drip of damaging details as the Senate expenses scandal winds its way through the courts, it may find itself rueing the day it abandoned one of its key promises in the 2006 election campaign.

That promise — to update the Access to Information Act — is something that Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault is lobbying hard for the government to follow through on.

CALGARY - Prime Minister Stephen Harper is sticking to his story in the Senate expense scandal, maintaining his former chief of staff acted alone in paying Mike Duffy's invalid expense claims.

Harper repeated on Saturday that it was Nigel Wright's decision to give Duffy $90,000 out of his own pocket to reimburse the Senate and he must take the responsibility.

"It was a decision of Mr. Wright and he will be held accountable for that,” Harper told a news conference that he called to comment on a train derailment and fire in Lac- Medantac, Que., earlier that day.

Byelections are a byproduct of political infidelity.

Politicians take a solemn vow at election time to remain faithful ’till the next election do us part. If they prematurely abandon us for a better offer, they have betrayed their democratic covenant.

Seven impatient and impetuous MPPs (six Liberals and one Tory) have quit the legislature since the 2011 election, when they sought a full, four-year term of office. Now, the province must hold five costly summer byelections at great expense (on top of two costly campaigns last summer).