Democracy gone Astray: 11/01/2015

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.]

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Cooks And Janitors At U.S. Capitol Strike In Protest Of The British Company We Pay To Serve Senators

Workers who serve food at the United States Capitol went on strike Tuesday morning to protest their low wages and call attention to retaliatory actions they say their employer has taken against workers who want to unionize.

That company, Restaurant Associates, holds the federal contract to operate the cafeterias in the Capitol Visitors Center and in the Senate itself. The government contracts out janitorial and food service work at many public buildings, paying taxpayer money to private companies rather than employing service workers directly.

Liberal fans haven't been able to persuade Sen. Elizabeth Warren to make a run for president, but she'll appear at Tuesday night's Republican presidential debate on Fox Business Network—during a commercial break. As Politico's Burgess Everett reports, the conservative American Action Network will run an ad opposing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the consumer watchdog agency that Warren created following the financial crash. Per Everett, the group is spending half a million dollars to run the ad during the debate and later this week.

It is legitimate to look for real change in economic policy under the new Liberal government. Instead what requires explaining is Justin Trudeau naming Bill Morneau -- a leading economic conservative -- as finance minister.

Morneau who made millions working for his Father's firm told Eric Andrew-Gee of the Globe and Mail: "Most of the really smart people find jobs. Even when there's high youth unemployment. The reality is, it's 13 per cent. That means 87 per cent are employed."

Young Canadians looking for change now find an apologist for the status quo is the new Liberal finance minister.

When students at the University of Missouri started a petition calling for the system's president, Tim Wolfe, to resign, it was not simply because he hadn't done enough to address racism on campus. The petition clearly stated students were outraged that Wolfe sat in silence while his driver clipped at least one protester with a car during a demonstration weeks earlier.

On Oct. 10, a group of black students interrupted the Mizzou homecoming parade. Wearing T-shirts that read "1839 Was Built On My B(l)ack," referring to Mizzou's founding and slave labor, the students stopped right in front of the convertible that Wolfe was traveling in as he waved to parade watchers. The students took out a megaphone and one by one began speaking about incidents of systemic and anecdotal racism from the founding year 1839 through 2015.

OTTAWA — Conservative senators don't plan to be an ideological roadblock to the Liberal government's legislative agenda.

Sen. Claude Carignan, the Conservative leader in the upper chamber, says his senators will look for ways to improve legislation coming from the House of Commons and won't abuse their majority status in the upper chamber to thwart Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's program.

In an extraordinary opinion, DC judge Richard Leon has laid into the NSA and US government for its bulk collection of phone records, and issued an injunction banning the collection of metadata on several individuals.

Railing against arguments made by the government to dismiss the case, claims it needed more time to make changes, and the argument that the USA Freedom Act makes the case moot, Leon's opinion [PDF] is unequivocal that the program breaks the US Constitution and infringes citizens' rights.

For millions of people in Burma and for supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi around the world, Sunday's election appears to be the fulfillment of their dreams. Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) looks to have won a landslide victory, ending more than fifty years of military rule. Democracy has finally arrived. Or has it?

Canadian housing is overheating and Toronto’s housing market is especially at elevated risk of a “severe correction” due to an oversupply of condos, the OECD says.

But CIBC thinks the international organization is “barking up the wrong tree.”

In a new report, the group calls on Canada’s incoming new government to cool down the housing market, calling for “further tightening” of the mortgage market.

In shocking news that comes in utter contradiction to a statement released just yesterday, University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe has announced his resignation.

The move comes after incidents of bigotry and racial vandalism that scarred the Columbia campus, followed by weeks of protest, a hunger strike by grad student Jonathan Butler, as well as the announcement that faculty members would not be showing up for work.

Ontario must stop allowing big companies to rip off the province's water. It is bad enough that the government allows multinational companies to privatize a public resource, it is even worse that taxpayers are being hosed by charging so little for it.

Several industries get a total free ride when it comes to taking our water, an explosive new report from Ontario's Environment Commissioner revealed. Those who do pay for taking water -- "phase one" industrial and commercial users that include bottled water producers; vegetable and fruit canning facilities; and certain types of chemical manufacturers -- are charged a paltry $3.71 per million litres used.

OTTAWA — After the Queen’s portrait was removed from a prime location at the Foreign Affairs building, the Monarchist League of Canada is expressing concern that Justin Trudeau’s government may be trying to “excise” her images from Canada’s “national life.”

In an email titled “urgent bulletin” to league members on Monday, chairman Robert Finch wrote: “It is curious, at the start of the first complete week of the Trudeau government, that such a high-profile removal of The Queen’s portrait would have been made.”

REGINA — Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall says he still believes the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a good deal, despite concerns being raised by a prominent businessman.

The premier says the agreement is too important for Western Canada not to proceed with it and is writing a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, urging Canada to move forward.

Wall specifically says the partnership is good for agriculture in the province.

The pace of Canada’s aerial bombardments against ISIL has picked up since Justin Trudeau became prime minister, a curious scenario given his campaign pledge to withdraw from the U.S.-led mission in Iraq and Syria.

Since Trudeau’s swearing-in five days ago on Nov. 4, Canada’s CF-18 jets conducted five airstrikes, hitting seven targets identified as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant assets, according to information from the Department of National Defence.

There were 14 airstrikes in all of October, 10 in September and 11 in August. The busiest the CF-18 crews have been recently was in July, when there were six airstrikes in a five-day period.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) vetoed a package of election reforms passed by the state's Democrat-controlled legislature Monday, arguing the legislation was "thinly-veiled political gamesmanship."

The Democracy Act aimed to implement automatic voter registration when voters apply for driver's licenses. (Eligible voters have the option to opt out before they are automatically registered with Department of Motor Vehicles information.) Only two states -- California and Oregon -- have passed automatic registration bills.

WASHINGTON, Nov 9 (Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency is ready to end later this month collecting Americans' domestic call records in bulk and move to a more targeted system, meeting a legislative deadline imposed earlier this year, according to a government memo seen by Reuters.

The memo, sent on Monday from the NSA to relevant committees in the U.S. Congress, stated that the spy agency "has successfully developed a technical architecture to support the new program" in time for it to become operational as scheduled on Nov. 29.

An Alberta family whose farmland has been tainted by chemical contamination has asked the province's energy regulator to force the responsible companies to negotiate compensation.

"These are very solid facts upon which the regulator can demonstrate it does have the ability to be an enforcer when things go wrong,'' said Keith Wilson, lawyer for Ron and Lonni Saken.

Montreal can begin dumping eight billion litres of untreated sewage into the St. Lawrence River if certain risk-mitigating conditions are met, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said Monday, calling the situation "less than ideal" but the best solution to the city's waste water crisis.

Before the city can dump the sewage into the river it needs create an emergency plan for unintended problems, keep a close watch on the discharge and deploy measures to clean up affected areas, McKenna said during a media conference call from Paris.

By the time you read this column, Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, Dawoud Hussein al-Marhoon and Abdullah Hasan al-Zaher may be dead.

In case you’ve never heard their names, they are young prisoners of conscience currently housed in solitary confinement at the notorious al-Ha’ir penitentiary in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. They are waiting to be beheaded. In all likelihood, as is Saudi custom, no advance public notice of their executions will be given. We’ll learn of their demise only after the fact, via social media, or when the Saudi government officially announces that their sentences have been carried out.

Premier Christy Clark should be facing the fight of her life. Just one week ago, it was reported that the BC Liberal government routinely disposes of all written records relating to government decisions.

When a local resident from Delta submitted a request for background information on how the government made the $3 billion decision to replace the Massey Tunnel, the government stated that there was simply no written information to be found.

Last week, Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal think tank that uses mainstream economic tax modeling, analyzed Marco Rubio’s tax-cut plan. Thirty-four percent of the benefits of the plan would go to the highest-earning one percent of Americans (who, by the way, earn about 21 percent of all income). Rubio’s proposal deliberately provides some benefits to Americans of modest income, which means that its enormous tax cuts for the very rich come alongside some pretty decent-size tax cuts for the rest of us. All told, Rubio’s plan would reduce federal revenue by $11.8 trillion over the next decade. The entire Bush tax cuts cost about $3.4 trillion over a decade, making the Rubio tax cuts more than three times as costly.

Following a series of racist incidents on campus, at least 32 members of the University of Missouri’s football team will not play until the school’s president, Tim Wolfe, resigns. On Saturday night, a group of black players declared that they are going on strike, citing Wolfe’s “negligence” in handling discrimination on campus.

The announcement was tweeted from Missouri’s Legion of Black Collegians, next to a photo of 32 players with linked arms. According to the Columbia Missourian, 60 of the 124 players on the current roster are black, but the exact number joining the protest is undetermined.

First, Iceland jailed its crooked bankers for their direct involvement in the financial crisis of 2008. Now, every Icelander will receive a payout for the sale of one of its three largest banks, Íslandsbanki.

If Finance Minister Bjarni Benediktsson has his way — and he likely will — Icelanders will be paid kr 30,000 after the government takes over ownership of the bank. Íslandsbanki would be second of the three largest banks under State proprietorship.

Jim Balsillie warns that provisions tucked into the Trans-Pacific Partnership could cost Canada hundreds of billions of dollars — and eventually make signing it the worst public policy decision in the country's history.

After poring over the treaty's final text, the businessman who helped build Research In Motion into a $20-billion global player said the deal contains "troubling" rules on intellectual property that threaten to make Canada a "permanent underclass" in the economy of selling ideas.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appointed West Bank squatter Ran Baratz to be his director of communications on the eve of his procession Monday to Washington to demand a vast increase in annual US aid to Israel, which includes civilian as well as military grants of some $3 bn. a year. Netanyahu wants $5 bn. now, or $50 billion over the next ten years.

One wouldn’t even complain about this aid if Israel weren’t using it in part to occupy the stateless Palestinians. But it is worth noting that the US doesn’t give such sums to NATO allies like France or Britain or even Turkey. Israel is a wealthy country. It already receives special access to the US market and technology. But there is no point in complaining about this tax on American households for Netanyahu’s brutal policies toward Palestinians. As long as Congress is bought and sold, this sort of thing will continue inexorably. In fact, in the terms of Washington debate, it cannot even be brought up as an issue. It is after all a minor piece of corruption, in a political system that is among the more corrupt in the world.

The Republicans' Manufactured Media War

After the first Republican presidential debate on August 6, 2015, Donald Trump, a former reality television star, made a joke about the moderator's menstrual cycle. Trump also spoke of how he wants to build a $6.4 billion security wall along the border and charge the bill to the Mexican government (which is understandably befuddled by the candidate's "enormous ignorance"). At the second GOP debate on September 16, Dr. Ben Carson answered a question about his flat-tax proposal that made it painfully clear he does not understand the difference between progressive taxation and socialism. Using Carson's criteria, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were both socialist presidents.

An Alabama Board of Education member is drawing criticism for making a number of outlandish claims about the Common Core during a recent GOP luncheon.

Betty Peters, the state school board member for District 2, in the southeast part of the state, spoke at a meeting of the Republican Women of Coffee County Oct. 21 during which she espoused views on the Common Core, "transgender values" and the "homosexualist" takeover of education in Southern states.

Partially paralyzed and reliant on a wheelchair, Ozella Campbell spends a lot of time watching television. It was under those circumstances in February 2014 that she saw a commercial urging her to call MyHouseIsADump.com, a company that offered to buy houses in as-is condition, in cash, and to close the purchase within seven days.

She called the toll-free number and within hours, she said, a well-spoken young man appeared at her brownstone, a longtime family home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a Brooklyn neighborhood in the throes of transformation.

The office of the President of the United States may not be what it once was, but it's occupant remains the Most Powerful Person in the World.

Can we agree on just that much before we plunge ourselves into full-blown apocalyptic hysteria on the topic of the Keystone XL pipeline, of which the officeholder formerly known as the Most Powerful Man in the World yesterday said No, thank you, Canada, it will not be built?

Maybe, just maybe, telling the most powerful person on the planet that we just weren't going to take no for an answer, and his political enemies would soon be ushered into power anyway -- neener! neener! -- might not have been the best way to get what we wanted.

RUNNING OUT OF NUCLEAR OPTIONS

A roomful of demanding taxpayers and interest groups can pose an awful inconvenience to a nuclear operator seeking to extend the life of its plant.

That's exactly what Ontario Power Generation (OPG) faced this week at licensing renewal hearings for its Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Clarington as about 80 oral presentations and just as many written submissions filled the agenda.

According to an MSNBC interview on Tuesday with Charles Koch, he and his brother David are still shopping for a presidential candidate to support. They're looking to spend a cool $250 million for their chosen presidential candidate and, as Koch admitted, "I expect something in return."

Netanyahu's Arrogance; Our Stupidity

"When I entered the Prime Minister's office for my second term, I was summoned to Washington. 'Not one brick', they told me...The pressure from the international community and the Americans was enormous...And still, after five years on the job, we built a little more than 'one brick'...the important thing is to do it in a smart way...to stand up to international pressure by maneuvering...we continue to head straight toward our goal, even if one time we walk right and another time we walk left."

Benjamin Netanyahu, 2014

"I know what America is. America is a thing that can be easily moved in the right direction. They will not bother us. Let's suppose they will say something...so they say it?...We have such support there!".

Benjamin Netanyahu, 2001

CALGARY — The University of Calgary will face an independent review over concerns about corporate influence at the institution.

"Questions have been raised regarding the creation and operation of the Centre for Corporate Sustainability, and the potential infringement of academic freedom of those involved," Mark Starratt of the university's board of governors said in a release Friday.

Anyone experiencing a case of déjà vu while reading the province's widely anticipated regulations on police street checks released October 28 should not be overly concerned. Your mind is not playing tricks on you.

That's because, like an off-season TV rerun, the regulations, presented by Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services Yasir Naqvi, stipulate several policies that we've all seen before.

The release Thursday of the 5,544-page text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade and investment agreement involving 12 countries comprising nearly 40 percent of global output—confirms what even its most apocalyptic critics feared.

“The TPP, along with the WTO [World Trade Organization] and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history,” Ralph Nader told me when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws.”

Across the country, movements are rising up to challenge politicians who balance public budgets on the backs of working people instead of taxing corporations. "Municipal frugality" and "shared sacrifice" are examples of the political doublespeak and hypocrisy that governments employ while the 1% hoards its record levels of wealth.

In May, National Nurses United and student groups gathered in the nation's capital to join Democratic presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders to announce his introduction of the Robin Hood Tax bill, which proposes a small levy on Wall Street financial transactions. A burgeoning, national movement has sprung up in support Sander's legislation. The bill has not made it out of the Senate Finance Committee. Economists backing this proposal, such as Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, estimate the 0.5 percent tax would generate $350 billion annually in the US alone.

Amid the continuing national debate about policing, Thursday brought the latest batshit PR move from police union leaders. Their current target, Quentin Tarantino, found himself on the receiving end of a veiled threat when Jim Pasco, the head of the national Fraternal Order of Police, told reporters that "something is in the works" against the Hollywood filmmaker. The union's plan, Pasco said, "could happen any time" between now and the premiere of Tarantino's upcoming film, The Hateful Eight, on Christmas Day. Just what exactly did he mean? More from the Hollywood Reporter:

"Because, because, friends we believe that in a dangerous world, Canada must without apology advance our values and our interests...." As those words passed by former prime minister Stephen Harper's lips, I felt like I had closure. Everything became clear about this man, his policy and the legacy he leaves behind him. In a "dangerous world" he said, and to me that said everything. Suddenly the man I saw standing at the podium giving the last important address he will give as leader of Canada, I saw a man who was scared. A man who made his decisions and policy out of fear. It all made sense -- the fearful perpetuate the fear.

MONTREAL — Canada's dairy industry could face a bigger hit from the Trans-Pacific Partnership than previously thought, says an agricultural expert who studied the text of the deal involving 12 countries.

In addition to affecting milk, the TPP agreement would allow for more imports of yogurt, ice cream and different types of cheese, says Sylvain Charlebois, professor of distribution and food policy at the University of Guelph's Food Institute.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doesn't like the U.S. decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, but says it will not hurt the strong bond between the two countries.

"We are disappointed by the decision but respect the right of the United States to make the decision," he said in a statement.

"The Canada-U.S. relationship is much bigger than any one project and I look forward to a fresh start with President Obama to strengthen our remarkable ties in a spirit of friendship and co-operation."

After seven years of acrimonious court battles, profligate spending and hardball political lobbying, the Keystone XL pipeline is dead. U.S. President Barack Obama rejected the proposal, as most suspected he would.

"Several years ago, the State Department began a review process for the proposed construction of a pipeline that would carry Canadian crude oil through our heartland to ports in the Gulf of Mexico and out into the world market," said Obama in a press conference on Friday November 6.

In the 1980s, Dr. Ranjit Chandra at Memorial University in St. John's, Canada was already well-known for his research in the fields of pediatrics and immunology. As a leader in medical research, he was elected as an officer of the Order of Canada, and served as president of the Nutritional Immunology & Allergy Center in India.

So when his 1989 British Medical Journal (BMJ) study purported to show the benefits of "hypo-allergenic" infant formula in reducing the risk of eczema in infants, no one raised concerns about the doctor's connection to infant formula maker Mead Johnson, which had funded the research.

Carly Fiorina Isn't Just Attacking Planned Parenthood at the Debates

For more than a month, households in California have been receiving robocalls and mailings about abortion. "In California, a 13-year-old girl can have a surgical abortion without either of her parents ever knowing about it," says the voice on the line, before asking recipients to sign a petition supporting a 2016 California ballot initiative that would require parental notification before a girl can terminate a pregnancy. The vaguely familiar voice making this pitch? Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina.

Twelve miles off the coast of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Tim Marshall and I knife through the salty, choppy waters of the Chesapeake Bay in an aging white fishing skiff. It's a clear, bright August morning, and Marshall, slugging cans of Diet Coke, steers us straight for the approximately 4,500 acres of tidal marsh that make up the federal Martin National Wildlife Refuge. To our backs is Smith Island, the last inhabited offshore island on the Maryland side of the Chesapeake.

“Parliamentary government,” said the late Eugene Forsey, constitutional expert, “is not just a matter of counting heads instead of breaking them. It is also a matter of using them. It is government by discussion, not just by majority vote.”

From the moment of his majority victory in the 2011, Stephen Harper gave Canada governance without discussion. Harper democracy was a long line of unamended government bills forced through with as little debate as possible, with time allocations and committees controlled by the government’s majority. As a result, and at the first opportunity, Canadians threw him out on his ass.

Key players in Canada’s vital auto sector say Justin Trudeau’s government now faces a major decision: whether to seek changes to the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal – an agreement, the just-revealed text shows, that offers worse-than-expected terms for Canadian vehicle parts makers.

“They’re going to have to take a look at this closely, see what has been negotiated and decide whether they want to pursue renegotiation of any element of the agreement,” said Mark Nantais, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association, which represents the Canadian units of the Detroit Three auto makers.

A major Canadian journalistic genre is media's advice to the losing parties after their latest defeat. While the Liberals have had a lot of advice since 2006 (and especially since 2011), the New Democrats have been advised to the point where, if the advice was worth anything, they'd now be the natural governing party.

Now it's the Conservative Party of Canada's turn. The survivors belong to a tribe that sought and gained power by studying their adversaries' weaknesses, not their own. Introversion is not a Conservative talent, or they wouldn't have chosen an old guard ideologue like Rona Ambrose as interim leader. She will doubtless let both MPs and grassroots vent a lot, but they're likely to blame Stephen Harper and carry on in their old ways. So they might benefit from an adversary's advice, at least as much as from those within the tribe.

Individuals dependent on the provincial government for financial assistance in British Columbia have about $21 a week to spend on food, according to the organizers of the Welfare Food Challenge that launched this week.

Asked if $21 a week is enough for food, the minister for social development Michelle Stilwell said, "I think certainly the comprehensive support system we have in place for individuals on income assistance and persons with disabilities helps support them in a multitude of ways."

Supermarket workers are speaking out to CBC's Marketplace about how stores tamper with best-before dates and how it can make food unsafe.

For five years, Mohammad Saffari has worked as a bakery clerk at a Loblaws store in Montreal. He says he was told to change best-before dates on fresh or frozen bakery items such as cheesecakes, muffins and pastries that were weeks or months past the best-before date.

The Canadian daily newspaper industry is dying a slow death and it's all because of the Internet. At least that's the story the newspaper industry is telling itself.

I'm sure you've heard the sad refrain: "We can't compete with online outlets that simply recycle the news content we've spent so much time and money creating."

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) took his opposition to same-sex marriage to an entirely new level during a speech at Virginia's Liberty University last week.

Gohmert, who previously compared the treatment of marriage equality opponents to how Nazis persecuted Jews during World War II, argued that even Americans who don't believe in God should be able to see that same-sex relationships aren't natural, Right Wing Watch reports. He went on to suggest conducting a "totally secular" congressional study that would prove it, too.

“Worse than anything we could’ve imagined.”

“An act of climate denial.”

“Giveaway to big agribusiness.”

“A death warrant for the open Internet.”

“Worst nightmare.”

“A disaster.”

As expert analysis of the long-shrouded, newly publicized TransPacific Partnership (TPP) final text continued to roll out on Thursday, consensus formed around one fundamental assessment of the 12-nation pact: It’s worse than we thought.

Democracy Gone Astray

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Monday, November 16, 2015

Sunday, November 15, 2015

Saturday, November 14, 2015