Democracy gone Astray: Saturday, July 25, 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.]

Saturday, July 25, 2015

White House: Greece Should Be Allowed To Remain In Eurozone

The White House is urging European and Greek leaders to reach a compromise on Greece's debt crisis, arguing that the country should be allowed to remain in the eurozone.

"The task before the leaders of Europe remains the same," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said during a Monday press briefing. "We have long indicated that it's our view that it's in their collective interest for these differences to be resolved."

The great paradox of the present debacle over Greece in Europe is that Wolfgang Schäuble, the sober, wheelchair-bound austerian who is German finance minister, and Alexis Tsipras, the fiery, freewheeling populist leader of Syriza, are both right.

Schäuble is right that an ever-closer union that tightly binds the economies of Europe through a common currency can only be founded on adherence by all members to agreed rules of supranational sovereignty. Tsipras is completely correct that Greece can never escape ever-more-spiraling-depression through abiding by those rules.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is “worried” about Bernie Sanders, whom a top Clinton aide described as a “serious force” in the 2016 battle.

“We are worried about him, sure. He will be a serious force for the campaign, and I don’t think that will diminish,” Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri said Monday in an interview with MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

Thomas Piketty isn’t mincing words when it comes to the Greek debt crisis.

In an interview with German newspaper Die Zeit last month (and translated recently by business analyst Gavin Schalliol), the leading French economist pummeled Germany for its hypocrisy in demanding debt repayment from Greece.

BERLIN, July 6 (Reuters) - The German government signaled a tough line towards Greece on Monday, saying it saw no basis for new bailout negotiations and insisting it was up to Athens to move swiftly if it wanted to preserve its place in the euro zone.

With opinion towards Greece hardening in Germany's ruling coalition following the landslide rejection of European bailout terms in a Sunday referendum, the government indirectly raised the prospect of a Greek exit from the currency bloc.

Only one hurdle stands between Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his upcoming bid for the White House: passing a budget to keep his state chugging for the next two years.

After months of uproar over provisions to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from state universities and strip the values of “truth” and “service” from their mission, lawmakers in Madison missed their July 1 deadline to pass the budget.

hereJoe Conason’s article is not just a partisan puff piece, it is specifically a piece of Clintonista campaigning.

Conason charges The New York Times with a “longstanding animus against the Clintons,” and on this premise Conason questions the “liberal” reputation of the paper. Extraordinary!

Canada's human rights record will be under the microscope at the United Nations this week in the first substantive review since Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to power in 2006.

Several of the country’s most high-profile advocacy groups are in Geneva to participate in UN Human Rights Committee hearings over a three-day period. Among them is Canada Without Poverty, an Ottawa-based charity that leans on using human rights and international law to advocate for impoverished and homeless Canadians.

"I decided that you can't cover a controversy by being in one."

That's Peter Mansbridge's revelatory explanation as to why his name no longer appears -- after many months -- as an Honourary Patron of the controversial Never Forgotten war memorial proposed for Cape Breton Island.

Apart from the fact that this is one of the basic tenets of journalism -- along with get your facts right, and don't misspell someone's name -- it avoids answering the really important question in this whole fiasco.

Even with a historic political victory in his pocket after seeing his nation vote overwhelmingly against the imposition of further austerity in exchange for a new loan package from foreign creditors on Sunday, Yanis Varoufakis, the outspoken finance minister of Greece's Syriza-led government, announced his resignation on Monday morning.

In a statement posted to his personal blog, Varoufakis said he "shall wear the creditors' loathing with pride" after it was made clear to him that his "absence" from future talks was urged by negotiating members of the so-called Troika -- the European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund.

Christy Clark’s about to drive another nail into the coffin of B.C.’s economic and environmental future.

It’s such an unusual move for the B.C. legislature that so far it isn’t even listed on the official schedule.

Something very unusual happened at the nation’s highest Court this year. The justices adjourned for their summer vacation and liberals were left feeling pretty good about the just-completed Supreme Court term. Marriage discrimination is dead, and Obamacare is alive. America’s civil rights laws were left largely intact, and state election laws were not cast into turmoil.

As we’ve explained, many of these outcomes most likely stem from conservative overreach — litigants looking to disrupt progressive legislation brought long shot cases because they were encouraged by the Roberts Court’s record of conservatism and decided to “press their luck.” In any event, it is unlikely that liberals will feel the same way about the next Supreme Court term as they do about this recently completed one. Based on two major cases that the Court has already agreed to hear, and a third that is likely to be added to the Court’s docket this fall, next term is shaping up to be a much more conventional term rife with longtime conservative boogie men waiting to be slain by the Court’s right flank.

Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political systems of exploitation—all of it legal and built into the ruling apparatus—that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to murder and imprison poor people of color with impunity.

Athens—Making history means not knowing what comes next. I knew that in theory, but I hadn’t known what it feels like until these last two days in Greece. Nor had I understood how an unimaginably complex and confusing landscape can crystallize, through a formal (if flawed) democratic process, into something that looks like an expression of national will—and in that shape become a player on the world stage.

ON AUGUST 30, 2013, a billionaire businessman named Dan Gilbert arrived at the White House to discuss the future of Detroit. Gilbert, founder and chairman of Quicken Loans and owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, had already invested heavily in the city; in 2010 he moved Quicken's headquarters from the suburbs to downtown and relocated several of his businesses along with 12,500 employees. Six weeks before that White House meeting, the city had filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history. Gilbert was in Washington as part of an elite delegation to discuss federal assistance for the country's most visibly dysfunctional city.

Inadequate public transit has become as Canadian as maple syrup, and cities are struggling to find affordable solutions.

Metro Vancouver took a novel crack at the problem last week with a plebiscite on a five cent sales tax hike that would have covered the region's $7.5-billion share in a massive 10-year transit strategy.

Voters resoundingly rejected the plan, with nearly 62 per cent of the 759,696 ballots cast for the 'No' side. It was a stunning defeat for the proposal's backers in an area in need of new transit infrastructure to serve a growing population but without any way of paying for it in the foreseeable future.

When former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney calls from Rome to express sympathy and outrage that Ches Crosbie was blocked from running as a Conservative candidate in the 2015 federal election, you know the Conservative Party of Canada has a big problem.

Nor does that problem get any smaller, when former Conservative cabinet minister Jim McGrath calls to add his voice to the political maelstrom triggered by this blunder of epic proportions.

“The party has gone to hell,” he told his former cabinet colleague and fellow Newfoundlander.

The federal government has softened tough anti-corruption rules for companies that want to do business with Ottawa.

The move comes after intense lobbying from industry, which warned of spreading economic damage because of the regulations introduced just 16 months ago.

Recent Western "regime change" machinations seem not to have worked out quite as advertised, so ordinary citizens in the still partly democratic West should be concerned about what happens in Greece today, where yet another such effort appears to be under way.

After all, at least one plausible interpretation of the unfolding Greek tragedy is that the zone in which neo-fascism is permitted to reinforce neoliberal totalitarianism is now creeping back toward one of the regions where it has not been encouraged since the end of Europe's great fascist upheaval, which culminated in the catastrophe of World War II. This should worry all of us.

OTTAWA - The first fixed-date election in Canadian history is just around the corner, but some observers are raising concerns about overspending because of a law they say is flawed.

When the Conservatives introduced a fixed election date nine years ago, political financing rules were not adjusted accordingly, says Elections Canada boss Marc Mayrand.

"We must not be blind," said Mayrand. "As much as it is easier for Elections Canada to plan for the election, it's just as easy for political parties and third parties" to plan their spending before the election.

LONDON—The future of coal has come under scrutiny from a perhaps unlikely source—the head of the organisation representing wealthy nations that relied on coal for 32% of electricity generation last year.

Angel Gurría, secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), said the scale of new investments in “unabated” coal-fired electricity generation—where greenhouse gases are emitted directly to the atmosphere—posed the most urgent threat to the Earth’s climate.

The fall of Srebrenica in Bosnia 20 years ago, prompting the worst massacre in Europe since the Third Reich, was a key element of the strategy pursued by the three key western powers –Britain, the US and France – and was not a shocking and unheralded event, as has long been maintained.

Eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed over four days in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb death squads after they took the besieged town, which had been designated a “safe area” under the protection of UN troops. The act has been declared a genocide by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, and the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadžic and General Ratko Mladic await verdicts in trials for directing genocide.

Residents of Guatemala City are angry with the United States Marines. Early in June, a Marine CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter flew low over Zone 9 of Guatemala city, causing damage to buildings in the area.

The United States Embassy confirmed to the Guatemalan press that the helicopter did indeed belong to the United States Marine Corps Southern Command. The embassy explained that, "due to high winds, the helicopter could not maintain altitude after takeoff. It regained its altitude, but apparently the airstream caused by the rotors damaged buildings."

Robert Rankin Doggart, a former candidate for Congress, admitted in federal court to “plotting the annihilation” of a village in New York that is home to many Muslims. Doggart’s plans included “burning down a school, a mosque and a cafeteria,” according to the criminal complaint.

“We’re gonna be carrying an M4 with 500 rounds of ammunition, light armor piercing. A pistol with three extra magazines, and a machete. And if it gets down to the machete, we will cut them to shreds,” Doggart allegedly said according to the transcript of a wiretap cited in the complaint. He also allegedly tried to recruit other individuals to participate in his plot through a Facebook group.

BEIJING (AP) — More than two dozen companies in China are postponing initial public offerings and security companies are pledging more than $19 billion for a fund to stabilize the country's free-falling stock market.

The 28 companies, which had obtained permission from China's securities watchdog for IPOs planned in Shanghai and Shenzhen, said they would postpone them due to recent market fluctuations and refund money already paid, the official Xinhua News agency announced late Saturday. That followed reports that regulators were asking companies to postpone the IPOs.

US-led coalition aircraft have conducted a series of air strikes targeting the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa in eastern Syria, killing at least 10 militants and wounding many others, in one of the largest such operations in the country to date.

At least 16 air strikes were reported late on Saturday and early on Sunday. The US-led coalition often targets Isis-held towns and cities in Syria, but the overnight strikes on Raqqa were unusual in their intensity.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has become the first bank to call for a Canadian recession this year.

Economist Emanuella Enenajor and her team now say that Canada’s economy will shrink by 0.6 per cent in the second quarter, following a 0.6 per cent contraction in the first. The definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of contraction.

A recession sets up the Bank of Canada for another rate cut this year, said Enenajor, and she expects that the downturn will hammer the Canadian dollar — knocking it down to just under 77 cents U.S. by early 2016, the lowest level in more than a decade.

The head of a small Ottawa-based charity is in Geneva this week to complain to a United Nations committee about the Canada Revenue Agency's program of political-activity audits.

Harriett McLachlan, president of Canada Without Poverty, is pleading her case before the UN Human Rights Committee, arguing that a special audit program launched by the tax agency in 2012 violates Canada's international commitments on human rights.

GLEN, N.H., July 4 (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton accused China on Saturday of stealing commercial secrets and "huge amounts of government information," and of trying to "hack into everything that doesn't move in America."

Speaking at a campaign event in New Hampshire, Clinton said she wanted to see the peaceful rise of China.

With the release of the first batch of the thousands of emails that Hillary Clinton turned over to the State Department, what has America learned about the former secretary of state and current presidential candidate?

Nothing sufficiently voyeuristic to titillate journalists ever on the hunt for Clinton “scandals”—but just a few things that voters might be learning for the first time, if all they know about her is what the mainstream media always tells them.

FRANKFURT - After two bailouts totalling 240 billion euros ($335 billion Cdn) and six years of depression, spending cuts and lost jobs, Greece teeters on the edge of collapse.

How did it come to this? Why couldn't all that money and all that sacrifice turn around a country that makes up less than two per cent of the 19-country eurozone economy?

On Sunday the country will hold a referendum on whether or not to accept the tough creditor conditions attached to loans needed to avoid default and a banking collapse.

CALGARY— Prime Minister Stephen Harper is warning voters that a victory by the New Democrats or Liberals in this fall’s election would bring European-style economic calamity to this country and open the door to an increased security threat from jihadist terrorists.

In a highly partisan speech delivered Saturday evening to supporters at a Conservative barbecue, Harper predicted voters will opt to return his party to power with another majority.

“I’m confident that this October, Canadians will choose security over risk.”

OTTAWA—Authorities are moving to further tighten the rules on anyone visiting federal prisons to crack down on contraband despite fears the new system can be applied “subjectively.”

A notice quietly posted to a federal government website the afternoon before Canada Day said that despite concerns from inmates’ advocates and visitors, Correctional Services Canada will move forward with the new regime.

ATHENS, July 4 (Reuters) - Greece's finance minister accused creditors of trying to "terrorize" Greeks into accepting austerity, warning Europe stood to lose as much as Athens if the country is forced out of the euro after a referendum on Sunday on bailout terms.

After a week in which Greece defaulted, shuttered its banks and began rationing cash, Greeks vote on Sunday on whether to accept or reject tough conditions sought by international creditors to extend a lending lifeline that has kept the debt-stricken country afloat.

Injured ex-soldiers are being forced to wait longer for support from the government as the number of employees working at Veterans Affairs Canada has fallen to levels not seen since before the war in Afghanistan.

The revelation is contained in internal briefing notes for Veterans Affairs Minister Erin O’Toole, poking holes in the Conservative government’s assertions that recent budget cuts and layoffs at the department have not affected frontline service.

Canada is moving ahead with the destruction of surplus anti-tank missiles and other equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars despite a plea by Ukraine for such equipment to help it fight separatists.

Among the items declared surplus are more than 5,400 Eryx anti-tank missiles, according to a 2014 Department of National Defence documents leaked to the Citizen.

In addition, there are 10 Husky and Buffalo vehicles, used to clear routes of improvised explosive devices. Those vehicles were purchased in 2007 for use in Afghanistan.

OTTAWA — Senior Conservatives and New Democrats are defending Thomas Mulcair’s portrayal of a period in early 2007 when the NDP leader — then poised to leave the provincial Liberals in Quebec — was in private talks with headhunters from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.

They challenged the picture painted in a Maclean’s magazine article last week of Mulcair, formerly Quebec’s environment minister, as an unprincipled opportunist who was prepared to join a Conservative government, and even be a candidate despite the much-criticized Tory record on the environment.

Justin Trudeau says he will let Prime Minister Stephen Harper "continue to make the mistakes he's making by underestimating Canadians" and accused him of "using terrorism for political gain."

The Liberal leader made the comments in an interview Friday. Global Calgary's Amber Schinkel asked Trudeau whether he was concerned about Conservative attack ads — some featuring ISIS propaganda — that have targeted him and his party.

Amid mounting calls for an independent public inquiry into the botched 2012 firings of seven health ministry employees, Health Minister Terry Lake has instead asked a legislature committee to ask the conflicted provincial ombudsperson to investigate.

The Tyee reported last week that Jay Chalke, who became the ombudsperson on July 1, worked most recently as a senior official in the justice ministry. That ministry was closely involved in the firings and their aftermath.

In a July 3 letter to Scott Hamilton, the MLA who chairs the select standing committee on finance and government services, Health Minister Terry Lake wrote, "I would ask the Committee to have the Ombudsperson investigate the events leading up to the decision to terminate the employees, the decision to terminate itself, and the actions taken by government following the terminations, in addition to any other matters he may deem worthy of investigation."

It's the most expensive weapon ever built in human history. But after decades of internationally-funded research and development at an estimated cost of a trillion dollars, a leaked report from a mock combat test reveals that the F-35 is terrible at air-to-air combat.

"[The report found that] the F-35 cannot turn or accelerate fast enough to maneuver into an advantageous position to shoot at an F-16," says David Axe, a military journalist and blogger. "Nor can it escape an F-16 that's attacking it."

Finance Minister Joe Oliver denied it on Friday, but a growing number of economic analysts now say Canada is in a recession.

The country's economy likely shrank at an annual rate of 0.6 per cent in the second quarter of this year, Bank of America Merrill Lynch economist Emanuella Enenajor said Thursday, as quoted at Bloomberg.

Rona Ambrose's backwards pot politics

Well we finally found out what it takes to get the Harper government outraged. It wasn't our allies carrying out a global assassination campaign that presumes guilt without trial, or Canadian mining companies acting like the Latin American mafia, or even Zayn leaving One Direction. It was pot brownies. Health minister Rona Ambrose says she was "outraged" by the Supreme Court's unanimous decision that medical marijuana users should be free to purchase pot edibles like cookies, brownies, oils, or even a nice artichoke dip with some minced red onion...bit of lemon juice...little bit of pot. It's lovely.

Sapped by the oil slide, Canada’s economy appears headed toward recession, economists warn — and one says we’re already there.

Emanuella Enenajor of Bank of America Merrill Lynch says the Canadian economy appears to have shrunk by 0.6 per cent in the second quarter after a drop of the same amount in the first, “suggesting a recession.”

Enenajor also predicts the Canadian dollar will tumble to under 77 cents U.S. by the end of the year.

Only Stephen Harper could be cynical enough to dream it up, and only Pierre Polyester sufficiently crass to carry it out.

Canada’s minister of Employment and Social Development has had a photo-op with a bunch of government cheques.

The usual photo partners — starry-eyed children, carefully vetted students, or alleged constituents lovingly gazing at Poilievre handing out flyers — were nowhere to be seen. Instead, just cheques.

A national election is months away, but campaigning has already begun. While party leaders talk issues of economy and security, no one is asking the big question: what kind of society do we want?

Canada is no longer one of the top five countries for integrating immigrants, a European think-tank announced in May. Health care for refugees has been slashed, and new rules make it much harder for immigrants to bring their families with them.

Hillary Clinton is privately signaling to wealthy Jewish donors that — no matter the result of the Iranian nuclear negotiations — she will be a better friend to Israel than President Barack Obama.

But, even as donors increasingly push Clinton on the subject in private, they have emerged with sometimes widely varying interpretations about whether she would support a prospective deal, according to interviews with more than 10 influential donors and fundraising operatives.

Scores of social media users, myself included, have taken to Twitter to express anger and grief over the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina. Despite the racist and dismissive trope of the angry Black woman, many Black women in my Twitter circle are affirming the political value of angry Black womanhood. Some of us are pushing back on calls for healing, because this is a moment for grieving, and not yet for healing.

It's also a time to be angered by calls for us not to be angry. I am angry: at the entrenched system of white supremacy that, let's face it, is a core value of our nation, and at the duplicitous vocabulary being used to discuss the Charleston massacre. Calls for "healing" and "moving forward as a nation," injunctions against "anger" and applications of the trope of the "lone wolf" to Dylann Roof are complicit with right-wing attempts to maintain the racial status quo and postracial wishful thinking that refuses to name white supremacy.

Just in time for the Fourth of July — when millions of people across the country will visit America’s national parks and other public lands — the Koch brothers are rolling out their latest campaign against these treasured places: pushing for no more national parks.

In an op-ed published in Tuesday’s New York Times, Reed Watson, the executive director at the Koch-backed Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), along with a research associate at the Center, call for no more national parks, citing the backlog in maintenance for existing parks.

OTTAWA - Newly released memos show Canada's spy agency revealed its interest in people to foreign partners in two cases after receiving assurances the individuals would not be tortured — a practice human rights advocates say shirks the law and puts vulnerable detainees at risk.

In one case, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service got the green light from a high-level internal committee to interview a Canadian detained abroad as long as captors gave "proper assurances" the person would not be abused, the CSIS documents say.

In 2012, when Tom Mulcair was a candidate to lead the New Democratic Party, the Toronto Star reported on his negotiations with the Harper government, five years earlier, about a possible job.

That 2012 story mentioned the possibility of Mulcair heading an unnamed "environmental agency" at a salary rumoured to be in the $150,000 range.

Over the years there have been other reports about discussions between Mulcair and the Conservatives -- discussions the current Official Opposition leader has never denied.

Two days before Canada Day 2015, Maclean's magazine decided to resuscitate the story, claiming to have new information.

Would abortion rights be more secure today had Roe v. Wade been decided on the basis of women’s right to equality rather than privacy? Many smart people have thought so.

You can see why this is a tempting argument. Roe has been relentlessly attacked as confused, illogical, and poorly written, relying on a concept of privacy that is found nowhere in the Constitution (in Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision that struck down a state ban on birth-control use by married couples, Justice William O. Douglas famously located the right to privacy in the “penumbras” and “emanations” of various provisions, such as the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against self-incrimination). To conservatives, Roe is the very definition of judicial overreach. Wouldn’t it be a good thing if abortion rights could be reconstructed on more solid ground?