Democracy gone Astray: 05/01/2016

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, May 31, 2016

Eric Holder says Edward Snowden performed a 'public service'

Chicago (CNN)Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder says Edward Snowden performed a "public service" by triggering a debate over surveillance techniques, but still must pay a penalty for illegally leaking a trove of classified intelligence documents.

In a 2011 interview with the Indian newspaper The Siasat Daily, Indian-American businessman and longtime friend and financial supporter of the Clintons, Sant Chatwal, was unusually candid (for a big donor, at least) about his experiences in American politics as a wealthy donor:

“In politics nothing comes free. You have to write cheques in the American political system. I know the system. I had to work very hard. So I did as much as I could,” said Chatwal, who was co-chair for Hillary Clinton’s presidential exploratory committee in 2008. He continued: “I was interested in building a relationship between India and America… [So I] invested a lot of money in [Michael Dukakis]…But he lost the election because he failed in the debate. Then I thought, let me bet on [Bill] Clinton…I bet on [Clinton]. He became president. Already we were good friends like a family.”

If you set yourself the task of watching the Republican presidential debates, you may have noticed that when the candidates talk about the military they careen between declaring America as the greatest, most powerful military force in history and repeated declarations of decline, decimation, and degeneration. These ideas seem like unusual partners, perhaps even enemies, but the happy coexistence of contradictory propositions is one of the hallmarks of popular conservative thought.

Illogic is wonderful stuff as long as it generates political yardage and doesn’t upset the mental furniture.

All the news about Paul Ryan these days centers on the state of his relationship with the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, but the speaker is also apparently getting ready to churn out some new policy recommendations for the House Republican Caucus. As The New York Times reported, Ryan and the House GOP are going to start churning out one new policy proposal a week after the Memorial Day holiday, and the first product to roll off the line “will focus on combatting poverty.”

John Horgan didn't hold back while questioning Premier Christy Clark on a rather puzzling $150,000 provincial grant paid personally authorized by the premier, that ended up indirectly benefitting her brother.

A donation that appears to have no paper trail, policy or even a record that the request for the donation was ever made. The donation went to a First Nations school in Haida Gwaii, that oddly enough is under federal responsibility not provincial, to complete a feasibility study on building a new gym for their school (it's worth noting that there had already been two of these studies done on the same school in the past 10 years paid for by federal funds).

You can find conspiracy theorists on street corners, call-in radio shows and social media.

Soon, you might be able to find one in the Oval Office.

Generally, presidential candidates tend to shy away from conspiracy theories. They involve a mixture of paranoia and gullibility that seems ill-suited for someone seeking access to America’s nuclear codes.

No major American cultural force is more opposed to examination and more active in suppressing it today than Silicon Valley. So when it was revealed this week that Facebook board member Peter Thiel had been secretly bankrolling a lawsuit to inflict financial ruin on the news and gossip site Gawker, Silicon Valley cheered.

The investor Vinod Khosla wrote on Twitter that the “press gets very uppity when challenged”. And that these bad journalists need “to be taught lessons”.

Donald Trump has an anti-Semitism problem.

Granted, the newly minted Republican nominee for president has long insisted that his is not himself anti-Semitic, and regularly points out that his daughter is a Jewish convert. Yet Trump has done little to quell a rising tide of anti-Semitism among his supporters since launching his campaign last year: Trump initially refused to disavow anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, a Trump surrogate implied at a rally that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders should convert from Judaism and “meet Jesus,” prominent anti-Semites went on radio shows to encourage their supporters to "get out and vote" for Trump, and a man was filmed leaving a Trump rally shouting in Cleveland shouting “Go to fucking Auschwitz.”

Donald Trump supposedly told House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) he supports cutting Social Security but will not admit it publicly because it would hurt his election chances, according to a report in Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee reportedly made the comments during a May 12 meeting with Ryan aimed at mending ties between the two top Republican leaders, Bloomberg reported, citing an unnamed source who was in the room. (Ryan has yet to endorse Trump.)

On the list of topics researchers -- sociologists, political scientists, economists, criminologists, workplace rule-makers, pollsters and even biologists -- have been known to study is honesty.

And with reason. Honesty underpins the function of our courts and our personal relationships, our electoral system, our healthcare operations and our workplaces. And in the world of truth-telling studies, a sub-field exists: These researchers examine what role, if any, gender plays in honesty.

When Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law sought funding for his new hedge fund in 2011, he found financial backing from one of the biggest names on Wall Street: Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein.

The fund, called Eaglevale Partners, was founded by Chelsea Clinton’s husband, Marc Mezvinsky, and two of his partners. Blankfein not only personally invested in the fund, but allowed his association with it to be used in the fund’s marketing.

Donald Trump told voters in drought-plagued California on Friday that he had a solution to the water crisis: Open up the water for farmers, because “there is no drought.”

“We’re going to solve your water problem. You have a water problem that is so insane,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee told a crowd filled with farmers in Fresno. “It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea.”

Last Friday, after weeks of political maneuvering, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Avigdor Lieberman to be his defense minister. A longtime political hard-liner who has filled various cabinet positions for more than a decade, Lieberman made his career with coarse talk: Israel, he said, should “cut off the head” of a disloyal Arab citizen, or take “a lesson from Putin” on how to deal with terror. His appointment served as a climax to parallel dramas: a public dispute between Netanyahu’s most conservative ministers and the Israel Defense Forces, which Lieberman’s appointment will inflame, and a secret peace initiative prompted by Tony Blair, involving players from the opposition leader, Isaac Herzog, to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, which the appointment effectively scuttles.

The presidential campaign of Donald Trump has largely been a policy-free, fact-free, detail-free event, based on emotion (especially fear), pandering to shallow slogans (“Make America Great”), and the aggressive personal and ad hominem abuse of his Republican and Democratic opponents.

As a result, it is of special interest when Trump tries to address real issues and policies. This has happened only a few times, but it offers a glimpse into how woefully ignorant Trump is and how absolutely unprepared and unqualified he is to assume any kind of public office or hold any position of political power.

Congress abandoned the Capitol Thursday for an almost two-week break without addressing how to combat Zika, even as public health officials issue dire warnings about the spread of the mosquito-driven virus with summer approaching.

Republican leaders insist a deal can be struck soon to provide the money federal health officials say is needed to develop a vaccine. They also downplayed the risk of waiting a little longer, arguing existing money is available for the initial steps needed to help contain the virus while lawmakers resolve the larger funding fight.

Last February, New York Republican Rep. Peter King said Donald Trump was "not fit to be president, morally or intellectually." In early May, he endorsed Trump. And King is not alone. Where many Republican Party members were once focused on Trump's negatives, they're now courting him. Like King, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who previously labeled Trump an albatross, is endorsing him, tweeting pictures of himself with the smiling businessman.

A provision snuck into the still-secret text of the Senate’s annual intelligence authorization would give the FBI the ability to demand individuals’ email data and possibly web-surfing history from their service providers without a warrant and in complete secrecy.

If passed, the change would expand the reach of the FBI’s already highly controversial national security letters. The FBI is currently allowed to get certain types of information with NSLs — most commonly, information about the name, address, and call data associated with a phone number or details about a bank account.

People who make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour can’t find an affordable place to live anywhere in the country, according to a new report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

But perhaps even more surprising is that even if the minimum wage were raised to $15 an hour — the level low-wage workers have been demanding in a constant flow of strikes and protests and the highest level supported by Democratic lawmakers — they would still be out of luck.

Republican lawmakers in Ohio approved a bill late Wednesday night that would force residents to put up a cash bond when they petition a court extend voting hours during an election day emergency, such as a natural disaster. If Gov. John Kasich (R) signs the bill, Ohio could become the first state in the nation to make voters risk losing tens of thousands of dollars of their own money when making the case for keeping the polls open a few extra hours.

The bill’s author, Republican Sen. Bill Seitz of Green Township, wrote an op-ed this week about his motivation for pushing the measure.

"Clinton has a new weapon against Trump: Elizabeth Warren," a Washington Post headline proclaimed Tuesday. That story referred to a blistering denunciation of Donald Trump that Warren delivered on Tuesday, just one example of the liberal favorite's increasing willingness to jump into the presidential campaign fray. The consensus around Warren's recent attacks on Trump, on Twitter and elsewhere, is clear: She's positioning herself as a prime attacker to hit Trump on behalf of Hillary Clinton in the general election.

Uber is a traditional employer recruiting employees. Or Uber is a non-employer facilitating the work of independent contractors. Or Uber is a technology company supplying an app to small businesses.

It depends on which lawsuit you read. The company, valued at over $62 billion, changes its description of what it does depending on what best allows it to avoid regulatory scrutiny.

In January, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon delivered a speech to the Security Council about, as he put it, violence “in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory,” noting that “Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half century of occupation” and that “it is human nature to react to occupation.” His use of the word “occupation” was not remotely controversial because multiple U.N. Security Resolutions, such as 446 (adopted unanimously in 1979 with three abstentions), have long declared Israel the illegal “occupying power” in the West Bank and Gaza. Unsurprisingly, newspapers around the world — such as the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, the BBC, the LA Times — routinely and flatly describe Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza in their news articles as what it is: an occupation.

After the 2012 GOP “autopsy” which strongly recommended that the Republican party take immediate action to try to mend its bad reputation with Latinos and women lest it be shut out of the White House for decades, one of the people mentioned most often by GOP strategists as a natural choice for the national ticket was New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez. She was considered a rising star in Republican circles, a Latina who had been able to win in a blue state that went for Barack Obama twice. She had given a barn-burner of a speech at the 2012 convention and was widely assumed to be one of the new faces of the Republican party in an era of changing demographics.

This week, leading Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz appointed professional influence peddlers with ties to weapons makers, hedge funds and WalMart to the committee responsible for drafting the Democratic Party’s policy platform.

Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani report at The Intercept:

Wendy Sherman and Carol Browner, two of the representatives chosen by Clinton, work at the Albright Stonebridge Group, a “government affairs” firm that was created in 2009 through a merger with Madeleine Albright’s consulting company and Stonebridge International, a defense contractor lobbying shop.

LONDON—Farming is a dirty business—so dirty now that, according to new research, air pollution from agriculture in the form of fine particles of lung-choking dust outweighs all other human sources of that kind of pollution.

These particles are calculated to cause around 3.3 million deaths a year worldwide—and most of this lung-penetrating murk is from fertilisers. Back in 1950, the world produced 20 million tons of artificial fertilisers, but farmers now spread on their fields every year around 190 million tons.

A global battle is being fought over the future of the world's food. Hear from the women on the front lines in Seed Sovereignty, Food Security: Women in the Vanguard of the Fight Against GMOs and Corporate Agriculture. These seed keepers, food producers, scientists, activists and scholars are committed to building a food system that is better aligned with ecological processes, human health and justice for all. Order this amazing book by donating to Truthout today!

The following is excerpted from Vandana Shiva's foreword to Seed Sovereignty, Food Security:

Well, that was quick!

On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Ontario's Crown prosecutors announced there would be no appeal of the acquittal of Sen. Mike Duffy, who had been found not guilty last month of 31 charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery.

Yesterday -- that is to say, for those of you who read this later, on Wednesday -- The Globe and Mail reported that former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper will now resign as MP for the Calgary Heritage riding and slip out the back door of the Parliament Buildings a final time.

The Globe's story, and all the coverage of the same story since, seems not to have mentioned the elephant in the Parliamentary chamber, that is, the simplest explanation of why the humiliated ex-PM was sticking around so long after the Oct. 19, 2015, federal election when he obviously didn't feel much like it. To wit: He needed to preserve his Parliamentary privilege long enough to avoid being called to testify about the shenanigans in the Prime Minister's Office back in the days when the boys in short pants were trying to get then-Conservative Sen. Duffy to stop embarrassing the Harper Government.

Last week, the Liberal government introduced Bill C-16, an Act to Amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code of Canada to protect transgender individuals from discrimination and hate propaganda. The bill is almost identical to Bill C-279, a private member's bill introduced in 2012 by NDP MP Randall Garrison. The two bills seek to make very simple amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) and the Criminal Code of Canada (Criminal Code): to provide protection from discrimination and from hate propaganda based on gender identity or expression.

On May 12, Brazil’s democratic government, led by the Workers’ Party (PT), was the victim of a coup. What will the other BRICS countries (Russia, India, China, and South Africa) do?

Will they stand by as the reactionaries who took power in Brasilia pivot closer to Western powers, glad to warm Dilma Rousseff’s seat at the BRICS summit in Goa, India in five months’ time?

HILLARY CLINTON’S use of a private email server while secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 has been justifiably criticized as an error of judgment. What the new report from the State Department inspector general makes clear is that it also was not a casual oversight. Ms. Clinton had plenty of warnings to use official government communications methods, so as to make sure that her records were properly preserved and to minimize cybersecurity risks. She ignored them.

The Obama Years Have Been Very Good to America's Weapons Makers

The Obama years have been a boom time for America's weapons makers. Since 2009, the United States has approved arms deals worth some $200 billion—more than under any other presidency. The deals include sending Apache helicopters to Qatar, "bunker buster" bombs and cluster munitions to Saudi Arabia, and Hellfire missiles all over the place. Predicting an increase in weapons sales fueled by the war against ISIS, an unnamed American weapons manufacturing executive told Reuters last year: "Everyone in the region is talking about building up supplies for 5 to 10 years. This is going to be a long fight. It's a huge growth area for us."

Arleja Stevens considers herself a hard worker. After she got a job as a customer service manager at a Walmart in Washington, DC right before last year’s holiday rush, she says she worked longer than was required in every single shift except one, when a computer glitch forced her and her coworkers to go home.

That didn’t change after she found out she was pregnant in January. She didn’t tell her manager right away; she was worried about how it would be received, particularly at a company that has become somewhat known for taking action against pregnant employees over the years. “I didn’t tell anyone at the store because basically the culture I have seen there, they were not too forgiving of people if they had certain debilitations or injuries,” she said.

Hillary Clinton ran afoul of a federal record keeping law meant to help government agencies be more transparent when she used a private email server to conduct official business, according to a new State Department compliance report given to lawmakers Wednesday.

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that while the State Department suffers from “systemic weaknesses…that go well beyond the tenure of any one secretary of state,” Clinton’s office — as well as that of her predecessors — have been recalcitrant in managing cybersecurity risks.

Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker Media was about more than Hogan’s payout from the beginning.

Now, reporting from Forbes alleges that Silicon valley billionaire and pledged Trump delegate Peter Thiel — who has referred to Gawker writers as “terrorists” — has been secretly backing the suit. The New York Times also reports that Thiel is bankrolling the case. The revelation adds a twist to a case already tied up in questions over freedom of speech, and has big implications for how critical press functions in an age of billionaires.

It’s been six months since the video of Laquan McDonald’s fatal shooting put a national spotlight on police brutality and corruption in Chicago, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel is still grappling with how to restore trust of the city’s officers.

After replacing the head of the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) to review and overhaul the agency, which has long colluded with Chicago officers instead of holding them accountable, Emanuel wants to scrap the police oversight body altogether.

It’s a dangerous inversion: In Israel, according to Ronen Bergman in his analysis for The New York Times, the relationship that Benjamin Netanyahu and other politicians are cultivating with their country’s military and intelligence leaders is one in which the wrong side is making the case for caution.

Now you see it, now you don’t. Think of it as the Department of Defense’s version of the street con game, three-card monte, or maybe simply as the Pentagon shuffle. In any case, the Pentagon’s budget is as close to a work of art as you’re likely to find in the U.S. government—if, that is, by work of art you mean scam.

The United States is on track to spend more than $600 billion on the military this year—more, that is, than was spent at the height of President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War military buildup, and more than the military budgets of at least the next seven nations in the world combined. And keep in mind that that’s just a partial total. As an analysis by the Straus Military Reform Project has shown, if we count related activities like homeland security, veterans’ affairs, nuclear warhead production at the Department of Energy, military aid to other countries, and interest on the military-related national debt, that figure reaches a cool $1 trillion.

Victor Phillip Dahdaleh, a British-Canadian billionaire honoured recently by York University with his name on a new health institute, is the mysterious middleman in a 20-year “corruption scheme” in which U.S. officials say he “enriched himself” with $400 million (U.S.) in mark-ups and paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes to Bahraini officials, a Toronto Star/CBC investigation has found.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said before that he doesn’t get much sleep. And at a campaign event Wednesday in Anaheim, California, less than two weeks before the California presidential primary, Trump bragged again: “I don’t sleep much. I don’t sleep much.”

The above MSNBC clip captures Trump berating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for allegedly “sleeping” through a very important call at three in the morning.

Elizabeth Warren isn't ready to endorse Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, but she's had no trouble going after Clinton's presumptive Republican opponent, Donald Trump. Warren and Trump have sparred on Twitter ever since The Donald locked up the Republican nomination, and on Tuesday night she expanded her arguments against him during a speech at the annual gala for the liberal nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy.

In January, Donald Trump claimed a stunt fundraising event he hosted raised $6 million for veterans. He said he personally contributed $1 million of his self-proclaimed $8.7 billion fortune toward that total.

But a Wall Street Journal report published roughly three months after the fundraiser found the promised beneficiaries had apparently received just a “fraction of the promised money.” In recent days, reporters started pressing the Trump campaign for more details. When specifics weren’t forthcoming, a Washington Post reporter used Twitter to investigate whether any veterans groups had posted about receiving the money Trump purportedly raised. They found nothing.

It is clear that the U.S. 2016 presidential campaign will be unlike any other. It will pit the first woman to be a major party’s nominee for the presidency against a man who is, without argument, the least qualified candidate to be president in the country’s history — a man who has embraced hate speech, racism, and misogyny as platform planks of his campaign.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), amplifying her her recent attacks on Donald Trump, admonished the presumptive GOP presidential nominee in a no-holds-barred speech on Tuesday, calling him “a small, insecure money-grubber who doesn’t care who gets hurt.”

The Canadian political tribe will pay two tributes this weekend to the legacy of Stephen Harper. The first will happen in Vancouver, where the reclusive former prime minister will take the stage at the Conservatives’ convention and his party will thank him for his decade at the helm.

The other, far more subtle nod in Harper’s direction will be taking place in Winnipeg, when Liberals hold their own gathering this weekend.

QUEBEC — The head of a taxi lobby in Quebec says ride-hailing company Uber has the attitude of a hardened criminal.

Guy Chevrette made the comment today in Quebec City ahead of the start of legislative hearings into a new bill seeking to regulate the U.S.-based company.

The former Parti Quebecois transport minister told reporters he thinks Uber will try and stall for time in order to impede the passing of the legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KT), House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are among the prominent establishment Republicans who not so long ago publicly expressed concern about Donald Trump’s character, but have recently indicated they’re setting those aside in hopes of installing a Republican — any Republican — in the White House.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is reviving some of the ugliest political chapters of the 1990s with escalating personal attacks on Bill Clinton’s character, part of a concerted effort to smother Hillary Clinton’s campaign message with the weight of decades of controversy.

Trump’s latest shot came Monday when he released an incendiary Instagram video that includes the voices of two women who accused the former president of sexual assault, underscoring the presumptive Republican nominee’s willingness to go far beyond political norms in his critique of his likely Democratic rival.

Roughly 70 percent of women in the United States hate Donald Trump. The reasons are too innumerable to list here, but we can begin with his flagrantly sexist zinger about Megyn Kelly’s alleged menstrual issues. Stir into the mix Trump’s tweet about how women should expect to be assaulted in the military because they’re choosing to serve with men, then wrap up the list with this: “All of the women on ‘The Apprentice’ flirted with me — consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.” Eww.

The neofascist reaction, the force behind Trump, has come about because of the extreme disembeddedness of the economy from social relations. The neoliberal economy has become pure abstraction; as has the market, as has the state, there is no reality to any of these things the way we have classically understood them. Americans, like people everywhere rising up against neoliberal globalization (in Britain, for example, this takes the form of Brexit, or exit from the European Union), want a return of social relations, or embeddedness, to the economy.

What do Israel’s Arab neighbors think about the political earthquake that struck PM Binyamin Netanyahu’s cabinet on Thursday and Friday? Netanyahu invited into his government the far right Yisrael Beitenu ultra-nationalist party and offered the minister of defense position to extremist Avigdor Lieberman. He appears to have attempted to mollify the old defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, by offering him the foreign ministry. Yaalon angrily declined and announced his resignation from the government.

Democracy Gone Astray

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Monday, May 30, 2016