Democracy gone Astray: Monday, March 14, 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.]

Monday, March 14, 2016

Who’s Pumping Money Into the 2016 Election? Hedge Fund Heads

A new analysis by Reuters offers a fresh look at the interests pouring money into the 2016 president election.

Hedge fund managers are upping their game in this election season, with Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and Republican Ted Cruz the biggest beneficiaries, Reuters’ review of Federal Election Commission filings found.

(Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday said Apple Inc's rhetoric was "false" in a high-profile fight over the government's bid to unlock an encrypted iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters.

Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation obtained a court order requiring Apple to write new software and take other measures to disable passcode protection and allow access to shooter Rizwan Farook's iPhone.

On a brisk Saturday in early March, I went to the Ronald Reagan Building to spend the evening with a bunch of white nationalists who were in town for the National Policy Institute’s winter conference.

The three black security guards at the entrance grimaced when I asked for directions to the eighth-floor rotunda room where the group was holding its event.

Yasmeen Alamiri was standing in the press pen at a Donald Trump rally in Radford, Virginia, late last month when a man in the crowd called her a terrorist.

The slur didn’t register, perhaps because Alamiri, a 31-year-old Arab-American, had heard it before, or more likely because she was focused on her work as a reporter for RarePolitics.com. It was another reporter who told about the epithet.

WASHINGTON -- Video surfaced Thursday of a Donald Trump supporter punching a protester in the face at the Republican presidential front-runner's rally in North Carolina on Wednesday.

The footage shows a white man in a cowboy hat walk down the row to the aisle where protesters are leaving and sucker-punch an African-American man, later identified as Rakeem Jones.

WRAL reports that the suspect, John McGraw, 78, was charged with assault and battery on Thursday.

PIRAEUS, Greece -- Piraeus, the port near Athens well known to tourists for its ferries to Greece’s picturesque islands in the Aegean Sea, has in the past month turned into one of the country’s largest makeshift shelters for different kinds of travelers: migrants and refugees.

In the past weeks, they have taken over four passenger waiting areas at the port as temporary accommodation. In just a few days, 5,000 people were taking shelter there.

Four days after the assassination of Honduran indigenous leader Berta Cáceres captured worldwide headlines, a vigil to remind of the blood on Canada’s hands for all those who have died protesting Canadian mining projects abroad interrupted the mining industry’s annual confab in Toronto on Sunday, March 6.

The vigil held by the Mining Injustice Solidarity Network at the convention of the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) was presided over by Anglican priest Maggie Helwig. “We are here to name the dead,” she said.

According to reports, Republican legislators are having an uneasy time cottoning to the notion that real estate developer and white-supremacist cuddle muppet Donald Trump seems to be on the glide path to becoming their party's standard-bearer. Many have declared their intention to not support Trump under any circumstances. Many more fret about how a Trump nomination might adversely affect their party's opportunities down the ticket.

WASHINGTON -- So far in the Democratic primary, there's only one set of circumstances in which the party is producing strong voter turnout: When Bernie Sanders wins a state, tons of voters are showing up.

In Colorado, Kansas and Maine, Democrats have actually surpassed the turnout of the 2008 primary contests, while the caucuses in Minnesota and Nebraska only narrowly missed. Sanders won all five states. That's no small feat. Democrats were energized in 2008, eager to turn the page on the Bush years, and excited by two candidates whose election would have represented a breakthrough for millions of people.

Donald Trump wants YOU to be rich!

But he has some pretty disturbing advice on how exactly you should do that: Don’t save your money, he says; spend it! In fact, live above your means — it will fill you with confidence. Getting a job is for losers; the key is to get other people to work for you. And spend other people’s money, too. Above all, market yourself aggressively and enthusiastically.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is demanding a vote on a bill that would provide a one-time cash payment to Social Security beneficiaries and veterans who did not get a cost-of-living adjustment this year.

At least a dozen activists and heads of major advocacy groups joined Warren and several Democratic colleagues for a press conference outside the Senate on Wednesday, armed with boxes of 800,000 petition signatures in support of the bill that they subsequently delivered to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

"Fortunately, there is nothing predestined about what will come after the exhaustion of the new normal. The road out of the upcoming "T junction" can still be influenced in a consequential manner by the choices we make, as households, companies, and governments. But to make better choices, we need to understand the forces at play and their likely evolution. There is no better way of doing so than through an examination of the world's central banks...past, present, and future." -- Mohamed A El-Erian, "The Only Game in Town"

Generally, when you're debating a person who might get indicted because of an ongoing FBI investigation, you've won the contest in terms of trustworthiness. Bernie Sanders defeated Clinton during the Univision Democratic Debate on Wednesday, primarily because only one Democrat on stage risks indictment by the Justice Department. If you've traveled into the future, from a time period in American history when FBI investigations doomed presidential campaigns, then you're reading this correctly.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government is pushing to keep some evidence in the criminal case against militants who occupied federal property in Oregon secret from people who are not directly involved, including the press. Federal prosecutors claim releasing this information will endanger witnesses.

More than two dozen people face felony conspiracy charges for their role in the 41-day occupation of a remote federal wildlife refuge near Burns. Ammon Bundy, son of Nevada "rancher" Cliven Bundy, who is dealing with his own charges related to a 2014 standoff, led the effort. The armed militants seized the facility to protest the imprisonment of two local ranchers and the federal government's control of public land. The standoff, which ended last month, resulted in numerous arrests and the death of one prominent occupier, LaVoy Finicum, who was shot dead by authorities in January.

WASHINGTON -- One of the Republican Party's most candid senators, Lindsey Graham (S.C.), admitted Thursday a stark fact that the rest of his colleagues have tried their best to avoid: that their blockade of any Supreme Court nominee by President Barack Obama is unprecedented.

And he insisted that he was going to go along with it, even though he predicted it would worsen relations between the parties and the functioning of the Senate.

As the news broke on March 7, 2016, that US drone strikes had killed 150 people in Somalia, the White House announced it will reveal, for the first time, the number of people killed by drones and manned airstrikes "outside areas of active hostilities" since 2009. The tallies will include civilian deaths. This is a critical first step toward much-needed transparency. But it will not go far enough.

MONTREAL — The CEO of Canadian Pacific Railway says fossil fuels are "probably dead."

Hunter Harrison told a transportation conference today that the transition to alternative fuels will be long, but new investments in traditional energy sources will dry up because of environmental hurdles.

The Supreme Court of Canada will allow the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation the chance to appeal a plan by Enbridge Pipelines to use a line through southern Ontario to Quebec to move oilsands bitumen from Western Canada.

Chief Leslee White-Eye applauded the decision, saying a statement that members of the First Nation were "distressed" when the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed their appeal and "failed to acknowledge our aboriginal and treaty rights."

The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) returned to the bargaining table this week for a second round of contract negotiations under Justin Trudeau's Liberal government.

Labour reporter Teuila Fuatai looks at what we can expect from the talks.

Today, in Victoria's Supreme Court, the Province of B.C. is seeking an injunction to forcibly remove the remaining residents of Super InTent City.

Last spring, there were a handful of tenters on the provincial courthouse property, but now the tent community has grown to over 100 people who have a sense of pride and belonging. In fact, when the tenters were served with an eviction notice telling them to leave by February 25, they instead stayed and threw a block party.

Even though a law almost exactly like it is still being reviewed in the Supreme Court, the state of Florida just passed a massive anti-choice bill that, under the guise of supporting women’s health, is aimed at cutting off as many women as possible from abortion, contraception, and STI prevention and treatment services. Most of the bill is modeled after the one in Texas, the one the court is currently reviewing, which uses medically unnecessary red tape to regulate abortion clinics out of existence.

Here Are The Raises Canada's Big Bank CEOs Got Last Year

TORONTO — Promotions meant big pay raises last year for the men taking the helm at three of Canada's biggest banks.

David McKay, RBC — up 44 per cent

In his first full year as president and CEO of Royal Bank, McKay saw his total direct compensation jump 44 per cent to $10.9 million.

An internal Pentagon report made public on Wednesday revealed that the U.S. Department of Defense has been using unarmed drones to conduct surveillance missions over American soil since 2006.

The Pentagon inspector general report, entitled “Evaluation of DoD Use of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) for Support to Civil Authorities,” obtained by USA Today through a Freedom of Information Act request, said that “less than 20” such missions occurred between 2006 and 2015, though they anticipate many more in the years to come.

WASHINGTON -- The Constitution may say that the president shall appoint judges with the advice and consent of the Senate, but doing so now would be to trash that very Constitution, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) argued Wednesday.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared almost immediately upon the death of Justice Antonin Scalia that the Senate would entertain no replacement named by President Barack Obama, leaving the seat vacant for more than a year.

I've been reluctant to use the "f" word to describe Donald Trump because it's especially harsh, and it's too often used carelessly.

But Trump has finally reached a point where parallels between his presidential campaign and the fascists of the first half of the 20th century -- lurid figures such as Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Oswald Mosley, and Francisco Franco -- are too evident to overlook.

WASHINGTON -- For weeks, senators have said they are close to a deal on legislation to help Flint, Michigan recover from the poisoning of its water supply, but on Wednesday another lawmaker threw a wrench in the negotiations.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) put a hold on the agreement just as Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) appeared close to putting out a flame with Republican Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) over the legislation.

ISTANBUL -- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is taking advantage of the refugee crisis in Europe to obtain the European Union's support for his own authoritarian regime. The 2.5 million refugees in Turkey are the ultimate trump card for Erdogan. He's the one calling the shots.

A meeting in October between Erdogan and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission resulted in a shady deal by which the release of an EU progress report for Turkey -- which contained serious criticisms of Erdogan's party -- would be delayed for Erdogan's sake. The European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, even seemed willing to overlook Turkey's diminishing freedom of the press and human rights. Even so, Erdogan acted insulted by the EU's offer of 3 billion euros in financial aid, noting that Greece, during its own crisis, had received 400 billion euros in aid. He then threatened to "open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria" and "put the refugees on buses" into Europe.

The City of Seattle has been slammed with a lawsuit over its groundbreaking bylaw allowing drivers-on-demand -- including Uber, Lyft and taxi operators -- to unionize.

Last Thursday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sued the city in a U.S. district court. The national business lobby group argued that Seattle's historic Dec. 14 ordinance, which lets drivers negotiate pay and working conditions, violates federal labour laws. It also alleges a breach of a 126-year-old antitrust law preventing the formation of a criminal "cartel."

Democracy gone Astray