Democracy gone Astray: Thursday, March 31, 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.]

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Métis Accuse Oilsands Giant CNRL Of Economic Retaliation Over Environmental Concerns

In her 68 years, Margie Wood has seen the landscape around her transformed from isolated wilderness to an intensive industrial zone. She has lived her life in the heart of what is now the Alberta oilsands.

Today her community is surrounded by open pit mines and massive upgrading plants. Pipelines and service roads snake through the trapline she once shared with her father.

Donald Trump has fought to block wind farms, said climate change was a concept created by China, and threatened to cut the Environmental Protection Agency if elected president. Now, critics can add one more anti-environmental hit to Trump’s track record: His Trump National Golf Course in Sterling, Virginia is exacerbating pollution in the Potomac River, according to one environmental group.

The golf course, as Washingtonian Magazine reports, was purchased by the Trump Organization in 2009. One year later, the company expanded the golf course — in the process cutting down 465 trees along the bank of the Potomac. The loss of those trees created the largest treeless stretch along the river from American Legion Memorial Bridge in Maryland to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, said Hedrick Belin, the president of the Potomac Conservancy.

Back in her radical pro-Palestinian days, Hillary Clin … wait, her what?

Take two. Back in 1999, before neutrality on Israel/Palestine was deemed radically treasonous by America’s billionaire presidential anointers, Hillary Clinton actually spoke warmly of Palestinian aspirations. On a visit to the West Bank, she shocked pro-Israel enforcers by kissing the cheek of the Other, Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha, who had denounced Israel’s military domination of the Palestinians. The kiss was essentially diplomatic behavior by the then-first lady, but it rattled the enforcers, already skittish about Clinton after her shocking use of the actual word “Palestine” and her endorsement, a year earlier, of an independent state of that name.

Now that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has nearly completed a crackdown on dissent at home — closing down opposition newspapers, prosecuting students for joking on Twitter about officials and putting journalists on trial — he seems intent on silencing critics in other countries as well.

After the president arrived in Washington on Tuesday night, his security team got right to work, harassing protesters and journalists outside his hotel, as writers for one of the papers recently shuttered by Erdogan’s government noted.

LAST THURSDAY, an Israeli soldier was arrested after the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem posted horrific video of the soldier shooting a 21-year-old Palestinian man in the head from point-blank range, and killing him, even though he was already shot, wounded, and lying incapacitated on the ground. The killing took place in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron after the Palestinian man, Abed al-Fatah al-Sharif, stabbed an IDF soldier at a military occupation checkpoint.

A new film narrated by Roger Waters, The Occupation of the American Mind, traces the rise of Israeli war propaganda in the United States. This propaganda, which has skillfully swayed U.S. public opinion in support of Israeli wars and occupations, has in fact been not so much a matter of skill as a matter of control.

The U.S. corporate media has obeyed the Israeli propaganda office, because the U.S. government has done so, and the U.S. corporate media generally obeys the U.S. government. How much the U.S. government’s stance is shaped by its own independent, albeit perverse, interests, and how much by Israeli propagandizing and corruption is one question. But the U.S. corporate media’s lockdown on criticism of Israeli wars is only a slight variation on its coverage of U.S. wars.

The Bagman

There was little about the man walking through Heathrow Airport to show he held secrets that could bring down some of the most powerful men in Iraq.

Moustached, olive skinned, hair receding, eyes sharp. His name was Basil Al Jarah. His British passport showed he lived in Hull, an unremarkable town in the north of England, but it bore the stamps of a frequent traveller: London, Baghdad, Basra, Amman, Paris, Istanbul, Kuwait.

Francisco Javier Romero Astorga died in immigration detention on March 13. He was 39 years old, from Chile, a father of four. The Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), responsible for his detention, has refused to explain how he died.

Indeed, Astorga's family in Chile has received scant information, beyond the amount they must pay to return his body to them: $10,000.

APPLETON, Wis. — Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said Wednesday that there “has to be some form of punishment” for abortion if it were banned in the U.S. — as he says it should be — and that punishment should fall on the woman.

Trump, who is currently struggling with women voters, was pressed on the issue of abortion during an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, set to air Wednesday evening.

Democracy gone Astray