Democracy gone Astray: 07/01/2018

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, July 31, 2018

Female senators took down Al Franken

As more and more women came forward to accuse Sen. Al Franken of sexual misconduct, top Senate leaders — all men — stayed quiet. It was not until a group of female senators stood up and said, “Enough,” that the tide turned.

"The allegations against Sen. Franken describe behavior that cannot be tolerated," Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) tweeted. Within minutes, five other Democratic female senators posted messages urging him to step down.

What had been billed a groundbreaking visit to Greece, the first by a Turkish president in 65 years, turned into a verbal theatre of war as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, flouting the niceties of diplomacy, crossed an array of red lines.

Disputes that had lain dormant – not least the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne delineating the borders between the two nations – were prised open with brutal force on Thursday by Erdoğan on the first day of a historic visit dominated by the leader’s unpredictability.

According to The Guardian, JBS, Cargill and Tyson—three of the world’s largest meat producers—emitted more greenhouse gas last year than all of France and nearly as much as the biggest oil companies, such as Exxon, BP, and Shell.

Hardly any meat or dairy companies publish their climate emissions, so it’s almost impossible to know the exact amount of greenhouse gas generated. But using the most comprehensive data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The Guardian estimated emissions from animal agriculture, and the results are staggering.

The mounting allegations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein opened the floodgates in Hollywood and elsewhere, revealing a systematic culture of men who had power preying on those who had little or none.

But Weinstein's story isn't just that of a catalytic moment for the movement that Time recognized in its Person of the Year issue. It's a still-unfolding tale of a master manipulator, one who had a large network of increasingly visible co-conspirators, what The New York Times calls in a bombshell report published Tuesday night a "complicity machine."

It has been a rough couple of months for Ksenia Pakhomova, a bright-eyed, garrulous 23-year-old from the Siberian mining town of Kemerovo. Her boyfriend was kicked out of university, her mother was fired from her teaching job at an arts school, and her grandmother was threatened with dismissal from her job at a gallery.

To top it off, someone plastered notices with her photograph in public places near her home, complete with her mobile number and an offer of sexual services.

The estimates for what it will cost to restore areas already damaged during the construction of the Site C dam are being exaggerated, says Chief Roland Willson of the West Moberly First Nations.

“The Peace country is very resilient,” Willson said at a news conference in Victoria Monday. “All they’ve got to do is make it safe, make the site safe, deal with those tension cracks they have, and then leave. Go home. It will take care of itself.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to cut diplomatic ties with Israel over reports that the United States plans to recognise Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.

Such a move would be a "red line" for Muslims, Erdogan said on Tuesday.

Reports emerged on Friday that US President Donald Trump was considering recognising Jerusalem as Israel's capital, a move that would be symbolised by relocating the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, upsetting decades of US policy.

There was once a time when school children would hang out at the Al-Karama library in Cairo’s bustling, impoverished Dar El Salam neighborhood. They sought escape from the polluted drudgery of slum life, or just a safe space to finish their homework. But for almost a year now, the library’s decrepit maroon garage door has been rolled shut: In December 2016, Egyptian security forces raided the library and three of its sister branches after deeming them seditious spaces.

The Nation’s Sarah Posner has published an investigative report on anti-LGBTQ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom, the so-called Christian “legal army” that is arguing before the Supreme Court on December 5 in the Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission case. The Supreme Court’s decision on this case, which involves a Christian baker who refused to serve a gay couple, could have huge implications on LGBTQ peoples’ right to access otherwise public accommodations.

Little distinguishes democracy in America more sharply from Europe than the primacy—and permissiveness—of our commitment to free speech. Yet ongoing controversies at American universities suggest that free speech is becoming a partisan issue. While conservative students defend the importance of inviting controversial speakers to campus and giving offense, many self-identified liberals are engaged in increasingly disruptive, even violent, efforts to shut them down. Free speech for some, they argue, serves only to silence and exclude others. Denying hateful or historically “privileged” voices a platform is thus necessary to make equality effective, so that the marginalized and vulnerable can finally speak up—and be heard.

Jacob Rees-Mogg had a private meeting with former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon in London on Thursday to talk about how conservative movements can win in the US and UK, the Guardian has learned.

Rees-Mogg, a favourite among Conservative members to be the next party leader, spent more than an hour at the meeting in a Mayfair hotel with Bannon, who was at one point seen as Trump’s most influential adviser.

As house prices have soared, the issues of foreign homebuyers and house-flipping have become big in Canada. Industry insiders, policymakers, economists and virtually everyone else has an opinion on just how much of the house-price boom can be attributed to investors from abroad or speculators who buy properties only to sell them at inflated prices.

But there's one group of people that really doesn't want to talk about it: Real estate associations. In fact, they seem to be doing everything they can to keep people from finding out just how much of these sorts of activities is going on.

The Federal Court of Appeal has upheld a previous ruling that Canada's largest real estate board must allow its realtor members to make home sales data available online, in a precedent-setting case that could enable agents across the country to introduce new online services.

The Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) has vowed to continue to fight the decision in court.

Vladimir Putin signs bill targeting foreign media

So he's signed it. Of course, there was never much doubt Vladimir Putin would put pen to paper on a piece of legislation that's been rushed through both houses of parliament in roughly two weeks.

But now that it's officially law, we'll soon see how Russia's media foreign agent bill is to be used.

At a time when hate crimes against Muslims are at an all-time high in the United States, it’s hard to believe religious extremists in the U.S. could have much in common with religious extremists in Turkey, where the population is over 90% Muslim. But they certainly share at least one thing in common: a desire to undermine the teaching of science in schools. They are even targeting the same subject, evolution, as part of their radical sectarian agenda. And if they succeed, both the United States and Turkey will face equally devastating economic consequences.

At least 80 people have been killed in just over 24 hours in suspected Russian and Syrian government shelling in the eastern and southern parts of Syria.

The majority of those killed were civilians.

In the eastern province of Deir Az Zor, suspected Russian warplanes hit al-Shafah village on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River on Sunday, killing about 51 people.

Bernie Sanders is taking steps to address longstanding political shortcomings that were exposed in 2016, ahead of another possible presidential bid in 2020.

From forging closer ties to the labor movement to shoring up his once-flimsy foreign policy credentials, the moves have provided the senator inroads into party power structures that largely shunned him in favor of Hillary Clinton last year. They've also empowered the progressive icon to harness his newfound political power and help Democrats fight President Donald Trump's administration.

In the days before he walked into Charleston’s Mother Emanuel church with a gun and murdered nine people, Dylann Roof put together a manifesto. It was a bizarre, rambling tract loaded with racial and political animus, much of it cribbed from white-supremacist groups with ties to South Carolina’s Republican establishment. In the final section, Roof wrote:

"I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.

Susan Sarandon is back in the spotlight for her politics again, this time doubling down on the fervent anti-Hillary Clinton position she took during the 2016 presidential election.

In an interview with The Guardian published Sunday, Sarandon discussed feminism, her vote and backlash she's sustained from the left for speaking out against Clinton. The interview seems to suggest that, while all of Sarandon's other political perspectives and stances are rounded and nuanced, Clinton remains an inscrutably hard line for her. Seriously, she can’t admit that we would be profoundly better off with Clinton in office.

Theresa May is facing fresh accusations of “rigging Parliament” with an unprecedented move to prevent MPs from changing legislation on the Budget.

Labour attacked May’s latest “power grab” after it emerged that the Government will deploy a little-used procedural device to effectively eliminate any attempts to amend the Finance Bill.

The tactic will severely restrict MPs’ ability to secure alternative tax measures, such as a DUP-backed plan to abolish VAT on all domestic fuel after Brexit.

One of Egypt's leading opposition figures has told Al Jazeera that the country is ruled by an "oppressive military regime", which has killed off any chance of political pluralism.

Former presidential candidate and leader of the Ghad al-Thawra (Tomorrow's Revolution) party, Ayman Nour, said Egypt's President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi was presiding over a failing government that was harming Egyptian citizens and the wider region.

Amnesty International is calling for a criminal investigation into the oil giant Shell regarding allegations it was complicit in human rights abuses carried out by the Nigerian military.

A review of thousands of internal company documents and witness statements published on Tuesday points to the Anglo-Dutch organisation’s alleged involvement in the brutal campaign to silence protesters in the oil-producing Ogoniland region in the 1990s.

Amnesty is urging the UK, Nigeria and the Netherlands to consider a criminal case against Shell in light of evidence it claims amounts to “complicity in murder, rape and torture” – allegations Shell strongly denies.

Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, a wilderness of deserts and raw mountains about the size of West Virginia, is famed for its Biblical history, Bedouin tribal life, and Red Sea resorts. But, now that the Islamic State’s caliphate in Iraq and Syria has been destroyed, the Peninsula linking Africa and Asia is also gaining notoriety as the Middle East’s hottest frontline against jihadist groups, including ISIS, an Al Qaeda franchise, and smaller cells.

Since 2013, terrorism has increasingly disrupted life in Egypt, especially in the Sinai. The Egyptian hinterland has witnessed more than seventeen hundred attacks over the past four years, according to a tally by the Washington-based Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. The Sinai Province, the local ISIS affiliate, has claimed credit for some eight hundred of them. Lately, the attacks have been creeping closer to Cairo and targeting more civilians.

BUDAPEST — The massive independence day march that took place in Warsaw earlier this month left even the harshest critics of Poland’s right-wing government speechless. How could Jarosław Kaczyński, Poland’s de facto leader, let the “evil genie” of neo-Nazism and hateful nationalism “out of the bottle”?

Other policies pushed forward by the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) have incited a similar mix of outrage and bewilderment. Why does Kaczyński not appear to worry that the judiciary he captured may one day be used against his own party? Is he not afraid that antagonizing Germany, a key NATO and EU ally, may eventually help Russian President Vladimir Putin? Is he not uneasy about increasing Poland’s economic vulnerability by lowering the retirement age and introducing massive new welfare spending?

The large, red swastika spray-painted onto a Minneapolis garage door in November 2016 was not even drawn correctly.

Half of its loopy, lurid arms bent right; the others, nearly touching, bent left, lacking the ironclad symmetry of the iconic Nazi symbol. Yet it appeared on a garage door on the city’s north side just days after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. A photo of it was posted on social media. That’s how Carin Mrotz first became aware of it.

Report: Wells Fargo Bankers Overcharged Hundreds In Latest Scandal

Wells Fargo bankers chasing bonuses charged hundreds of clients inflated foreign transaction fees, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The report comes just over a year since Wells Fargo paid a $185 million fine for “widespread illegal” sales practices involving fees on 2 million deposit and credit-card accounts opened without customers’ knowledge.

Parents at one Michigan school are furious that a teenage sex “predator” could be returning to classes after spending about six weeks in detention.

The 15-year-old was sentenced to 45 days in juvenile detention last month after pleading guilty to sexual assault, and he could return to Brighton High School as early as next week, reported WXYZ-TV.

Shelling has killed at least three people in Syria's Eastern Ghouta, according to a monitoring group, just hours before the UN announced that Syria's government had agreed to a ceasefire in the rebel-held area, after days of intense bombardment.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported the death toll, a day after air raids in the besieged district on the outskirts of Damascus killed at least 19 people.

NEW YORK — An avalanche of sleekly produced, glitzy talk-shows took over prime time television in Russia in the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s military adventure in Ukraine in 2014. He needed to sell the war to his electorate, and the Kremlin kicked its vast apparatus of state-controlled print and broadcast media into overdrive.

The shows created an alternative, topsy-turvy reality in which Ukraine became the Western-backed aggressor and Russia became the victim.

Children learn class at their mothers’ knee. Childrearing, like so many other aspects of daily life, is demarcated by class. Working-class and low-income families follow what Annette Lareau, in her important book Unequal Childhoods, called the “accomplishment of natural growth.” They view “children’s development as unfolding spontaneously, as long as they [are] provided with comfort, food, shelter” and other basics. Providing these represents a challenge and is held to be a considerable achievement.

Clear boundaries exist between parents and children, with prompt obedience expected: crucial training for working- class jobs. Class migrants often note with shock the disrespectful way professional elite children talk of and to their parents. Noted bell hooks, whose father worked for 30 years as a janitor, “we were taught to value our parents and their care, to understand that they were not obligated to give us care.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has accused the US of seeking to provoke North Korea into stepping up its nuclear missile programme.

He rejected a call by the American envoy to the UN Security Council to sever ties with the North after its latest ballistic missile test.

A new $60-million university institute in Nova Scotia celebrating former prime minister Brian Mulroney — and being built with money he personally solicited — got a good chunk of that financing from donors embroiled in international controversy, a joint investigation by the Toronto Star, CBC/Radio-Canada and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has found.

From a Jordanian-born metals magnate implicated in aluminum-industry kickbacks, to a Syrian-British entrepreneur who helped broker a massive U.K. arms deal mired in corruption allegations, to one of U.S. President Donald Trump's cabinet picks with ties to Russia, a number of the power players bankrolling the Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University have checkered resumés.

A bar of gold. A disk of iron. A chain of beads. A card of plastic. A slip of cotton-linen paper. These things are worthless. One cannot eat them, or drink them, or use them as a blanket. But they are valuable, too. Their value comes from the simplest thing. People believe they are money, and so they are.

If every currency is a consensual delusion, then bitcoin, a digital cryptocurrency that changes hands over the internet, feels more like a consensual hallucination on psychedelic drugs. The concept of bitcoin was born in a detailed white paper published in late 2008 by a pseudonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto.” By 2013, one bitcoin was worth $12. As of this writing, it’s worth more than $10,000. Its value has doubled in the last two months alone. For any currency’s value to increase by 100 percent in eight weeks is, to use a technical term, bonkers. If the Japanese yen or American dollar did the same, their economies would plunge into an infernal deflationary spiral.

Gerry Hope of the Sik'nax.ádi clan of the Tlingit tribe sees good reason for native people to question Alaska Day, an annual celebration of the U.S. acquisition of this land from Russia. The acquisition happened 150 years ago, but the Tlingit people have called this land home for 10,000 years.

“Our hurt, anger, and resentment have been simmering and smoldering for the past 150 years,” Hope said.

Last Wednesday, Detective Sean Suiter, along with an as-yet-unnamed partner, were in the West Baltimore neighborhood of Harlem Park. Suiter’s usual partner in the homicide unit, Detective Jonathan Jones, was off that day.

The police version of what happened, as relayed to the Baltimore Sun, goes like this: The detectives were looking for a witness to an unsolved triple homicide case that is nearly a year old when they spotted “suspicious activity” nearby. Suiter and his backup partner split up to cover different exits of the block. Suiter then confronted a man, who shot him in the head after the detective tried to speak. Suiter, an 18-year veteran of Baltimore’s police force, and a 43-year-old married father of five, was pronounced dead a day later, becoming the city’s 309th murder victim of 2017.

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, is more loved, and more hated, than ever. And just who is doing the loving and the hating is more complicated than ever.

In his rise from libertarian hacker to global publisher, Assange pioneered a new kind of power, the power to disrupt the secrecy of the national security state. With the help of Chelsea Manning, the silver-haired Australian published the "Collateral Murder" video, which showed the world the reality of the war in Iraq, and the State Department cables, which showed the realities of American diplomacy. So a lot of people admired him.

Two Syrian groups are at odds over the sudden departure of a high-ranking Syrian commander who reportedly left for neighbouring Turkey last week.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, and the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA), a loose entity of opposition rebel groups, have presented different versions of the reasons behind General Talal Silo's departure.

Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded that his country’s biggest enterprises must show that they can step up arms production and important services on short notice to be war-ready.

“The economic ability to increase the production of defense products and services quickly is a vital element of military security,” Putin told military leaders and senior officials in the defense industrial complex on Wednesday. “All strategic and simply large companies, regardless of the type of ownership, must be able to do this.”

It is what it is. The United States of America is a massive, thriving global powerhouse that rivals the rest of the world in military, economic and political power. And we “Indians,” as we have come to be inaccurately but commonly known, are a part of it, whether we like it or not.

We’re probably a part of every American’s Thanksgiving story, too. If you’re from the old school, we Natives don’t exist in reality anymore, but we live on through your grandson Matthew, who is running around your gigantic house, making awful noises that he calls “war cries,” wearing a construction paper headdress he made in school, while you sit at the table waxing nostalgic about the good old days, when your greatest grandaddy arrived on a boat and the Indians and Pilgrims had a big friendly orgy over a bountiful harvest and so began America.

After weeks of denying its existence, the Russian government this week acknowledged the strange surge of radiation that billowed over Europe in September.

The French nuclear safety regulator IRSN first detected the radioactive element ruthenium 106 in the air in late September, tracing its origins to the Ural Mountains in the border region between Russia and Kazakhstan. Other European cities like Stockholm, Milan, and Budapest also began picking up radiation traces.

The European Commission brokered a “global political solution” with Hungary over its controversial Russia-backed nuclear power station rather than escalate a fight amid already fraught relations with Budapest, according to internal documents obtained by an MEP and reviewed by POLITICO.

More than 200 pages of Commission memos, emails and meetings minutes from 2016 show that Commission officials expressed serious doubts about Hungary’s numerous attempts to justify awarding the contract to build the €12 billion Paks II nuclear project to the Kremlin-owned Rosatom without opening up the project for bids.

Uber confirmed Tuesday that it paid hackers $100,000 to keep quiet after an October 2016 attack led to the disclosure of 57 million customers' personal data, Bloomberg first reported.

The breach included the names, email addresses and mobile phone numbers related to accounts of people around the world, the company said. About 600,000 Uber drivers also had their names and driver's license numbers stolen. More sensitive information, including trip location history, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, Social Security numbers and dates of birth, was not accessed.

The Arctic: the smallest of Earth’s five oceans, with icy waters and dagger-like winds, is home to some of the most unforgiving conditions on the planet.

But far below the skin of sea ice that waxes and wanes with the seasons, this inhospitable ocean is hiding a treasure trove of natural resources – one that’s largely untapped by mankind.

Jim Cooke is looking to purchase health insurance this open enrollment period on Maryland Health Connection, the state’s Obamacare exchange. He usually pays the penalty for not having insurance, due to the individual mandate under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But for him, this year is different.

“It’s not urgent, I’d just feel more comfortable,” Cooke told ThinkProgress. “I’m 61 now, and I think I better have this coverage.”

Better late than never.

Film mogul Harvey Weinstein’s case felt like a watershed moment. After decades of whispers within the Hollywood community, the high-profile movie producer’s sexual misconduct was brought into the light by a scathing report by New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. Even more amazing, a powerful man actually faced consequences for his actions, being fired from the company he helped found and being booted from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The slow-motion self-immolation that is Brexit continues for the U.K. Speaking in Brussels on Monday, Michel Barnier, the senior European Union official in charge of negotiating the terms of Britain’s departure, confirmed that British banks were set to lose their so-called E.U. passport, which currently enables them to offer services throughout the twenty-eight nations in the bloc. “On financial services, U.K. voices suggest that Brexit does not mean Brexit,” Barnier said. “Brexit means Brexit, everywhere.”

The Republican tax plan winding its way through Congress includes a special middle finger to the nation’s graduate students.

It’s a little bit wonky, so stay with me here. I’ll explain how it affects me, since I’m an actual graduate student.

Going to grad school would’ve been entirely out of reach for me if I had to pay full tuition for my education. Getting a PhD takes at least five years and often more. I don’t have a spouse, trust fund, or parents to cover my cost of living or my tuition.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad thanked his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for "saving" his country and for Russia's support in Syria.

The two heads of state met for talks in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi on Monday, the Kremlin said in a statement on Tuesday.

They discussed the fight against "terrorism" and the possibilities for a political settlement in Syria, which has entered its seventh year of war. The statement added that Assad had expressed his readiness to hold discussions with parties interested in resolving the conflict.

Keystone Pipeline Leaks 5,000 Barrels Of Oil In South Dakota, TransCanada Says

A section of the Keystone oil pipeline has leaked 5,000 barrels of oil, or about 210,000 gallons, in a remote area of South Dakota, TransCanada announced Thursday.

The company said the conduit was “safely shut down” about 6 a.m. local time, in line with safety procedures, but environmental groups have pointed to the leak as evidence a sister pipeline, the Keystone XL, should be rejected in neighboring Nebraska.

Public support for Theresa May has grown despite a disastrous party conference speech, two Cabinet resignations and Brexit talks stalling.

A YouGov poll for The Times found 34% of voters want May to stay as Prime Minister, up one point from a month ago.

Backing for Jeremy Corbyn as PM, meanwhile, fell two points to 35% and a sizeable 35% said they were not sure who they wanted to lead the country.

I was a magazine guy.

After eight years as managing editor of Time, I left at the end of 2013 to become under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. It’s a fancy title, but that job is one of the few in Washington that’s tailored for someone with a media background like me. After I was nominated, some of my colleagues joked that I was now “head of U.S. propaganda,” but I thought of myself instead as the chief marketing officer of brand America. I figured I’d be spending a lot of my time combating America’s negative image in the Muslim world—and I did—but then the Russian annexation of Crimea happened in early 2014. What I saw Russia do online and in social media around this grave violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty was a revelation to me—and nothing short of a trial run for what they did to manipulate our presidential election in 2016. Few Americans realized it back then, but we were already in a global information war with Russia.

Democracy Gone Astray

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Monday, July 30, 2018

Sunday, July 29, 2018