Democracy gone Astray: Sunday, July 22, 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.]

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Why the Bundys and Their Heavily Armed Supporters Keep Getting Away with It

Ideologues look forward to their court dates. A trial is a good place to make a case. When a far-right movement first began to coalesce around the Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy, in 2014, it seemed to be designed as bait for prosecutors, so flagrant and direct were its violations. Bundy had stopped paying the federal government for a grazing lease in 1994, so he had been illegally grazing his cows there for two decades—according to the Feds, he owed a million dollars in back fees, which made him by a vast margin the most delinquent rancher in the country. When the Bureau of Land Management arranged an operation to remove Bundy’s trespassing cattle, the allies who came to his aid, many of them militiamen, set up sniper positions and aimed their rifles down at the Bureau’s officials. An extremist married couple from Indiana who came to town to support Bundy ambushed and killed two Las Vegas police officers, covering the cops’ bodies with the Gadsden flag, a Libertarian symbol, before officers shot the husband and the wife committed suicide.

When I set out to write my novel The Half-Drowned King about Viking-Age Norway, I found only a few other pieces of fiction about Vikings, including Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles, and Juliet Marillier’s Wolfskin. Even the non-fiction written for a general audience was minimal enough for me to read it in a few months and then move onto scholarly works. However, in the last few years, Viking and Viking-inspired fiction has gained popularity, with TV shows like Vikings, The Last Kingdom—a television adaptation of Cornwell’s series, and Game of Thrones, which borrows elements of Viking culture for both the Stark and the Greyjoy families.

Say that you want to discredit the idea that Vladimir Putin’s Russian spies hacked the Democratic National Committee last year and weaponized the data via WikiLeaks. (Leave out, for a moment, whether or not Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russians, though that’s precisely what special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI are trying to find out.) You’d need a counter-theory, right?

As the nation continues to grapple with the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, right-wing demonstrators and white supremacists plan to descend on cities in California and Tennessee this weekend, with authorities preparing for possible clashes.

Here’s a look at what to watch out for this weekend.

ExxonMobil officials reportedly knew about the dangers of climate change as early as 1977 but continued to publicly raise doubts about the science behind it for more than 40 years, a new study by Harvard University has found.

Researchers examined 187 public and private communications from the company between 1977 and 2014 and found that there was a massive discrepancy between the way the oil and gas giant talked about climate change publicly and privately. In internal documents, around 80 percent allegedly acknowledged that climate change was “real and human caused,” but only 12 percent of “advertorials” – editorial-style advertisements in the New York Times – said it was cause for concern.

The unscripted Trump is the real Trump — and he is terrifying

Every day, the desk at every major U.S. newspaper asks the same question:

What will it be today? Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde?

The question is about which persona constitutes the “real” Donald Trump. It’s worth asking, because in recent days the president has been telegraphing mutually exclusive versions of who he is, what he thinks, and what he’s likely to do next.

It was almost lunchtime inside the country’s largest kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, on May 12, 2008. The meatpackers, mostly migrants from Guatemala and Mexico, wore earplugs to block out the noise of the machinery and couldn’t hear the two black helicopters hovering overhead or the hundreds of armed federal immigration agents closing in around them until the production line stopped. One worker tried to flee with his knives, stabbing himself in the leg when he was pushed to the ground. “They rounded us up toward the middle like a bunch of chickens,” a 42-year-old Guatemalan worker later recalled. “Those who were hiding were beaten and shackled.”

When I first wrote about the growing popularity of Eastern Orthodox Christianity among those on the far-right for Religion Dispatches in November of last year, I was regularly told that Matthew Heimbach’s excommunication from the Orthodox Church was the end of the problem. They told me that in making connections between the so-called alt-right and Orthodoxy I was overreacting.

This article is reprinted with permission from Religion Dispatches. Follow RD on Facebook or Twitter for daily updates.

Some good might come in Canada from neo-fascists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Taking advantage of media interest in protests over monuments to historical figures with racist views activists in Halifax are pushing to remove commemorations to two individuals who helped conquer Africa. And there's no lack of other such memorials to target across the Great White North.

The only North Korean restaurant in Moscow is in a basement, and the staff doesn’t like to answer questions, or be asked them. When a group of North Korean officials entered, they went straight away to the VIP area at Koryo Phenyan, as the eatery is called. Eventually, reluctantly the waitresses confirmed that the place is owned by Pyongyang’s embassy.

Meanwhile the flatscreen TV on the wall showed North Korean military commanders, national dancers, singers, and from time to time the square face of “dear,” “brilliant,” “wise” leader Kim Jong Un.

Six years after revolt first broke out in cities and villages across Syria, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has rolled back the fractious opposition to its rule and regained control of almost every major population center in the country — except one, the northwestern province of Idlib.

Once famous for its olive groves and archaeological ruins, Idlib is now the last redoubt of Islamist opposition to Assad. The capital, Idlib City, has been under Islamist control since 2015, and today the two million people living in the province — many of them refugees from other parts of the country – could be caught up in a disastrous final confrontation between jihadists and the Assad regime.

Russian investigators have arrested one of the country’s most prominent theatre directors for fraud, in a case that many in the arts world fear is part of a crackdown on dissenting voices.

Kirill Serebrennikov stands accused of embezzling 68m roubles (£900,000) of government funds. He was questioned by investigators on Tuesday and denied the allegations, Russian agencies reported. The director will spend the night in prison and a court will decide on Wednesday whether he should be remanded in custody or put under house arrest.

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's conservative Rebel Media said a technology company stopped directing traffic to its website, making it inaccessible to some users around the world on Monday as the site known for tirades against Muslims and refugees scrambled to get back online.

Last week GoDaddy Inc, Alphabet Inc's Google and other technology companies pushed the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer offline by terminating services to the online publication, which helped organize a white nationalist rally that turned violent in Virginia on Aug. 12.

Virtually all of the debates over the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia waged a multifaceted campaign to influence the 2016 election look at the issue through a prism of US domestic politics or the bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia. That’s understandable, given what a shocking outcome the election produced. But it also sidesteps the troubling reality that the Kremlin’s attempts to influence other countries’ electoral processes have been a problem across Europe for over a decade, and that our intelligence agencies weren’t alone in sounding the alarm. And that’s a serious problem for those who are dismissive of the evidence of Russian intervention. Russia’s effort in our election may have been its most dramatic—and arguably its most fruitful—but evidence suggests it was hardly an isolated event.

How Quebec became ground zero for immigration paranoia

In 2007, about a month after Christmas, André Drouin saw what was on the horizon and decided he’d had enough. A town councillor in Hérouxville, a community of about 1,300 located about 200 kms northeast of Montreal, Drouin believed his responsibilities extended well beyond the plowing of snow and the collecting of trash.

His duty, as he saw it, was both simple and profound: He was going to save Hérouxville from the world creeping closer and closer to its borders.

Once a customer has barked their order into the microphone at the Popeyes drive-thru on Prospect Avenue, Kansas City, the clock starts. Staff have a company-mandated 180 seconds to take the order, cook the order, bag the order and deliver it to the drive-thru window.

The restaurant is on “short shift” at the moment, which means it has about half the usual staff, so Fran Marion often has to do all those jobs herself. On the day we met, she estimates she processed 187 orders – roughly one every two minutes. Those orders grossed about $950 for the company. Marion went home with $76.

Twenty-six years ago this week, the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev spelled the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin was a disaffected young KGB officer; as president of Russia a mere decade later, he would call the Soviet collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

Donald Trump, meanwhile, spent August 1991 trying to dig out of a financial hole so big it had the New York Times jokingly comparing him to the Soviet Union. “Both the developer and the country,” the newspaper wrote, “are motivated by the same impulse: survival.”

Alt-right and assorted racist groups have canceled plans to march in Boston and eight other cities tomorrow, because, say the organizers of #MarchOnGoogle, they’ve received “credible alt-left terrorist threats.” They nevertheless hope to regroup and march “in a few weeks’ time.” (They’re outraged at Google for firing an employee who ripped its efforts to increase gender and racial diversity.) But whenever and in whatever form white racists gather again, the mainstream news media need to resist their every instinct to talk mush and passively imply that “both sides” are at fault, as some media initially did over Charlottesville.

"When I see someone walk towards me on the street with a bottle of water or something, I just freak out." Those were the words of Gina Miller, the City financier who famously took the UK government to court to ensure Parliament secured a vote on Article 50.

Speaking to UK media, she admitted she was now considering leaving the country. She has suffered weeks of threats amid a spate of acid attacks, having already endured dozens of death threats. She lives with her young family under 24-hour protection, and meets with her police handlers to discuss her protection regularly. The police have already issued eight cease and desist letters against her more determined harassers.

As anger mounted in Israel last week over President Donald Trump’s ― and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ― response to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the country’s communications minister urged Israelis to prioritize their support for Trump over their denunciation of neo-Nazis.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, Ayoub Kara, who was handpicked for his ministerial role by Netanyahu in May, said that Israel must defend Trump, who he described as the “best U.S. leader Israel has ever had.”

When President Donald Trump let loose at his Tuesday press conference, equating anti-racism protesters with neo-Nazis, it was a big hit with the men who’d taken part in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

But Trump wasn’t just playing to the kind of racist crowd that marches around carrying Tiki torches and waving swastika flags in the streets. He was also sending a signal to those in the executive suites.

Labor historian Paul Le Blanc is the author of more than 20 books and has served as an editor of the eight-volume International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest (2009) and of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg (begun in 2013). Le Blanc has more than half a century of activist experience in social movements and is an internationally recognized scholar of working-class history and revolutionary politics.

In this interview, Le Blanc discusses the radicalization process that he sees unfolding in the United States today and possible revolutionary strategies for the future.

In March, I went to the White House to visit Steve Bannon, who today was fired by President Trump. After Bannon showed off his office and his famous whiteboard, we sat down at a wooden conference table in the large corner office of Reince Priebus, who was then the White House chief of staff. Moments earlier, Priebus had left the building, and Bannon seemed to use the chief of staff’s office as if it were his own, roaming around while he talked, and flinging a Coke can in Priebus’s trash bin, as if he were marking territory. Despite the show of confidence, Bannon felt like he was beset by enemies.

Legal experts say Stephen Bannon may face a challenge in his security clearance as President Trump's now-former chief strategist returns to his pre-White House career as executive chairman at the media company Breitbart.

“People with Top Secret clearances are bound by a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) for life,” said Bradley Moss, a partner at the Law Office of Mark Zaid specializing in national security and security clearance law.

The deadly violence that enveloped Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend when white nationalists rallied in support of preserving a statue of Robert E. Lee in a public park has not deterred the racist Alt-Right from planning similar rallies across the country in the coming months. Several events were planned for this weekend, but only one is moving ahead, what organizers are calling the “Second Boston Free Speech Rally.”

The “Free Speech Rally” organized by the “free speech absolutionists” at Boston Free Speech Coalition has been plagued by problems almost since its inception. Despite holding the first “Boston Free Speech Rally” in May, naïve organizers have stumbled around the permit process and struggled to stay on message—particularly difficult in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville.

No snowflake melts quite so easily as a neo-Nazi, or a white supremacist, or an alt-rightie, or an identitarian, or whatever obfuscatory name racists are hiding behind this week. That’s been clear in the aftermath of Charlottesville, Virginia.

As a reminder, Unite the Right’s explicit purpose was to bring together all of Donald Trump’s most fervent fans, from the alt-right to the Ku Klux Klan, in the fight to preserve a memorial to a U.S. traitor, one Robert E. Lee. Those various factions “spent months openly planning” for the violence that ultimately resulted in Charlottesville, as Mother Jones notes. “The Daily Stormer, a popular neo-Nazi website, encouraged rally attendees to bring shields, pepper spray, and fascist flags and flagpoles. A prominent racist podcast told its listeners to come carrying guns. ‘Bring whatever you need, that you feel you need for your self defense. Do what you need to do for security of your own person,’ said Mike ‘Enoch’ Peinovich on The Right Stuff podcast.”

Democracy gone Astray