Democracy gone Astray: Wednesday, July 25, 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.]

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

The Swiss Vote on Guaranteed Income Is About Rich People’s Problems

On Saturday, voters in Switzerland will go to the polls to vote on whether to give a government-guaranteed minimum income to every citizen. While organizers have tossed around a figure of twenty-five hundred Swiss francs (about the same in dollars) a month for every adult, the referendum is actually less precise. It promises only an unspecified minimum income sufficient to insure a “dignified existence.”

The final phase in a battle against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) armed group in the Syrian city of Raqqa will begin on Sunday night, a rebel spokesman has told Al Jazeera.

"We do not know how long it will take, but we don't think that it will be a long battle," Talal Silo, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, told Al Jazeera on Sunday.

Nobody ever told Heinz-Christian Strache you never get a second chance to make a first impression. But if the polls ahead of Sunday’s election are anything to go by, he’ll soon find out if that’s true.

The Austrian right-winger, famous for breathless beer-fest attacks on his country’s political mainstream, has been trying for months to convince his compatriots that he has more in his political playbook than the cheap shot.

More than 260 people have been detained across Russia as jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s supporters staged protest rallies on Vladimir Putin’s 65th birthday.

Dozens were arrested in Putin’s hometown of St Petersburg, Russia’s second biggest city. One woman had her leg broken when riot police dispersed hundreds of protesters chanting “Putin is a thief!” in the centre of the city, according to Russian media. Blood could be seen pouring down the head of another woman detained by police in footage posted to social media.

On Thursday, a federal judge denied a second request for bail from Reality Winner, a former National Security Agency contractor accused of violating the Espionage Act, despite an admission from the federal prosecutor in charge of the case that the government relied on false information in Winner’s initial bail hearing.

In his decision denying bail, Judge Brian Epps did not acknowledge or reference the prosecutor’s false statements, despite the statement having been a principal reason the defense moved for the renewed hearing.

Is American democracy in decline? Should we be worried?

On October 6, some of America’s top political scientists gathered at Yale University to answer these questions. And nearly everyone agreed: American democracy is eroding on multiple fronts — socially, culturally, and economically.

The scholars pointed to breakdowns in social cohesion (meaning citizens are more fragmented than ever), the rise of tribalism, the erosion of democratic norms such as a commitment to rule of law, and a loss of faith in the electoral and economic systems as clear signs of democratic erosion.

One of the few bright spots of the Trump era thus far has been a new wave of electoral wins for candidates with decidedly left-of-center views. The victories have come in municipal and state-legislative races—most notably in places like Alabama, Mississippi, and Long Island, where the left isn’t “supposed” to have a chance to win anything. In some cases, like last week’s mayoral victory of Randall Woodfin in Birmingham, left-wing Democrats are unseating centrist, Chamber-of-Commerce-style Democrats. In others, longtime left-wing activists are successfully challenging Republicans in places where centrist Democrats have long failed.

Mismanagement, politically motivated decision-making and lack of transparency have dogged BC Hydro’s support for the Site C dam, says a new report submitted to the BC Utilities Commission by the former CEO of BC Hydro.

The project is already over budget, more big cost overruns are coming and BC Hydro’s demand forecasts justifying the project are overstated, Marc Eliesen warns in his second submission to the BCUC panel reviewing the megaproject.

To hear Monsanto tell it, the rollout of its latest genetically modified soybean offering went without a hitch. The novel soybeans, engineered to withstand two different herbicides, debuted in 2016. Just a year later, they were planted on 20 million acres —representing nearly a quarter of the total US crop.

In its latest quarterly profit report, released Wednesday, the company hailed that rapid uptake as a “record” adoption rate for one if its new products. And that’s not all. “The vast majority of U.S. growers are reporting tremendous success” with a newly formulated herbicide designed to be used on the soybeans, the company declared.

TORONTO — The federal government has agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to survivors of the '60s Scoop for the harm suffered by Indigenous children who were robbed of their cultural identities by being placed with non-native families, The Canadian Press has learned.

The national settlement with an estimated 20,000 victims, to be announced Friday by Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett, is aimed at resolving numerous related lawsuits, most notable among them a successful class action in Ontario.

You can't deny that the NDP likes to make history by shattering old anachronistic traditions. It began way back in the early seventies in British Columbia when Rosemary Brown became the first black woman to be elected to a provincial legislature. It continued when the party chose Audrey McLaughlin as the first woman to lead a national political party in Canada.

Vladimir Putin isn’t just undermining our democracy, he’s securing his own long-term power in Russia by destabilizing the West — a strategy that United States and Europe have been dangerously slow to understand and counteract.

That was the unnerving takeaway from a high-level working group POLITICO convened on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Sept. 19. Amid threats like North Korea, ISIS and surging right-wing populism on both sides of the Atlantic, we wanted to see what some of the smartest security minds from Europe and the U.S. would say if we put them in a room and let them speak candidly about the most dire security threats facing our continents.

Last week, Saudi King Salman was greeted in Moscow with a lot of pomp and media attention. The 81-year-old monarch arrived with a 1,500-strong delegation amid high expectations for major political and trade deals.

The first visit of a Saudi king to Russia was rich in diplomatic courtesies, but it lacked in substance. What came out of the three days of meetings was much more modest than expected.

Uber is threatening to cease operations in Quebec next month if the province doesn't back down on new, stricter rules regulating the ride-hailing service.

Jean-Nicolas Guillemette, director general of Uber Quebec, said the service will shut down Oct. 14 if nothing changes.

On that date last year, the two sides agreed to a pilot project that allowed the ride-hailing company to operate.

As Catalonians gear up for Sunday’s independence referendum – a vote that will not be recognized by Madrid, and may yet be canceled altogether – a new, surprising figure has emerged as the primary spokesman for Catalan independence: Julian Assange.

The WikiLeaks founder, and current tenant of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, has come out forcefully in favor of breaking Catalonia off from the rest of Spain. Where Assange had previously remained largely silent on the issue of Catalonian secession, he has, over just the past two weeks, unleashed approximately 100 tweets on the topic to his 400,000 followers.

The former British prime minister, a perennial lightning rod for controversy on both sides of the Atlantic, has in recent months chosen to return to the political fray, warning of the “destiny-changing” dangers of the British exit from the European Union and insisting—how, he’s not exactly sure—that last year’s “Brexit” vote can and should still be undone before it’s too late.

“There’s no such thing as a Republican judge or a Democratic judge,” Neil Gorsuch told the nation during his confirmation hearings. “We just have judges in this country.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters in July that he doesn’t quite agree. Asked to explain to his party’s base the Senate’s lack of legislative accomplishment, McConnell said, “Well, we have a new Supreme Court justice.”

DOHUK, IRAQI KURDISTAN - Seeham Haji Khudayda, a 22-year-old Yazidi woman from northern Sinjar, was sold seven times during her ISIS captivity. Like chattel, she was passed from one ISIS fighter to the next. She was raped almost daily. Sometimes she was gang raped by her owner’s guards. But of all the abuses she endured, what outraged her the most was the women who were complicit in it -- and who participated directly in her rape.

In addition to being raped, captured Yazidi women were forced to work as domestic servants for ISIS families. The wives and children of ISIS fighters would often participate in verbally and physically abusing Yazidis, according to accounts from survivors I spoke to in Dohuk. For Seeham and at least one other Yazidi survivor I spoke with who asked not to be named, the complicity went even further.

LONDON — The hard left of the U.K. Labour party is in control — and is determined to make it count.

Emboldened by a surprise surge in support in June’s general election in which the party won 30 additional seats (though fell short of an overall majority), its leader Jeremy Corbyn will begin the process of overhauling the organization from top to bottom at the party’s annual conference in Brighton which kicks off Sunday.

Sadiq Khan should be leader of the Labour Party if Jeremy Corbyn decided to step down, a poll of British voters has found.

The BMG poll, commissioned by HuffPost UK, also found a staggering 57% thought no high-profile Labour figure could fill Corbyn’s shoes.

Of the candidates picked out, most (12%) of the 1,500 sample thought the Mayor of London was the best candidate for the job, while the second most popular figure was Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham.

At first, conservative agitator Milo Yiannopoulos’s Free Speech Week in Berkeley, California, seemed like it might be a major event. Four straight days of provocative events on campus featuring right-wing luminaries, culminating with appearances by conservative writer Ann Coulter and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and all in the heart of one of the most symbolically resonant places Yiannopoulos could have chosen: the campus of University of California, Berkeley, a campus with a longstanding image as a hotbed of left-wing activism where protests shut down an event of his last year.

But things didn’t go according to plan.

Across Iraqi Kurdistan, a scene is starting to become familiar: young and old alike fill the public squares and parks clad in Kurdish dress, furiously waving Kurdish flags in a rallying cry for independence.

“Long live Kurdistan!” they chant.

It was not the first time Muhammad Rabbani had problems when returning to the United Kingdom from travels overseas. But on this occasion something was different — he was arrested, handcuffed, and hauled through London’s largest airport, then put into the back of a waiting police van.

Rabbani is the 36-year-old international director of Cage, a British group that was founded in 2003 to raise awareness about the plight of prisoners held at the U.S. government’s Guantánamo Bay detention site. Today, the organization has a broader focus and says it is working to highlight “the erosion of the rule of law in the context of the war on terror.” Due to its work campaigning for the legal rights of terrorism suspects, Cage has attracted controversy, and Rabbani has faced the government’s wrath.

Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of a western capital city, is no stranger to making powerful enemies, and few come as mighty and ill-tempered as Donald Trump. The mayor of London and the US president have clashed several times – spats that appeared engineered by Trump to show who’s boss. Khan has not flinched, chastising and ridiculing Trump with apparent relish.

News that the 46-year-old son of a Pakistani bus driver was taking on Uber would have surprised few seasoned Khan-watchers. His 15 months as mayor of a London navigating one of the most tumultuous periods of its modern history have left him battle-hardened rather than bowed.

The rise of Alternative for Germany, the new far-right political party competing in the upcoming federal election, has unsettled the consensus-driven, moderate politics of postwar Germany with its rabid anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, unabashed nationalism, and winking gestures embracing the country’s Nazi past.

The low-profile prosecution of a 22-year-old Canadian hacker may offer clues regarding how US intelligence officials learned about Russia’s efforts to disrupt last year’s election—and it could offer a lot more clues if the case goes to trial.

Last month in US District Court in San Francisco, Karim Baratov, a Canadian citizen born in Kazakhstan, pleaded not guilty to multiple felonies related to his bit part in the cyberattack that compromised 500 million Yahoo accounts starting in 2014—and that nearly derailed Yahoo’s acquisition by Verizon. Of the four men indicted, Baratov is the only one in US custody. The others include an internationally wanted Latvian hacker and two members of a cyber unit within Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB for short). They are the first FSB operatives American authorities have charged in any hacking case.

Facebook’s political troubles do not appear to be anywhere near ending, despite mea culpas by founder Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg that the global social media giant now recognizes its platform was used by Russian troll accounts to influence the 2016 election and its automated advertising platform can be gamed to foment racist messaging.

The past two weeks' media revelations about how, as one New York Times piece put it, Zuckerberg created a 21st-century Frankenstein, a behemoth he cannot control, read like a screenplay from the latest Netflix political thriller. Last weekend, the Washington Post reported that Facebook discovered a Russian-based operation “as it was getting underway” in June 2016, using its platform to spread anti-Democratic Party propaganda. Facebook alerted the FBI. After Facebook traced “a series of shadowy accounts” that were promoting the stolen emails and other Democratic campaign documents, it “once again contacted the FBI.”

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Tuesday that there was “no doubt” sexism played a role in the 2016 presidential election between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump.

Ginsburg, in conversation with journalist Charlie Rose, spoke on a wide range of issues during an event at the 92nd Street Y, including her future on the court, her legendary exercise routine, her mentors and advice she had for young women. When asked about Clinton ― the first female presidential nominee for a major political party ― and her loss in last year’s election, however, Ginsburg commented that sexism was a “major, major factor.”

School athletes will soon be competing in Rob Ford Memorial Stadium if Toronto Mayor John Tory gets his way.

In a letter to his city council colleagues obtained by the Star, Tory makes the case for renaming Centennial Park Stadium to honour his predecessor who served as an Etobicoke councillor for a decade before a tumultuous term as mayor. Ford, 46, died from cancer, after a return to council, in March 2016.

Over the past year of clashes between “alt-right” and left-wing protesters and an escalating debate over violence as the means to an end, the word “masked” has become an epithet of sorts to describe protesters on the left.

Last month in famously liberal Berkeley, California, where right-wingers have been planning rallies that seem intended to stir up raucous counterprotests—and which have drawn hundreds of masked opponents—city leaders passed an ordinance allowing the city manager to set ground rules as to what kinds of items cannot be worn or carried into protest areas. Masks and other face coverings have been banned at every local demonstration since.

On July 22, 2011, a Norwegian extremist named Anders Behring Breivik shot off an email to more than a thousand people. A self-identified fascist, Breivik attached a 1,500-page screed attacking Islam, cultural Marxism, feminism, and immigration. Titled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” the manifesto demanded the forced deportation of all Muslims from Europe. An hour and a half later, Breivik set off in a Volkswagen van to kill 77 people, first by detonating a fertilizer bomb in Oslo, then by gunning down teenagers at a summer camp on the island of Utoya. It was the bloodiest attack on Norwegian soil since World War II.

WASHINGTON - A vigorous campaign by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to break Catalonia off from Spain, further splintering Europe, is landing him in hot water with the government of Ecuador that has provided him with diplomatic refuge in its embassy in London.

Assange and Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno have traded barbs this week over whether his behavior comports with that of someone granted political asylum.

Assange challenged Moreno Thursday to try to silence him.

OTTAWA—Ottawa says health programs for Indigenous peoples have “room for review” but is making no promises to halt a court case that has cost taxpayers $110,000 and counting — all to avoid paying a $6,000 bill for a teen’s braces.

Jane Philpott, the former health minister recently appointed minister of Indigenous services, said through a spokesperson that “unacceptable” social and economic gaps facing Indigenous peoples, including health care, were the motivations in the establishment of her department.

Democracy gone Astray