Democracy gone Astray: Saturday, July 28, 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.]

Saturday, July 28, 2018

Syria takes centre stage as Putin meets Iran's leaders

Tehran, Iran - Russian President Vladimir Putin has arrived in Iran on Wednesday for a trilateral summit, which also includes Azerbaijan.

Economic cooperation was at the top of Putin's agenda, specifically the completion of a rail link along the North-South Transport Corridor that runs through Iran and Azerbaijan and connects Russia to India.

LONDON — As the Chinese Communist Party concluded its 19th National Congress, President Xi Jinping ushered in a new era in the People’s Republic of China. This is more than rhetoric.

The previous two eras in contemporary China were characterized by Mao Zedong’s totalitarianism and then by Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening.” In this new era, the Chinese Communist Party is confident of its own socialist developmental model. It no longer looks outside its borders for inspiration, and it emphatically rejects any democratic or Western model. Xi has closed the book on Deng’s strategy of “hide your capacities, bide your time.” Instead, he now feels China should openly assert itself. It is the era of putting China first and making China great again.

Four years before World War I shattered the empires of Europe, the Encyclopaedia Britannica predicted an indefinite age of peace and commercial prosperity. Published at the high-water mark of imperial self-confidence, the entry on “civilization” was particularly optimistic. Thanks to technology and moral enlightenment, the writers judged, an increasingly connected world was hurtling toward the age of “cosmopolite man,” who would enjoy leisure and freedom in a global community of equals. “When this ideal is attained,” the Encyclopaedia promised, “mankind will again represent a single family, as it did in the day when our primeval ancestors first entered on the pathway of progress.”

Twenty-three years ago, I was in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, talking with a man named Frank Ragano, whose memoir of sorts, “Mob Lawyer,” contained a sensational claim about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. (By sheer chance, no doubt, Richard Helms, the former director of Central Intelligence, was two tables away.) In the book, co-written with the veteran Times reporter Selwyn Raab, Ragano revealed that a client, a Florida Mafia boss, Santo Trafficante, Jr., had admitted being in on the assassination plot. Although attorney-client privilege extends beyond the grave, Ragano ignored that (and whatever claim the Mafia code of silence—omertà—may have had on him) by recounting what he claimed was Trafficante’s admission, uttered in Sicilian, four days before his death, in 1987: “Carlos è futtutu. Non duvevamu a Giovanni. Duvevamu ammazzari a Bobby.” (“Carlos fucked up. We shouldn’t have killed John. We should have killed Bobby.”) “Carlos” was the New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello; Bobby was Robert F. Kennedy, who was his brother’s Attorney General. According to Ragano, the motive was a quid pro quo: the mob killed Kennedy as a favor to Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters boss, and a target of Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department. In return, the Mob got access to Teamsters’ pension fund, then worth about a billion dollars. It was all about the money, Ragano told me as we sat at the Mayflower—“forget everything else.” Ragano died, of natural causes, four years after his book came out, and there’s no real evidence to substantiate his story.

Russia hackers pursued Putin foes, not just US Democrats

WASHINGTON (AP) — It wasn’t just Hillary Clinton’s emails they went after.

The hackers who disrupted the U.S. presidential election last year had ambitions that stretched across the globe, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, U.S. defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press.

The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that went back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users — from the pope’s representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow. The targets were spread among 116 countries.

OCCUPIED WEST BANK - Exactly 100 years have passed since British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour wrote his famous letter to Walter Rothschild, promising that Britain would help to create a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

Current prime minister Theresa May says that the Balfour Declaration was “one of the most important letters in history”. It led within barely three decades to the creation of the state of Israel. No wonder then that Benjamin Netanyahu flies to London next week to celebrate its anniversary.

The hackers who upended the US presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, US defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hitlist obtained by the Associated Press.

The news comes as US prosecutors are reportedly considering charges against six members of the Russian government accused of hacking into the Democratic national committee’s computers.

An enormous document leak of over 13 million files was revealed on Sunday, in what is being collectively referred to as the Paradise Papers. It’s one of the biggest data leaks in history, and involves the elaborate offshore assets of top politicians and corporations, as well as some of the world’s wealthiest individuals and celebrities.

Millions of the leaked files come from a single company, Appleby, which is based in Bermuda and offers offshore legal services. Appleby has denied any wrongdoing in relation to the findings from the documents.

MONTREAL - Valérie Plante scored a stunning upset in Montreal's mayoral election on Sunday, defeating incumbent Denis Coderre to become the first woman to win the post.

Coderre said just after 10:30 p.m. that he'd called Plante to congratulate her. He later announced he was leaving municipal politics.

Paul Pelletier, a former Justice Department prosecutor, is the ninth Democrat to join the field of contenders vying for the chance to oust Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), one of the most at-risk Republicans in next year’s 2018 midterm elections. But in a year that has seen thousands of newcomers run for office in response to Donald Trump’s presidency and the national political climate, Pelletier is one of the more intriguing first-timers.

Last Thursday, Donna Brazile dropped a bombshell on a Democratic coalition that’s still nursing open wounds from a bruising 2016 primary fight. But, as more details have emerged about what Brazile described as Hillary Clinton’s “secret takeover” of the party infrastructure, it looks a lot less explosive than it first appeared to be.

The attempted Syrian revolution is over save for the shouting, and the winner is the corrupt and authoritarian Assad family, a dynasty that has ruled the country with a titanium fist since 1970. This outcome is largely owing to the intervention in that country since 2015 by Russia’s air force. Last week a Russian lawmaker declared that ISIS (aka ISIL or the Islamic State) will be completely defeated by the end of the year. The Syrian intervention of President Vladimir Putin gives clues about how he sees the world and how his post-Soviet crony-capitalist state is attempting to shape it to Moscow’s liking.

PRYMORSKE, Ukraine — In the idle heat, a hundred eyes stare out from the tangle of fishing nets, the fish drying like tiny slivers of tinfoil under a stifling sun. Plastic buckets, battered hulls and lengths of knotted rope litter an otherwise empty beach. A few wooden dinghies bob on the sea’s flat, mercury surface; white light glares in the haze.

It’s peak fishing season and today’s catch is nothing special: Another hot day on a frozen frontline.

One is a lifelong Republican, a Donald Trump appointee, living abroad for the first time, whose only language is English — with a strong Texas twang.

The other is a diehard Democrat, veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations, fluent Russian speaker, and career expert on non-proliferation.

In 1997, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the Clinton administration’s lead official on all matters Russia, gave a speech at Stanford University on American policy toward Moscow. He admitted, in not so many words, that persuading the erratic President Boris Yeltsin to keep on course with economic reform and progress toward democracy was a daunting task. But Talbott declared himself optimistic nonetheless. His main reason, he said, was “generational,”

or to be even more blunt, biological. The dynamic of what is happening in Russia today is not just Westernizers versus Slavophiles; it is also young versus old—and the young have a certain advantage in at least that dimension of the larger struggle.

Israel has delayed a vote on a controversial bill that would annex illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank to the Israeli-defined boundaries of the city of Jerusalem.

The so-called "Greater Jerusalem bill" was meant to be voted on by a ministerial committee on Sunday before going to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, for approval.

Images of the Ku Klux Klan, forefather of the many white supremacist hate groups that are active and becoming emboldened in America today, often focus on two terror-filled epochs: the group’s genesis during Reconstruction, formed to prevent through violence the gains black Americans stood to make in the former Confederate states during the post-Civil War era, and the mid-20th century third wave that arose in the American South in backlash to the fight for civil rights.

Deedee Kirkwood is a hippie housewife in Camarillo, a scenic beach town in California outside of Los Angeles. When she was younger, she followed the Grateful Dead on tour and says she smoked copious amounts of pot “before and after." But her youthful indiscretions had no legal consequences. “I did a lot of stupid stuff, but as a white lady I got lucky,” she tells me over the phone.

Kirkwood often writes letters to Fate Vincent Winslow, an inmate in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. He’s not as lucky as she was. In 2008, Winslow was homeless on the streets of Shreveport, Louisiana. One night, an undercover cop approached and asked him for “a girl” and some pot. Winslow got two dime bags of weed from a white dealer he knew and sold them to the officer. In all, he made five bucks from the sale, money he needed to buy food, he says.

A man was arrested in Orange County, California, after plowing his car into a group of protesters in a manner reminiscent of the infamous violence at the Charlottesville protests.

The alleged driver, 56-year-old Daniel Wenzek, is accused of being the man behind the wheel of a car that plowed through a group of pro-immigrant protesters who had gathered near the Brea office of Rep. Royce, according to the Los Angeles Times. The protesters had initially assembled outside of Royce's office but, after being told to leave, proceeded to march in a circle at an intersection near his office. Police began to try to shut down the protest at around 12:30 p.m. because it was blocking cars from the intersection. It was at this time that the car began to plow through the protesters.

Pope Francis is one of the most hated men in the world today. Those who hate him most are not atheists, or protestants, or Muslims, but some of his own followers. Outside the church he is hugely popular as a figure of almost ostentatious modesty and humility. From the moment that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio became pope in 2013, his gestures caught the world’s imagination: the new pope drove a Fiat, carried his own bags and settled his own bills in hotels; he asked, of gay people, “Who am I to judge?” and washed the feet of Muslim women refugees.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is working on a “comprehensive plan that includes debt forgiveness” for Puerto Rico, an effort that will be informed by his trip to the island on Friday, Sanders told The Intercept.

Sanders’s plan is being developed in conjunction with other members of the progressive flank of the Senate Democratic caucus. The plan is still in its early stages, but Democratic aides said that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is one of the lawmakers involved in the informal talks with Sanders, hoping to lay down a marker as to where the party should be on the issue of aid, debt relief, and governance on the island.

On Tuesday I happened to write about the brewing hysteria I saw in the right-wing media over what they're calling the "real Russia scandal." Lo and behold, later that very morning, House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., came before the cameras to announce a new investigation into a 2010 sale of uranium to Russia, which was approved by the Obama administration's State Department -- then headed by Hillary Clinton -- along with eight other departments.

A conspiracy theory involving uranium, Russians, bribery and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to trigger a congressional probe this week. But if the story seems unbelievable, well, that's exactly what it is, some expert observers said.

“I have to say that this is one of those things where reasonable people cannot disagree: There just aren’t two sides,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear materials and nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.

As Venezuela’s humanitarian and financial crisis deepens, the European Union opted to award the country’s opposition-led National Assembly legislature with the Andrei Sakharov award, named after the Soviet dissident.

Reuters reported on Thursday that the award came with a statement from the European Parliament President Antonio Tajani, saying: “Today we are supporting a nation’s freedom struggle.” But statements of support from Europe and other quarters have done little to calm the political tensions consuming Venezuela for over a year, since President Nicolas Maduro started cracking down on the opposition.

As the fallout from the Harvey Weinstein scandals continues to play out, and more women step forward with stories about men in entertainment and journalism sexually abusing them, a peculiar development has emerged: Two prominent men who have faced legal trouble after being accused of rape have injected themselves into the mix. Perhaps even more disturbingly, they are framing themselves as righteous crusaders for justice.

Brexit negotiators may still be deadlocked over phase 1 of their divorce, but both sides are already positioning themselves for the next clash — trade talks.

Heartened by commitment from EU leaders attending last week’s summit to begin “internal preparatory discussions” on the future trading relationship between the U.K. and the rest of the bloc post Brexit, the British government is pushing to get a trade deal wrapped up before it leaves in March 2019.

The word most frequently attached to Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably pessimistic. His critics charge him with focusing on American racism’s intransigence, and overstating the power that white supremacy exerts on black life. In the New York Times, Michelle Alexander raised concern that Coates too quickly dismissed the individual citizens’ power to alter race relations via political change. Thomas Chatterton Williams characterized Coates’ approach to race as dangerously essentialist, saying that his writing, “Mirrors the ideas of race—specifically the specialness of whiteness—that white supremacist thinkers cherish.” Meanwhile, critics from the left, such as R.L. Stephens, would prefer that he contextualize race relations within the more optimistic bounds of class struggle and interracial solidarity between workers. Coates’s critics think that he views racism as fundamentally unchanging, a static anti-blackness that infects American history from 1619 to now, and they extend that immobility to Coates’ thought: If only he introduced some movement into his analysis, they argue, he’d have a more clearheaded perspective.

If you pay for a flight using credit-card rewards points, be sure to check your card to make sure you weren't charged for the full cost of the ticket.

That's what happened to Toronto resident Atalah Haun last week, when he used all 122,000 rewards points he collected on his RBC Avion Visa card to buy a flight ticket to his native Brazil, but found the full $1,620 cost of the ticket was charged to his card anyway.

The Los Angeles Police Department has apparently been arresting residents for speaking 20 seconds longer than their allotted time at public city hearings. Now the ACLU of Southern California is fighting an ordinance that could make it even harder for residents to speak out—especially those who dissent against the practices of the LAPD. If passed, the ordinance will make it "an arrestable offense to violate any posted rules of public facilities” and would empower law enforcement to make criminal trespass charges, tighten restrictions on speaking time and shut down criticism at meetings.

The collapse came quickly and unexpectedly.

For weeks on end, Kurdish politicians, soldiers and activists had appeared absolutely determined to fight for an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq.

Defying fierce opposition from the Iraqi government and the international community alike, the Kurdistan Regional Government on Sept. 25 organized a referendum on independence that received overwhelming support from Kurdish voters. Kurdish leaders refused to back down following the contentious vote, ignoring mounting threats and warnings from Baghdad to cancel its outcome.

Sahar Dofdaa lived a tragically short and painful life. With sunken eyes and frail, protruding bones, the famished infant hardly stood a chance. Trapped in a Syrian conflict zone, her mother was too malnourished to breastfeed, and her father too impoverished to afford milk supplements.

Freelance journalist Amer Almohibany photographed Sahar for the last time at a medical facility in the war-torn country on Saturday. She died hours later, barely a month old and weighing just 4 pounds.

There is no excuse for the Democratic National Committee's efforts to undermine Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. This doesn't mean, however, that the DNC was wrong for distrusting Sanders' sincerity when he claimed to be a Democrat.

The fact that Sanders has just announced he will run for reelection in 2018 as an independent underscores that point.

Democracy gone Astray