Democracy gone Astray: Friday, August 03, 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.]

Friday, August 03, 2018

Brexiteers Boris Johnson And Michael Gove Are 'Clueless' About Economics, Says Ex-Treasury Minister Lord O'Neill

Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are “clueless” about the world economy, a former Tory Treasury minister has declared.

Lord O’Neill of Gatley said that Johnson was a “ludicrous” figure and that he and Liam Fox were “crazy” to focus on “shameful” talk of trade deals with Commonwealth countries like New Zealand, rather than China.

In a brutal flourish of history’s whip, the son of the man who coined the term “meritocracy” has been given a job for which he is not remotely qualified. In 1958, Michael Young published the satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy, set in a world where a system of personal merit has replaced the old-fashioned ruling gentry, only to harden into its own arbitrary social class. Now, to general outrage and dismay, his son Toby Young has been made a member of the British government’s new regulating body for universities, the Office for Students (OfS).

A campaign attacking the singer Lorde for pulling out of a planned concert in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv has been condemned as bullying by pro-Palestinian activists and others on Twitter.

The 21-year-old performer took the decision after two supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS) published an open letter to the singer, urging her not to play in the state as it would be seen as "giving support to the policies of the Israeli government" against Palestinians.

Iran is being rocked by its biggest wave of protests in nearly a decade. Since December 28, tens of thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets in huge numbers of towns and cities to demand freedom from their theocratic government. At least 20 people have since been killed in clashes with security forces, and hundreds of mostly young people have been arrested, per news reports.

The demonstrations began as small gatherings protesting a slow economy in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city; over the past week they’ve morphed into a wave of major demonstrations in which ordinary Iranians are often heard calling for a revolution against the country’s theocratic government.

Former Vice President Joe Biden pushed back against political observers who say the Democratic Party should seek a younger candidate in 2020.

In an interview Thursday with "PBS Newshour," Biden responded directly to a quote from former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean, who said earlier Thursday that older members of the party should "get the hell out of the way."

Officials in the Chicago suburb of Elgin, Illinois gave resident Greg Schiller an ultimatum: stop providing shelter to the homeless, or we’ll condemn your house.

Schiller told Chicago’s NBC 5 that he began hosting “slumber parties” for homeless people to stay warm during the region’s frigid cold in December, and would give them food and warm drinks in his unfinished basement — but would not allow drugs or alcohol.

Employees at nearly a dozen Tim Hortons outlets across Ontario tell CBC News they are facing the loss of paid breaks, benefits, and perks by franchise owners citing Ontario's minimum wage increase.

The cuts go beyond the iconic coffee chain, with minimum wage workers at other businesses being told they're also going to take a hit as a result of the hike.

Manila, 1901. The city is a steamy mix of grand Spanish colonial buildings mildewed from tropical humidity, the ramshackle dwellings of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, and horse-drawn wagons rumbling through squares and gates with names like Plaza de Cervantes and Puerta de Isabel II. Hastily erected hotels, houses of prostitution, and gambling dens cater to a flood of newly arrived Americans: bureaucrats, missionaries, merchants, speculators—and soldiers. Despite its swift victory in the Spanish-American War three years earlier, the United States is now in the middle of its first protracted war in Asia. Filipino nationalists, delighted to be free at last from several centuries of Spanish rule, have discovered that the US troops with leggings tucked into their high boots whom they first hoped were liberators are in fact here to establish an American colony. The brutal conflict now underway will eventually leave more than 200,000 Filipinos dead.

After learning of major security flaws in his company’s products, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold off tens of millions of dollars worth of company stock before the story was revealed to the public.

Security researchers at Google discovered the two microprocessor flaws, dubbed Spectre and Meltdown, back in June 2017, both of which open the door for hackers to steal sensitive information from PCs, smartphones, and the servers that help keep beloved internet services running. The Meltdown flaw affects 90 percent of microprocessors made by Intel, while Spectre affects practically all microprocessors on the marketplace.

Jitu Brown is a community organizer who serves as national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance, a grassroots education advocacy group. Brown has been an education activist for the past twenty-six years. Beginning as a volunteer with youth programs on Chicago’s South Side, he became a board member of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization in 1993. We spoke by phone in early November.

Q: How did you become an activist?

Jitu Brown: I’m from the South Side of Chicago, educated in the Chicago public schools. I sort of flamed out playing college football and was in the music industry. I had the choice of either signing with MCA Records as a solo artist or doing what was pulling at my spirit, which was community work. And I made the best decision of my life. I left the music industry and I started volunteering with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, doing youth program work.

When Hurricane Harvey hit Houston last August, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh expressed his fear that his own city would have been “wiped out” by a comparable deluge. Scores of people would be rendered homeless, waterfront areas would be ravaged, the damage would run into the multi-billions. Several years earlier, the city dodged a bullet during Hurricane Sandy: Boston was spared the flooding that paralyzed Manhattan only because the storm hit Boston hours after high tide.

Exclusive: Dirty deal traced to three Ukrainian tycoons

Three Ukrainian oligarchs traded part of around $1.5bn in illicit assets traced to cronies of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, an exclusive investigation by Al Jazeera revealed on Sunday. They did so as the war-torn country struggled to return suspected misappropriated funds to its coffers.

An unsigned contract obtained by Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit identifies Alexander Onyschenko - the gas tycoon, former member of parliament and currently one of Ukraine's most-wanted men - and Pavel Fuchs, a real estate tycoon who made his fortune in Moscow, as the buyers in the illegal deal.

In between anti-government protests in Iran and President Donald Trump’s tweets about the size of his nuclear button, Huma Abedin and civil aviation safety, an important vote took place in Israel. Few people seemed to notice. The Washington Post relegated the story to its “Digest” of world news and Reuters produced a short article, but the Wall Street Journal did not even bother to cover it.

There may have been a mention along the crawl of the three cable news networks, but who gets their news from television? Only the New York Times ran an article commensurate with the fact that on New Year’s Eve, the Likud Party’s Central Committee voted to extend Israel’s legal jurisdiction to settlements in the West Bank. It is a legal nuance that seems insignificant against the backdrop of 50 years of occupation, but it has significant consequences. The move is a prelude to annexation.

A court convened Wednesday afternoon to hear the case of students at Fordham University who are suing the school, which had denied them the ability to form an official student club in December 2016. The petitioning students, Ahmad Awad, Sofia Dadap, Sapphira Lurie, and Julie Norris, who are represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal, had tried to form a club on one of the most contentious political issues on campus: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The prominent British campaign group War on Want has been listed as one of 20 foreign NGOs whose representatives are banned from visiting Israel over their support of the pro-Palestinian boycott, sanctions and divestment (BDS) movement.

The publication of the list, which also includes a well-known Jewish anti-occupation group and a Nobel peace prize-winning US Quaker group, had been threatened for months by Israel.

Reading any statement from an economist on the subject of minimum wage, you might think the eventual results are unequivocal and well understood.

The strongest critics of Ontario's sharp hike on Jan. 1 in the hourly rate from $11.60 to $14 use traditional economics to predict certain doom for an economy devastated by plunging employment.

Democrats say 'O! Yes!' to Winfrey

There's no way someone makes a great speech about hope and American unity on national television and immediately gets catapulted into being a serious presidential contender. Totally absurd.

A television star going straight to the White House? Ridiculous.

Like the early talk of Barack Obama and Donald Trump for president before her, the obsession over Oprah Winfrey as a legitimate potential White House contender was widely dismissed Monday as the latest cable catnip — except for all the hardened political operatives who spent the day amazing themselves by taking it seriously.

Toronto's reputation as a hotbed of anti-Muslim incitement continues to grow after a U.S. federal district court in Washington, DC formally handed down hate crimes charges against a member of the Toronto-based Jewish Defence League (JDL) last month.

Yosef Steynowitz of Thornhill, was charged with assaulting Kamal Nayfeh, a technical instructor at a North Carolina college, and graduate student Ben Doernberg with wooden poles and repeated kicks during pro-Palestinian protests at last year’s AIPAC conference in DC. Nayfeh's bloodied face required nine stiches. The assault against Doernberg caused a concussion. Rami Lubranicki, an American member of JDL, was also charged along with Steynowitz.

In 2016, the highest-paid employee of the State of California was Jim Mora, the head coach of U.C.L.A.’s football team. (He has since been fired.) That year, Mora pulled in $3.58 million. Coming in second, with a salary of $2.93 million, was Cuonzo Martin, at the time the head coach of the men’s basketball team at the University of California, Berkeley. Victor Khalil, the chief dentist at the Department of State Hospitals, made six hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars; Anne Neville, the director of the California Research Bureau, earned a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars; and John Smith, a seasonal clerk at the Franchise Tax Board, earned twelve thousand nine hundred dollars.

The British government may have breached a major “environmental democracy” law by failing to consult the public when drawing up Brexit legislation.

A UN-backed committee has confirmed it is considering a complaint from Friends of the Earth that the government’s EU withdrawal bill breached the Aarhus convention, which requires public consultation on any new environmental law.

As a Jewish mother, one of the most important things to me is to instill in my children a sense of Jewish identity and values. For my teenage children, this has over the years included Tot-Shabbat at our synagogue, Hebrew school, Jewish summer camp and Jewish youth group trips to Israel.

As a family, our history dates back to Rabbi Joseph Karo of 14th-century Palestine, writer of the “Shulchan Aruch” (the codification of Jewish religious law). In 2015, I took my children to visit Karo’s grave, in the holy Jewish city of Safed. It was the most prominent grave in the cemetery. My son, daughter and I placed stones at the gravesite of the ancient rabbi and said a short prayer.

Iran's supreme leader lashed out at the United States and Britain and vowed to respond against foreign powers he accused of attempting to overthrow the Islamic republic.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also took a shot at Donald Trump on Tuesday, accusing the US president of being "a very unstable man" who exhibited "extreme and psychotic episodes".

It’s the middle of the frigid, long midnight at Tapkaurak Point, a spit of gravel curling out into the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska. Up in the middle of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the largest remaining wilderness area in the U.S., the sun set weeks ago and won’t peek above the horizon until the middle of January.

If you were there now, bundled up against the minus-20-degree chill, you could climb the low bluff at Tapkaurak, turn away from the frozen sea, and in the dim light cast by the moon and the stars you’d take in the expansive arctic plain giving way to the craggy Brooks Range to the south. In the middle of the plain, if the aurora borealis is bright enough, you might see poking out of the snow cover an upright post—physically insignificant but utterly out of place in the treeless Arctic landscape.

Cabot Oil & Gas, a petroleum, natural gas and natural gas liquids exploration and production company based in Houston, Texas, has filed a $5 million lawsuit against water pollution victim Ray Kemble and his lawyers for speaking out about his polluted water well.

Kemble, who lives in Dimock, Pennsylvania, a tiny town in the rural northeast corner of the state whose aquifer was famously polluted by gas extraction, hasn't had clean water since Cabot started hydraulically fracturing, or fracking, near his home eight years ago. The town’s fracking-related pollution was featured in the HBO films Gasland and Gasland II.

Theresa May has a message for young, green-minded Britons: The Tories care about plastic pollution, animal welfare, forests and climate change too.

It’s been a gaffe-filled year for the U.K. prime minister, with an election fiasco, onstage coughing fits, memes of a young May running through wheat fields and a series of embarrassing ministerial resignations that ended with this week’s botched Cabinet reshuffle — not to mention fierce Cabinet infighting over Brexit.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) spent millions of dollars over the past financial year to contract private debt collectors that targeted some of Americas poorest citizens for unpaid taxes and only recovered a small fraction of the funds they were supposed to return to the agency, a new report released on Wednesday found.

The report, by the independent Taxpayer Advocate Service, found that the debt collectors had cost the IRS $20 million but had only brought in $6.7 million — less than one percent of the total amount targeted for collection. In some cases, the private agencies received commissions for work they hadn’t actually carried out.

As the Mueller investigation continues to examine links between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, the Pentagon and the State Department are preparing for a slew of high-level meetings over the next two months with Russian government officials, BuzzFeed reported on Sunday.

The meetings include a gathering later in January featuring US Army General and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) Curtis Scaparroti and General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of Russia’s armed forces and the country’s top military official. It has been five years since the last similar meeting, which took place before the United States restricted military communications with Russia following its 2013 invasion of Ukraine.

A controversial Liberal bill, Bill C-23, which has been popularly dubbed the Pre-Clearance Act, has received royal assent. Although it is not yet in force, it is now law.

The Pre-Clearance Act relates to the powers afforded to U.S. border guards operating on Canadian soil. These border guards work in pre-clearance zones at Canadian points of departure to the U.S., like the Vancouver International Airport.

Democracy gone Astray