Democracy gone Astray: Sunday, August 05, 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, August 05, 2018

Hundreds Attend Funeral for Stephon Clark a Week After He Was Shot by Sacramento Police

Hundreds attended a funeral service Thursday morning for Stephon Clark, the unarmed 23-year-old African American man who was fatally shot by police officers earlier this month in Sacramento, California. Police officials have said the officers believed Clark was holding a gun; a phone was found near Clark’s body. The funeral took place as protests sparked by the March 18 shooting enter their second week. The incident is one of only a handful of police shootings that has drawn national media attention since President Donald Trump took office.

Spencer Ackerman and Kevin Poulsen have some interesting news:

Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.

The arrival of a US-blacklisted Russian motorcycle club in Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of their nine-day "Russian Balkans" tour has stoked fears among Bosnian and international authorities.

The Night Wolves are visiting Serbia and Bosnia's Serb-dominated Republika Srpska semi-autonomous region this week. About 20 members arrived on Tuesday.

Britain is braced for retaliation from Moscow after Theresa May blamed the Russian state for the Salisbury poisoning, and announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats and a crackdown on “corrupt elites”.

The prime minister told the House of Commons the Kremlin had responded with “sarcasm, contempt and defiance” to the 24-hour deadline the government set on Monday for explaining the attack on former spy Sergei Skripal.

The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, has succeeded in abolishing presidential term limits, a momentous political coup that paves the way for him to stay in power for years to come.

Nearly 3,000 members of China’s National People’s Congress voted the highly controversial constitutional amendment through during a Sunday afternoon session at the Great Hall of the People – an imposing Mao-era theatre on the western fringe of Tiananmen Square.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Edward Snowden’s most lasting contribution was saying that there “may never be a safer election in which to vote for a third option.”

During today’s presidential election in Russia, though, Snowden opted for a different — and far more critical — tack. Taking to Twitter, Snowden wrote that the “ballot stuffing seen today in Moscow and elsewhere … is an effort to steal the influence” of the Russian people. He urged citizens of the country where he is an exile: “Demand justice; demand laws and courts that matter. Take your future back.”

Chuck Rifici

Former CFO of the Liberal Party of Canada and a founder and former CEO of Canopy Growth Corp. and Tweed Marijuana Inc., the country’s largest licensed producer. Made a killing when Canopy took over Tweed. He's reportedly still a shareholder. Currently, CEO at Nesta Holding Company, “the premiere partner for companies within the cannabis space.”

Potential conflict of interest As the former overseer of the finances of the federal Liberal Party, Rifici's connections to money bags contributors in the party run far and deep. No doubt he's turning a few of them on to the big bucks to be made in the business of weed.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wanted to provide Fox News host Sean Hannity "some news" about Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

One problem: Assange messaged a fake account, whose owner then alerted the press. Dell Gilliam, a writer from Texas, said she created the fake @SeanHannity__ account while she had the flu and was bored, according to the Daily Beast.

Australia Plans to Become Leading Defense-Industry Exporter

CANBERRA, Australia — Australia’s government announced a strategy Monday to create high-tech jobs and become one of the top 10 defense-industry-exporting countries within a decade through arms sales to liked-minded nations while also keeping those weapons from rogue regimes.

Australia will create a 3.8 billion Australian dollar ($3.1 billion) fund to lend to exporters that banks are reluctant to finance, a central defense export office and expand the roles of defense attaches in Australian embassies around the world.

Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull said that with AU$200 billion budgeted to increase Australian defense capabilities in the next decade, Australia should rank higher than 20th among arms-exporting countries. The planned Australian military build-up was the largest in its peace-time history, he said.

A Russian military jet performed an "unsafe" intercept on the Black Sea on Monday, flying within 5 feet of a U.S. Navy plane on the Black Sea, U.S. military officials told CNN.

The U.S. Navy P-3 surveillance plane was reportedly flying in international airspace when the incident occurred and was forced to end its mission prematurely as a result.

An expected US report that could sanction Kremlin-linked oligarchs is an attempt to influence Russia's March presidential election, Moscow has said.

The US treasury report is expected to detail the closeness of senior Russian political figures and oligarchs to President Vladimir Putin, who is standing for re-election.

“A prescription for disaster.”

That’s how opponents described a 2017 Ohio ballot initiative in their television ads, claiming the law would increase the cost of prescription drugs, when in fact the law was intended to decrease drug prices. What the ads didn’t say is that they were financed by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an association of for-profit pharmaceutical companies that spent more than $58 million — more than three-and-a-half times the spending of the proponents of the initiative — to defeat the citizen initiative designed to lower the price of prescription drugs.

It’s useful, almost ten years after his election to the Presidency, to recall how much of the opposition to Barack Obama during his first run for that office was conducted via image, and the promise—or, really, the threat—of images to come. The way he looked was inextricable from the rest of his appeal as a potential leader, and so, perhaps, a game of subliminal, symbolic tit for tat was to be expected. The latter months of Hillary Clinton’s losing 2008 primary campaign were characterized by a Pyrrhically effective, subtly racialized populist appeal to the people she referred to, at one point, as “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” in states such as Michigan and Ohio. As Clinton chugged beers and downed shots of whiskey at every notch along the Rust Belt, her campaign disseminated photos of Obama looking especially black or exotic, or standing next to figures of questionable repute. There was the image of Obama dressed in traditional Somali robes and a turban, released in mysterious synch with the ongoing rumors that he was a crypto-Muslim and that, as a kid living in Indonesia, he had been educated at a madrassa. (The Clinton campaign denied spreading that one.) Then, after the controversy over Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and his more bombastic political utterances from behind the pulpit, pictures of Wright and Obama together, in better times, flooded the Internet and the airwaves.

In January 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that Henry Montgomery’s life prison sentence was unconstitutional and that he had the right to seek release from Louisiana’s most notorious prison, Angola. But two years later, the 71-year-old Montgomery is still there.

A Baton Rouge jury convicted Montgomery of murder and sentenced him to life in prison for shooting a deputy sheriff, Charles Hurt, in 1963, when he had just turned 17. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama that such mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional. Montgomery petitioned the court with the help of a jailhouse lawyer, asking it to apply the Miller decision retroactively to people who’d received such sentences before 2012. The court ruled in his favor.

Last August, Congress sent President Trump a clear signal that he could not be trusted when it comes to Russia; A near-unanimous, bipartisan majority delivered a bill to the president’s desk imposing new sanctions on the country, while also slashing his office’s power to ease those restrictions. Trump, under scrutiny by federal investigators for possible collusion between his presidential campaign and the Kremlin, had little choice but to sign the bill into law.

Russian-sponsored diplomatic talks over the future of Syria have begun in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, but experts predict the summit will merely attempt to enforce a political solution that is in line with the Syrian government's agenda.

The two-day conference that started on Monday has been given the name "Congress of the Syrian National Dialogue". It will be the first round of negotiations to take place in Russia, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's main ally.

A 50-strong commission representing most strands of Syrian society will draft a new constitution for the country, the UN and Russia have agreed at the end of a peace conference put together by Vladimir Putin in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi.

The UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura faced intense criticism from the Syrian opposition for attending the conference, which the opposition boycotted on the basis that it was an attempt to supplant the UN peace process and marginalise their role in ending Syria’s seven-year civil war.

EDMONTON — Ann Hardy was 10 years old when she contracted tuberculosis, said goodbye to her Metis family in Fort Smith, N.W.T. and was taken to the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital in Edmonton in 1969.

Over five months, she was treated for the infectious disease in the segregated facility but said she was also sexually assaulted several times by an X-ray technician.

An 18-year-old in Florida allegedly shoots and kills two of his roommates. A 21-year-old, also in Florida, plots to bomb synagogues and a nuclear power plant. A 17-year-old in Virginia allegedly shoots and kills his girlfriend’s parents. And a 20-year-old in California allegedly stabs a gay Jewish college student 20 times, burying him in a shallow grave.

All of these young white men had connections to the Atomwaffen Division, a well-armed neo-Nazi group enamored with Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler whose members harbor grand and demented delusions of fighting a “race war” and overthrowing the U.S. government.

Twitter on Wednesday said it notified 1.4 million people in the US that they engaged with Kremlin-linked troll accounts during the 2016 US election. That's more than double the 677,775 people Twitter initially said it would notify earlier this month.

"We have expanded the number of people notified about interactions with Twitter accounts potentially connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency," Twitter said in an updated blog post. "Approximately 1.4 million people have now received a notification from Twitter."

Despite its progressive environmental policies, the state of California actually has the worst air quality in the nation, according to a 2017 report from the American Lung Association. More specifically, California’s Central Valley, which produces one third of the country’s vegetables and two thirds of its fruits and nuts, is home to some particularly nasty air, thanks to its bathtub-like topography, which traps air pollution in the region. Just in the past month, the Central Valley saw, by some measures, its worst period of polluted air in nearly 20 years, which researchers have attributed primarily to smoke from wildfires that ravaged areas of Southern California, as well as the typical culprits—vehicle emissions and residential wood-burning.

The Xinhua news agency has just issued a long, unprecedented statement about directions from the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee to the National People’s Congress regarding revisions to China’s national constitution.

The People’s Congress is now required to propose these revisions at its annual meeting this month.

Far Right Surges As Italy Faces Hung Parliament

ROME (Reuters) - Italy faces a prolonged period of political instability after voters delivered a hung parliament on Sunday, spurning traditional parties and flocking to anti-establishment and far-right groups in record numbers.

With votes counted from more than 75 percent of polling stations, it looked almost certain that none of the three main factions would be able to govern alone and there was little prospect of a return to mainstream government, creating a dilemma for the European Union.

Italy’s election on Sunday didn’t deliver a clear victory to any single party or alliance, yet there was an unmistakable winner: the populist and far-right parties that campaigned on anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-establishment views and an avowed dislike of the European Union.

The preliminary results of the vote show a fractured political landscape with no easy path for parties to negotiate a coalition government. Both established center-right and center-left parties lost support, while the populist and ideologically amorphous Five Star Movement gained the largest single share of the vote.

The linguistic gymnastics needed to report on police violence without calling up images of police violence is a thing of semantic wonder. Officers don’t shoot, they are merely “involved” in shootings; victims are not victims, but “suspects” “fleeing”; human beings become premortem cadavers as bullets “enter the torso” rather than the chest of a person; guns and bullets act on their own as they “discharge” or “enter the right femur,” rather than being fired by autonomous individuals with agency and purpose. Headlines become 14-word, jargon-heavy tangles where a simple five-word description would suffice.

A lot has been said about the toxic slurry of fracking fluids and its impact on water quality, but what about the millions of gallons of water that's sucked up by the drilling process and its impact on water quantity?

A new study highlights how the five million gallons of freshwater used to fracture just one gas well in the U.S.—or more than enough to fill seven Olympic-size swimming pools—has depleted water levels in up to 51 percent of streams in Arkansas, as Motherboard reported from the research.

Bakhchisaray, Ukraine - Mumine Saliyeva cannot forget how masked, gun-toting pro-Russian security officers pounded on her door last October. They arrived to search her apartment and arrest her husband, Seiran Saliyev.

"Every day, I check a hundred times whether the door is locked, I get up at night to check, check again before my morning prayer," the fine-featured 32-year-old woman in a white headscarf told Al Jazeera.

Imagine a society in which you are rated by the government on your trustworthiness. Your “citizen score” follows you wherever you go. A high score allows you access to faster internet service or a fast-tracked visa to Europe. If you make political posts online without a permit, or question or contradict the government’s official narrative on current events, however, your score decreases. To calculate the score, private companies working with your government constantly trawl through vast amounts of your social media and online shopping data.

Leading Brexiters who accuse civil servants of sabotaging Britain’s exit from the EU are adopting dangerous tactics similar to those of rightwing German nationalists between the two world wars, a former head of the civil service has warned.

In a stark assessment of the acute tensions developing over the issue, Andrew Turnbull, who led the civil service under Tony Blair, said that Whitehall officials had become the victims of “pre-emptive scapegoating” by Brexiters who feared they were losing the argument.

Images of death and destruction from the northern province of Idlib in Syria have flooded social media, with local activists and aid workers saying shelling by Russian and Syrian government warplanes in the area has intensified.

Rescue workers from the Syrian Civil Defence (SCD), a volunteer search and rescue team, say that at least 18 civilians have been killed and more than 45 wounded in the continuous bombardment and a gas attack on the rebel-held province since Sunday night.

In 2000, I did a survey of all police departments in Kentucky. One small finding revealed a little-known fact about the practice of civil asset forfeiture (CAF): the average dollar amount seized was only $300.00. The State seizing suspected drug dealers’ property was justified on crippling drug kingpins financially. This finding exposed a dark reality: police and prosecutors were mostly taking small amounts of cash from enormous numbers of everyday people that may or may not have committed low-level drug crimes.

In 2016, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) filed a class-action lawsuit against Uber, claiming the rideshare giant denied them benefits, even though they were full-time workers. The company accomplished this, the suit charged, by classifying workers who spent “six or seven” days a week “laboring for 12-plus-hour shifts” as independent contractors.

These grievances will likely sound familiar. Uber is widely reviled for its instrumental role in creating a tenuous 21st-century gig economy fueled by a precariat of contracted drivers — a point countless news outlets have exhaustively detailed. As a result of that negative press, and a rash of additional lawsuits challenging Uber’s labor abuses, the company now ostensibly seeks to mitigate the damage it’s done.

On a Thursday afternoon in November 2015, a light snow was falling outside the windows of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, despite the relatively warm weather, and Julian Assange was inside, sitting at his computer and pondering the upcoming 2016 presidential election in the United States.

In little more than a year, WikiLeaks would be engulfed in a scandal over how it came to publish internal emails that damaged Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and the extent to which it worked with Russian hackers or Donald Trump’s campaign to do so. But in the fall of 2015, Trump was polling at less than 30 percent among Republican voters, neck-and-neck with neurosurgeon Ben Carson, and Assange spoke freely about why WikiLeaks wanted Clinton and the Democrats to lose the election.

Ex-Workers at Russian 'Troll Factory' Trust U.S. Indictment

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — While Russian officials scoff at a U.S. indictment charging 13 Russians with meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, several people who worked at the same St. Petersburg “troll factory” say they think the criminal charges are well-founded.

Marat Mindiyarov, a former commenter at the innocuously named Internet Research Agency, says the organization’s Facebook department hired people with excellent English skills to sway U.S. public opinion through an elaborate social media campaign.

Democracy gone Astray