Democracy gone Astray: Tuesday, August 07, 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.]

Tuesday, August 07, 2018

How Russia Is Weaponizing International Students in the New Cold War

Russia is a top destination for international students and the most popular place for students from former Soviet countries to study. The country currently hosts more than 243,752 international students and considers international recruitment to be an important geopolitical goal.

More recently, Russia has resurrected and intensified the Soviet tradition of politicising student mobility. The government has requested that Russian students studying abroad should leave their new countries, when Russia’s political relations with those destinations deteriorate.

Ben Rhodes is the Barack Obama speechwriter and national security staffer who helped drive the Iran deal and negotiated the thaw between the US and Cuba. Over time, he earned his fair share of enemies. Indeed, he has the tire marks on his back to prove it.

Last month, days before Donald Trump’s decision to junk the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Observer and Ronan Farrow reported on the efforts of Black Cube, an Israeli intelligence-gathering firm, to discredit Rhodes and other Obama administration officials – just as Black Cube abetted Harvey Weinstein in his attempt to silence his victims. Five years ago, voices from the Pentagon derided Rhodes and others as jihadis in the White House after they opposed continued aid to Egypt in the aftermath of the military takeover.

When the early returns of the November 26 presidential election in Honduras began coming in, supporters of the leftist opposition candidate, Salvador Nasralla, had cause to celebrate. With 57 percent of polling stations counted, he had a five-point lead, a seemingly irreversible advantage. But then the vote-counting system went dark, victim of a computer glitch. A day and a half later, the system began working again, only now the conservative incumbent, Juan Orlando Hernández, had suspiciously caught up, and soon after, he took the lead. Cities throughout the country erupted in protest, and military police responded with force, firing at demonstrators. After three weeks of turmoil, electoral officials finally declared Hernández the winner; by the time he began his second term, on January 27, more than 30 people had been killed.

Barbara Zeughauser had lost so many relatives to cancer: Her mother, her uncle, her grandmother, her second cousin. She thought that ghost in the family line might come after her, too. So in 2009, Zeughauser took a test offered by Myriad Genetics. It analyzed her DNA for mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that can make cancer more likely than not, raising the lifetime risk of breast cancer in women to between 55 and 85 percent, and to between 10 and 70 percent for ovarian cancer.

As corporate media outlets predictably trumpeted the right-wing narrative that Social Security is in dire financial straits after the Social Security Trustees' annual report was released on Tuesday, advocacy groups and experts were quick to denounce the fearmongering and correct the record, arguing that the new analysis shows the program is "stronger than ever."

"Each year, the release of the trustees report provides an occasion for Social Security scaremongering by those wanting to shrink our social insurance system," Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, noted in a blog post on Tuesday. "But not only can we afford current benefits, we can afford to expand them."

The Jill Stein campaign is refusing to comply fully with a Senate intelligence committee request for documents and other correspondence, made as part of the committee’s probe into Russian activities in the 2016 election, according to a letter to be delivered Thursday to the panel by an attorney for the campaign.

The Green Party campaign will agree to turn over some documents, but raised constitutional objections to the breadth of the inquiry, which was first made in November 2017, arguing that elements of it infringe on basic political rights enshrined in the First Amendment.

Jill Stein ended months of silence and speculation about her role in the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, announcing this week that she would not be complying with a documents request put forth by the Senate intelligence committee.

The announcement, first reported by The Intercept, adds to the litany of questions about Stein’s role in Russia’s broader interference campaigns — a role that suddenly faces new relevance, given the rolling indictments from the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Barack Obama was a writer before he became a politician, and he saw his Presidency as a struggle over narrative. “We’re telling a story about who we are,” he instructed his aide Ben Rhodes early in the first year of his first term. He said it again in his last months in office, on a trip to Asia—“I mean, that’s our job. To tell a really good story about who we are”—adding that the book he happened to be reading argued for storytelling as the trait that distinguishes us from other primates. Obama’s audience was both the American public and the rest of the world. His characteristic rhetorical mode was to describe and understand both sides of a divide—black and white, liberal and conservative, Muslim and non-Muslim—before synthesizing them into a unifying story that seemed to originate in and affirm his own.

Russians are proud of the role their nation played in the wartime defeat of Nazi Germany, which makes it all the more extraordinary that this week a YouTube channel associated with Russian state television borrowed an insult from the Nazi lexicon to deride an Austrian journalist who challenged President Vladimir Putin in a combative interview.

While Western journalists expressed their admiration for reporter Armin Wolf’s grilling of the Russian president for nearly an hour, Vesti News, which adds English subtitles to reports from the Russian state broadcaster, headlined a segment on the encounter: “The Lying Press: Putin Absolutely Destroys Dishonest Austrian Journalist During State TV Interview.”

More than 50 years ago, the state of Israel shocked the world when it seized the remaining Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, in a matter of six days.

In a war with Egypt, Jordan and Syria, known as the 1967 War, or the June War, Israel delivered what came to be known as the "Naksa", meaning setback or defeat, to the armies of the neighbouring Arab countries, and to the Palestinians who lost all what remained of their homeland.

President Vladimir Putin has said Western sanctions against Russia are "harmful for everyone" and it is in everyone's interests to lift them.

Speaking in Austria, he said Russia had restored stable growth, despite the EU and US sanctions first imposed in 2014 after Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea.

Like many ambitious young scientists, José Pastor-Pareja came to the United States to supercharge his career. At Yale University, he worked in cutting-edge laboratories, collaborated with experts in his field and published in prestigious journals.

But the allure of America soon began to wear off. The Spanish geneticist struggled to renew his visa and was even detained for two hours of questioning at a New York City airport after he returned from a trip abroad. In 2012, he made the surprising decision to leave his Ivy League research position and move to China.

On the evening on January 23rd, Viktor Filinkov, a twenty-three-year-old software engineer, was at the departures terminal in Pulkovo Airport, in St. Petersburg, waiting to board a flight to Minsk. From there, Filinkov planned to catch a connection to Kiev, where his wife, Alexandra, was living. He never made it. Filinkov was approached by several men who identified themselves as agents from the F.S.B., a successor agency of the K.G.B., and took him to a waiting dark-blue minivan. What happened next, according to Filinkov, was a five-hour-long torture session, which ended with Filinkov in jail, awaiting trial on charges that could send him to prison for up to ten years.

Few figures in the Kremlin stand as close to the nexus of the trends defining modern Russia — rank kleptocracy, Western sanctions, a socially conservative agenda — as oligarch Vladimir Yakunin.

Yakunin, a one-time KGB general and former head of Russian Railways, has been close to President Vladimir Putin for decades, using that proximity to allegedly bilk staggering sums. He has devoted his wealth to a variety of causes: anti-LGBTQ campaigns and organizations; helping bring far-right Westerners to Russia; even reportedly building a mansion with an entire room devoted to his wife’s fur coat collection.

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has told a U.N human rights expert who said the country’s judicial independence was under threat to ‘go to hell’, warning against interference in domestic affairs.

The Philippine Supreme Court voted last month to remove Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, whom Duterte had called an “enemy” for voting against controversial government proposals, citing violations in the way she was appointed.

Istanbul, Turkey - When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Turkish Republic nearly a century ago, the former military leader banished religion from the public sphere and looked westwards to Europe for inspiration.

After replacing Islamic law (sharia) with European civil codes, he installed the principles of secularism into the Constitution, banned the Muslim call to prayer in Arabic and pushed for the social integration of the sexes, reforms which would radically alter the fabric of the Muslim-majority country which only years earlier was the seat of the Ottoman Empire.

China has warned that all trade talks between Beijing and Washington will be void if the US sets up trade sanctions.

After talks between Vice Premier Liu He and US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, China said it was ready to boost imports from many countries.

Mr Ross's China visit comes days after Washington threatened to impose extra tariffs on $50bn of Chinese goods.

The images and video of Israeli soldiers shooting live ammunition into masses of mostly unarmed Palestinians on the other side of the Gaza border fence over the past several weeks horrified observers around the world. Starting March 30, Israeli troops suppressing protests in Gaza killed 118 people and wounded more than 13,000, including 1,136 children.

The deaths and injuries, Israel Defense Forces international spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus lamented recently, have “done us a tremendous disservice, unfortunately, and it has been very difficult to tell our story.” Now Israel’s government is moving to make sure there are no more videos of mass shootings in the future — not by ordering a stop to the shootings, but by considering a law that would ban anyone from filming or photographing any military operations “with the intention of undermining the spirit of IDF soldiers and Israel’s residents.”

The Brexit charge is that the European Union has become an overbearing political project threatening British sovereignty and values. Britain, so the story runs, is an exceptional country with an exceptional history, exceptional institutions and an exceptional destiny. For Europeans inured to political instability and bloodshed, supranational institutions are needed to keep the peace. These chosen British lands have no such need. The Brexit vote was a protest vote against an order that had created insupportable lives for too many British citizens, intensified by fears over immigration, but it was underpinned by this cultural narrative of Britain’s uniqueness.

Bashar al-Assad is to visit North Korea, Pyongyang state media has claimed, in what would be a first state visit to the isolated nation under the leadership of Kim Jong-un.

The report by the official Korean Central News Agency did not say when the visit would be, but the two sanctions-hit nations have been allies for decades and Washington has accused the North of assisting Syria with its weapons programmes.

Russia may be suspended from INTERPOL, an international criminal justice compact that allows for international arrests, after using a sham warrant to cause a prominent American-born critic to be detained, The Telegraph reports.

Last week, the Russians used the system to cause Spanish police to detain Bill Browder, an American-born British financier who started a campaign for sanctions against Russian after his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was found dead in a Russian prison in 2009. He successfully campaigned for a law named after his lawyer and friend which froze the assets of the Russians involved—watch the below video interview with Joy Reid to hear the story.

On Wednesday, Federal bank regulators proposed to allow Wall Street more freedom to make riskier bets with federally-insured bank deposits – such as the money in your checking and savings accounts.

The proposal waters down the so-called “Volcker Rule” (named after former Fed chair Paul Volcker, who proposed it). The Volcker Rule was part of the Dodd-Frank Act, passed after the near meltdown of Wall Street in 2008 in order to prevent future near meltdowns.

To hear the Religious Right tell it, men like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were 18th-century versions of Jerry Falwell in powdered wigs and stockings. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Unlike many of today’s candidates, the founders didn’t find it necessary to constantly wear religion on their sleeves. They considered faith a private affair. Contrast them to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (who says he wouldn’t vote for an atheist for president because non-believers lack the proper moral grounding to guide the American ship of state), Texas Gov. Rick Perry (who hosted a prayer rally and issued an infamous ad accusing President Barack Obama of waging a “war on religion”) and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum (whose uber-Catholicism leads him to oppose not just abortion but birth control).

ISTANBUL, TURKEY — As the nightly Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to Kabul begins to fill up, Hemat sits in his seat staring blankly at the television screen in front of him. He isn’t interested in watching “Black Panther” or episodes of “The Big Bang Theory.” His mind is racing with what he is about to face in five hours time. He takes out his cell phone and calls his family in Afghanistan to let them know the news — that he is among dozens of young Afghan men being deported back to Kabul.

After the Republican tax bill passed, Walmart announced it would boost the minimum wage paid to its workers to $11 an hour, give “eligible associates” a $1,000 one-time bonus, and deliver other new benefits to an estimated 1 million employees thanks to its tax cut.

If the company hadn’t also planned to deliver $20 billion to shareholders via stock buybacks over the next two years, a decision announced before the tax bill was passed, it could have done a lot more.

Is Italy Europe’s new political laboratory – the country in which liberal democracy changes its hue and sinks below the horizon into populism? The question is legitimate, not only because historians have long established how, in his rise to power, Hitler took Mussolini as a model. And not only because Donald Trump was preceded on to the world stage by Silvio Berlusconi – another unscrupulous tycoon devoid of political experience, unfit for government, and with whom Trump shares more than a few personal traits. Above all the question is legitimate because, in Italy, not one but two populisms have won. Together they command more than half the votes in parliament and were until a few days ago on the verge of forming a government.

Update: Arkady Babchenko, the Russian journalist whose murder was dramatically announced by Ukraine on Tuesday, emerged very much alive later on Wednesday and said he had staged his own death in order to thwart a plot by Moscow to kill him. Read the latest news here.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has rejected a Ukrainian allegation that Moscow was behind the murder of a dissident Russian journalist in Kiev, calling it part of an anti-Russian campaign, according to Moscow media reports.

Bill Browder, a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin, has been released following his arrest in Spain on Wednesday morning under a Russian warrant.

The anti-corruption campaigner wrote on Twitter that he was freed from custody in Madrid after the Interpol general secretary in Lyon had advised them not to honour the Russian arrest warrant. He said it was the sixth time Russia had “abused” Interpol in his case.

Makers of brand-name drugs called out by the Trump administration for potentially stalling generic competition have hiked their prices by double-digit percentages since 2012 and cost Medicare and Medicaid nearly $12 billion in 2016, a Kaiser Health News analysis has found.

As part of President Donald Trump’s promise to curb high drug prices, the Food and Drug Administration posted a list of pharmaceutical companies that makers of generics allege refused to let them buy the drug samples needed to develop their products. For approval, the FDA requires so-called bioequivalence testing using samples to demonstrate that generics are the same as their branded counterparts.

British Prime Minister Theresa May faces a showdown with ministers and lawmakers in her Conservative party after refusing to back reform of Northern Ireland’s highly restrictive abortion rules after neighboring Ireland’s vote to liberalize its laws.

Voters in Ireland, a once deeply Catholic nation, backed the change by two-to-one, a far higher margin than any opinion poll in the run up to the vote had predicted.

First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon said Monday that the U.K. government’s position on leaving the EU customs union and single market is “unsustainable” and dominated by “mad Brexiteers.”

In an interview with POLITICO’s Ryan Heath in Brussels, Sturgeon urged British citizens not to give up on the possibility of preserving the U.K.’s membership of both.

Video posted to Facebook and Twitter over the weekend showed a police officer in Wildwood, N.J. punching a woman who appears to be much smaller than him.

NJ.com reported that the video shows the officer punching a woman in the head as people around her shout, “Stop resisting.” The video was recorded Saturday afternoon and by Sunday afternoon, it had been viewed on Facebook more than 140,000 times.

Democracy gone Astray