Democracy gone Astray: Thursday, August 09, 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.]

Thursday, August 09, 2018

Israeli intelligence firm targeted NGOs during Hungary’s election campaign

The Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube was involved in a campaign to discredit NGOs ahead of Hungary’s April election, according to a former Black Cube employee and a person with knowledge of the company’s inner workings.

Between December 2017 and March 2018, Hungarian NGOs and individuals connected to American-Hungarian businessman George Soros were contacted by agents using false identities who secretly recorded them. The recordings, which began appearing in the Jerusalem Post and Hungarian government-controlled daily paper Magyar Idők three weeks before Hungary’s election, were used by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to attack independent civil society organizations during the last days of the campaign. Orbán’s right-wing Fidesz party went on to win in a landslide.

Amman, Jordan - Despite a raging crisis in neighbouring Syria, Jordan has recently kept its doors shut in the face of thousands of displaced Syrians massing along its northern borders.

On June 19, forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and his military ally, Russia, launched a fierce offensive against rebels in southern Syria's Deraa province.

In late May, the same day she got fired by the US TV network ABC for her racist tweet about Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, Roseanne Barr accused Chelsea Clinton of being married to George Soros’s nephew. “Chelsea Soros Clinton,” Barr tweeted, knowing that the combination of names was enough to provoke a reaction. In the desultory exchange that followed, the youngest Clinton responded to Roseanne by praising Soros’s philanthropic work with his Open Society Foundations. To which Barr responded in the most depressing way possible, repeating false claims earlier proferred by rightwing media personalities: “Sorry to have tweeted incorrect info about you! Please forgive me! By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth – were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea?”

Russian President Vladimir Putin ought to be enjoying a tidal wave of popularity about now.

The World Cup is going on across the country, and unexpected wins by the home team are generating moments of national euphoria not seen since the end of the Second World War. At the same time, he can look forward to a one-on-one summit with his admirer U.S. President Donald Trump on July 16 in Helsinki.

As difficult as it might be for some recalcitrant Americans to believe or embrace — Trumpsters, listen up, this column is especially for you — the United States is in the midst of a profound and irreversible demographic shift.

Two dramatic changes in the nation’s population are occurring simultaneously: we’re getting older, and more racially diverse, according to a U.S. Census Bureau tip sheet released last week. Census figures show that fewer than 17 percent of U.S. counties reported a decrease in median age from April 2010 to July 2017, with the majority of those counties clustered in the Midwest. Nationally, the median age rose to 38.0 years in 2017, up from 37.2 years in 2000.

British Columbia’s new surtax on high-value homes has elicited outcry by many affected homeowners, calling it “radical,” “punitive,” “confiscatory,” and simply “unfair.” In contrast, opinion polls of the general public find wide support for this addition to the provincial “school tax.”

What would taxation policy analysts say about the charge that the property surtax is unfair? To begin, they would ask whether it meets the four criteria of good tax policy enunciated first by Adam Smith: simplicity, certainty, efficiency and equity. Let’s see if it does.

Nearly 50,000 people have been displaced since the Syrian government and its Russian allies escalated an offensive in the southern province of Deraa last week, prompting concerns at the United Nations over where these displaced civilians have to run.

Airstrikes, mortar shells, and barrel bombs have pounded the area, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. The goal of the campaign seems to be regaining control of the town as well as the border with Jordan.

The killing of a loved one. An attempt at gang recruitment. A rape. Harassment by a police officer. A death threat over an outstanding extortion payment. Amid the justified uproar at the Trump administration’s policies on America’s southern border, often lost are the reasons many Central Americans leave their homes, and are prepared to brave the perils of the journey north, in the first place. Families arriving at the border from countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala leave behind a myriad of stories, many of them connected to their homelands’ plague of armed violence.

Texas-based Kinder Morgan made a seven-fold return on the sale of its Trans Mountain pipeline system to Canada's federal government, according to a new report that also warns the federal budget deficit could jump by 36 per cent because of the purchase.

The report comes from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), which is funded by a variety of philanthropic groups dedicated to climate and energy issues, including the Rockefeller Family Fund.

July 4 marks the peak of the largest, most valuable wild salmon run left in America.

The sockeye salmon migration into Bristol Bay, Alaska, can exceed 40 million fish. As they charge into the Kvichak and Nushagak rivers and fan out across myriad tributaries, the sockeye and four other species of Pacific salmon are pursued by commercial and sport fisheries valued at over half a billion dollars. When they reach the region’s clear, wild headwaters, those millions of salmon spawn and produce billions of offspring that then find their way down into Iliamna, Alaska’s largest lake. Then the fish head out toward the Bering Sea, get big and fat on omega-3-rich krill, and in three more years return to their headwaters to begin the cycle anew. Whether marketed to Americans or exported to other countries, Bristol Bay salmon are a major bulwark against America’s “seafood deficit,” which in 2016 exceeded $14 billion.

What do we talk about when we talk about class? Is it economic or is it cultural? Is it the working poverty of a nurse and single mother in Washington County, Pennsylvania, whose household is poisoned and small homestead ruined by fracking? Or is it the identity politics of a white Wisconsinite flying a Confederate flag from his pickup truck a short drive from the Canadian border? Is class an open wound in American life, evident in Bernie Sanders’s denunciations of “the billionaire class” and Donald Trump’s images of “American carnage,” or is it the country’s secret shame, constantly shuffled aside with reassurances that poor Americans are simply “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” as John Steinbeck put it?

For Karl Marx, whose 200th birthday passed this year, class named a person’s role in the way a society wrests its living from the earth and divides the value. Class described the difference between a sharecropper and a plantation owner, between the enslaved person being worked to death in a Caribbean sugar field and an investor living in London on dividends from the sugar trade. It was the only nonarbitrary way to begin a description of human life, because we are our bodies, productive and need-ridden. As God told Adam and Eve, and as John Smith reminded the starving colonists at Jamestown, those who do not work do not eat. By the same token, those who do not find some stand-in to work for them—a machine, a draft animal, or another person—do not get much chance to rest, play, or learn. So to understand any group of people, you must know who does the work and who gets the goods. You can expect that a great deal of politics, law, culture, and religion will be shaped in response to these material patterns—sometimes against them but more often in an attempt to give them the appearance of inevitability and justice.

Since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post in 2013, the newspaper has been one of the great—and few—success stories in media, legacy or otherwise. The size of the paper’s staff has grown to over 800, and it has opened bureaus around the globe, most recently in Hong Kong and Rome. In 2015 it beat its arch-rival The New York Times in terms of readership (though the Times has since regained the upper hand), and it has been profitable for two years. No one, in 2018, seems to really know how to run a lucrative, well-read, daily publication, but The Post suggests that one way is to be owned by the richest man in the world.

You want to know what all that pearl clutching over “civility” by the pusillanimous punditocracy has been about for the last few days? For a change, a white woman and her family were refused service at a restaurant. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had spent most of the previous week lying her way through a pathetic defense of Trump’s inhumane border policy, and the entirety of her career as Trump’s press secretary lying every day before that, was politely asked to leave the Red Hen Restaurant in Lexington, Virginia by the manager. The drinks and cheese plate Sanders and her party had already ordered were comped.

Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Palestine have warned Israel on separate occasions about Turkey's creeping influence in occupied East Jerusalem, according to a report by Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

The report notes that senior officials from the three Arab countries told Israel that Turkey was "extending its influence in Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem" which they said was "part of an attempt by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to "claim ownership over the Jerusalem issue".

Manila, Philippines - Police have arrested more than 10,000 people for loitering in the streets in the last two weeks, after President Rodrigo Duterte issued a directive to round up “idlers” in order to avoid “potential trouble for the public.”

Most of the arrests have involved men from the metropolis’ most impoverished and densely populated districts, but police have also rounded up women and minors whom they found outdoors during curfew hours.

Tens of millions of Mexican voters will go to the polls Sunday to vote in more than 3,000 races—none more important than the one to choose the country’s next president. Andrés Manuel López Obrador (or AMLO, as he’s commonly called) has held a healthy lead in polling for months and is widely expected to succeed Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s unpopular current president.

Obrador is the former mayor of Mexico City. He has twice before sought the presidency, without success, on a leftist nationalist or center-left platform—depending on who you ask. While he’s taken a tough line against President Donald Trump, most recently for his treatment of migrants at the border, AMLO’s popularity has more to do with his vows to purge crime and governmental corruption and use the savings to fund services for the poor. Violence is spiking in the country, as the Guardian notes. More than 120 candidates have been killed while running for office over the last 10 months. Obrador has presented himself as the only alternative to business as usual in a country where a brutal drug war has led to more than 160,000 deaths over the last decade or so.

Native communities and environmental advocates slammed the approval of a controversial oil pipeline on Thursday, threatening protests in the style of Standing Rock and pledging civil unrest in response to the project.

In a unanimous vote Thursday, all five members of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) approved a certificate allowing Canadian energy company Enbridge to proceed with rebuilding the deteriorating Line 3 oil pipeline. The project would see the pipeline likely restored to its full capacity of 760,000 barrels of crude oil per day — this would bring a boost to the total 2.5 million barrels of tar sands crude oil that is currently exported into the United States from Canada each day.

Video showing a white police officer in Lancaster, Pennsylvania tasing an unarmed black man has gone viral on social media, drawing condemnation from critics who say it is just the latest case of unprovoked police abuse against people of color.

Police claim that the African American man, Sean Williams was not following their orders at the time of the incident, but bystander video appears to tell a different story.

Fox News is already freaking out about the man who is expected to become the new president of Mexico, a socialist and nationalist who had pledged to aggressively clean up the country’s corruption.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador is polling at least 20 points ahead of two rivals for the country’s presidency, with the vote scheduled for Sunday.

Washington policymakers are growing increasingly worried about the threat of high-tech foreign surveillance, a development complicated by U.S. spy agencies' use of similar technologies.

Lawmakers are stepping up their demands for more information from the Trump administration about foreign efforts to spy on Americans' cellphones.

The first time that Andrés Manuel López Obrador ran for President of Mexico, in 2006, he inspired such devotion among his partisans that they sometimes stuck notes in his pockets, inscribed with their hopes for their families. In an age defined by globalism, he was an advocate of the working class—and also a critic of the PRI, the party that has ruthlessly dominated national politics for much of the past century. In the election, his voters’ fervor was evidently not enough; he lost, by a tiny margin. The second time he ran, in 2012, the enthusiasm was the same, and so was the outcome. Now, though, Mexico is in crisis—beset from inside by corruption and drug violence, and from outside by the antagonism of the Trump Administration. There are new Presidential elections on July 1st, and López Obrador is running on a promise to remake Mexico in the spirit of its founding revolutionaries. If the polls can be believed, he is almost certain to win.

After eight long and extremely painful years of austerity due to gigantic rescue packages that were accompanied by brutal neoliberal measures, in Athens, the “leftist” government of Alexis Tsipras has announced that the era of austerity is now over thanks to the conclusion of a debt agreement with European creditors.

In the early hours of June 22, a so-called “historic” deal on debt relief was reached at a meeting of Eurozone finance ministers after it was assessed that Greece had successfully completed its European Stability Mechanism program, and that there was no need for a follow-up program.

Nearly half of millennials describe themselves as sympathetic to “socialism” and not terribly fond of “capitalism.” Yet if you asked each of them to explain the mechanics of how a socialist economy would function, I doubt many would have especially detailed answers. Jacobin magazine’s ABCs of Socialism consists of answers to skeptical questions about socialism (e.g. “Don’t the rich deserve their money?” “Is socialism pacifist?” “Will socialism be boring?”) but notably “How will socialism actually work?” is not among them. With twelve million Democratic primary voters having cast ballots for a self-described “socialist,” isn’t it concerning that nobody has explained in detail how socialism will “work”? Embracing a new economic system without having a blueprint seems like it could only ever lead to something like Venezuela’s collapse.

Russians demonstrated in cities across the country on Sunday in protest at a rise in the pension age. The rallies, organised by an unusually broad group of opposition forces, drew crowds of up to 3,000 in dozens of towns and cities across the country, opposition leaders said.

No protests were held in World Cup host cities due to a regulation banning protest in the cities for the duration of the tournament, and also out of a desire not to overshadow it.

Mexico elected leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador in a landslide victory on Sunday, according to exit polls showing the former mayor with double-digit leads over his competitors.

López Obrador, 64, mounted his third bid for the presidency with promises to rein in widespread corruption and fight poverty within the country. A former mayor of Mexico City, he will replace current President Enrique Peña Nieto and has promised to upend traditional party politics.

He would be the first leftist president in decades, according to Reuters.

López Obrador’s two main opponents, Jose Antonio Meade, the ruling party candidate, and center-right candidate Ricardo Anaya conceded the election late Sunday.

VANCOUVER — A First Nations woman working to revive a threatened language in her traditional territory of northern British Columbia says she's being forced to leave the country on Canada Day.

Mique'l Dangeli belongs to the Tsimshian First Nation, whose territory straddles the border between Alaska and British Columbia. She says Canada won't recognize her right to live and work in B.C. because she was born on the American side on Annette Island Indian Reserve.

Gennady Timchenko, a billionaire friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has sold his private jet, according to a broker and aircraft registration data, after complaining that U.S. sanctions made it impossible for him to use the aircraft.

The owner of the Gulfstream jet now is a subsidiary of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), the registration records showed.

Israel's parliament has passed a law that withholds hundreds of millions of dollars in funds from the Palestinians over welfare payments given to prisoners and their families.

The Knesset, Israel's parliament, approved on Monday the law with 87 of the 120 legislators voting in favour and 15 opposing.

The new legislation will deduct the money that the Palestinians allocate to prisoners and others killed by Israeli forces from taxes collected by Israel on behalf of the Palestinian Authority.

In late March, Amr Samour and his friend Ahmed al-Shami left their homes at 2:30 a.m. to harvest parsley in fields not far from the city of Khan Younis, in the eastern part of the Gaza Strip. For the men, it was their fifth day in a row going to the same place to do the same work, which neither particularly enjoyed, but the 25 shekels — about $8 — they were offered at the end of a tiring 10-hour shift helped put food on their families’ tables.

They had no reason to think the morning of March 30 would be any different. By about 4 a.m., they had already filled a number of boxes of freshly cut parsley when they heard a loud boom from the east, where just a kilometer away, Israeli troops are permanently positioned. Al-Shami recalled Samour asking what the sound was before the early morning’s dark blue sky exploded in a flash of red. Both men were knocked to the ground.

At least 134 Palestinians have been wounded by Israeli gunfire as thousands of Palestinian women demonstrated along the heavily fortified fence with Israel in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Ashraf al-Qudra, spokesperson for Gaza’s healthy ministry, said in a statement on Tuesday that media representatives covering the event were among those who were injured at the scene, east of the enclave.

AMESBURY, England, July 4 (Reuters) - Two British citizens are critically ill after they were exposed to Novichok, the same nerve agent that struck down a former Russian agent and his daughter in March, Britain’s top counter-terrorism officer said on Wednesday.

The pair, a local 44-year-old woman and a 45-year-old man, were hospitalized after being found unwell on Saturday in Amesbury, just miles away from Salisbury where ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were attacked in March.

“I have received test results from Porton Down (military research center) which show that the two people have been exposed to the nerve agent Novichok,” Neil Basu, Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism officer, told reporters.

The Syrian government and its closest military ally, Russia, have intensified their bombing campaign in the southern province of Deraa, after ceasefire deal between rebels and Russians broke down on Wednesday.

Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut, said that had air raids intensified on Thursday as government troops advanced steadily to recapture lost territory.

Israeli forces have assaulted dozens of Palestinians protesting the demolition of a Bedouin village near occupied East Jerusalem and the forcible transfer of the entire community.

According to the Palestinian Red Crescent, at least 35 Palestinians were wounded, including four who were hospitalised, during the events which took place on Wednesday at the Khan al-Ahmar village.

A British couple who both fell ill on Saturday after visiting Salisbury, the English town where a former Russian double agent and his daughter were poisoned in March, were exposed to Novichok, the same military-grade nerve agent used in that attack, Britain’s top counterterrorism official said on Wednesday.

Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu told reporters that tests carried out by chemical weapons experts at Porton Down, the British military lab near Salisbury, “confirm that the man and woman have been exposed to the nerve agent Novichok, which has been identified as the same nerve agent that contaminated both Yulia and Sergei Skripal.”

Democracy gone Astray