Democracy gone Astray: Sunday, August 12, 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 12, 2018

The bizarre spat with Canada shows Mohammed bin Salman’s true colours

When western media and the punditocracy fawn over an Arab political figure who is superficially liberal but fundamentally still quite a nasty piece of work, it’s never long before they are spectacularly disappointed. I call this Desert Rose syndrome, after a 2012 Vogue profile that chose to flatteringly portray Asma al-Assad as first lady of a “wildly democratic” household, in a country that was the “safest in the Middle East”, just as Bashar al-Assad began to intensify a crackdown against his own people.

The latest to provoke Desert Rose syndrome is Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto head of government of Saudi Arabia. His western-friendly mien has won him many admirers, but they will have been pulled up short last week after the country cut all ties with Canada over a tweet.

LONDON — Close your eyes. Imagine for a moment that you’re waking up on June 24, 2016 and turn on the TV to hear that Remain had won the U.K.’s EU referendum. Prime Minister David Cameron is standing at a lectern in front of No. 10, flushed with success but also keen to reassure Brits that he’ll be dedicating the final three or four years of his premiership to reuniting a divided country by tackling “the big issues we all know need addressing.”

During the improbable summer of 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn went from being an unknown, sixty-six-year-old, leftist Member of Parliament to the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, there was a natural urge to know more about him. Journalists and bloggers, supporters and skeptics, all picked over Corbyn’s thirty-two-year parliamentary career, reading old speeches and looking into the causes he had adopted and the company that he kept. There was plenty to go through. Ever since he was elected as a Labour councillor for Haringey, in North London, in 1974, and later, as the M.P. for Islington North, in 1983, Corbyn has been the kind of politician who shows up to a pro-Sandinista rally on his bicycle, stays late in the House of Commons to protest the removal of Tamil asylum seekers, or sits through a sleepy Saturday conference about abolishing nuclear weapons.

More than 100 Westminster constituencies that voted to leave the EU have now switched their support to Remain, according to a stark new analysis seen by the Observer.

In findings that could have a significant impact on the parliamentary battle of Brexit later this year, the study concludes that most seats in Britain now contain a majority of voters who want to stay in the EU.

TEL AVIV, Israel — Members of Israel’s Arab minority led a mass protest in central Tel Aviv on Saturday night against a contentious new law that critics say marginalizes the state’s non-Jewish citizens.

The rally marked further fallout from the explosive Nation-State law and came a week after thousands of Druze, also members of the Arab minority, packed the same city square last week.

Tens of thousands gathered in the Romanian capital Bucharest on Saturday for a second straight day of demonstrations after more than 450 people were hurt and around 30 arrested in a huge anti-corruption protest on Friday.

Police came in for criticism after they used water cannons and teargas to disperse protesters calling on the leftwing government to resign. Many demonstrators needed treatment after inhaling pepper spray and teargas, while others suffered blows, hospital sources said. About 30 police were also injured, 11 of whom were taken to hospital.

A confidential report by Israeli military police investigators seen by The Intercept explains how a tragic series of mistakes by air force, naval, and intelligence officers led to an airstrike in which four Palestinian boys playing on a beach in Gaza in 2014 were killed by missiles launched from an armed drone.

Testimony from the officers involved in the attack, which has been concealed from the public until now, confirms for the first time that the children — four cousins ages 10 and 11 — were pursued and killed by drone operators who somehow mistook them, in broad daylight, for Hamas militants.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke by phone with Vladimir Putin to discuss “trade and economic cooperation,” the Kremlin said Friday, as the Turkish lira tumbled and Donald Trump said he would ramp up tarriffs against Ankara.

The statement will fuel speculation that Erdoğan is moving closer to Russia as relations worsen between Turkey and the United States, even though both countries are NATO members.

A former Scottish Labour leader has accused Jeremy Corbyn of being “arrogant” and “inept” in his handling of the row over anti-Semitism which has engulfed the party.

Jim Murphy has taken out a full page advert in the Glasgow edition of the Jewish Telegraph to offer an apology to British Jews and to accuse Corbyn of failing to do enough to throw anti-Semites out of his party.

The statement will fuel speculation that Erdoğan is moving closer to Russia as relations worsen between Turkey and the United States, even though both countries are NATO members.

More than half a million Venezuelans have crossed into Ecuador this year as part of one of the largest mass migrations in Latin American history, the United Nations said on Friday.

About 547,000 citizens of the crisis-stricken South American country have entered Ecuador since January – mostly through its northern border with Colombia – to escape rampant crime and political violence, a collapsing economy and severe shortages of food and medicines.

Mohamed Bin Salman is at it again. The yacht-loving Renaissance art collector who tried to pull the wool over the eyes of the American elite this spring is a serial diplomatic disaster.

Bin Salman’s plans for a transition of Saudi Arabia from being an oil giant to being a financial hub depend heavily on international confidence and investment. Those plans have crashed and burned, in large part because Bin Salman is like a young bearded Donald Trump, erratic and alternately angry and foolish. Foreign Direct Investment in Saudi Arabia collapsed in the past year, as Bin Salman scared investors off with his various rampages. His hopes for an IPO of the Saudi Aramco petroleum company have receded. Electric cars and renewables are coming on fast (renewables just hit a terawatt globally), and the lion’s share of Saudi Arabia’s economy depends on an increasingly worthless petroleum.

The biggest threat to our democracy that nobody is talking about is the real possibility of a rogue Constitutional convention – empowering extremists to radically reshape the Constitution, our laws, and our country.

If just a few more states sign on to what’s called an “Article V convention” for a balanced budget amendment, there’s no limit to the damage they might do.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia would consider any U.S. move to curb the operations of Russian banks or their foreign currency dealings a declaration of economic war, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday.

The United States announced a new round of sanctions on Wednesday targeting Russia that pushed the ruble to two-year lows and sparked a wider sell-off over fears Russia was locked in a spiral of never-ending sanctions.

Argentina’s Senate Thursday morning rejected a measure to legalize abortion up to 14 weeks. The final vote, 38 to 31 with two abstentions, deals a heavy blow to a grassroots movement that has long tried to legalize abortion.

About 60 percent of residents supported the measure to legalize abortion countrywide, according to Argentina’s Amnesty International director Mariela Belski.

Russia’s delegation to the international chemical weapons watchdog said on Thursday that the West was acting as a prosecutor, judge and executioner in the case of the poisoning of a former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal.

“Collective West in the so-called #Novichok drama acts as a prosecutor, judge and hangman at the same time. Why should (Russia) prove its innocence and not the other way round?” the delegation to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons wrote on its official Twitter account.

Original Article
Source: rawstory.com
Author: Reuters

A month to save Corbyn’s Labour

LONDON — The walls are closing in on Jeremy Corbyn.

The U.K. Labour leader has less than a month to back down in his dispute with the Jewish community over the definition of anti-Semitism or face a potentially catastrophic rupture in the party which could see a number of his MPs resign in protest, some of his closest and most influential allies said.

According to two senior Labour figures, two of the power bases behind the Labour leader — the campaign group Momentum and a major trade union — are prepared to break ranks with Corbyn over the dispute. That would mark the most significant split in support for Corbyn from at least part of his base since his unexpected rise to power in 2015.

For many years it struck me as amusing rather than ominous that the place where I first spent any time with Boris Johnson was a Munich beerhall. We were journalists covering a defence summit in the 1990s. We’d both filed our pieces – he to the Telegraph, me to the Guardian – and we were bored. So, along with the man from the Times, we took a taxi into the city centre and spent the rest of the afternoon drinking beer and chatting. Johnson made a lot of good jokes, and one or two rather loud and tasteless ones about Hitler and Munich beerhalls.

Saudi Arabia is selling Canadian assets as the kingdom escalates its response to Ottawa’s criticism of the arrest of a female activist.

The Saudi central bank and state pension funds have instructed their overseas asset managers to dispose of their Canadian equities, bonds and cash holdings “no matter the cost”, two people with direct knowledge of the orders said.

Facebook revealed on July 31 that it had discovered a 17-month-long influence campaign to sow political divisiveness on its network, an effort that bore the hallmarks of the Kremlin-connected Internet Research Agency.

Two days later at the White House, the nation’s top national security officials said Russia is conducting a pervasive campaign to weaken our democracy and influence this year’s midterm elections.

A Cincinnati police officer is now being investigated by his own department after he deployed a stun gun against an 11-year-old girl who was allegedly shoplifting at a grocery store.

USA Today reports that the officer, who was off-duty at the time of the incident, was working at his second job as a security guard at a local Kroger in the neighborhood of Spring Grove Village.

The number of anti-Semitic crimes in Germany increased substantially in the first six months of this year compared to the same period in 2017.

According to figures from the government, 401 such crimes were reported in the first half of the year, a rise of more than 10 percentage points. Most of the offences — 349 — had a far-right motive. Twelve of the 401 were classed as violent crimes.

LONDON — Jeremy Corbyn has done it again — he’s confounded everyone’s expectations. This time, he’s done it not by winning the Labour leadership but in his latest bid to win the general election itself. He has hired the Guardian columnist Seumas Milne to be his director of communications.

This is a man who many in the British media — the very people Corbyn’s team will need to reach out to, after all — regard as being as close to an unreconstructed Stalinist as you can get in 21st century Britain. Holding the sorts of positions Milne does takes serious commitment these days, considering the Soviet archives have long been opened and Communism has gone the way of feudalism as a viable, or indeed ethical, political system.

WASHINGTON — It is a testament to the enervated state of the European left that Jeremy Corbyn could be viewed as some sort of savior. And yet that is how an increasing number of desperate social democrats appear to see the hard-left leader of Britain’s Labour Party.

It’s easy enough to understand why: Despite being in opposition, Labour is relatively strong compared to nearly every other social democratic party in Europe, where the left is in freefall and center-right and far-right parties dominate.

OTTAWA — Kinder Morgan Canada says expanding the Trans Mountain pipeline could cost the federal government as much as $1.9 billion beyond the company's original construction estimate and take 12 months longer to finish.

The figures are included in documents the company filed Tuesday with the United States Security and Exchange Commission related to its plan to sell the pipeline to the Canadian government for $4.5 billion.

In recent decades, Americans have become increasingly angry at the federal government, anger that helped propel Donald Trump to the White House. And yet, more Americans than ever are benefiting from government social programs, many of which the Trump administration is actively working to destroy. Political scientist Suzanne Mettler calls this paradox “the government-citizen disconnect.” Such is the title of Mettler’s new book, which draws on original survey data to explore how the use of 21 federal social policies is connected to Americans’ attitudes about government. She finds that 96 percent of Americans have used at least one of these policies. But partly because of policy design—which makes means-tested programs for the poor more visible than policies for the rich hidden in the tax code—many Americans don’t recognize the value of government social programs. Critically, wealthier Americans—who tend to exert more influence over national politics—often don’t see themselves as benefiting from government support.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. ― The Associated Press reporter on the phone with Jalane Schmidt wanted two voices for her article: One would be Jason Kessler, the white supremacist who organized the Unite the Right rally here last year that left one dead and dozens injured. The other, the reporter hoped, would be Schmidt herself, a Black Lives Matter activist and associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia.

The story would be a debate, of sorts. Both sides would be represented.

The pandemonium started with a tweet, as so many political uproars seem to do these days.

“Canada is gravely concerned about additional arrests of civil society and women’s rights activists in Saudi Arabia, including Samar Badawi,” said a tweet from the Canadian government’s official foreign-policy account last Friday. “We urge the Saudi authorities to immediately release them and all other peaceful human rights activists.” Canada was responding to the arrest days earlier of two activists, the latest targets of a Saudi government crackdown on women’s rights campaigners, more than a dozen of whom have been arrested since May.

The U.S. electricity grid is hard to defend because of its enormous size and heavy dependency on digital communication and computerized control software. The number of potential targets is growing as “internet of things” devices, such as smart meters, solar arrays and household batteries, connect to smart grid systems.

As researchers of grid security, we believe that current security standards mandated by federal regulations provide sufficient protection against observed threats. But recent incidents demonstrate the ongoing challenge of ensuring everyone follows the guidelines, which themselves must change over time to keep up with technological shifts.

Months of low-level conflict between Israel and Gaza seem to be reaching a boiling point — and experts worry the two sides may be hurtling toward all-out war.

Since March, thousands of Gazans have been protesting nearly every week at the Israeli border. They’re calling for the “right of return” for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and their descendants who fled or were displaced from their homes after the creation of the state of Israel, as well as an end to Israel’s crippling 12-year land, sea, and air blockade of Gaza.

PARIS — In this “silly season,” when real news takes a summer holiday, two wrong ideas are vying for the attention of Britons bored stiff by the interminable feuding of their political class over future relations with the European Union.

One is that the U.K. can afford and should prepare for a “no-deal” Brexit, crashing out of the EU next March without a withdrawal agreement. The other is that Brexit can still be averted by holding a second referendum, dubbed a “People’s Vote” to avoid the impression that citizens are being invited to resit a failed exam and get the answer right next time.

A domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas, shifting currents and dying forests could tilt the Earth into a “hothouse” state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile, a group of leading climate scientists has warned.

This grim prospect is sketched out in a journal paper that considers the combined consequences of 10 climate change processes, including the release of methane trapped in Siberian permafrost and the impact of melting ice in Greenland on the Antarctic.

Wells Fargo is making things right for its customers, building a better banking experience, identifying and fixing its problems, and becoming better and stronger each day. This is what the company’s website says, anyway.

However, Wells Fargo’s actual banking practices continue to be at odds with the increasingly cheerful and apologetic tone of their advertising copy. This week, a new regulatory filing revealed that hundreds of customers — 625 in total — were denied loans and, in many cases, foreclosed upon because a company computer glitch marked “certain accounts” between April 2010 and October 2015 as undergoing the foreclosure process. The company said in the filing that it set aside $8 million to pay off those affected. It later issued a statement saying it was “very sorry,” according to CNN.

CARACAS, Venezuela — Investigators searched a blackened apartment building Sunday where witnesses described seeing a drone and then hearing a thunderous explosion in what President Nicolas Maduro called an assassination attempt by the embattled nation’s opposition.

Authorities said they have arrested six people suspected in Saturday’s failed attack with two explosives-laden drones.

OTTAWA — Saudi Arabia said on Sunday that it is ordering Canada's ambassador to leave the country and freezing all new trade and investment transactions with Canada in a spat over human rights.

"We consider the Canadian ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia persona non grata and order him to leave within the next 24 hours,'' Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry said on Twitter.

The ministry added that Saudi Arabia is recalling its ambassador to Canada in a dispute that appears to be over a tweet on Friday from Global Affairs Canada.

Georgia has only one highway. It cuts through the country horizontally in the middle, connecting its east to the west.

Any hostile act on E60 would pose an existential threat to the whole nation, disrupting its food supply route.

And Georgians are well aware of the potential consequences of such a scenario. It's exactly what happened just 10 years ago.

Bangladesh police arrested an award-winning photographer for "provocative comments" allegedly made in media interviews about student protests that have gripped the country for more than a week.

At least 20 plain-clothes officers picked up Shahidul Alam, 63, at his Dhaka home late on Sunday, hours after his comments were broadcast on Al Jazeera.

Democracy gone Astray