Democracy gone Astray: Friday, September 22, 2023

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, September 22, 2023

How democracies fail: Anne Applebaum on the rise of authoritarianism

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," Leo Tolstoy wrote in the opening lines of his 1877 classic, Anna Karenina. He was referring to the myriad ways that marriages can fail, but Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum believes the quote can also apply to politics.

Her latest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, examines how some of the western world's brightest examples of democratic success stories have descended into far-right autocracy. She explores the rise of populist figures like Viktor Orban in Hungary, Donald Trump in the U.S. and her own former friend and colleague, Boris Johnson in the UK.

Turkey’s parliament is preparing to vote on a bill that would effectively block sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube unless they comply with strict new regulations, as Ankara significantly steps up its efforts to control social media content.

The draft legislation would force social media companies with more than 1 million daily users in Turkey to establish a formal presence in the country or assign an in-country representative who would be legally accountable to the Turkish authorities.

Earlier this week, Chinese leader Xi Jinping held a rare meeting in Beijing with business leaders. Admitting that the Covid-19 pandemic had a “huge impact” on the country’s economy, Xi used a Chinese idiom to assure his listeners.

“While the green hills last, there will be wood to burn,” he said. “If we maintain our strategy … we will find opportunity in crisis and turbulence. The Chinese people will surely prevail over all difficulties and challenges ahead”.

Many of the world’s biggest fashion brands and retailers are complicit in the forced labour and human rights violations being perpetrated on millions of Uighur people in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, says a coalition of more than 180 human rights groups.

There is mounting global outrage over the atrocities being committed against the Uighur population in the region, including torture, forced separation and the compulsory sterilisation of Uighur women.

Tory ministers and intelligence agencies did not do enough to investigate or protect the UK from possible Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum, MPs have said in a long-awaited report.

The Russia report, compiled by parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC), was finally released on Tuesday after months of delay.

But No.10 swiftly rejected one of its main recommendations, which was to publish an assessment of whether Moscow tried to influence the EU vote.

At the genocide memorial centre outside Srebrenica, thousands of simple white gravestones stretch across the gently inclined hillside for as far as the eye can see.

Nearby, over a number of days in July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces systematically murdered around 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys. It was the worst crime of the Bosnian war, and remains the only massacre on European soil since the second world war to be ruled a genocide.

Books written by prominent Hong Kong democracy activists have started to disappear from the city’s libraries, online records show, days after Beijing imposed a new national security law on the finance hub.

Among the authors whose titles are no longer available are Joshua Wong, one of the city’s most prominent young activists, and Tanya Chan, a well known pro-democracy lawmaker.

The Kremlin and its supporters have won a controversial vote to amend the constitution and reset Vladimir Putin’s term limits, potentially allowing him to rule as president until 2036. Critics have challenged the result, saying that the voting was rigged to produce a blow-out win.

The ad hoc vote, which did not fulfil legal criteria to be classed as a referendum, saw 77.92% of voters endorse constitutional amendments, with 21.26% against the changes, after all the ballots were counted. Turnout was nearly 68%, the election commission said.

A new Hong Kong security law came into effect on Wednesday that will punish crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces with up to life in prison, heralding a more authoritarian era for China’s freest city.

Hong Kong authorities threw a security blanket across the territory early on Wednesday, the 23rd anniversary of the former British colony’s handover to Chinese rule, only hours after Beijing imposed the new legislation.

Vladimir Putin has exhorted fellow Russians to vote for a slew of constitutional amendments that would also let him stay in office until 2036.

Standing before a new statue commemorating the efforts of Soviet soldiers during the second world war on the day before voting ends, Putin appealed to ordinary Russians’ patriotism and their desire for stability without mentioning the stark political implications the vote would have by resetting his term limits and allowing him to seek re-election twice more as president.

Plans by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to begin annexing parts of the occupied Palestinian territories from as early as Wednesday appeared in disarray as the country’s alternate prime minister, Benny Gantz, suggested annexation would have to wait while the country dealt with its coronavirus crisis.

Gantz told a White House envoy, Avi Berkowitz – who is in Israel for talks on the issue – that a 1 July deadline was neither “sacred” nor urgent in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. Israeli media widely suggested that the timing could slip beyond Wednesday.

The drugmaker Gilead has set the price for its coronavirus treatment remdesivir at $390 per vial for the U.S. government and developed countries.

That puts the price of a five-day treatment course at $2,340 per patient for people enrolled in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid — but private insurers will pay $520 per vial, or $3,120 for five days of treatment, the company said Monday. The U.S. is the only country for which Gilead has set tiered pricing.

OAKLAND, Calif. (Reuters) - An incorrect facial recognition match led to the first known wrongful arrest in the United States based on the increasingly used technology, civil liberties activists alleged in a complaint to Detroit police on Wednesday.

Robert Williams spent over a day in custody in January after face recognition software matched his driver’s license photo to surveillance video of someone shoplifting, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan (ACLU) said in the complaint. In a video shared by ACLU, Williams says officers released him after acknowledging “the computer” must have been wrong.

DRESDEN, Germany — When Vladimir Putin first arrived in Dresden as a mid-level KGB officer in 1985, East Germany was already living on borrowed time. On the verge of bankruptcy, the country was surviving with the help of a billion-Deutsche Mark loan from West Germany, while voices of dissent were on the rise. All around the eastern bloc, the mood of protest was increasing amid the misery and shortages of the planned economy and the brutality of state law-enforcement agencies.

CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez, an Afro-Latino reporter for the TV network, was arrested Friday morning while covering the Minneapolis uprising, which took place in response to the police killing of George Floyd earlier this week.

Jimenez was cooperative with the police prior to and during his arrest, but officers did not respond to his questions about his arrest, according to video of the event. The camera crew working alongside Jimenez was also arrested.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” CNN anchor John Berman, who watched the events unfold in real time back in the studio, said.

Today, in 2020, it's George Floyd in Minneapolis, killed by a police officer kneeling on his throat during an arrest for the alleged offense of "forgery." Cell phone cameras captured the whole thing. Images of a handcuffed black man lying face-down on the street, under the knee of a white police officer, quickly flew around the world. Rioting broke out on Wednesday and Thursday nights. Stores were looted. Buildings burned. Early on Friday morning, fires burned at the Third Police Precinct in Minneapolis, where the four officers present at the death of George Floyd were assigned.

Hong Kong police arrested at least 360 people during day-long protests and skirmishes across the city, as residents railed against controversial legislation aimed at bringing the territory further under Beijing’s control.

Police fired pepper-spray bullets into lunchtime crowds as people shouted slogans. Officers stopped and searched residents, including students, and rounded up suspected protesters, forcing them to sit in rows on the ground.

MILAN — Women are overwhelmingly on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic. And yet, in Italy, when it comes to engineering an exit from lockdown, they’ve had a hard time getting heard.

Women make up two-thirds of Italy’s health workers, 80 percent of cashiers in supermarkets, 90 percent of home care workers and nearly 82 percent of teachers. But very few have a seat at the table where key decisions are being made about the policies to navigate the country’s reopening.

As governments across the globe expand mass surveillance programs in the name of public health, activist and whistleblower Edward Snowden warns that we are watching them build "the architecture of oppression." Perhaps more insidious are new measures that simply expand the power and discretion of the police to "enforce social distancing" in the name of flattening the curve — many of which were passed swiftly in just the past few weeks.

Jhonna Porter felt a duty to alert her co-workers to a potentially dangerous change on the fifth floor of Los Angeles’ West Hills Hospital. Without much notice, the administration had begun converting the floor into a COVID-19 unit on March 20.

“The rumors are true,” Porter, a registered nurse, wrote that evening in a private Facebook group used by the floor’s staff. “Be careful.”

Porter, whose department usually works with cardiac patients, didn’t think the hospital was providing staff on the newly converted floor with adequate personal protection equipment. She posted a plea for donations on her personal Facebook page on March 24.

Banks that processed the small-business loans allocated by Congress in the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill made $10 billion in fees, according to financial records obtained by NPR.

The fees were earned while processing loans that require less review than regular bank loans and have little risk for banks.

All federally insured banks and credit unions could process the loans before they are approved by the Small Business Administration (SBA).

They're still baking at the Factory of Happiness.

Staff in face masks sprinkle nuts and berries on to buns and pipe chocolate into pastries, but only a handful are left working the production line and their creations are for takeaway only now.

The coronavirus lockdown has forced the firm to close its chain of family-friendly cafes, leaving the business struggling to stay afloat. But its owner says the state isn't holding out any lifelines.

Laughter has been banned indefinitely during the pandemic, by order of all but a few holdout governors, on the unanimous recommendation of health experts.

Many people, however, found it challenging to abide by the rules early in the crisis, when libertarian Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky announced that he had caught coronavirus (or, more precisely, that coronavirus had caught him). They had to conceal their amusement by directing laughter and potential airborne germs into bent elbows.

What kind of sick person is entertained by the sickness of another person?

Machiavelli’s words, borrowed by Rahm Emanuel during the 2008 financial crisis when he was Barack Obama’s chief of staff, offer a stark warning about the COVID-19 pandemic: it kills human beings and economies on a massive scale, but it also puts democracy itself in mortal danger.

Everyone can appreciate that things like war, insurrection or disease may require extraordinary powers to manage the risk. President George W. Bush assumed police state surveillance powers over his own citizens in the wake of 9/11. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared the War Measures Act to deal with the FLQ crisis in Quebec. And president Franklin D. Roosevelt placed 100,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps during the Second World War.

By now, the early history of Covid-19 is well known, if not clear in its details. The virus was first detected somewhere around Wuhan, in Hubei province, then appears to have entered the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, from where it infected many others. Doctors in Wuhan first noticed the novel coronavirus in December and began exchanging urgent warnings. Local government authorities set out to silence them; some were detained and made to sign documents admitting wrongdoing.

On Friday morning, doctors, nurses, and other employees of Partners HealthCare, the largest health care system in Massachusetts, received an email from the company informing them they would not be receiving hazard or crisis pay for dealing with coronavirus cases. The letter was signed by the CEO, who makes at least $2 million a year and perhaps up to $6 million.

When the coronavirus began to spread, Mongolia took sensible precautions. It halted border crossings from China, with which it shares a 2,877-mile border. Mongolia also imposed travel bans on people from South Korea and Japan, the other epicenters of the pandemic at the time. Yet the virus nonetheless found its way to Mongolia, where the first infected person — known as the “index case” — was a Frenchman who had come to the country from France via Moscow.

The world is now paying a frightful price for a historical accident. It is this: a highly disruptive and novel virus happened to emerge first in China, a high-tech surveillance state that, despite the experience of SARS, remains allergic to the truth and fearful of transparency.

Compounding the cost to humanity is China’s influence over the World Health Organization, which has whitewashed its public health analysis and prescriptions at this crucial moment.

Let’s rewind this calamitous falling of dominos.

Faced with the coronavirus threat, Chinese authorities, according to comprehensive reports by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, suppressed whistleblowers, ignored critical evidence and responded so tardily to the outbreak that they moved to compensate for their failures with a draconian lockdown.

If the slow-on-the-uptake response to COVID-19 by the White House seems a little familiar to you, you're definitely not imagining it. As if we're caught in some sort of "Groundhog Day" loop in the time-space continuum, we've absolutely been here before. Cue "I Got You Babe" on the alarm clock.

I realize too many Americans have gnat-like attention spans and even shorter memories, so I'll be specific. Beyond several details, the Trump presidency is looking an awful lot like the second term of the George W. Bush presidency. To his credit, Mike Pence hasn't shot anyone in the face, but we're seeing a traffic jam of similar events: a crisis with a growing death toll, a painfully tone-deaf, slow and inept government response, a financial meltdown and an out-of-control budget deficit. (Trump promised to eliminate the deficit.) Only now, it's all happening at the same time.

St Paul, Alberta, Canada – A map of embedded sorrow seems to crisscross the weary face of 55-year-old Howard McGillvery. But when he smiles – a close to toothless grin – there is a warmth in his dark brown eyes; a sparkling of optimism and unpretentiousness that draws people to him.

He is known in the town of St Paul, Alberta, as the leader of the “Back Streeters”- a name the homeless and transient here use for themselves.

St Paul looks like many other prairie towns built primarily on agriculture and the service industry. There is only one main street, about three kilometres long. But it has the staple Canadian coffee franchise, Tim Hortons, typical “mom and pop” stores and a small retro-looking movie theatre. Outside the town’s post office, a bronze statue of a First Nations man in traditional garb holds out a peace pipe.

But there has not always been much in the way of peace here.

MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin has backed a proposal to “reset” the two-term presidential limit once planned constitutional changes are adopted, meaning he could remain in power until 2036.

In a surprise speech in parliament on Tuesday, Russia’s leader of two decades tempered the fevered speculation about his future that began when he called for constitutional changes in January. Debate about what position Putin could hold once his current term ends in 2024 now appears redundant as he has signaled he will stay in the Kremlin.

Beijing (AP) — For decades, the Uighur imam was a bedrock of his farming community in China’s far west. On Fridays, he preached Islam as a religion of peace. On Sundays, he treated the sick with free herbal medicine. In the winter, he bought coal for the poor.

But as a Chinese government mass detention campaign engulfed Memtimin Emer’s native Xinjiang region three years ago, the elderly imam was swept up and locked away, along with all three of his sons living in China.

News came from Moscow overnight that the Russian government had resigned, followed by the announcement that Putin would be recommending the current prime minister Dmitry Medvedev be replaced by the head of the tax office, Mikhail Mishustin.

Why has the government resigned, and what does it mean for the future?

Prior to the government’s resignation, President Vladimir Putin announced a series of proposed changes to the constitution to be placed before the people in a future referendum. In announcing the government’s resignation, Medvedev hinted that their resignation was to facilitate the progression of the proposed constitutional reforms.

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a constitutional overhaul Wednesday to boost the powers of parliament and the Cabinet, a move signalling Putin’s intention to carve out a new position for himself after his current term ends.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev submitted his resignation hours after Putin discussed the constitutional amendments during his state of the nation address.

The Russian leader thanked Medvedev for his service but said the prime minister’s Cabinet had failed to fulfill all of its objectives. In televised remarks, Putin said Medvedev would take up a new position as a deputy head of the presidential Security Council.

Medvedev, a longtime close associate of Putin’s, has served as Russia’s prime minister since 2012. He spent four years before that as president in 2008-2012, becoming a placeholder when Putin had to switch into the prime minister’s office because of constitutional term limits on the presidency.

Vladimir Putin has embarked on a sweeping reshuffle of Russia’s leadership, accepting the resignation of Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev and proposing constitutional amendments that would enable him to hold onto power even after leaving the presidency in 2024.

In a surprise move, Russia’s government said it would resign in full just hours after Putin announced plans for a national referendum that would shift power away from a successor to the presidency.

Recently, nonviolent Palestinian activist Kifah Adara drew water from the Ein Albeida spring near her West Bank village of Al-Tuwani for the first time in 15 years. The spring is a natural water source that was used by Palestinian communities in the region for generations, but a decade and a half ago, nearby Israeli settlers started swimming in the spring, which dirtied the water and made it unsuitable for drinking. For years, due to settler violence and intimidation tactics, Palestinians couldn’t access the spring at all.

Talks in Russia aimed at agreeing on an unconditional and open-ended ceasefire in Libya failed to achieve a breakthrough on Monday and have been adjourned for the night.

The head of the UN-supported Government of National Accord (GNA), Fayez al-Sarraj, signed a draft ceasefire agreement, while Khalifa Haftar – commander of the eastern-based Libyan National Army (LNA) – requested more time to consider it.

The EU can step up or sit back down, but Russia and Turkey have taken charge — at least when it comes to Libya.

Minutes after European Council President Charles Michel vowed Wednesday that the EU would “step up” its efforts to halt “worrying military escalations” in Libya, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced a cease-fire to begin at midnight Sunday.

The Russian government just announced its Avangard hypersonic missile to the world—intensifying the dispute about the future of U.S. arms control agreements with Moscow. The debate playing out among national security professionals, in the media and in select precincts of Congress is over whether to extend New START Treaty, a nuclear arms reduction agreement between the U.S. and Russia that was signed and ratified in 2010 and is up for renewal in 2021.

The problem with the squabble over the fate of New START, however, is that it assumes only two potential courses of action: either extend the treaty for five years unconditionally or allow it to expire in the hope of pursuing a more far reaching pact. Members of the disarmament community are pushing for the former option while some defense hawks have expressed interest in the latter.

Poland’s prime minister has launched a furious response to claims by Vladimir Putin that Poland was partially responsible for the outbreak of the second world war.

It is the latest episode in a bitter conflict over historical memory that is likely to intensify as the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazism approaches next May.

Mateusz Morawiecki issued a four-page statement on Sunday accusing the Russian president of “repeated lies” over the history of the conflict. Earlier, the Polish foreign ministry said Putin’s words resembled “propaganda from the time of Stalinist totalitarianism”.

Russia has deployed its first hypersonic nuclear-capable missiles, with Vladimir Putin boasting that it puts his country in a class of its own.

The president described the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which can fly at 27 times the speed of sound, as a technological breakthrough comparable to the 1957 Soviet launch of the first satellite.

Putin has said Russia’s new generation of nuclear weapons can hit almost any point in the world and evade a US-built missile shield, though some western experts have questioned how advanced some of the weapons programmes are.

MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia has got a strong edge in designing new weapons and that it has become the only country in the world to deploy hypersonic weapons.

Speaking at a meeting with top military brass, Putin said that for the first time in history Russia is now leading the world in developing an entire new class of weapons unlike in the past when it was catching up with the United States.

The Russian leader noted that during Cold War times, the Soviet Union was behind the United States in designing the atomic bomb and building strategic bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

On November 6, 2016, the Sunday before the presidential election that sent Donald Trump to the White House, a worker in the elections office in Durham County, North Carolina, encountered a problem.

There appeared to be an issue with a crucial bit of software that handled the county’s list of eligible voters. To prepare for Election Day, staff members needed to load the voter data from a county computer onto 227 USB flash drives, which would then be inserted into laptops that precinct workers would use to check in voters. The laptops would serve as electronic poll books, cross-checking each voter as he or she arrived at the polls.

With less to a week to go before the United Kingdom heads to the polls on Thursday for a nearly unprecedented December parliamentary election, the race has been rocked by suspicions that Russia was involved in spreading secret leaked records that have become central to the debate. The chain of events raises the possibility that, just as in the United States in 2016, online forces linked to the Kremlin are working to shape the information landscape as a national election of enormous consequence unfolds.

The watch towers, double-locked doors and video surveillance in the Chinese camps are there “to prevent escapes.” Uighurs and other minorities held inside are scored on how well they speak the dominant Mandarin language and follow strict rules on everything down to bathing and using the toilet, scores that determine if they can leave.

“Manner education” is mandatory, but “vocational skills improvement” is offered only after a year in the camps.

Voluntary job training is the reason the Chinese government has given for detaining more than a million ethnic minorities, most of them Muslims. But a classified blueprint leaked to a consortium of news organizations shows the camps are instead precisely what former detainees have described: Forced ideological and behavioral re-education centers run in secret.

As the 2020 election race heats up, U.S. politics, the nation’s political culture as a whole, and even the future of organized human life are at a crossroads. Another four years of Donald Trump would deliver nightmarish blows to democracy and social rights, handing an unthinkable mandate to a president who has become notorious for undermining virtually everything of decent value to humanity.

Yet, the question remains as to whether this dangerous man will actually be defeated in 2020. At the Democratic debate on Wednesday night, we witnessed a cacophony that did little to convey the ideological elements and political values that define the Democratic Party in the age of authoritarian neoliberalism and plutocracy. Intellectual shallowness and opportunism were prevalent throughout the debate. Pete Buttigieg’s meager attempts to parry questions on his lack of support among Black voters attracted the most buzz. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren’s reasonable and anything but radical “wealth tax” proposal received little attention because it remains an anathema to the political establishment of the Democratic Party, as do Bernie Sanders’s universal health care and climate change policies.

The internal workings of a vast chain of Chinese internment camps used to detain at least a million people from the nation’s Muslim minorities are laid out in leaked Communist Party documents published on Sunday.

The China Cables, a cache of classified government papers, appear to provide the first official glimpse into the structure, daily life and ideological framework behind centres in north-western Xinjiang region that have provoked international condemnation.

Swedish authorities have discontinued an investigation into a rape allegation against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, after a review of the evidence.

The deputy chief prosecutor, Eva-Marie Persson, said the complainant’s evidence was deemed credible and reliable, but that after nearly a decade, witnesses’ memories had faded.

Before he traveled back to his home in California for the 2017-’18 winter break, the University of Pennsylvania sophomore had been elected managing editor of a campus cooking publication called Penn Appétit. It’s a position he ended up never filling.

On the morning of January 2, his parents noticed that he’d left their house in the Orange County community of Foothill Ranch and tried to contact him. When he didn’t respond, they checked his Snapchat account and found messages between their son and Sam Woodward, a former high school classmate. The two had planned to hang out at a local park.

Relatives of foreign citizens in Russian prisons have accused Moscow of engaging in hostage diplomacy and say they are concerned about their family members being used as bargaining chips to exchange for Russians detained abroad.

The brother of Paul Whelan, an American arrested on spying charges 11 months ago who returns to court on Tuesday, said he believed Russia was drawing out his case to “see what they can get from the United States for him”.