Democracy gone Astray: Monday, October 02, 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.]

Monday, October 02, 2023

Biden Labor Department moves to expand overtime pay for millions

The Biden administration on Wednesday proposed giving raises to more than 3 million workers by making them eligible for overtime pay.

The move by the Department of Labor comes more than eight years after the Obama administration embarked upon a similar effort to boost wages by rewriting overtime eligibility rules under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Workers making less than about $55,000 annually would be automatically entitled to time-and-a-half pay under DOL’s proposal, up from $35,568 set in 2019 under former President Donald Trump. The Obama-era plan initially proposed setting a $50,440 floor before settling on $47,476 annually — though a federal judge in Texas blocked the rule from taking effect.

Joe Biden is a little tired.

That shouldn’t be surprising. Biden is, after all, the president of the United States. He has a demanding job, an intense travel schedule and a re-election campaign looming, Most presidents, one would assume, are tired a lot of the time.

But Biden’s tiredness is one “bombshell” from a forthcoming biography of the 46th president by the journalist Franklin Foer.

Whenever Nello Scavo returns from Ukraine, he is overcome with frustration. As a war correspondent for the Italian national newspaper Avvenire, he knows the first question people will ask him is: “Is it really as bad as they say?”

“Sometimes I think that only if I come back badly injured will people start taking me seriously,” he told the Guardian. “It’s as if they don’t believe that Russia is massacring civilians. The problem is that Vladimir Putin has always enjoyed wide sympathy in Italian politics and public opinion, with the Kremlin always enjoying effective propaganda here.”

A critical juncture has been reached in Ukraine’s months-long counteroffensive. After weeks of difficult battles, Ukrainian forces have slowly edged south in the Zaporizhia region, taking hamlet after hamlet as Russian forces try to keep them at bay.

The counteroffensive in the south is just one part of a significant push along a vast front line, stretching from Vasilivka in Zaporizhia to the city of Donetsk in the eastern region of Donbas and up to Bakhmut, a city north of Donetsk to the outskirts of Kupiansk in northeastern Ukraine. This does not even include the strikes and raids on Crimea and from across the Dnipro River from the city of Kherson to the Black Sea.

She has extended the invitation multiple times but has yet to set a date for the welcome party. “You are part of our family, your future is in our union, and our union is not complete without you,” Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, last year told Ukraine and the nine other countries queuing patiently for EU membership.

But as the prospect of Ukraine in particular joining the bloc looms closer, EU leaders are asking if the EU is ready for enlargement.

A Palestinian driver has slammed his truck into soldiers at a busy checkpoint in the occupied West Bank, killing one of them before being shot dead, Israeli authorities have said, the latest bloodshed in a relentless cycle of violence to roil the region.

The violence came a day after Israeli police shot and killed a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who stabbed a man in a Jerusalem light-rail station and after Palestinian militants detonated a bomb near a convoy of Israeli troops escorting Jewish worshippers to a holy site in the West Bank, wounding four Israeli troops.

NEW YORK — Donald Trump fraudulently inflated his net worth by as much as $2.2 billion per year, New York officials said in court filings unsealed Wednesday ahead of his upcoming civil fraud trial.

The new estimates came in filings from the New York state attorney general’s office, which is suing Trump, some of his adult children and his business empire for falsifying his net worth in an effort to obtain favorable terms from banks and insurance companies. The trial is set to begin Oct. 2.

Ukraine has no chance of winning the war against Russia — and Donald Trump is the West’s only hope, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told controversial American TV host Tucker Carlson.

In an interview Tuesday, Orbán said that Kyiv’s victory against Moscow “is not just a misunderstanding. It is a lie. It’s impossible … [Ukrainians] will run out earlier … of soldiers than the Russians. What finally will count is boots on the ground and the Russians are far stronger.”

New U.S. intelligence shows North Korea and Russia are “actively advancing” high-level talks for additional weapons and other materials to assist Moscow’s brutal war in Ukraine, the Biden administration disclosed on Wednesday.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu recently traveled to North Korea to try to secure additional artillery ammunition, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters. Since that visit, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un have exchanged letters pledging to increase their cooperation.

Peter Navarro, a former senior White House adviser to former President Donald Trump, failed to prove that Trump asserted executive privilege to block him from testifying to the House Jan. 6 select committee, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta keeps on track Navarro’s Sept. 5 contempt-of-Congress trial, where he will face jurors on two charges that he defied the committee’s subpoena for testimony and documents related to Navarro’s role in Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.

Diesel, kerosene and other fuels refined from Russian crude are flooding into Europe, prompting Kyiv to call for tightening sanctions against Moscow.

In an interview with POLITICO, Oleg Ustenko, an economic adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, appealed for the EU, as well as the U.K. and the U.S., to close the "loophole" that allows third countries like India, China and Turkey to refine crude bought from Moscow's state energy firms into petrol, diesel and other products before selling them on without restrictions.

In response to a spate of coups by U.S.-trained military personnel in West Africa and the greater Sahel, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., has authored an amendment to the 2024 defense spending bill to collect information on trainees who overthrow their governments. It would require the Pentagon for the first time to inform Congress about U.S.-mentored mutineers, Gaetz told The Intercept in an exclusive interview.

Canada updated its U.S. travel advisory on Tuesday, warning Canadians traveling to the U.S. to be cautious due to state laws and policies targeting LGBTQ people.

The “Laws and Culture” section of Canada’s U.S. travel advisory provides information on dual citizenship, drugs, cannabis and other relevant topics for Canadian travelers visiting the U.S.

The website now includes a section for “2SLGBTQI+” travelers (two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and others), who make up a population of about 1 million in Canada.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is so angry he can hardly sip.

Cruz ― who has been in the headlines lately for repeatedly getting duped by fake stuff he saw on the internet ― said “these idiots” want people to limit drinking to two beers a week.

“That’s their guideline!” he said.

That’s not the guideline.

The past six months has brought a stream of bad news for China's economy: slow growth, record youth unemployment, low foreign investment, weak exports and currency, and a property sector in crisis.

US President Joe Biden described the world's second-largest economy as "a ticking time bomb", predicting growing discontent in the country.

China's leader Xi Jinping hit back, defending the "strong resilience, tremendous potential and great vitality" of the economy.

Rudy Giuliani has lost a civil lawsuit brought by two Georgia election workers after he failed to turn over discovery documents in the case, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

Judge Beryl Howell issued a default judgment ordering the former Donald Trump attorney to pay nearly $133,000 in sanctions. In a 57-page opinion, Howell admonished Giuliani’s failure to turn over the documents as “willful discovery misconduct.”

“Perhaps, he has made the calculation that his overall litigation risks are minimized by not complying with his discovery obligations in this case,” the judge wrote. “Whatever the reason, obligations are case specific and withholding required discovery in this case has consequences.”

The group of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ former clerks who signed on to a letter this week defending the justice from “attacks on his integrity, his character [and] his ethics” included one individual whose integrity has been drawn into serious question: John C. Eastman.

Eastman is accused of undermining the core of American democracy — free and fair elections — by scheming to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Prosecutors there charged him earlier this month as part of a sprawling racketeering case that also implicates former President Donald Trump.

To hear Donald Trump tell it, the fact that he keeps getting indicted by prosecutors is a boon to his reelection effort. “Any time they file an indictment, we go way up in the polls,” he said at a dinner shortly after he was charged by the Justice Department with attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

This counterintuitive claim is questionable on its face — if not demonstrably false upon close examination — but it is one among many dubious arguments that Trump and his allies have advanced in recent months as he has been confronted with four different prosecutions brought by the Justice Department, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and, most recently, the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office in Georgia.

Early last year, University of Baltimore law professor Kim Wehle raised an intriguing legal question in POLITICO Magazine concerning Donald Trump’s eligibility to run for elected office: Could the 14th Amendment, which prevented ex-Confederates from seeking office after the Civil War, also bar the former president from reclaiming office after his actions in the weeks following the 2020 presidential election?

Now, with Trump facing down his fourth criminal indictment — this time for his effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia — the idea is gaining traction. Earlier this month, a pair of conservative legal scholars affiliated with the Federalist Society — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — endorsed the theory in the New York Times. A recent piece in the Atlantic added two more voices to the chorus from across the ideological spectrum: Laurence Tribe, a liberal constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School, and retired conservative judge J. Michael Luttig both support the notion that the Constitution stands between Trump and the White House. It even came up during the first GOP debate this week, when former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said he would not “support somebody who’s been convicted of a serious felony or who is disqualified under our Constitution.”

Substack’s Josh Barro scored a palpable hit on Vivek Ramaswamy last week by capturing the presidential candidate’s imbecilic narcissism when he called him a “section guy,” that fellow student who dominates class discussion section with his “interpretations of the course material, and who will not ever, ever, ever shut up.”

The grist for Barro’s damnation was Ramaswamy’s scene-stealing performance in the first Republican debate. He was a human magnet, all right, but instead of attracting the positive attention of voters he repelled it with maximum, negative propulsion. Had there been loose iron filings scattered on the stage, the crowd would have suffered a million tiny shrapnel wounds.

As the United Auto Workers braces for a potentially historic strike in September, the union has taken a justifiably hard line in its negotiations with America’s Big Three automakers. The companies’ outsized profits and the more than ample reward structures for top executives at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis underscore the fruits of a period of industry prosperity from which 350,000 unionized auto workers have largely been excluded.

Why, for instance, the union asked, has GM CEO Mary Barra seen huge raises — earning $29 million in 2022 and over $200 million over the last nine years — while many auto workers still toil under a draconian two-tier wage system that pays new hires substantially less than old ones, inaugurated following GM’s 2009 bankruptcy and massive Washington bailout?

The Supreme Court’s public approval is back at record lows, and there is a common explanation: partisanship. The diagnosis is certainly understandable. Today’s court is extremely partisan by any measure, and it has lurched the law rightward on a host of important issues, from abortion to guns and voting rights to environmental law.

But what if this explanation is too simplistic?

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Rudy Giuliani is legally liable for defaming two Georgia election workers who became the subject of conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election that were amplified by Donald Trump in the final weeks of his presidency.

In an unsparing, 57-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell said Giuliani had flagrantly violated her orders to preserve and produce relevant evidence to the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, resulting in a “default” judgment against him. She also ordered him to pay Freeman and Moss “punitive” damages for failing to fulfill his obligations.

Donald Trump says he will lock up his political enemies if he is president again.

In an interview on Tuesday, the rightwing broadcaster Glenn Beck raised Trump’s famous campaign-trail vow to “lock up” Hillary Clinton, his opponent in 2016, a promise Trump did not fulfill in office.

Beck said: “Do you regret not locking [Clinton] up? And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?”

It is highly probable that we will never know precisely how or why Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, was killed. It is also highly probable that he was assassinated, most likely on the orders of Vladimir Putin, but possibly on the orders of his enemies in the Russian defence ministry, who had probably been dreaming of this moment for a long time and believed they could finally kill him with impunity.

Most western commentary on the assassination has focused on the fear of Putin that Prigozhin’s death will cause among the Russian elites, or on the underlying fragility it reveals in the Russian regime.

Debris from a large-scale Russian missile attack on Kyiv has killed two people and injured several more, in the largest air strike on the Ukrainian capital since spring.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Russia launched 28 missiles and 16 drones, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. Ukrainian air defense forces destroyed all missiles and 15 out of the 16 drones within the regions of Kyiv, Cherkasy, Odesa, Mykolaiv and Zhytomyr.

Ukrainian drones have attacked at least six regions deep within Russia, including an airfield where they destroyed military transport planes, in one of the largest-scale attacks on Russia in months.

A drone assault on the city of Pskov in north-western Russia damaged four IL-76 military cargo aircraft, Russian authorities said early on Wednesday, engulfing two of the planes in flames.

LAKE GENEVA, Wis. — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett told attendees at a judicial conference in Wisconsin on Monday that she welcomed public scrutiny of the court. But she stopped short of commenting on whether she thinks the court should change how it operates in the face of recent criticism.

Barrett did not offer any opinion, or speak directly about, recent calls for the justices to institute an official code of conduct.

The British parliament has for the first time referred to Taiwan as an "independent country" in an official document, breaking a political taboo as Foreign Secretary James Cleverly visits China this week.

The new language, adopted in a report published Wednesday by the influential foreign affairs committee of the House of Commons, risks a stinging backlash from Beijing and comes as Cleverly becomes the first top British envoy to visit Beijing in five years amid a frosty relationship.

President Joe Biden is offering one of his White House challengers hundreds of millions of dollars to spend in his state. The only problem: that opponent is refusing to take it.

The Inflation Reduction Act makes Florida eligible for some $350 million in energy efficiency incentives. But Gov. Ron DeSantis has rejected the funding and other measures, creating the most prominent blockade by any Republican governor against Biden’s economic agenda.

And there’s nothing the White House can do besides hope he changes his mind.

Dr. Cornel West offered a searing takedown of the Democratic party during a Tuesday appearance on The Hill’s “Rising,” where he accused the party of being complicit in the suffering of working class people and completely “beyond redemption.”

The 2024 third-party presidential candidate addressed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ recent endorsement of President Joe Biden, calling the self-described Democratic Socialist’s support for the presidential incumbent “consistent” but disappointing.

WASHINGTON (AP) — With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump, recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to his own.

Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president’s second term — or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Joe Biden in 2024.

Taipei, Taiwan – More than any other country, China holds the power to make or break global efforts to prevent a climate catastrophe.

The world’s second-largest economy is the largest polluter globally, although its emissions are comparable to many countries on a per capita basis.

China produces about 30 percent of total emissions – more than the United States, the European Union and India combined, according to Global Carbon Budget 2022.

At the same time, Beijing is eking out a place as a leader in renewable energy, building up more solar power capacity than the entire rest of the world.

But while developed economies are reducing their emissions – albeit too slowly to meet their Paris Agreement pledges – China’s emissions are rising fast due to a furious appetite for coal used to power its cities and energy-intensive industries like steel.

China is approving new coal power projects at the equivalent of two plants every week, a rate energy watchdogs say is unsustainable if the country hopes to achieve its energy targets.

The government has pledged to peak emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by 2060, and in 2021 the president, Xi Jinping, promised to stop building coal powered plants abroad.

But after regional power crunches in 2022, China started a domestic spree of approving new projects and restarting suspended ones. In 2022 the government approved a record-breaking 106 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity. One gigawatt is the equivalent of a large coal power plant.

On Saturday, three Black lives were stolen in Jacksonville, Florida, at a dollar store just blocks away from Edward Waters University, a historically Black university. Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr, 19; Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion, 29; and Angela Michelle Carr, 52, were assassinated by a 21-year-old white supremacist who “hated Black people”, in the words of the local sheriff.

This intentional murder – like the many which came before it – was not only experienced by those whose lives were stolen and their families, but by every Black person in America. This murder and those like it are a constant reminder that Black people are nowhere safe. It is reminder that our presence, our absence, our movement, our stillness, our attempts to enjoy basic citizenship or complete the routine duties of human life – like grocery shopping – are liable to result in our death.

Britain must take a tougher stance on China over its severe human rights abuses and help Taiwan build its defences to deter a potential attack from Beijing, an influential group of MPs says.

With the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, scheduled to land in China on Wednesday for a first official visit in five years, a report from the foreign affairs select committee says ministers have to call out the country’s transnational repression.

Donald Trump has “the moral compass of an axe murderer”, a Republican opponent in Georgia said, discussing the former president’s legal predicament in the southern US state and elsewhere but also his continuing dominance of the presidential primary.

“As Republicans, that dashboard is going off with lights and bells and whistles, telling us all the warning things we need to know,” Geoff Duncan told CNN on Monday.

Washington, DC – X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has lifted a ban on political advertising, though it says it will still prohibit the promotion of false information.

The move comes as the 2024 election campaign season in the United States kicks off. In a blog post on Tuesday, X laid out its approach to “political discourse” as the election nears.

“Building on our commitment to free expression, we are also going to allow political advertising. Starting in the US, we’ll continue to apply specific policies to paid-for promoted political posts,” X said in the post.

There’s plenty of chatter on social media about the plan by the United Conservative Party’s powerful and secretive Take Back Alberta faction to stealthily take over the province’s school boards in the next round of elections and set the stage for indoctrinating children with social conservative ideology.

As usual, though, conservative mainstream media (which is the only kind we have in Alberta) seems to be largely ignoring the story. This is most likely the result of understaffing and pitiful resources devoted to journalism as opposed to actual malice, but who knows for sure?

Vladimir Putin moved his $100m (£75m) superyacht from a German shipyard to Russia just weeks before he ordered the invasion of Ukraine, according to secret documents released in a new investigation.

A Russian anti-corruption organisation set up by the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny claims emails show that the Russian president ordered the urgent moving of the 82-metre superyacht, called Graceful, from a shipyard in Hamburg, where it was undergoing a $32m refit, by 1 February 2022.

Antonina Sanina, 75, had spent the last two nights hiding in the basement of her apartment block in Kupiansk. She had endured six and a half months of Russian occupation last year, but now the renewed shelling of the city had prompted her to abandon her home. “I couldn’t take it any more,” she said a few minutes after local volunteers had driven her to safety.

She said eight neighbours hid in the cellar with her as the Russians targeted what they thought, wrongly, was a barracks nearby. “You could barely sleep. It would be on and off. Then you’d just wake up and you wouldn’t know – was that an actual hit or was it a dream?” A day before she took flight, one civilian was killed and 11 injured in a daytime artillery strike on the city centre.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) appeared livid at her fellow GOP lawmakers while endorsing a presidential impeachment inquiry during a Tuesday morning interview on Real America’s Voice News’ “American Sunrise.”

The far-right congressperson from the Peach State seemed like she was in a pugnacious mood as she asked, “What the hell is wrong with Republicans” who aren’t moving to investigate President Joe Biden?

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Other members of the the extremist Jewish Power Party are adding fuel to the firestorm that broke out last week when the party’s leader and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir asserted that Israeli rights to move around the Palestinian West Bank took precedence over Palestinian rights to freedom of movement in their own land. Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu tried to uphold Ben Gvir’s supremacist assertions and to defend Israeli policy toward Palestinians, rejecting the label of Apartheid for it.

On Sunday, former Vice President Mike Pence — who is also running for the GOP nomination for the 2024 presidential election — reacted to a shooting over the weekend in Jacksonville, Florida, by suggesting that mass shooters should be subjected to an “expedited” death penalty process.

“Justice delayed is justice denied,” Pence said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” program, “and I’m calling for an expedited federal death penalty for anyone engaged in a mass shooting like took place in Jacksonville.”

After a federal judge established a March 4, 2024, court date for former President Donald Trump in the federal case regarding his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Trump logged onto his Truth Social site and promised to appeal the decision — something he and his lawyers don’t actually have the power to do.

Earlier this month, after a vote by a grand jury, Trump was indicted by Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel Jack Smith of four charges relating to his attempts to subvert the democratic preference of American voters in the 2020 election.

A former top White House aide to Donald Trump made a last-ditch bid to scuttle his upcoming trial for contempt of Congress, testifying to a federal judge on Monday that Trump “directed” him to defy the House Jan. 6 select committee.

Peter Navarro, a top trade adviser who pushed discredited claims of fraud about the 2020 election during Trump’s final days in office, is scheduled to go to trial Sept. 5 on criminal contempt charges for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the committee.

People with ties to China’s law enforcement agencies conducted the largest known covert digital influence operation aimed at discrediting the West and promoting Beijing's agenda across more than 50 social media and online platforms, according to a report published Tuesday by Meta.

On Facebook, clandestine users with ties to the authoritarian government racked up more than 550,000 followers by spouting lies about the United States' alleged role in creating the COVID-19 pandemic and criticizing Washington's support of Taiwan.

A solar energy project in western Alberta was poised to not only power 1,200 homes but innovate a new way to pay for such initiatives, say its backers. But then came the “gut-wrenching” decree by Premier Danielle Smith.

Now the future of Western Canada’s first co-operatively financed solar farm is uncertain, following the United Conservative Party’s sudden freeze on approvals for renewable energy projects in Alberta.

The Peace Energy Cooperative, or PEC, was days away from Alberta Utilities Commission approval that would allow construction to begin on a 13-hectare solar farm. Unless the UCP lifts the seven-month moratorium, the co-operative will have to convince investors to not withdraw their money.

MADISON, Wis. — The conservative chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Monday told the new liberal majority in a scathing email that they had staged a “coup” and conducted an “illegal experiment” when they voted to weaken her powers and fire the director of state courts.

Chief Justice Annette Ziegler, in two emails obtained by The Associated Press, said that firing and hiring a new state court director was illegal and ordered interim state court director Audrey Skwierawski to stop signing orders without her knowledge or approval.

Republicans have waged a decades-long battle to blow up the campaign-finance laws that rein in big-money spending. Now, they are making a play that could end in their biggest victory since the Citizens United ruling in 2010.

The GOP is growing increasingly optimistic about their prospects in a little-noticed lawsuit that would allow official party committees and candidates to coordinate freely by removing current spending restrictions. If successful, it would represent a seismic shift in how tens of millions of campaign dollars are spent and upend a well-established political ecosystem for TV advertising.