Democracy gone Astray: Wednesday, October 11, 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.]

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

Elon Musk Hit With Lawsuit For Falsely Accusing Man Of Being Part Of Neo-Nazi Brawl

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and far-right sympathizer, has been hit with a defamation lawsuit after he falsely accused a recent college graduate of being a federal agent involved with a neo-Nazi group.

Ben Brody, a 22-year-old Jewish man from California, filed the lawsuit against Musk on Monday after he said he and his family were forced to flee their home after continued harassment and threats after Musk promoted a dangerous conspiracy against Brody.

NEW YORK (AP) — Aggrieved and defiant, former President Donald Trump sat through hours of sometimes testy opening statements Monday in a fraud lawsuit that could cost him control of Trump Tower and other prized properties.

“Disgraceful trial,” he declared during a lunch break, after listening to lawyers for New York Attorney General Letitia James excoriate him as a habitual liar. The state’s lawsuit accuses the business-mogul-turned-politician and his company of deceiving banks, insurers and others by misstating his wealth for years in financial statements.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has a big decision to make.

In the run-up to preventing a government shutdown, any questions about what the Democrats would do in the event of a vote to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker were easily batted aside as too theoretical to entertain.

“We haven’t given any thought to how to handle a hypothetical motion to vacate, because we are entirely focused on making sure that we avoid this extreme MAGA Republican shutdown,” Jeffries said last week.

After almost a century and a journey of thousands of miles, an artefact taken from Canada is now home. It is the first totem pole to be returned from a British museum to an indigenous community - a potentially precedent-setting moment in the broader move towards museum repatriation.

Museum curator Marius Barbeau had been eyeing the totem pole for some time.

It was the late 1920s, and the Canadian ethnographer had paid many visits to the Ank'idaa village in the Nass Valley, an indigenous community nestled between picturesque mountains, creeks and waterfalls in a remote part of British Columbia (BC).

The US government has shutdown ten times over the past 40-plus years. Meanwhile, in other countries, governments keep functioning, even in the midst of wars and constitutional crises. So why does this uniquely American phenomenon keep happening?

For most of the world, a government shutdown is very bad news - the result of revolution, invasion or disaster. That leaders of one of the most powerful nations on Earth willingly provoked a crisis that suspends public services and decreases economic growth is surprising to many.

In the early hours of 14 January 2020, blood-curdling screams could be heard at an apartment block in the Russian region of Kemerovo.

Shocked and scared, a resident called the police to report what sounded like an attack on a woman.

But no-one came.

The screaming continued, alongside loud bangs and cries for help. Six more calls were made to emergency services but still no police officers arrived.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said he plans to try to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy after the California Republican worked with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown on Saturday.

“Speaker McCarthy made an agreement with House conservatives in January and since then he’s been in brazen, repeated material breach of that agreement,” Gaetz told Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” on Sunday. “This agreement that he made with Democrats to really blow past a lot of the spending guardrails we set up is a last straw.”

The 2023-2024 Supreme Court term will begin on Monday, October 2. Dominated by six right-wingers, the court has agreed to review cases in which voting rights, consumer protection, and the regulation of health and safety, workers’ rights and the environment are in jeopardy. The cases present the issues of gerrymandering and the power of administrative agencies. In light of its recent conservative rulings, we should be wary about how the court will rule on these critical matters.

Besides the cases already on the Supreme Court’s docket, the court will add more cases by mid-January. Their decisions will be issued by the end of June or beginning of July 2024.

President Joe Biden said Friday that he was not fully confident that the current U.S. Supreme Court, which he described as extreme, could be relied on to uphold the rule of law.

When asked the question directly, Biden paused for a few seconds. Then he sighed and said, “I worry.”

“Because,” he said, “I know that if the other team, the MAGA Republicans, win, they don’t want to uphold the rule of law.”

The notorious far-right attorney who helped craft Texas’s bounty-hunter abortion ban, Senate Bill 8, is now attempting to force abortion funds to hand over reams of information on every abortion the organizations have supported since 2021. This includes the city and state where each patient lived, the names of the abortion providers, and the identities of nearly every person who helped the patients access abortion care.

Earlier this month, Jonathan Mitchell — himself not a Texan but based in Washington state — served requests to nine Texas abortion funds and one Texas doctor. The brazen attempt to acquire sensitive information about abortion patients and the funds that assist them is a disturbing turn in the ongoing legal battle over Texas’s six-week abortion ban.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., appeared at a General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri, earlier this week to join members of the United Auto Workers on the picket line against the Big Three automakers. There, he called himself “pro-worker,” challenged the companies to give workers a pay raise and more time off, and said he’s with the workers “100 percent.”

While he is rallying against the Big Three now, he has previously received campaign contributions from the automakers. During his first run for Senate in 2018 and through 2020, Hawley’s PAC received $8,500 from GM’s PAC, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission. His Senate campaign received $3,500 from Ford’s PAC and another $1,000 from a GM executive during that same time period. His PAC and campaign received an additional $13,000 from PACs associated with Toyota, a Japanese company notorious for running non-union shops in the United States.

One of the 18 defendants in a Georgia election interference case involving former President Donald Trump pleaded guilty on Friday.

Scott Hall, a bail bondsman, pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor charges for his role in helping Trump attempt to reverse his 2020 presidential election loss in the state. Hall was charged after he breached a Coffee County election office on Jan. 7, 2021.

The conservative Supreme Court could soon eviscerate a key part of Congress’ response to the 2008 global financial crisis, with payday lenders challenging the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in one of the first hearings of the court’s new term.

In its challenge to the CFPB, the Community Financial Services Association of America, a trade association for the payday lending industry, argues that the agency’s funding through the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional under the Constitution’s appropriations clause. It is the latest attack on the CFPB by the financial industry following a 5-4 decision in the 2020 case of Seila Law v. CFPB, which allowed the president to fire the CFPB director at will instead of giving them a defined six-year term.

With hours left to go on the eve of a government shutdown, Congress passed a stopgap bill to keep federal agencies funded and workers at their desks through mid-November.

The price? About $6 billion in aid to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian invaders and new worries Russian dictator Vladimir Putin will be encouraged to continue the full-scale invasion he started in February 2022.

Tushar Gandhi says that as politicians have used societal division as a political tool to get elected in India, hate has been normalized in the country.

Tushar is the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian lawyer who helped lead his country to freedom from British colonial rule in 1947.

But, after 10 years of rule by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Tushar Gandhi says his great-grandfather's legacy has been openly attacked and even vilified.

The German government has rebuked Elon Musk after he criticised the work of rescue ships being operated by German humanitarian groups in the Mediterranean Sea.

The owner of X, formerly Twitter, retweeted a video on Friday that showed refugees and aid workers on a boat. The rightwing account that first put the content on the social media platform used the post to praise the populist far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which has taken a hard line on migration issues.

Donald Trump called for shooting store robbers on Friday in a bleak speech to California Republicans – and warned “this country will die!” if Joe Biden remained president.

During the address to GOP members, Trump also railed that wealthy Beverly Hills residents smell because of water denials, and repeated election fraud lies, according to the Associated Press.

“We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” Trump said, spurring applause. “Shot!”

What a pathetic coda to the respectable if not quite illustrious political career of Jim Dinning!

Once the whiz kid and heir apparent of Alberta’s Conservative establishment, Dinning has resurfaced years later as, in my view, chief snake oil salesman for the scam artists and would-be separatists dreaming of hijacking half the Canada Pension Plan’s investment fund.

Dinning may not have gotten to be the premier of Alberta in 2006, when he was widely seen as front-runner in what was supposed to be not much more than a two-horse race with another former Progressive Conservative finance minister Ted Morton.

President Joe Biden said in an interview on Friday that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had made a “terrible bargain” and that “in order to keep the speakership, he’s willing to do things that he, I think, he knows are inconsistent with the constitutional processes.”

Asked about the looming government shutdown, and the impeachment inquiry that McCarthy agreed to authorize in the hopes of keeping right-wing Republicans from ousting him from his post as

Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman has never seen a scenario like this week: “Not in real life — in movies. It’s crazy.”

It’s practically a national adage to say that Congress is wracked by dysfunction. Yet in the days leading up to Sunday’s potential shutdown, the House and the Senate are witnessing a cinematic parade of horribles.

The GOP-controlled House has failed to pass a spending plan. At the helm, Speaker Kevin McCarthy faces daily threats to his job from the right and recently launched an impeachment inquiry that some of its own members believe botched its inaugural hearing.

After stepping down as America’s highest-ranking military officer on Friday, retiring Gen. Mark Milley issued a reminder about the role of the armed forces ― one that seemed particularly directed at former President Donald Trump.

“We don’t take an oath to a country, we don’t take an oath to a tribe, we don’t take an oath to a religion, we don’t take an oath to a king or a queen, or to a tyrant or a dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said at his farewell ceremony. “We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

Former President Donald Trump drew laughs from California Republicans on Friday after he ripped Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and mocked her husband, Paul Pelosi, over a brutal hammer attack against him.

“We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco. How’s her husband doing, by the way, anybody know?” said Trump in remarks at a California GOP convention.

At 81, my father still recounts stories about our village, Nuris, and his place of birth, Bisan (Beit She’an), with a heavy heart.

As children, my siblings and I would often stand with our father on the western border of Jordan, where our family has lived as refugees for more than 75 years, and look over to our homeland, Palestine. He would point out to us, with tears in his eyes, the location where his family home in Bisan once stood.

Our village, Nuris, was depopulated in 1948. Now, an Israeli settlement called Nurit stands on its ruins. Nuris is just 20 miles (32km) away from that border spot we used to visit. However, the distance always felt much greater. We always felt as if there were oceans and continents between us. Sure, we knew the village was nearby, but we had no way of getting there.

What is Matt Gaetz‘s endgame: spending cuts, a political boost, or revenge?

It’s the question reverberating on Capitol Hill after the simmering feud between the Florida conservative and Speaker Kevin McCarthy flared up again Thursday morning in a closed-door meeting, with one lawmaker telling Gaetz to “fuck off” for leveling unproven accusations against the speaker. Gaetz has threatened to force a vote on booting McCarthy for weeks, publicly called him “pathetic” and accused him of lying multiple times.

Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter) said overnight that a global team working on curbing disinformation during elections had been dismissed — a mere two days after being singled out by the EU's digital chief as the online platform with the most falsehoods.

Responding to reports about cuts, the tech mogul said on X, "Oh you mean the 'Election Integrity' Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) accused the GOP of displaying a “fabricated” screenshot during the first formal hearing in Republicans’ impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden on Thursday.

Ocasio-Cortez’s allegations came after Republican Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida showed a message that Jim Biden, the president’s brother, sent to Hunter Biden, the president’s son, in 2018. Donalds claimed it indicated that the president benefited from fraud and money laundering committed by Hunter Biden.

Donald Trump did not speak to a roomful of striking Detroit autoworkers Wednesday night. He didn’t speak in Detroit, even. And he definitely didn’t speak at a unionized automaker.

The former president did speak at Drake Enterprises, a small non-union company outside Detroit, where he repeatedly bashed union leadership and argued United Auto Workers members had their priorities backward.

Reading news coverage of the event, though, might tell you otherwise.

Less than a month after pledging to expand the safety and elections teams at X, formerly known as Twitter, Elon Musk has instead slashed the workforce.

The Information reported Wednesday that half the global team had been cut, including the head of the election integrity team, Dublin-based Aaron Rodericks. At least four people have been let go; it’s unclear how many remain.

DETROIT — Donald Trump claimed he came to Michigan on Wednesday to show solidarity with striking autoworkers. Instead, he fearmongered about the transition to electric vehicles, told autoworkers they would be out of a job in two or three years even if they secured a contract with wage increases, then begged United Auto Workers leadership to endorse him for president.

“There’s no such thing as a fair transition to the end of your way of life. You’re going to lose your beautiful way of life … it’s a transition to hell. It’s a transition to unemployment and to inflation,” Trump said at a nonunion manufacturing facility in swingy Macomb County in the Detroit suburbs. “In other words, your current negotiations don’t mean as much as you think.”

Retired four-star U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey warned Wednesday that when it comes to Donald Trump-supporting MAGA Republicans, “what we are seeing is a parallel to the 1930s in Nazi Germany.”

“This is worth being extremely concerned about,” McCaffrey told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes during a discussion centered on Trump’s dangerous social media post floating the idea of executing outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) singlehanded blocking of military promotions in the Senate in protest of Pentagon abortion policies.

Former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) says a government shutdown seems inevitable as House Republicans can’t agree on a spending deal to keep federal agencies open.

And that, she said on MSNBC on Wednesday night, could force House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to give up his leadership post in a matter of weeks.

“Here’s the problem he has: In order to keep the government from shutting down or to open the government back up, he’s gonna have to go to Democratic voters,” McCaskill said. “And that means he can’t be speaker anymore.”

Brussels has warned European companies and governments that it could ban the sale of certain components to Turkey and other countries from where Iran and Russia are sourcing parts for drones and other weapons striking Ukrainian cities.

The comments from the European Commission follows a leak to the Guardian of a 47-page document in which the Ukrainian government detailed the use of western technology and appealed for long-range missiles to attack drone production sites in Russia, Iran and Syria.

Ships carrying grain are again sailing from Ukraine's Black Sea ports, despite Russia pulling out of a deal which allowed them to pass safely through the sea.

They have been following a new route, around the western coast.

What was the grain deal?

Ukraine is one of world's biggest suppliers of crops such as sunflower oil, barley, maize and wheat.

European maritime companies are ditching their old ships for scrap on Bangladeshi beaches in dangerous and polluting conditions that have killed workers pulling them apart, says Human Rights Watch.

Bangladesh’s southeastern Sitakunda beaches have emerged as one of the world’s largest shipbreaking yards, fuelling the South Asian country’s booming construction industry and its need for cheap sources of steel.

European firms are among the shipping companies to have sent 520 vessels to the site since 2020, where thousands of workers take apart ships without protective gear.

The first complaints landed at the offices of Philips Respironics in 2010, soon after the company made a fateful decision to redesign its bestselling breathing machines used in homes and hospitals around the world.

To silence the irritating rattle that kept users awake at night, Philips packed the devices with an industrial foam — the same kind used in sofas and mattresses. It quickly became clear that something had gone terribly wrong.

The reports coming into Philips described “black particles” or “dirt and dust” inside machines that pump air to those who struggle to breathe. One noted an “oily-like” substance. Others simply warned of “contamination.”

The complaints targeted some of the company’s most celebrated devices built in two factories near Pittsburgh, including ventilators for the sick and dying and the popular DreamStation for patients who suffer from sleep apnea, a chronic disorder that causes breathing to stop and start through the night.

To accurately measure the metabolism of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign we must invoke the images and manners of the bestiary’s most indolent and sluggish creatures. The three-toed sloth, which favors slow motion. The echidna, which would lose a race against a continental plate. The nurse shark, which is so lazy it relies on ocean currents to aerate its gills. And then there is Australia’s pygmy blue-tongue lizard, which “hunts” by lounging by its burrow hole in hopes that an insect or spider will stride by.

BRUSSELS — It's one thing to be dealt a weak hand. It's another to play it badly.

But that's exactly what the European Commission has done in the crisis caused by a glut of Ukrainian grain that has put Kyiv at odds with its European allies and, in particular, left Brussels at the mercy of Polish electoral politics.

The EU's eastern capitals had warned that they would impose their own import bans if EU-wide restrictions expired, as planned, on September 15. Nevertheless, the Commission let them lapse. Ukraine gave notice that it would sue at the World Trade Organization if that happened, and has duly done so.

In a rather striking split screen today, Joe Biden became the first president ever to walk a union picket line, grabbing a bullhorn and using the word “we” to rally striking autoworkers. His Federal Trade Commission teamed with 17 attorneys general to sue Amazon for unfair competition (which was fun to see Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post report). And the FCC, finally under the control of Democratic commissioners, announced it would be moving to restore net neutrality rules undone by Trump.

International regulators are incapable of properly monitoring safety at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, according to a critical dossier compiled by Greenpeace that is being sent to western governments on Thursday.

The environmental campaign group concludes the International Atomic Energy Agency has too few inspectors at Europe’s biggest nuclear plant – four – and that there are too many restrictions placed on their access.

House Democrats and Republicans teamed up to defeat a pair of proposals to gut Ukraine funding in annual defense spending legislation, though each vote showed sizable GOP opposition to continued aid for Kyiv.

The amendment votes on Wednesday serve as a barometer of Republican views on further support for Kyiv as the war with Russia drags on, with funding for Ukraine becoming a major sticking point in Capitol Hill talks to avert a government shutdown.

CLINTON TOWNSHIP, MICH. — The main political split screen Wednesday night wasn’t Donald Trump appearing at a rally in Michigan next to his Republican primary rivals debating in California.

It was the former president trying to woo auto workers in a critical battleground state, and the current president who did the same the day before.

Trump traveled to the Detroit area on Wednesday night to counterprogram the GOP’s second debate. But the visit sent a warning shot to President Joe Biden that he was already looking ahead to the general election — and he wants to win back the support of some of the same union workers who helped put him in the White House in 2016.

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — Seven of Donald Trump’s rivals for the GOP presidential nomination return to the debate state Wednesday night, once again without the presence of the poll-leading Trump himself — and likely, once again, without the will to go after his greatest vulnerability: four criminal indictments that could put him in prison for decades.

The coup-attempting former president has scheduled a speech in the suburbs of Detroit, where he is likely to blame striking autoworkers’ woes on President Joe Biden’s efforts to encourage electric vehicles to fight climate change.

Gen. Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he is taking appropriate measures to ensure his safety and that of his family after former President Donald Trump attacked the top military leader by suggesting he is a traitor who deserves to be executed.

Trump went after the Army general Friday in a Truth Social post, accusing Milley of being a “Woke train wreck” who went behind his back to communicate with China in the final months of the former president’s administration. Milley, who was nominated to the position by Trump, is set to leave his post at the end of this month.

A New York state judge ruled on Tuesday that former President Donald Trump committed business fraud for several years by falsely inflating the value of his assets to secure better loans from banks and policies from insurance companies.

The ruling comes in a civil case brought against Trump by state Attorney General Letitia James. The attorney general had considered bringing criminal charges relating to the allegations she made against Trump, but ultimately opted not to.

The U.S. government is set to run out of money later this week, not because the U.S. has suddenly gotten poor, but because hard-liners within the GOP are looking for major policy concessions from the White House and the Democratic-controlled Senate simply to keep government operations afloat. Without those concessions, many Republicans have made it clear they will refuse to cast their votes for the 12 appropriations bills that keep the system ticking along.

This is the latest installment of what has become an entirely dysfunctional congressional ritual — using vital legislative deadlines as bargaining chips in a high-stakes effort to impose a far right agenda on the body politic. If the borrowing limit needs to be raised, a significant number of Republicans simply refuse to vote for the increase. If government needs to be funded through appropriations bills, as is the case this week, these same hard-liners see it as an opportunity to leverage their votes in exchange for massive cuts to federal spending and the adoption of a raft of other policy demands.

Former President Donald Trump will be skipping the second Republican presidential debate on Wednesday evening to instead speak to auto workers in Michigan amid the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike against the Big Three auto companies.

In spite of the strike, however, Trump will not be delivering his speech at a union shop.

Micah Rasmussen knows what it’s like to be on the wrong side of Bob Menendez. Back in 2003 as press secretary for Democratic Gov. Jim McGreevey, he pushed back against Menendez’s favored candidate for the state Supreme Court, fellow Cuban Zulima Farber. Menendez, then a U.S. representative, deridingly called the governor’s office “amateur hour” in the press because McGreevey did not put her on the bench, and he wanted to know why. So Rasmussen explained: Farber had a poor driving record that included unpaid parking tickets.

Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley is handing the reins over to his replacement on Friday. It couldn’t come at a more precarious time, as the West show signs of running out of weapons — and out of patience — with Ukraine.

As the top military adviser to the president, Milley has weighed in on every major decision in the Ukraine conflict, from what weapons to send Kyiv to how to best train its forces. He has a longstanding relationship with Ukrainian Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, commander of the Ukrainian armed forces, as well as other chiefs of defense around the world. He and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a former four-star general, have led the charge in rallying the West to support Ukraine with modern arms and equipment.

A group of Republicans will march onto the debate stage Wednesday night to argue that each of them could stave off another Donald Trump defeat against President Joe Biden.

Polling increasingly shows it’s not true.

Far from being an electoral liability, the former president is starting to lead — or at the very least tie — Biden in general election polling.

Not only is Trump the top choice of a growing majority of Republican primary voters in national surveys, but Republicans overwhelmingly think he’s the candidate with the best chance of beating Biden next fall. And poll after poll suggests Biden and Trump are essentially tied with just over a year until the general election.

WASHINGTON — The top Republicans in the House and Senate don’t agree on how to avert a government shutdown that is looking increasingly likely this weekend.

And if the government shuts down, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has made clear who should get the blame: the Republican-led House.