Democracy gone Astray: 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 26, 2018

Georgia police chief defends tasering a grandmother

Police in Georgia were right to electrocute an 87-year-old woman who didn’t understand that they wanted her to drop the knife she was using to cut dandelions, their boss says.

“In my opinion, it was the lowest use of force we could have used to simply stop that threat at the time,” Chatsworth Police Chief Josh Etheridge told the local Daily Citizen-News last week. Martha Al-Bishara, a grandmother who doesn’t speak English, “still [had] the ability to hurt an officer,” he said.

Boris Johnson has ruled out sharing a platform with Nigel Farage as the former Ukip leader tours the country to fight against the government’s plan for Brexit.

HuffPost UK has been told the former foreign secretary will not join forces with the MEP, despite both being opposed to Theresa May’s negotiating stance with Brussels.

Farage announced over the weekend he would join a battle bus tour organised by the Leave Means Leave campaign group, as he feels May’s Chequers agreement “is nothing less than a direct betrayal of everything people voted for.”

The financial crisis that broke out a decade ago was a long time in the making, and a long time in the playing out. Over just a few days in September, 2008, Lehman Brothers essentially ceased to exist, the Federal Reserve took over American International Group to prevent a wider collapse, and commercial banks and mortgage lenders around the country failed. The speed and the scale of destruction were so breathtaking that only the direst analogies seemed adequate—the stock market crash of 1929, or an economic 9/11. Citigroup appeared poised to go down next, with General Motors and Chrysler to follow. Everything solid in the American economy turned out to be built on sand. But the crisis took years to emerge. It was caused by reckless lending practices, Wall Street greed, outright fraud, lax government oversight in the George W. Bush years, and deregulation of the financial sector in the Bill Clinton years. The deepest source, going back decades, was rising inequality. In good times and bad, no matter which party held power, the squeezed middle class sank ever further into debt.

In the middle of the 1970s, Zbigniew Brzezinski approached his friend, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, with a question: Is democracy in crisis? It was a subject of much concern at the Trilateral Commission, a kind of Rotary Club for members of the international power elite that Brzezinski had co-founded in 1973 with David Rockefeller, head of Chase Manhattan and grandson of the famous robber baron. With the Trilateral Commission’s backing, Huntington and two co-authors produced a survey of democracy’s health in the United States, Europe, and Asia. They found that faith in government had nosedived, political parties were fracturing, and efforts to pacify voters through more public spending had sent both inflation rates and deficits soaring. Too many people—Huntington’s list included “blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women”—were demanding too much from politics, rendering the entire system ungovernable.

Labour 'finished' if it backs Brexit in a snap election, says Adonis

A pro-EU Labour peer and former cabinet minister has said the party is “finished” if it contests another election promising to back Brexit, as a new poll suggested the party’s support depends heavily on remain voters who could switch their allegiance to the Lib Dems.

Andrew Adonis, a former transport minister and a vocal critic on Britain’s departure from the EU, said the party could not be seen as an “accomplice to Brexit” should a snap election take place before March 2019.

WASHINGTON ― Now that United Nations experts have endorsed widespread reports that China is holding a million members of its Muslim minority Uighur community in internment camps, the Chinese government’s denials of a crackdown look flimsier than ever. Activists and reporters who have documented the repression appear vindicated and awareness about the crisis seems to be growing ― but there’s no certainty of resulting international pressure from governments like the United States that experts see as essential to forcing change.

Just weeks after scoring a major military victory in the south, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad appears set to fully open a new, more complex, front in the country's war - now in its eighth year.

The key northwestern Idlib province is the Syrian opposition's last major bastion in the country. It is currently home to nearly three million people, half of whom are internally displaced, and encloses what was once a major commercial highway linking Syria to Turkey and Jordan.

“Socialism” vs. “capitalism” is a false dichotomy

Suddenly there’s a lively debate on both the left and the right about the specter of socialism in America. According to Gallup, Democrats now view socialism in a more positive light than capitalism. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, became an instant political star after she clinched the Democratic Party’s nomination for the New York 14th District’s House seat.

Time is running out to strike a Brexit deal, according to the Danish finance minister, who has echoed warnings that there is a 50-50 chance of Britain crashing out of the European Union without an agreement in place.

Kristian Jensen said the window of opportunity for striking a deal that was positive for both Britain and the EU was closing.

Earlier, Latvia’s foreign minister, Edgars Rinkēvičs, claimed the chance of a no-deal Brexit was “50-50”. Rinkēvičs said it was a “very considerable risk” but stressed he remained optimistic an agreement with Britain could be reached.

Len McCluskey has hit out at what he calls the “intransigent hostility” of Jewish community leaders and accused “Blairite” Labour MPs of exploiting the anti-Semitism row to provoke a split in the party.

Writing for HuffPost UK on Thursday afternoon, the general secretary of the Unite union and close ally of Jeremy Corbyn, said Labour risked descending “into a vortex of McCarthyism”.

Police in Jakarta have killed dozens of people as part of an escalating crackdown against petty criminals ahead of the Asian Games, in a campaign Amnesty International has described as “unnecessary and excessive”.

Based on monitoring from January to August this year, Amnesty International said 31 police killings were directly linked to the Games, which open in Jakarta and Palembang on Saturday.

A California bill that would radically change the standard for the use of deadly force by police officers got past a key hurdle on Thursday, as the state Senate Appropriations Committee voted unanimously to send it along to the full Senate for debate.

Assembly Bill 931, the Police Accountability and Community Protection Act, would allow officers to use lethal force only when “necessary” to “prevent imminent and serious bodily injury or death” to an officer or bystander, and when there are no “reasonable” nonlethal alternatives—a Taser, for example. The bill would also mandate that cops attempt to de-escalate potentially volatile situations using “time, distance, communications, and available resources” whenever it is “safe and reasonable” to do so. And it would bar police from using lethal force when a subject is a threat only to himself.

Hamas has condemned an Israeli decision to close a military investigation into an assault on August 1, 2014, in which 135 Palestinians were killed in Rafah, in the southern part of the besieged Gaza Strip.

In a report on Wednesday, the Israeli army cleared itself of wrongdoing and said it would not prosecute commanders who were involved, claiming its investigation found no reason to suspect criminal misconduct.

DALLAS — House Democrats, looking to wrest control of the chamber from Republicans in November, are discarding the lessons of successful midterms past and pressing only a bare-bones national agenda, leaving it to candidates to tailor their own messages to their districts.

It is a risky strategy, essentially putting off answering one of the most immediate questions facing the Democratic Party after its losses in 2016: What does it stand for? The approach could also raise questions among voters about how Democrats would govern.

The guidebook said that if we got off the bus at a certain point on the Karakoram Highway, a shepherd would greet us and let us stay in a yurt for a modest fee. The highway was a dirt road in Xinjiang, in northwestern China. I was travelling with a man I’ll call Tim, and we had been on buses for more than twelve hours. When we reached a pasture between snow-capped mountains and saw Karakul Lake glittering in the distance, we got off. The bus pulled away, and it was suddenly very quiet, the late-afternoon sky irrevocably clear, as if nothing bad could happen—not here, not anywhere.

Brexit could lead to price rises and delayed access to over-the-counter medicines including cough medicines and throat sweets, the drug industry has warned.

The Proprietary Association of Great Britain (PAGB) said its members, which include pharmaceutical giants GSK and Pfizer, expect to be hit with extra costs in excess of £1m as a result of leaving the EU.

A mysterious Russian satellite displaying "very abnormal behaviour" has raised alarm in the US, according to a State Department official.

"We don't know for certain what it is and there is no way to verify it," said assistant secretary Yleem Poblete at a conference in Switzerland on 14 August.

She voiced fears that it was impossible to say if the object may be a weapon.

How Bill Browder Became Russia’s Most Wanted Man

Shortly after Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin wrapped up their recent summit at the Finnish Presidential Palace, in Helsinki, around two hundred journalists gathered in the building’s neoclassical ballroom. It was July 16th, three days after the special counsel Robert Mueller published an indictment charging twelve members of the G.R.U., Russia’s military-intelligence service, with hacking into Democratic Party servers and disseminating e-mails during the 2016 election. As Trump started answering questions about the interference, and it became clear that he would not accept the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies over the denials offered by Putin, the frenetic sense of anticipation in the room turned to silent confusion.

The movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel – known as BDS – has been driving the world a little bit mad. Since its founding 13 years ago, it has acquired nearly as many enemies as the Israelis and Palestinians combined. It has hindered the efforts of Arab states to fully break their own decades-old boycott in pursuit of increasingly overt cooperation with Israel. It has shamed the Palestinian Authority government in Ramallah by denouncing its security and economic collaboration with Israel’s army and military administration. It has annoyed the Palestine Liberation Organization by encroaching on its position as the internationally recognised advocate and representative of Palestinians worldwide.

This is the time in the life of a majority government when minds usually turn to the drafting of a final throne speech. For a ruling party going into its last year before a general election, the occasion is an opportunity to try to articulate an auspicious ballot-box question but also, if need be, to ditch legislative baggage not wanted on the electoral voyage.

By all indications, the early summer shuffling of the federal cabinet was a prelude to a pre-election recasting of the Liberal agenda. No one would be surprised if Parliament were prorogued before its scheduled Sept. 17 return date to set the stage for a throne speech later in the fall. A lot of water — more, in fact, than anyone expected — has flowed under the bridge since Justin Trudeau’s sunny opening act almost three years ago.

ANKARA (Reuters) - President Tayyip Erdogan on Monday accused “economic terrorists” of plotting to harm Turkey by spreading false reports and said they would face the full force of the law, as authorities launched investigations of those suspected of involvement.

The lira currency, which has lost more than 40 percent against the U.S. dollar this year, pulled back from a record low of 7.24 earlier on Monday after the central bank pledged to provide liquidity, but it remained under selling pressure and its meltdown continued to rattle global markets.

Repression Intensifies in Argentina After President Empowers the Military

Weeks after Argentina signed a deal for a new $50 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and only days after hosting G20 leaders in Buenos Aires, Argentine President Mauricio Macri issued a decree July 23 that would allow the country’s armed forces to intervene in questions of domestic security.

The decree violates laws passed after the country’s last military dictatorship – an authoritarian military junta that took power in a coup in 1976 and used force and repression to silence all opposition – ended in 1983, which limited the role of the armed forces, and points to a disturbing trend of militarization and repression under the right-wing government. The decision sparked immediate outrage from human rights organizations and social movements who have since organized massive protests around the country.

CEDROS, Trinidad and Tobago — In the flickers of sunlight off the cobalt blue of the Caribbean sea, the vessel appeared as a cut on the horizon. It sailed closer. But the crew of the Asheena took no heed.

“We be lookin’ for our red fish as normal, thinkin’ they be fishin’, too,” said Jimmy Lalla, 36, part of the crew that had dropped lines in Trinidadian waters last April a few miles off the lawless Venezuelan coast.

The economy is growing strongly, the unemployment rate has been at or below 4.5 percent for 16 straight months, but wage growth remains disappointingly low.

Wages are growing much more slowly than the last time we had sustained low unemployment rates, the late 1990s. This is the notorious “wage puzzle,” a topic that has been the subject of much speculation by everyone from Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell to pretty much every economist I follow on Twitter.

In the summer of 2016, Adam Merberg was offered a job as a data scientist at AbleTo, a behavioral health care company based in New York City. After he verbally accepted the job offer, a corporate recruiter sent him an email letting him know the company would be running a routine background check. “Also attached is a confidentiality agreement,” the recruiter wrote. “Please review, complete, sign, and return to me as soon as possible.”

The agreement included a non-compete clause prohibiting Merberg from working at any of the company’s competitors for twelve months after leaving. Merberg, who had recently completed a Ph.D. in mathematics, didn’t consider how this might later affect him.

Rayyah has lived in Khan al-Ahmar all of her 47 years. She raised nine children there, and 24 grandchildren; one more is on the way. Her family and neighbors, members of a Bedouin community known as the Jahalin, found refuge on this scorched patch of rocks and dust in the 1950s, after they were expelled from the land they had inhabited for generations, in the Negev desert, following the establishment of the Israeli state. The land Khan al-Ahmar stands on was under Jordanian control when the Jahalin arrived. Today, this smatter of tin roofs and tarps sits on the side of a highway in the occupied West Bank, surrounded by a fast-growing ring of Israeli settlements, which — while illegal — have become de facto suburbs of Jerusalem.

SEOUL, Aug 13 (Reuters) - North and South Korea agreed to hold a summit in Pyongyang in September, the latest step forward in cross-border ties this year after more high-level talks on Monday, the South’s Unification Ministry said.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in met in April and May at the border truce village of Panmunjom, within the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that separates the two Koreas, and agreed that the next summit in autumn would be held in the North Korean capital.

A cancer patient served an eviction notice at Christmas, a landlord who lost his flat in a card game and a mum-of-three forced to move every time she fell pregnant - these are some of the horror stories behind the rental market in 2018.

Emma Percy and husband Rob tell their children moving is “an adventure” but the family has been turfed out of a staggering 11 properties in 16 years, once when she was nine months’ pregnant.

The couple, who are calling for the government to introduce mandatory long-term tenancies, have been heartbroken watching savings for their own home decimated as they fork out for letting fees, deposits and moving vans.

Thousands of Canadian residents hit hard by a retroactive tax signed into law by U.S. President Donald Trump have been dealt another blow, CBC News has learned.

Newly proposed regulations issued by the U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service threaten to increase their tax hit.

Tensions between Canada and Saudi Arabia have been building over the past week, and it all started with a tweet.

Last week, Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland took to Twitter to express concerns about the arrest of women's-rights activists in Saudi Arabia, including Samar Badawi.

Saudi's foreign ministry fired back in a series of tweets on Sunday, calling Canada's move "an overt and blatant interference in the internal affairs of the Kingdom of #SaudiArabia."

An official Communist Party newspaper said China's campaign of pressure against its Uighur Muslim minority has prevented the Xinjiang region from becoming "China's Syria" or "China's Libya."

The Global Times editorial on Monday came after a United Nations anti-discrimination committee raised concerns on Friday over China's treatment of Uighurs, citing reports of mass detentions that it said "resembles a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy".

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.

Democracy Gone Astray

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Saturday, August 25, 2018

Friday, August 17, 2018

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Monday, August 13, 2018

Sunday, August 12, 2018