Democracy gone Astray: Wednesday, September 20, 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, September 20, 2023

From The New Deal To The Green New Deal

Modern American politics was born in the winter after the election of 1932. As President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt battled with lame-duck President Herbert Hoover over the nascent New Deal agenda, Americans discovered new ways to fight about their government.

Hoover’s no-holds-barred efforts to block Roosevelt’s program redefined the Republican Party, while the plans that FDR ultimately implemented became the bedrock of 20th-century American liberalism. Domestic political debate has largely operated within these parameters ever since.

China has expressed serious concern after Taiwan confirmed a request to purchase more than 100 tanks, as well as air defence and anti-tank missile systems, from the United States.

The confirmation on Thursday by Taiwan’s defence ministry came after reports said the US could soon give the green light to sales of tanks and weapons to Taiwan worth more than $2bn.

In a statement, the ministry said it had submitted a letter of request for 108 M1A2 Abrams tanks, 1,240 TOW anti-armour missiles, 409 Javelin anti-tank missiles and 250 Stinger man-portable air defence systems.

Saudi Arabia has significantly escalated its ballistic missile programme by buying technology from China, according to a US media report.

In a story published on Wednesday, broadcaster CNN said the United States government had obtained intelligence on the technology transfers, but the administration of US President Donald Trump did not initially share its knowledge with key members of Congress.

MOSCOW — Russia is requiring dating app Tinder to hand over data on its users — including messages — to the national intelligence agencies, part of the country’s widening crackdown on internet freedoms.

The communications regulator said Monday that Tinder was included on a list of online services operating in Russia that are required to provide user data on demand to Russian authorities, including the FSB security agency.

Tinder, an app where people looking for dates swipe left or right on the profiles of other users to reject or accept them, will have to cooperate with Russian authorities or face being completely blocked in the country. The rule would apply to any user’s data that goes through Russian servers, including messages to other people on the app.

The messages arrived suddenly and then he went quiet. “My identity is leaked,” he said. “I am worried about my safety.”

The Chinese dissident artist Badiucao had been busy preparing an exhibition in Hong Kong to celebrate Free Expression Week, a series of events organized by rights groups. His show was partly inspired by Google’s plan to build a censored search engine in China, and was set to include work that the artist had created skewering the U.S. tech giant for cooperating with the Communist Party regime’s suppression of internet freedom.

China has defended the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in a rare public acknowledgement of events.

Defence Minister Wei Fenghe told a regional forum that stopping the "turbulence" was the "correct" policy.

In spring 1989, students and workers occupied Beijing's Tiananmen Square in a massive pro-democracy protest. Many were killed in a brutal clampdown by the communist authorities.

Protests erupted on Sunday after Israeli forces entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound along with hundreds of ultra-nationalist Jews whom they allowed to access the compound on Jerusalem Day – when Israelis celebrate the anniversary of their occupation of East Jerusalem at the end of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

The Muslim Waqf organisation which oversees the mosque compound – the third holiest site in Islam – said police used rubber bullets and pepper spray and arrested seven people.

Chinese authorities have detained dozens of people as part of a ramped-up annual crackdown ahead of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Tuesday will mark 30 years since the bloody event, which saw Chinese authorities brutally shut down long running student protests, killing thousands of people in and around the central square in Beijing.

Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), a US-based organisation for domestic and international activists, said the Beijing government’s “pre-emptive strikes” against anyone who might try to mark the anniversary had started in early May.

Boris Johnson has been summoned to court to face accusations of misconduct in public office over claims that he lied by saying Britain gave £350m a week to the European Union.

The ruling follows a crowdfunded move to launch a private prosecution of the MP, who is the frontrunner in the Tory leadership contest.

Israel‘s political elite is racing against time to form a new government through high-stakes backchannel negotiations before a midnight deadline.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s right-wing coalition has to secure the support of Avigdor Lieberman’s nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu faction on Wednesday or face an unprecedented second election of the year.

Netanyahu’s Likud and its right wing and religious allies won a total of 60 seats in April 9 elections in the 120-seat parliament in the polls.

Weeks before the general elections in India, opinion polls were already showing that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a fair chance of returning to office. He was riding on the crest of militaristic nationalism which gripped the nation after the military escalation with Pakistan in February.

But few had expected the tidal wave with which Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept the opposition aside to win a second term. The official results released on May 23 revealed that the ruling party had gone beyond even what Modi and his most-trusted aide and party president, Amit Shah, had set as a goal: going above the 300 mark in the 543-member Lok Sabha, the Lower House of Parliament.

The world’s largest secular democracy has just moved further away from its foundational ideals—exemplifying a worrisome global phenomenon.

India, like the United States, was established as a secular, democratic republic. The ascension to power five years ago of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who was banned from the United States for almost a decade for allegedly presiding over an anti-minority pogrom in his home state, struck a severe blow at these principles. His re-election (with a bigger parliamentary majority this time) cripples these values even further.

NEW DELHI — Narendra Modi, leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), on Thursday won a second consecutive five-year term as prime minister of India, months after bringing India to the brink of war with Pakistan, its nuclear-armed neighbor.

The BJP and its allies won a sizable majority in India’s lower House of Parliament, proving Modi’s continuing popularity despite his inability to provide jobs for India’s legions of unemployed youth — a central promise from his 2014 campaign.

Five years after he was first elected, the economy remains sluggish and the credibility of many of India’s democratic institutions — from the judiciary, to the election commission, to the media, and even the country’s central bank, Reserve Bank of India — have been compromised.

As a statement of principles and goals, the Green New Deal seems to take economic justice and workers’ rights pretty seriously. It calls for a federal jobs guarantee. It says we need workforce retraining, strengthening collective bargaining rights, retirement security, and universal health care.

The resolution decries “antilabor policies” and says it must be fleshed out with input from “frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, [and] worker cooperatives,” with the goal of creating “high-quality union jobs.”

Yemen’s Houthi rebels said they launched a bomb-laden drone into Saudi Arabia targeting an airport with a military base – an attack acknowledged by the kingdom.

It was not clear if there were any injuries or what the extent of damage was.

The Houthis’ Almasirah satellite news channel said early on Tuesday the attack hit the airport in Najran with a Qasef-2K drone, striking an “arms depot”.

Swedish authorities on Monday filed a request for a detention order against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is now jailed in the United Kingdom.

Eva-Marie Persson, the country's deputy director of public prosecutors, said in a statement that if the Swedish court decided to detain Assange "on probable cause suspected of rape . . . I will issue a European Arrest Warrant."

The founder of the whistleblower organization is currently in jail in the U.K., where he is serving a 12-month sentence for skipping bail in August 2012 as he fought extradition to Sweden in connection with the

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Turkey and Russia would jointly produce S-500 defence systems after Ankara’s controversial purchase of the S-400 missile defence system from Moscow.

Turkey’s push to buy the S-400s has further strained the already tense relations with the United States, which has repeatedly warned Ankara of the risks, including sanctions, if it goes ahead with the purchase.

There isn’t much to see around the River Correctional Center, a small, privately run jail near the Mississippi River and the tiny town of Ferriday, Louisiana. Farmlands and fields stretch in either direction beyond the jail’s barbed wire fence. In the 19th century, enslaved people worked cotton and sugar cane fields here, enriching white plantation owners with their daily labors. The local economy is still extracting profit from maintaining the captivity of people of color today.

River Correctional Center is one of several local jails and state prisons in Louisiana, Mississippi and beyond that have lucrative contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to incarcerate hundreds of people detained in the federal immigration detention system, which has swelled

Nigel Farage was lavishly funded by Arron Banks in the year after the Brexit referendum, Channel 4 News has alleged, with the insurance tycoon providing him with a furnished Chelsea home, a car and driver, and money to promote him in America.

According to invoices, emails and other documents, Banks, who regularly bankrolled Farage’s former party, Ukip, spent about £450,000 in the year after the referendum, when Farage had quit as Ukip leader, the programme said.

Boris Johnson confirmed Thursday that he wants to replace Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party.

“Of course I’m going to go for it,” the former foreign secretary told a business event in Manchester, the Evening Standard reported.

May has said she will step down as Conservative leader before the next stage of the Brexit negotiations and that she won’t be party leader at the next general election. However, no date has been given for her departure.

The prime minister on Thursday met with Graham Brady, chairman of the powerful Conservative backbench 1922 committee, to discuss her future.

Original Article
Source: politico.eu
Author: Paul Dallison

Vladimir Putin’s messing with our democracy — and he wants us to know it

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report confirmed Russia’s “sweeping and systemic” interference in our democratic process. Mueller’s investigation revealed evidence of Russian hacking and dissemination of stolen data from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, a sophisticated Kremlin social-media influence operation, and efforts to hack into U.S. election infrastructure.

Putin’s intelligence services have deep experience in the art of spying, which only a “cardinal in the Kremlin” (to borrow Tom Clancy’s phrase) who stole secrets on our behalf could uncover. But in this case, the Kremlin’s election interference was not meant to be clandestine. Putin was running discoverable influence operations.

Sweden’s Prosecution Authority reopened an investigation of Julian Assange for rape on Monday and will seek his extradition from Britain, the country’s deputy director of public prosecution, Eva-Marie Persson, told reporters in Stockholm.

The Swedish request will force British authorities to decide whether to send the detained WikiLeaks founder to Sweden or the United States, or neither, at the end of his 50-week jail sentence. He is currently serving for violating bail conditions in 2012, when he took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy after losing his final appeal against extradition to Sweden.

Julian Assange is to be investigated in Sweden over a rape case dating from August 2010, prosecutors announced on Monday.

The WikiLeaks founder, currently held in Belmarsh prison in London, now faces possible extradition from Britain.

“My assessment is there is still probably cause [to investigate] rape and a lesser offence,” Eva-Marie Persson, Sweden’s deputy director of public prosecutions, said.

Nigel Farage hit out at a “ludicrous” BBC interview on Sunday after he was forced to explain a series of his past positions.

The Brexit Party leader was questioned over why he had once appeared to back a Norway-style Brexit and suggested a second referendum might be needed.

Farage is now campaigning for a no-deal exit and has described holding another public vote as a “betrayal”.

In a speech denying allegations of antisemitism, misogyny and homophobia after Facebook banned him from the social media platform, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan referred to “Satanic Jews”.

During the speech on Thursday at a Catholic church on Chicago’s South Side, Farrakhan said people shouldn’t be angry if “I stand on God’s word”. He also said that he knows “the truth” and “separate[s] the good Jews from the Satanic Jews”.

A UK judge has sentenced WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to 50 weeks in prison for skipping bail seven years ago and holing up in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Judge Deborah Taylor said it was hard to imagine a more serious version of the offence as she gave the 47-year-old hacker a sentence close to the maximum of a year in custody.

She said Assange’s seven years in the embassy had cost UK taxpayers 16 million pounds ($21m) and said he sought asylum as a “deliberate attempt to delay justice”.

Demonstrators clashed with police on the streets of the Venezuelan capital, spurred by opposition leader Juan Guaido’s call on the military to rise up against President Nicolas Maduro, who said he defeated an attempted coup.

An apparently carefully planned attempt by Guaido to demonstrate growing military support disintegrated into rioting as palls of black smoke rose over eastern Caracas.

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó took to the streets with activist Leopoldo Lopez and a small contingent of heavily armed troops early Tuesday in a bold and risky call for the military to rise up and oust socialist leader Nicolas Maduro.

“I want to tell the Venezuelan people: This is the moment to take to the streets and accompany these patriotic soldiers,” said Lopez, who had been detained since 2014 for leading anti-government protests. “Everyone should come to the streets, in peace.”

NEW YORK ― On a Saturday evening in the fall of 2017, local activist Amy Bettys schlepped to Union Square in Manhattan, alongside members of the women’s reproductive rights group she works with, to protest a proposed federal restriction on abortion.

She and her group, Women’s Health & Reproductive Rights (WHARR), were attending an event they’d seen posted online, co-sponsored by the local Women’s March Alliance and an organization called the Resisters, which touted itself as being dedicated to “feminist activism against fascism.” It seemed like a good opportunity for WHARR at the time: Here was an event to promote women’s reproductive rights, held on one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares and co-sponsored by a legitimate feminist enterprise in the WMA.

Venezuela’s political crisis has lurched into a potentially historic and violent new phase as an attempted military uprising erupted at the heart of its capital, Caracas, and the opposition leader Juan Guaidó urged supporters to take to the streets to force his rival Nicolás Maduro from power.

A day of high drama and profound uncertainty began shortly before dawn on Tuesday when Guaidó – who has been spearheading a three-month campaign to topple Maduro – posted an online video in which he appeared surrounded by dozens of armed troops near a key military installation in Caracas.

MADRID — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialists scored a big victory in Sunday’s national election, though they will still have to seek coalition agreements to stay in power.

With over 99 percent of the ballots counted, the Socialists won about 29 percent of the vote and 123 of the 350 seats in parliament — a huge step up from the 85 seats they now have. This puts them well ahead of the second-placed conservative Popular Party on 66 seats. The liberal Ciudadanos won 57 seats, the far-left Podemos and its allies 42 seats, and the far-right Vox 24 seats.

MOSCOW — Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s landslide victory in last week’s presidential election in Ukraine has been interpreted by some as a big win for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The comedian is a Russian speaker and lived and worked in Moscow for six years. He’s also inexpert as a statesman — his only experience in politics is playing a fictional president in the Netflix comedy series “Servant of the People.”

COGNAC, France — Jordan Bardella leaned into the wooden cask, inhaled deeply and let out a satisfied “Aaaah!” like he was reconnecting with an aroma from distant childhood.

At 23, Bardella — the standard-bearer for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in next month’s European Parliament election — is too young for any memory to be very distant. And as someone who grew up in a rough Paris suburb, it’s safe to say wooden casks in rural France were not a big part of his childhood.

“Socialism,” anathema to many but a path worth exploring to others, has been packaged nicely as “democratic socialism” (a hilarious oxymoron) by millionaire author Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and proselytized by neophyte Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) who, like the president, invents statistics extemporaneously.

But in all fairness, neither is a socialist in the true sense of the term, meaning a belief in government ownership of production and the abolition of private property.

{mosads}Since more than half of Democrats, millennials and minorities hold socialism in higher regard than capitalism, one wonders if these groups truly understand what life is like, say, for the average Cuban. On the other hand, Americans as whole, according to Gallup, prefer capitalism 56 percent to 37 percent.

Vladimir Putin on Saturday described as “an outrage” the sentencing of Russian gun rights activist Maria Butina to 18 months in prison in the US, calling her treatment a travesty of justice.

The Russian president described the sentencing as an attempt by the US to “save face” in his first public comments in the wake of Butina’s sentencing in on Friday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday Moscow is considering fast-tracking Russian citizenship for all Ukrainians, not only those living in the war-torn east.

Putin made his comments during a press conference at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, Russian state news agency TASS reported.

This comes days after Putin signed a presidential decree that would allow people who permanently reside in certain areas of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions to apply for Russian citizenship through a simplified process.

Navy SEALs who witnessed their platoon chief commit war crimes in Iraq were encouraged not to speak out, and told they could lose their jobs for reporting him at a private meeting with a superior officer last year, according to new reports from The New York Times. A confidential Navy criminal investigation obtained by the Times reveals that the commandos saw Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher stab and kill an unarmed teenage captive, shoot to death a young girl and old man, and fire indiscriminately into crowds of civilians. But when the men on Gallagher’s team called a private meeting with their troop commander and demanded an investigation, they were told to stay quiet on the matter, and no action was taken. The group of seven SEALs eventually were able to force an investigation, and Chief Edward Gallagher was arrested in September on more than a dozen charges, including premeditated murder and attempted murder. The court-martial centers on a charge that Gallagher stabbed to death a teenage member of the self-proclaimed Islamic State while the unarmed youth was being treated by a medic. The trial begins May 28. If convicted, Gallagher could face life in prison. We speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and national correspondent for The New York Times Dave Philipps. His latest piece is headlined “Navy SEALs Were Warned Against Reporting Their Chief for War Crimes”

Dozens of Saudi Arabian nationals executed by Riyadh on Tuesday claimed to have been tortured into making false confessions, trial documents obtained by CNN revealed.

Saudi authorities said the 37 individuals were found guilty of attacking security installations with explosives, killing a number of security officers and cooperating with “enemy organisations” against the country’s interests.

But the revelations on Friday by CNN suggest many of the executed men – who for the most part were members of the country’s marginalised Shia minority – maintained their innocence until their dying breath.

A Russian who infiltrated the National Rifle Association and tried to get Donald Trump to meet with a Kremlin-linked official during the 2016 election was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison.

Mariia Butina, a gun-rights promoter and graduate student in America, has been in jail since her arrest last July on charges of operating as an unregistered foreign agent and conspiracy.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal judge sentenced Maria Butina to 18 months in jail Friday, with credit for time served, for conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of the Russian government.

“The offense Ms. Butina has pled to was serious and jeopardized this country’s national security,” District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan said as she handed down the sentence.

Butina entered the courtroom in a green prison jumpsuit, her hair loose and her hands cuffed in front of her. Her voice cracked with emotion as she addressed the court before her sentencing.

The first time Rachel Mulroy had to turn to Massachusetts’s cash welfare program, known in the state as Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children (TAFDC), her first daughter was two-and-a-half months old and Mulroy was fleeing an abusive relationship. She had been relying on family for financial support. “At some point, people had their own bills that they had to pay and I still couldn’t find any work,” she told Truthout. So she enrolled in TAFDC. The aid money wasn’t much — just the “bare minimum” to cover her needs, she said — but it got her through until she found a job a few months later.

If he hadn’t been speaking Japanese, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe could easily have been mistaken for an EU leader.

Visiting Brussels on Thursday to meet Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Council President Donald Tusk, Abe seemed to sing all the favorite tunes from the EU songbook. He fiercely defended the need for a free and fair international trading system, spoke out in favor of liberal democratic ideals, including human rights and the rule of law, called for protecting the environment, for nuclear disarmament of North Korea, and for avoiding a no-deal Brexit “by all means.”

If there’s one thing the Mueller report made crystal clear, it’s that Russian interference efforts were just as widespread and damaging as previous reports had indicated. From stealing internal Democratic emails to creating massively popular Facebook and Twitter profiles — some of which were then amplified by higher-ups in Donald Trump’s campaign — the interference efforts represented an unprecedented assault on American election integrity.

And as America gears up for another presidential election in 2020, there’s little reason to think the Kremlin’s operations won’t return. If anything, they might be worse — and make use of a slate of new technologies that weren’t available in 2016.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) ― A federal appeals court on Monday denied a request by former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to be released from jail on bail, and upheld a lower court’s decision to hold Manning in civil contempt for refusing to testify before a grand jury.

The ruling marks a blow for Manning, who has been detained since March after she declined to answer questions in connection with the government’s long-running investigation into Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.

A spokesman for Manning and Manning’s attorney could not be immediately reached for comment.

These days, anybody with an internet connection can be a publisher.

That doesn’t make everybody a journalist.

This distinction has become more important than ever in light of two recent events.

One was the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The other was a proposal by lawmakers from Georgia, the Peach State, that looked more like an export from the Georgia that was part of the Soviet Union: a so-called “ethics in journalism” act that would have imposed onerous new requirements and potential civil penalties on reporters.

In Ukrainian politics, the biggest story of 2019 has been the unexpected rise of Volodymyr Zelenskiy, an actor and comedian who has no political experience but defeated President Petro Poroshenko in the first round of Ukraine’s presidential race on March 31. Zelenskiy has been leading in the polls, and Ukrainian pundits are predicting a victory for him when the next round of voting takes place this Sunday, April 21. But Zelenskiy’s campaign isn’t without controversy, and the Ukrainian News Agency is reporting that his campaign is being investigated by Ukraine Security Services (SBU) for alleged financing by the Kremlin as well as by rebels in Eastern Ukraine.

Julian Assange repeatedly violated his asylum conditions and tried to use the Ecuadorian embassy in London as a “centre for spying”, Ecuador’s president has said in an interview with the Guardian.

Lenín Moreno also said he had been given written undertakings from Britain that Assange’s fundamental rights would be respected and that he would not be sent anywhere to face the death penalty.

When Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont conceded the 2016 Democratic presidential primary to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and encouraged his supporters to vote for her in the general election, many of them agreed that Clinton—shortcomings and all—would be much better for his liberal/progressive movement than GOP nominee Donald J. Trump. Sanders aggressively voiced his support for the centrist Clinton during his speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, stressing that a Trump presidency would be terrible for the United States (an assertion that proved to be frighteningly accurate). The “Bernie or Bust” crowd, however, adamantly maintained its opposition to Clinton: some voted for Green Party nominee Jill Stein or Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson (a former Republican governor of New Mexico), some didn’t vote at all, some even voted for Trump. And the Washington Post, in an article published on Friday, is reporting that some of Sanders’ more anti-Clinton supporters may have been manipulated by the Kremlin three years ago.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange must “answer for what he has done,” while speaking at an event Thursday.

“The bottom line is that he has to answer for what he has done, at least as it has been charged,” she said of the WikiLeaks founder, according to The Associated Press.

The Labour leadership’s support for Julian Assange has prompted a new row in the party, with several MPs accusing the frontbench of downplaying the allegations of sexual assault against the WikiLeaks founder.

The shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, joined Jeremy Corbyn in calling on the government to block Assange’s extradition after he was arrested on behalf of US authorities, who have charged him with involvement in a computer-hacking conspiracy.