Tag: Democracy

Illiberal Democracy?

HUH?

Democracy is sacred, right?

Well it is until it isn’t!

On both sides of the Atlantic the regnant elites have launched a furious regime change campaign not all that different from the ones they started in the former Soviet republics. The formula seems to go like this: hold an election in which the full resources of the EU states and their upper classes are brought to bear on one side of the question. Vilify dissenters as more than likely agents of Vladimir Putin.

On the British side the government of Prime Minister Theresa May, which has been all along pretending to be in favor the people’s decision to leave the EU, has effectively sabotaged the process with so many exceptions, amendments, other concessions to Brussels that they might as well have stayed in.

https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2018/12/02/democracy-is-sacred-except-when-it-isnt/

Let’s start with the election of Donald Trump….some painted him as an “isolationist”…..not something that I say or heard from him in all his campaigning…..

Let’s go even further back say 15 years or so……Illiberal Democracy…….

The term “illiberal democracy,” advanced by some as an acceptable model for future change in many parts of the Middle East, is, in truth, an oxymoron. Real functioning democracies can never be illiberal. Nor can they be at peace with the rest of the world, a fact that makes their appearance quite problematic for many of their neighbors and for the world at large.

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-oxymoron-of-illiberal-democracy/

But that was before the rise of Sir Donald…….enter Our Dear Supreme Leader and the royal presidency begins…..

Donald Trump never expected to win the presidency. As Michael Wolff exposes in Fire and Fury, he hoped to use the campaign to build his personal company’s brand and secure a career in right-wing media. Trump’s inner circle was so shocked by their victory that his wife Melania purportedly broke down in tears not out of joy, but horror at the prospect of moving into the White House and subjecting their pathological family soap opera to even more public scrutiny. Unprepared to rule, Trump scrambled to cobble together a cabinet with an amalgam of establishment Republicans, Wall Street Democrats, and far-right nationalists.

The new administration struggled from day one to produce a coherent foreign policy based on Trump’s slogans “Make America Great Again” and “Putting America First.” Trump’s consigliere Steve Bannon and his co-thinkers called for the United States to withdraw from free trade deals like the North American Free Trade.

https://isreview.org/issue/109/illiberal-hegemony-trump-administration-strategy-us-imperialism

Two years into a presidency and many are starting to see the Illiberal Hegemony as it begins to wrap itself around our country……

Barry Posen, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the leading scholars of American grand strategy, has a fascinating essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. I want to write more later about some areas where I disagree with Posen’s argument (some of which I articulated in the paper I wrote last year on libertarian foreign policy). However, I want to highlight here an aspect of Posen’s argument that I think is spot on.

Since he first articulated his “America First” foreign policy agenda during the 2016 campaign, critics have argued that Donald Trump wanted to end American hegemony. Posen argues that, as president Trump, has not actually tried to end American leadership of the international system. If anything, he has accelerated. However, Posen claims that Trump has also transformed America’s strategy of “liberal hegemony” into an “illiberal hegemony.” He writes,

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/notes/donald-trumps-illiberal-hegemony/

Trump is striving to set up his own little imperial court……maybe now with a Dem majority in the House this country will and should return to its liberal roots…..

But will it?

Further Reading:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/trump-the-illiberal-hegemonist/

https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/01/04/homegrown-varieties-of-illiberal-democracy/

Is More Democracy Better?

We have just practiced one of our “inalienable rights”….we voted in the midterms and according to the pundits democracy has won out over the silliness in the country today.

But has it?

I still have not seen a backlash that all were predicting…..okay the Dems won the House…..who did not see that coming?  Repubs keep the Senate….and this is a surprise?  At what point will all that make a difference to my life?  But it does give the high paid pundits something to talk about…..

Just what did the midterms prove?

People voted…..Trump still has a 40% approval……Dems still are as rudderless as always….do I really need to continue?

But now let’s look at the democracy we love (about here someone will no doubt point out that the US is a republic…..thanx for that now go back to sleep)……

Candidates and Political Parties…….the candidates no longer need to hold to party ideology……

n the late evening of August 29, 1968, a balding fifty-seven-year-old wearing a black suit and a black tie took the stage at the International Amphitheatre, in Chicago, to accept his party’s nomination for the Presidency of the United States. Framed by a gray backdrop, Hubert Humphrey promised America a bright new day: “It is the special genius of the Democratic Party that it welcomes change, not as an enemy but as an ally; not as a force to be suppressed but as an instrument of progress to be encouraged.”

When he was first elected to the U.S. Senate, some two decades earlier, Humphrey was hailed as a liberal hero for his outspoken support of civil rights. When he served as Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vice-President, he continued to champion progressive causes like equal-opportunity hiring and privately expressed misgivings about the military escalation in Vietnam. But, during the primaries, he did not publicly distance himself from Johnson even as the President became less and less popular, and activists gradually came to see Humphrey as the hapless face of a failing establishment. “Once a fiery liberal spirit,” the satirist Tom Lehrer lamented in song, “Ah, but now when he speaks he must clear it. / Second fiddle’s a hard part, I know, / When they don’t even give you a bow.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/is-more-democracy-always-better-democracy

An outside group, Indivisible, has taken upon themselves to help the Dems grow a spine…..a lofty task……..

After more than year of playing defense against President Donald Trump and the GOP’s attacks on healthcare, workers, immigrants, refugees, the LGBTQ community, and the common good, the progressive group Indivisible on Tuesday published a new action guide aimed at helping organizers and constituents go beyond resistance and pressure the new House Democratic majority to fight for a positive, ambitious agenda.

“This guide is for what comes next,” Indivisible notes, contrasting the new roadmap with its viral 2016 Trump resistance guide.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/11/14/help-democrats-stiffening-their-spines-new-indivisible-guide-details-how-trump

The GOP may be a hopeless cause…..they have sided with sex deviates and have lambasted a military man in defense of a cowardly president……their redemption will be harder for these spineless slugs…

Democracy is a fascinating topic and I will re-visit it in the near future….

Turn The Page ….but Stay Tuned!

Closing Thought–27Nov18

How many of my readers were on the internet in 1999?

Well I was and I participated in an experiment into democracy……

Democracy on the internet…….

in 1999 I felt that the internet was the future of democracy and voting…….now a look back into those days……

In 1999, the organization responsible for the backbone of the public internet, ICANN, tried to build a democracy.

In theory it was utopian: Internet users from around the world would register as at-large members of ICANN, elect delegates to represent their continent, and these delegates would sit on the ICANN board of directors. The structure of internet would be governed by its users.

ICANN was in a position to do this because it’s in the business of determining how people are found on the World Wide Web. It governs the directory that every computer uses for directions to the right web page on the right server. If you register a web page, it gets registered by an ICANN-approved registrar. This proposal wasn’t just about who could register a .edu domain versus a .org, but instead who would be allowed to have a place on the web at all.

https://qz.com/1422925/the-public-internet-was-almost-a-democracy/

I still think that the internet could be used for good but that would require a free internet and there are too many working to make sure that is NEVER the case.

Any thoughts?

Midterms Biggest Loser!

Today is the big day…the day that we all have been hearing about for over a year…..the 2018 Midterms (or is it mid-terms)….but no matter which way you vote….whether as a human or otherwise….there is one thing that is for sure….no matter who wins what the biggest loser will be democracy.

When Angelina Cruz, the head of the teachers’ union in Racine, Wisconsin, goes canvassing, she doesn’t just knock on doors. If she sees someone in the street she approaches them and starts a conversation.

“D’you know you can vote today,” she asked a young black man who walked by last Saturday.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m a felon.” (A felon is someone who has committed a “serious crime”.)

“On papers or off papers,” she asked. (In Wisconsin your voting rights are only restored after prison, parole and probation have all been served, and you are “off papers”.)

“On papers,” he said.

“Well, ask your friends to vote,” said Cruz.

“Most of them are on papers too,” he yelled back.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/11/02/why-democracy-will-be-biggest-loser-us-midterms

This may not matter to too many people….if not please do one thing no matter what…VOTE!

Dems may win the House but that matters not because…within the Party there is a “Civil War” brewing…..

Now here is something really interesting, via Politico: there’s a growing cultural divide within Democratic ranks:

As the party’s attention turns to the presidential nominating season, one of its biggest challenges will be navigating this culture war in its own ranks. The energy at the moment is with the liberal wing, centered around cities and college towns and on the coasts, its members mostly white and college-educated and far to the left on social and cultural issues compared with the rest of the party. But its voting majority is still more blue-collar and diverse, many of whom favor an incremental approach on social issues and who are more interested in preserving the clout of longtime powers like Crowley and Capuano than in notching symbolic victories for the “resistance.”

In many of the cases outlined above, the policy differences between the candidates are microscopically small. Nearly all Democrats favor tackling income inequality, raising taxes on the wealthy and the minimum wage, and reforming the criminal justice system. There is some dispute over how fast to move and how far to go, but the broad outlines are the same. The differences, in one analysis, are stylistic, and so it is easy to imagine that they will be worked out over the next year as the party settles on another presidential nominee.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/democrats-hidden-civil-war/

The Midterms may make these divisions more pronounced…..but the real battle will begin January 2019….how will the country turn?

What Is Democracy?

Closing Thought–31Oct18

As we approach the Mid Terms this is a great question.  There are many of us that are questioning the fact that democracy is slipping away in this country (please do not give me the republic crap for you know what I am writing about)…..

This is a good conversation that answers (tries to answer) the question presented in the title…..

With our democracy in free fall, many are terrified, but I’m convinced that there is one thing with the power to turn the tide.

And what is that?

At the risk of sounding corny, or even ridiculous, I believe the one force with the power we need now is “falling in love with democracy.”  I know love can’t be forced, but I also know that to love we must first get acquainted. So, let’s ask, What, exactly, does democracy mean to us?  Is it worthy of our devotion?

That’s the conversation I long for and offer these thoughts as an invitation.

For some, the answer’s easy: Democracy equals a market plus elections.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/10/18/what-democracy-anyway-lets-talk

If you would like to add anything to the conversation please feel free to do so……chuq

Founding Fathers And Today

Time for the IST history perspective….(I know all have been holding their breath waiting for this day)

Anyone who has studied American history then they will be familiar with the Federalist Papers and the responses to said…..but in case one has not read the Papers then the links below will help.

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1786-1800/the-federalist-papers/

The responses to the Papers were called the anti-Federalist Papers……

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1786-1800/the-anti-federalist-papers/

If these old works make little sense then try reading it in today’s language……In Other Words: The Federalist Papers in Modern Language

But for those looking for the quick way past this subject….a short video

Onward!

Most of the Papers were written by Madison and Hamilton under pen names……but how does their thoughts from 200 years ago stand up today?

First, Hamilton’s thoughts……

Conservatives have controlled our government for three definable periods in recent history—the Gilded Age of the last three decades of the 1800s (progressives followed from 1901 to 1920), the Roaring 20s (progressives followed from 1933 to 1980), and the Reagan Era that started in 1981 and continues to this day.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/09/20/alexander-hamilton-was-preoccupied-threat-presidency-trumps-posed-america

Next will be the thoughts from Madison……

James Madison traveledto Philadelphia in 1787 with Athens on his mind. He had spent the year before the Constitutional Convention reading two trunkfuls of books on the history of failed democracies, sent to him from Paris by Thomas Jefferson. Madison was determined, in drafting the Constitution, to avoid the fate of those “ancient and modern confederacies,” which he believed had succumbed to rule by demagogues and mobs.

Madison’s reading convinced him that direct democracies—such as the assembly in Athens, where 6,000 citizens were required for a quorum—unleashed populist passions that overcame the cool, deliberative reason prized above all by Enlightenment thinkers. “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason,” he argued in The Federalist Papers, the essays he wrote (along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) to build support for the ratification of the Constitution. “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/james-madison-mob-rule/568351/

Some fascinating reading the two “Papers”…..if you like politics then I suggest that you use the links that I provided and get to know the process that brought about this republic…….a republic that is in deep trouble.

Every Americans should have to study the Constitution and what it took to get this republic up and running……as it is today there are very few that know what the “Papers” were all about……political discourse something that is lacking in today’s world.

Class Dismissed!

Closing Thought–23Aug18

Before I start with the meat of this post……they say that blondes make up about 8% of the population and it looks like most of them work for FOX News…….so a comment made by an anchor on FOX makes perfect sense…..

Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt asserted on Thursday that America is “great” because it “defeated communist Japan.”

“We want to know what you think,” Earhardt said. “We defeated communist Japan, radical Islamists. We ask our men and our women to go overseas to fight for our country and sacrifice so much for this great country so that we can be the land of the free, the land of the brave.”

(FOX News)

Have you ever read an article that made you say to yourself….”No Sh*t”!…after reading?

Well the other day I found one that was a big No Sh*t for me…..

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a “defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the annals of the state of Israel” when the Knesset enacted earlier this month a basic law (having constitutional status in Israel) making the right of national self-determination “unique to the Jewish people” and not applicable to all citizens. The law further enshrined religiously based discrimination, including a clause that points to priority for Jewish-only communities by declaring “the development of Jewish settlement as a national value” and promising “to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.”

The law has been a subject of much controversy in Israel. It passed the Knesset by the narrow margin of sixty-two to fifty-five. Opponents argue that it constitutes a step away from democracy. But this was one more item on the agenda of the ruling right-wing coalition that, given the rightward move in Israeli politics in recent years, the coalition was able to push through.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/israel-not-liberal-democracy-28392

Again….No Sh*t!

Activist such as myself have been saying this for decades and few were listening……now the world is starting to see what I and others having been harping…Israel has NEVER been this shining democracy of the Middle East.

Of course Israel does not subscribe to these rights…….

Liberals…….

Liberals!  You know who they are according to most so-called conservs….they are anyone who does not meet what they consider a conserv ideology.

I would try to have an academic debate on this situation but that would be a waste of time and would end up with the so-called conserv saying “whatever” or their favorite retort “moving on”.

If there is half a brain out there then they will realize that we are witnessing the demise of democracy….but then few will see it for it is happening all around them slowly with a barrage of slogans……it is as if the world has lost all confidence in democracy…..

Democracy across the world is under siege. This according to the latest Freedom House report documenting that for 2017, “democracy faced its most serous crisis in decades” as seventy-one countries experienced declines in freedom or fair government, including the United States, and only thirty-five an improvement. This was the twelfth consecutive year of decline in democracy world-wide.

The question is why? Why has confidence in democracy retreated? Freedom House does not provide an answer, but there is a reason. It is democracy’s marriage to neo-liberal capitalism has fostered the conditions leading to its own undoing, similar to the way Karl Marx once described in the Communist Manifesto the “gravedigger thesis” (What the Bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers”) where capitalism would produce the conditions that would undermine its own existence.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/28/neo-liberalism-and-the-retreat-of-democracy/

Back in the early days of this republic a young Frenchman came to observe the founding of a new nation…..his name was Tocqueville and his book “Democracy In America” is required reading for a political scientist…..could this Frenchman save the US from itself?

The modern world differs from antiquity and the Middle Ages, a disjuncture Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840) proposes to explain and illustrate. In the past, societies were organized on the assumption that men were naturally unequal. However, the Christian idea of human equality provided the impetus for a “democratic revolution,” or a gradual reordering of the world based on the equality principle. Democracy in America shows what a difference equality makes by constantly contrasting modern, democratic forms of politics, work, family life, and the arts and sciences with their old, aristocratic counterparts.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-would-tocqueville-do/

This country needs all the assistance it can get….if it can be saved from itself…..I mean there are still those old farts that see a socialist behind every Democrat…..as always these people are afraid of something they cannot identify.

The Democracy That Was Iraq

After 15 years of occupation and several elections that no one wanted the Iraqis have had another election…..this is a good thing because that was what we came to Iraq for …..to give them democracy.

Iraq just held their latest election and to the surprise of the US their greatest critic and opponent of the occupation, Sadr, has won the vote for prime minister.

The pundits have called for a recount (simply because their man did not win)……there is lots of opinion on what will happen…..

Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose political bloc won the May 12 election, is rejecting calls by other factions to hold a re-run of the vote, saying certain factions are trying to start a civil war with all the allegations around the elections.

Sadr warned it was “time to stand as one for building and reconstruction instead of burning ballot boxes or repeating election just for one seat or two.” Some of the re-vote advocates, like the parliament speaker, lost their seats in the election.

The election’s votes were initially counted electronically, and parliament has since called for a full recount. The fire in Baghdad, at one of the ballot warehouses, has fueled even more claims of a cover-up of the results.

(antiwar.com)

Now some are calling for a new election……Abadi is doing the whining and the US is listening….all are worried about a Sadr leadership…..

With Iraqi parliament’s ordered recount at least somewhat derailed by a weekend fire at one of the ballot warehouses in Baghdad some officials are calling for a revote. A spokesman for PM Hayder Abadi, however, says only the Supreme Court can make that happen.

“This is a matter for the Federal Court and not for the executive branch,” noted Saad al-Hadithi, when asked for Abadi’s comments on the parliamentary speaker’s demand to repeat the vote. It’s not clear how the mechanism for such a re-run would work.

(antiwar.com)

As usual the US promotes democracy until it bites them in the ass….and a Shia backed PM will bite the hardest, especially considering who the new PM is and his history with the US…..

As parliamentarians in Baghdad work to form a new governing coalition in the wake of this month’s elections, their counterparts in Washington are seeking to sanction more than a dozen of the Iraqi legislators over their links to Iran.

The House of Representatives unanimously voted last week on legislation requiring President Donald Trump to sanction “persons that are officials, agents, affiliates of or owned and controlled by” two prominent Iran-backed militias that operate in Iraq and Syria. The amendment from Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, to a must-pass annual defense authorization bill targets Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, both of which are part of the Shiite-led Popular Mobilization Units battling the Islamic State.

Typical US actions…..if you do not like the election results then try to overturn them….Iraq will be no different than Chile.

This From A Democracy

Keeping with the theme of the day….Israel, has been billed the ONLY democracy in the Middle East, that is the biggest damn lie on record.

Equality is part of the principles of a democracy……the US is one state vote away from ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)…..I bring this up because that fake democracy in the Middle East has offered its version of equality….the problem is there will be NO vote…..

Israel is an apartheid state, but you don’t have to take my word for it. All you have to do is take a look at the actions of the lawmakers in the Israeli Knesset, the national legislature of Israel.

On June 5, the Knesset issued a press release stating that its Presidium (a group consisting of the speaker and deputy speakers) voted to disqualify a proposed bill that called for Israel “to be defined as a state of all its citizens” to be placed on the Knesset’s agenda.

By its own admission, the Knesset mentioned that this was an “unusual move,” since it is the “first time proposed legislation has been disqualified before being discussed in the plenum (the entire assembly of Knesset members) during the past two Knesset terms.” This means that such a swift shooting down of legislation has not occurred in at least five years.

http://mondoweiss.net/2018/06/lawmakers-equality-introduced/

In a rare act, the Presidency of the Knesset (a ten-member group representing most parties) last week disqualified a bill moved by Israeli Palestinian parliamentarians from coming to a debate or vote. The bill in question was named “Basic Law: Israel [is a] State of All Its Citizens.”

As the names hints, the bill would have declared that Israel belongs not to its Jews but to all its residents. The Knesset Presidency decided the bill was too dangerous to come to a vote.

http://mondoweiss.net/2018/06/officially-declares-democracy/

That is right this nation of cowards and bullies will not let the chance of equality for its citizens to even come up for a vote.

So please stop calling this band of criminals a nation of democracy….they will NEVER be a democracy….at best just an extension of fascism.  Please stop using the “D” word when referring to Israel…the land hate created.