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Donald Trumps reaction to the news that he is being investigated for possible obstruction of justice was to send out a twitter message claiming that: You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history led by some very bad and conflicted people!

Bad and conflicted people?? Trump is being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a man who served honorably as Director of the FBI under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He is an extremely capable, independent, and ethical public servant.

Among Trumps many problems is his fragile ego, his propensity to shoot from the hip, and his inability to keep his mouth shut (or twitter off!) He created this situation by speaking and tweeting evidence of his wish to obstruct the FBIinvestigation into possiblecollusion between his campaign and the Russians.

It appears that Trump is trying to create a false justification for ordering Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to fire Mr. Mueller as independent counsel. Perhaps he thinks he would then be able to order Rosenstein to appoint someone who is loyal to his highness.

Trump is a very immature and unstable person who has the power to seriously undermine our democracy. So far, Congressional Republicans are allowing him to act more and more like a spoiled child who cannot tolerate any restrictions on his behavior. When will they finally wake up to the fact that he is behaving like an autocratic dictator, not the president of a democracy?

Virginia Washburn

Grand Beach

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A danger to our democracy - Harborcountry News

Buchanan has developed a hidden programme for suppressing democracy on behalf of the very rich. It is reshaping politics. Illustration: Sbastien Thibault

Its the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century. To read Nancy MacLeans new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America, is to see what was previously invisible.

The history professors work on the subject began by accident. In 2013 she stumbled across a deserted clapboard house on the campus of George Mason University in Virginia. It was stuffed with the unsorted archives of a man who had died that year whose name is probably unfamiliar to you: James McGill Buchanan. She says the first thing she picked up was a stack of confidential letters concerning millions of dollars transferred to the university by the billionaire Charles Koch.

Her discoveries in that house of horrors reveal how Buchanan, in collaboration with business tycoons and the institutes they founded, developed a hidden programme for suppressing democracy on behalf of the very rich. The programme is now reshaping politics, and not just in the US.

Buchanan was strongly influenced by both the neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and the property supremacism of John C Calhoun, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that freedom consists of the absolute right to use your property (including your slaves) however you may wish; any institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression, exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses.

James Buchanan brought these influences together to create what he called public choice theory. He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money that others have earned, through involuntary taxes to support public spending and welfare. Allowing workers to form trade unions and imposing graduated income taxes were forms of differential or discriminatory legislation against the owners of capital.

Any clash between freedom (allowing the rich to do as they wish) and democracy should be resolved in favour of freedom. In his book The Limits of Liberty, he noted that despotism may be the only organisational alternative to the political structure that we observe. Despotism in defence of freedom.

His prescription was a constitutional revolution: creating irrevocable restraints to limit democratic choice. Sponsored throughout his working life by wealthy foundations, billionaires and corporations, he developed a theoretical account of what this constitutional revolution would look like, and a strategy for implementing it.

He explained how attempts to desegregate schooling in the American south could be frustrated by setting up a network of state-sponsored private schools. It was he who first proposed privatising universities, and imposing full tuition fees on students: his original purpose was to crush student activism. He urged privatisation of social security and many other functions of the state. He sought to break the links between people and government, and demolish trust in public institutions. He aimed, in short, to save capitalism from democracy.

In 1980, he was able to put the programme into action. He was invited to Chile, where he helped the Pinochet dictatorship write a new constitution, which, partly through the clever devices Buchanan proposed, has proved impossible to reverse entirely. Amid the torture and killings, he advised the government to extend programmes of privatisation, austerity, monetary restraint, deregulation and the destruction of trade unions: a package that helped trigger economic collapse in 1982.

None of this troubled the Swedish Academy, which through his devotee at Stockholm University Assar Lindbeck in 1986 awarded James Buchanan the Nobel memorial prize for economics. It is one of several decisions that have turned this prize toxic.

But his power really began to be felt when Koch, currently the seventh richest man in the US, decided that Buchanan held the key to the transformation he sought. Koch saw even such ideologues as Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan as sellouts, as they sought to improve the efficiency of government rather than destroy it altogether. But Buchanan took it all the way.

MacLean says that Charles Koch poured millions into Buchanans work at George Mason University, whose law and economics departments look as much like corporate-funded thinktanks as they do academic faculties. He employed the economist to select the revolutionary cadre that would implement his programme (Murray Rothbard, at the Cato Institute that Koch founded, had urged the billionaire to study Lenins techniques and apply them to the libertarian cause). Between them, they began to develop a programme for changing the rules.

The papers Nancy MacLean discovered show that Buchanan saw stealth as crucial. He told his collaborators that conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential. Instead of revealing their ultimate destination, they would proceed by incremental steps. For example, in seeking to destroy the social security system, they would claim to be saving it, arguing that it would fail without a series of radical reforms. (The same argument is used by those attacking the NHS). Gradually they would build a counter-intelligentsia, allied to a vast network of political power that would become the new establishment.

Through the network of thinktanks that Koch and other billionaires have sponsored, through their transformation of the Republican party, and the hundreds of millions they have poured into state congressional and judicial races, through the mass colonisation of Trumps administration by members of this network and lethally effective campaigns against everything from public health to action on climate change, it would be fair to say that Buchanans vision is maturing in the US.

But not just there. Reading this book felt like a demisting of the window through which I see British politics. The bonfire of regulations highlighted by the Grenfell Tower disaster, the destruction of state architecture through austerity, the budgeting rules, the dismantling of public services, tuition fees and the control of schools: all these measures follow Buchanans programme to the letter. I wonder how many people are aware that David Camerons free schools project stands in a tradition designed to hamper racial desegregation in the American south.

In one respect, Buchanan was right: there is an inherent conflict between what he called economic freedom and political liberty. Complete freedom for billionaires means poverty, insecurity, pollution and collapsing public services for everyone else. Because we will not vote for this, it can be delivered only through deception and authoritarian control. The choice we face is between unfettered capitalism and democracy. You cannot have both.

Buchanans programme is a prescription for totalitarian capitalism. And his disciples have only begun to implement it. But at least, thanks to MacLeans discoveries, we can now apprehend the agenda. One of the first rules of politics is, know your enemy. Were getting there.

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A despot in disguise: one man's mission to rip up democracy - The Guardian

It also seems clear that the failed coup attempt has helped Erdoan to solidify his power and use it to push his political agenda. Photograph: AP

A year after Turkeys failed coup attempt, Recep Tayyip Erdoans regime faces a dilemma: first it fears any kind of street-based movement. Erdoans harsh response to the Gezi Park protests in 2013 or the protests that were brutally quashed in the Kurdish cities of south-east Turkey last year are examples. Yet with the presidents power built on a friend-or-foe dichotomy, he also needs a street-based legitimacy. Witness the weekend ceremonies marking the anniversary of 15 July in which he whipped up public support for punishing coup plotters with the death penalty and talked about ripping the heads off so-called traitors.

And as a result of disabling parliamentary opposition and governing by decree under a continuous state of emergency it is not possible for him to prevent oppositional street-based movements from erupting. Last weeks justice march led by Kemal Kldarolu, chair of the opposition Republicans Peoples party, (CHP) which brought at least 1.5 million people for a final rally proves this point.

Erdoan and his followers come from a tradition of political Islam that is often accused of seeking to impose sharia law by stealth. Beyond this, Erdoan has given Turkey a worse record than China or Iran for jailing journalists and activists. Since July 2016 he has pursued a crackdown which has seen more than 50,000 people detained and nearly 170,000 people placed under investigation. It is fair now to say that democracy and its institutions in Turkey are dying by the day.

It also seems clear that the failed coup attempt has helped Erdoan to solidify his power and use it to push his political agenda. He is entrenching it via the institutions of Islam, notably the mosques. The directorate of religious affairs has become an apparatus of Erdoans political initiatives. Of course, mosques have been the carriers of rightwing politics in Turkey throughout history, but traditionally claimed to be supra-political and unbiased.

After last years events they no longer even pretend to be neutral. To underline this, look at some statistics on the Islamisation of the country: since Erdoan came to power, thousands of new mosques have been built, including the one inside the compound of Erdoans vast new presidential palace which is, incidentally, four times bigger than Versailles. Tens of thousands more students are attending religious schools than there were in 2002 when Erdoan came to power, according to the Education and Science Workers Union of Turkey. In effect, Erdoan is using Islamism for power.

Turkey has always been a divided nation but the rise of Erdoan since 2002 has fuelled polarisation

But it wasnt long ago that Turkey was seen as a model democratic state in the Islamic world. So, what has happened? Erdoan started his political career as a traditional Islamist and rebranded himself a conservative democrat politician by founding the Justice and Development party, the AKP. For years, explaining Turkeys democratic path seemed such an easy task. There was the persistence of an authoritarian tradition associated with Kemalism (the secularist founding ideology of the Turkish Republic led by Kemal Atatrk) which the military embodies. According to the mainstream liberal narrative on Turkey, all that was needed for Turkish democracy to flourish was the emergence of a force strong enough to curb the power of the military. Erdoan seemed, to western liberal observers, to be the answer.

Furthermore, a common narrative claims that Turkish military top brass were strictly secular and that this led them to stage coups at various times. They spoke out against Erdoans non-secular policies which prompted a political crisis in 2007. In 2010, a constitutional referendum gave Erdoans government more control over the judicial system. Prosecutors were given extraordinary powers to prosecute secular high-ranking officers in the military. The Turkish military has not been secular in the same sense since then. A number of new officers who have filled vacant positions allegedly had ties with the Gulenist movement, now the number one suspects for the failed coup.

Any lingering hopes that Erdoan would eventually return Turkey to the path of democracy have wilted following both the coup attempt and the referendum in April which allowed him to expand the executive power of the presidency. A French political scientist, Alain Rouqui, advances the term hegemonic democracy to describe regimes such as Erdoans Turkey. He suggests these are not liberal democracies, because the rights of the minorities and the rule of law are not respected; but neither are they dictatorships as elections are held thus political alternation remains possible. Erdoan once declared that democracy was a vehicle, not a goal implying that one could disembark at any point.

On the other hand he does not seem quite capable of transforming society to meet his political needs. In the recent referendum, Turkeys relatively urban cities including Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir as well as the Kurdish south-east region, largely voted against his presidency. Although just 33% of those in the cities voted against, these cities contribute 64% of Turkeys GDP and, in effect, sustain the economy. A poll by Ipsos for the Turkish affiliate of CNN International on the referendum result reveals that 87% of those who voted no consider the election process to have been unfair. And 77% of the yes voters think it was fair. Turkey, therefore, is split down the middle.

Meanwhile, the economy is deteriorating. Investment, tourism and the currency all continue to suffer. Foreign companies are reluctant to make long-term investments, uncertain how long Turkey will remain in a state of emergency. No wonder Bloombergs Misery Index, which combines countries 2017 inflation and unemployment outlooks, recently placed Turkey in fifth place, after Venezuela and Greece.

Thousands of educated Turks are seeking ways to flee and find another life in dignity and peace where they might secure the basic protection of law, citizenship, healthcare or social support. So what lies ahead for those citizens who remain? Turkey has always been a divided nation but the rise of Erdoan since 2002 has fuelled polarisation in the country. Indeed he has turned polarisation ethnic, sectarian and cultural into a political strategy. The opposition seems weak and divided.

Moreover, Turkey has never had a truly free press. It has a long tradition of censorship, especially around the combustible politics of its religious and ethnic minorities.

On the other hand, Erdoans crackdown has to be short-lived. He needs to show potential coup plotters that the cost of rebelling can be prohibitively high. Yet, plunging the country into a permanent state of suspicion, purges, economic uncertainty and military weakness is not in his interests either. The increasingly authoritarian president should know that the failed coup had underlying causes that will not go away by themselves.

Excerpt from:
Turkey's democracy is dying but this brutal crackdown can't last - The Guardian

Wednesday July 19 2017

People attend a candlelight march for the late Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo in Hong Kong on July 15, 2017. His ashes were buried at sea on Saturday, depriving his supporters of a place to pay tribute to the pro-democracy dissident. PHOTO | DALE DE LA REY | AFP

The death of Liu Xiaobo deprives China's dissident movement of a crucial figurehead at a time when political activism on the mainland is being forced ever deeper underground, and pro-democracy forces in Hong Kong are under threat.

The world had not heard from Nobel laureate Liu since he was jailed in 2009 for writing a petition calling for political reform, but he remained an influential heavyweight of China's democracy movement and an inspiration for opponents of the Communist-ruled system.

His death in custody from cancer last week triggered rage and frustration among the dissident community but also a sense of hopelessness as they face hardened repression under China's President Xi Jinping.

"When the Chinese authorities can so easily control life and death, people are more afraid to fight," said activist Su Yutong, who fled to Germany after being repeatedly detained and questioned over her work at an NGO.

"They see that even a Nobel Peace Prize winner can die in jail."

There are fears that Liu's supporters will now be targeted, particularly his wife Liu Xia, who has been under house arrest since 2010.

Veteran China specialist Willy Lam said most of Liu's friends were already under 24-hour surveillance and that the dissident community in general was "highly demoralised".

"They realise they are going through a long winter with no light at the end of the tunnel," said Lam, a politics professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The fact that support from the international community is outweighed by the desire of foreign governments to keep Beijing onside has also hit hard, said Teng Biao, a human rights lawyer and visiting scholar at Princeton University.

"If the West is reluctant to anger China, there will be no hope," Teng told AFP.

However, some say they will brave it out.

One of the country's most prominent social activists Hu Jia, 43, has vowed not to leave China despite being under police surveillance since his release from prison six years ago.

"I want to stay and make an impact on the country," he told AFP.

Liu's death prompted an outpouring of grief in semi-autonomous Hong Kong, where pro-democracy forces must also contend with an increasingly assertive Beijing.

"We have to face the same political system and oppression," said pro-democracy lawmaker Eddie Chu.

"There used to be some distance, but now it's more intimately felt."

A day after Liu died, Hong Kong's High Court disqualified four pro-democracy lawmakers from parliament following an unprecedented intervention from Beijing over the way they incorporated protests into their oaths of office last year.

Two lawmakers who advocate complete independence for Hong Kong a concept that infuriates China had already been ousted from the legislature.

Hong Kong still enjoys freedoms unseen on the mainland thousands gathered for a memorial march to Liu on Saturday, while over the border even online tributes to him were removed.

But a string of incidents, including the disappearance of a city bookseller and a reclusive mainland tycoon, have heightened concerns of Beijing's political overreach.

When it was handed back to China by Britain in 1997 under a semi-autonomous "one country, two systems" deal, some hoped Hong Kong's colonial institutions, such as an independent judiciary and partially elected legislature, would lead to liberalisation over the border.

However, as China's wealth and global clout skyrocketed, Hong Kong's influence waned. Now it is seen by Beijing as a hotbed of subversion, particularly since mass protests calling for more democratic reform in 2014.

Xi warned any challenge to Beijing's control over Hong Kong crossed a "red line" earlier this month when he visited the city to mark 20 years since the handover.

Jonathan Sullivan, director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham, described the current political environment as "increasingly circumscribed".

"It remains to be seen if (the democracy movement) feels it can advance its agenda through the 'legitimate' political process. And if not will there be a resurgence of street politics?" asked Sullivan.

The movement itself is struggling for direction, having splintered between veteran activists calling for change across China and younger Hong Kong-centric "localists" who say the city must just fight for itself.

Analysts agree that by-elections for the seats of the ousted lawmakers will prove whether or not the pro-democracy message is alive and kicking.

Lawmaker Chu says the movement needs a clearer vision, but must also accept that change will not come quickly.

"Liu Xiaobo persevered, sacrificing even his life, not because he knew he would succeed but because he saw himself as part of a long-term process," Chu told AFP.

"Maybe Hong Kong is like this too. It's not about setting a goal for victory at a certain time."

University don-turned-politician clears the air on her relationship with Total Man.

How did the exceptionally rich Kenyan coastal forest ecosystem turn into a battleground?

See the rest here:
Dark days for China's democracy dream - Daily Nation

By Wendy R. Weiser By Wendy R. Weiser July 18 at 2:55 PM

Wendy R. Weiser directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

Even before the microphones are turned on, the White Houses new voter fraud commission has already done significant damage to American democracy.

By now, most are familiar with the slapstick launch of this so-called bipartisan group, which is set to have its first meeting Wednesday. It was announced in a hurry two days after the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey before half its members were selected. Its led by two Republicans and stacked with some of the nations most notorious promoters of vote suppression. Prime among them is its vice chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), whose ill-conceived and ill-executed request for state voter data remains a debacle.

Given the commissions fiasco-filled first weeks, its easy to dismiss it as a joke. That would be a mistake. The panel is already having a big impact, and it is in no way benign.

Much of the damage so far flows from Kobachs data request, which has overwhelmed election offices and forced them to spend an inordinate amount of time, money and energy dealing with the commission instead of doing their jobs. State officials have had to compile detailed responses to the letter, engage lawyers to make sure they dont run afoul of state laws and mobilize to reassure citizens that their personal data will be safe. One state official told the Brennan Center for Justice that his office has spent 50 percent of its time in recent weeks responding to calls from concerned constituents.

The request faces no fewer than 10 legal challenges over multiple alleged infractions. Already one commissioner has resigned. And last week, in publishing the first set of public comments, the White House publicly released the addresses and phone numbers of individuals who expressed concern over the privacy of their data.

The farce is also wasting federal resources. Taxpayers will spend at least half a million dollars on the commission, even though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in February that no federal funds should go toward any examination of voter fraud.

Even more disturbing, the commission has already accomplished one of the main goals critics accuse it of harboring: making people less likely to vote.

Election administrators across the country are reporting that, in response to Kobachs request, voters are asking to be removed from the rolls. The director of elections in Denver said her office has seen more than a 2,000 percent increase in voter registration withdrawals. And the Seminole County, Fla., supervisor of elections a Republican said that in his 12 years in office, he has never had to talk so many people out of giving up their right to vote, telling them: Please dont let an action or policy you disagree with have the effect of silencing your most powerful tool to change or affirm it: your vote.

Kobach offered a callous, evidence-free response: Those who withdrew their registration could be people who are not qualified to vote or someone who is not a U.S. citizen saying, Im withdrawing my voter registration because Im not able to vote.

The commissions threat to publicize private voter information previously protected by the states has naturally caused anxiety and has deeply shaken confidence in election administration. As has its unprecedented effort to assemble a national voter registry at the White House.

The commission plans to match the voter lists it receives from states against other federal databases, such as those used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, supposedly to identify ineligible voters on the rolls. This threatens to further undermine confidence. Experts believe that any list matches using data the commission is seeking would significantly inflate the amount of improper voting, and findings could allow the commission to falsely claim it has identified widespread fraud.

The effort has thinly veiled ends: to justify President Trumps absurd claim that he lost the popular vote because of millions of illegal voters and to lay the groundwork for laws that dramatically restrict access to voting, including through strict voter-ID requirements and obstacles to voter registration such as requiring documentary proof of citizenship.

The agenda is pre-baked. According to emails made public last week, Kobach told Trumps transition team in November that he is putting together ... legislation drafts for submission to Congress and that he had started drafting amendments to the National Voter Registration Act to make clear that proof of citizenship requirements are permitted.

Every minute local officials spend dealing with this sham is time they cannot focus on pressing problems, such as the need to shore up our systems against foreign actors attempting to interfere in our elections, especially Russia.

And yet, Kobach and crew havent even gotten started. We should not underestimate the further damage they can do to the publics confidence in our election system. Its up to us to ensure this farce doesnt turn into a tragedy.

Originally posted here:
The White House's voter fraud commission has already damaged our democracy - Washington Post