Comment by Riaz Haq on November 9, 2021 at 11:12am

"This Is the Story of How #Lincoln Broke the (1787) #US #Constitution" by @NoahRFeldman . President Abraham Lincoln replaced it with the “moral” 1865 Constitution with 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, making a decisive break with #slavery. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/opinion/constitution-slavery-lin...

First, he waged war on the Confederacy. He did this even though his predecessor, James Buchanan, and Buchanan’s attorney general, Jeremiah Black, had concluded that neither the president nor Congress had the lawful authority to coerce the citizens of seceding states to stay in the Union without their democratic consent. Coercive war, they had argued, repudiated the idea of consent of the governed on which the Constitution was based.

Second, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus unilaterally, without Congress, arresting thousands of political opponents and suppressing the free press and free speech to a degree unmatched in U.S. history before or since. When Chief Justice Roger Taney of the Supreme Court held that the suspension was unconstitutional, Lincoln ignored him.

Lincoln justified both of these constitutional violations by a doubtful theory of wartime necessity: that as chief executive and commander in chief, he possessed the inherent authority to use whatever means necessary to preserve the Union.

Third, and most fatefully, Lincoln came to believe that he also possessed the power to proclaim an end to slavery in the Southern states. When he finally did so, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, he eliminated any possibility of returning to the compromise Constitution as it had existed before the war.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 10, 2021 at 4:56pm

Law enforcement has taken little action as backers of Donald Trump aim stark threats at election officials. Reuters tracked down nine of the harassers. Most were unrepentant.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-th...


In Arizona, a stay-at-home dad and part-time Lyft driver told the state’s chief election officer she would hang for treason. In Utah, a youth treatment center staffer warned Colorado’s election chief that he knew where she lived and watched her as she slept.

In Vermont, a man who says he works in construction told workers at the state election office and at Dominion Voting Systems that they were about to die.

“This might be a good time to put a f‑‑‑‑‑‑ pistol in your f‑‑‑‑‑‑ mouth and pull the trigger,” the man shouted at Vermont officials in a thick New England accent last December. “Your days are f‑‑‑‑‑‑ numbered.”

The three had much in common. All described themselves as patriots fighting a conspiracy that robbed Donald Trump of the 2020 election. They are regular consumers of far-right websites that embrace Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods. And none have been charged with a crime by the law enforcement agencies alerted to their threats.

They were among nine people who told Reuters in interviews that they made threats or left other hostile messages to election workers. In all, they are responsible for nearly two dozen harassing communications to six election officials in four states. Seven made threats explicit enough to put a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death, the U.S. federal standard for criminal prosecution, according to four legal experts who reviewed their messages at Reuters’ request.

“This might be a good time to put a f‑‑‑‑‑‑ pistol in your f‑‑‑‑‑‑ mouth and pull the trigger ... Your days are f‑‑‑‑‑‑ numbered.”

ANONYMOUS THREAT TO VERMONT ELECTION OFFICIALS
These cases provide a unique perspective into how people with everyday jobs and lives have become radicalized to the point of terrorizing public officials. They are part of a broader campaign of fear waged against frontline workers of American democracy chronicled by Reuters this year. The news organization has documented nearly 800 intimidating messages to election officials in 12 states, including more than 100 that could warrant prosecution, according to legal experts.

The examination of the threats also highlights the paralysis of law enforcement in responding to this extraordinary assault on the nation’s electoral machinery. After Reuters reported the widespread intimidation in June, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a task force to investigate threats against election staff and said it would aggressively pursue such cases. But law enforcement agencies have made almost no arrests and won no convictions.

In many cases, they didn’t investigate. Some messages were too hard to trace, officials said. Other instances were complicated by America’s patchwork of state laws governing criminal threats, which provide varying levels of protection for free speech and make local officials in some states reluctant to prosecute such cases. Adding to the confusion, legal scholars say, the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t formulated a clear definition of a criminal threat.

For this report, Reuters set out to identify the people behind these attacks on election workers and understand their motivations. Reporters submitted public-records requests and interviewed dozens of election officials in 12 states, obtaining phone numbers and email addresses for two dozen of the threateners.

Reuters was able to interview nine of them. All admitted they were behind the threats or other hostile messages. Eight did so on the record, identifying themselves by name.



In the seven cases that legal scholars said could be prosecuted, law enforcement agencies were alerted by election officials to six of them. The people who made those threats told Reuters they never heard from police.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 30, 2021 at 9:10am

Connect the Dots from Doval and Rawat to Arun Mishra and a Disturbing Picture Emerges
Not only these three statements, but several other actions by the highest in the land as also by the political leaders need to be put under the scanner.

By Admiral (retd) L. Ramdas, former chief of the Indian Navy.

https://thewire.in/government/constitutional-rights-ajit-doval-bipi...

The (Indian) NSA (Ajit Doval) is among those seen to be closest to the ‘Powers that Be’. While addressing IPS probationers at a passing out parade in the Police Academy at Hyderabad on November 11, he reportedly said that “the new frontier of war was civil society”, and equated this to the ” fourth generation warfare”. The freshly minted young police graduates are being openly told that since “civil society can be suborned, manipulated, subverted and divided and thus hurt the interests of the nation”, it is their duty to deal with them. He also implied that the ‘electoral process’ is not paramount, and what is important are the laws made by lawmakers which the police must enforce ruthlessly.

This sits uneasily in the context of the address from the NSA to police trainees when he openly suggests that civil society is the real threat and must be dealt with ‘ruthlessly’. Already we have seen sub-divisional magistrates telling the police to “break the heads of protesting farmers”. A recent report by the National Campaign Against Torture – a platform for NGOs working on torture in India – has highlighted how torture continues to remain a favoured tool in the hands of the police to extract information and confessions, or sometimes just to victimise oppressed sections of society.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 9, 2021 at 6:36pm

Edward Luce
@EdwardGLuce
"We're not in a great position right now to preach the virtues of democracy." My
@FinancialTimes
big read on the upcoming summit of democracies.

https://twitter.com/EdwardGLuce/status/1468573209255723012?s=20


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https://www.ft.com/content/3021d211-428e-49f7-9f62-7194a36f432e

If you could boil down Joe Biden’s foreign policy to its essentials, two things would stand out: competition with China, and the return of American values after the “aberration” of Donald Trump. Both are prevalent, although in tension, in Biden’s Democracy Summit, which the White House will host this Thursday and Friday.

The virtual gathering will feature the heads of 111 governments and exclude China, Russia and most other autocracies. Even in America’s long history of proselytising freedom, nothing like this has been tried before.

“It tells the world that America still believes in democracy and wants to put it back on the menu,” says Michael Abramowitz, head of Freedom House, which has registered a shrinkage in global freedom in each of the last 15 years. “The risk is that it is seen as a talking shop which could deepen cynicism about democracy.”

Biden’s grand online gathering could hardly be more dramatically timed. It coincides with a formidable Russian military build-up on Ukraine’s eastern border and in the wake of escalating Chinese military activity around the island of Taiwan.

On Tuesday Biden held a two-hour video conference with Vladimir Putin in which he threatened a drastic step up in western sanctions if Russia breached Ukraine’s borders. Whether Biden’s warnings have any effect on Putin’s territorial revisionism, which have so far appeared impervious to economic pressure, is an open question.

Tensions in the South China Sea appear to have subsided a little following a call between Biden and Xi Jinping last month. It is a safe bet that the words “democracy” and “summit” did not dominate Biden’s discussion with either Putin or Xi. The contention that the world is in a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism is nevertheless at the heart of Biden’s foreign policy — and one that he hopes will reboot America’s alliances.

Controversy over the usefulness — and wisdom — of the summit flared up last month when the White House released the guest list. It included 29 countries that Freedom House defines as “partly free”, such as Colombia, Indonesia and Kenya, and three that it classifies as “not free” — Iraq, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

This exposed Biden to criticism of smuggling realpolitik into a summit that was meant to be about values. Each discrete choice can be justified in geopolitical terms. As the most important potential bulwark against China, for example, India, which Sweden’s V-Dem, a research institute that measures levels of democracy, recently downgraded to an “electoral autocracy”, could not be kept off the guest list. Once India was on it, however, its arch-rival Pakistan had to be added too, even though it is a military-dominated state and a close ally of China.

If curbing Beijing’s influence was a guiding aim, why were Singapore and Thailand left out? Israel could not be the sole country in the Middle East to be invited, which is why “not free” Iraq was included. Having suffered a coup earlier this year, Tunisia ruled itself out. It is hard to see any grounds to invite Angola and the DRC other than concern over China’s stranglehold on their resources, including materials that feed into lithium batteries and the iPhone.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 9, 2021 at 6:38pm

Why Biden is hosting more than 100 countries to talk about democracy

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/09/1062501249/why-biden-is-hosting-more...


The White House is also dealing with a much more pressing and existential hurdle than remote logistics and the guest list as it plans this summit, though: the fact that as the summit convenes, democracy seems to be more under more of a threat in the United States than at any time since the Civil War.

Steven Levitsky, a political scientist who co-wrote a 2018 bestseller on the issue that a Biden reportedly regularly referenced throughout his presidential campaign, says he has grown "more worried" about the fate of American democracy in the years since publishing How Democracies Die.

Young Americans are raising alarms about the state of U.S. democracy in a new poll
POLITICS
Young Americans are raising alarms about the state of U.S. democracy in a new poll
Democracy is declining in the U.S. but it's not all bad news, a report finds
POLITICS
Democracy is declining in the U.S. but it's not all bad news, a report finds
Former President Donald Trump's false denial that he lost last year's presidential election has taken hold among a majority of Republican voters. As next year's midterm elections draw closer, Trump has pushed to establish that lie as a central organizing principle for Republican candidates.

Republican legislatures across the country have responded to Trump's lies about 2020 by passing new voter restrictions and by giving partisans more power over certifying ballots and election results.

And, of course, a mob of pro-Trump extremists stormed the U.S. Capitol, a global symbol of democracy, on Jan. 6, in an unsuccessful attempt to block the certification of the Electoral College votes electing Biden as president.

"Democratic parties — small-d democratic parties — have to be able to accept defeat. That's the first criteria for making a modern democracy work," Levitsky told NPR. "If a party that's big enough to win elections cannot lose elections — cannot accept losing elections — democracy is in trouble."

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 9, 2021 at 9:24pm

#US spends more on #defense than the next 11 countries combined. #democracy #DemocracySummit #military https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/07/the-united-states-spends-more-on-...

https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/1469175141405913088?s=20

Defense spending by the United States increased by $44 billion from 2019 to 2020, according to recently released figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). That increase outstripped growth in spending from other countries, and as a result, the United States now spends more on defense than the next 11 countries combined (up from outspending the next 10 countries combined in 2019).

SIPRI’s definition of defense spending is broader than the definitions that are most frequently used in fiscal policy discussions in the United States, and according to their calculations, the United States spent $778 billion on national defense in 2020. SIPRI includes discretionary and mandatory outlays by the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of State, and the National Intelligence Program. By contrast, the typical budget category of defense discretionary spending ($714 billion in 2020) excludes outlays by the Department of State and all mandatory spending. Nonetheless, the SIPRI comparison provides useful insights on the sheer scale of U.S. defense spending relative to other nations.


Although the United States spends more on defense than any other country, the Congressional Budget Office projects that defense spending as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) will decline over the next 10 years — from 3.3 percent of GDP in 2021 to 2.7 percent in 2031. That is considerably lower than the 50-year average spending on defense of 4.4 percent of GDP.


Defense spending accounts for a sizable portion of the federal budget and the United States vastly outspends other nations. In determining the appropriate level of such spending in the future, it will be important to evaluate whether it is being used effectively and how it fits in with other national priorities.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 10, 2021 at 7:49am

ian bremmer

@ianbremmer

·

1h

In light of the US democracy summit, % who think US is a good model of democracy: Italy 32% Greece 26% Spain 22% Taiwan 22% UK 20% France 18% Sweden 16% S Korea 16% Japan 14% Canada 14% Germany 14% Australia 11% New Zealand 8% US 19% (at least we’re honest) -Pew (Spring '21)

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 11, 2021 at 6:58pm

Assessment on Participation of #Pakistan in (#US) Summit For Democracy: "Endowment has provided funds for the private media like the Express Tribune, Geo News, Naya Daur, FactFocus to promote freedom of expression in cooperation with indigenous democratic forces" #DemocracySummit

https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/1469863720612339715?s=20

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 13, 2022 at 4:36pm

Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton The US military launched at least 251 foreign interventions from 1991 to 2022. This is according to a report from the US government's own Congressional Research Service. I went through the data and created a map showing just how vast the meddling is: https://multipolarista.com/2022/09/13/us-251-military-interventions... https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1569800676678696960?s=20&...

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 4, 2022 at 8:14am

#Trump calls for scrapping of the #US #Constitution as a means to reinstall himself into the presidency. Trump also called for a do-over of the #presidential race that he lost in a landslide to President Joe #Biden. #Democracy #America https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-calls-for-the-...

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday morning raged on his anti-Twitter app Truth Social about non-existent "fraud and deception" in the November 8th midterm elections – and he proposed scrapping the United States Constitution as a means to reinstall himself into the presidency. Trump also called for a do-over of the race that he lost in a landslide to President Joe Biden.


"So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution," Trump "truthed."

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in either the 2020 or 2022 elections, let alone that which was pervasive enough to affect the results.

"Our great 'Founders' did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!" Trump added. The authors of the Constitution – many of whom were traffickers of enslaved human beings – only wanted white male landowners to vote.

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