Emrys
Emrys's Journal"The attack on the judges is shameful. It strikes at the very heart of our democracy"
It has become painfully clear since June’s vote to leave the European Union that Theresa May’s government and its supporters have little or no idea where the country is heading. Lacking a plan or a shared philosophy, they are united by an arbitrary and destructive rush to the exit. Their hysterical reaction to last week’s unanimous high court ruling that Britain cannot quit the EU without parliament’s consent also reveals extraordinary ignorance about where we, as a country, have come from. It is dismaying that those who campaigned so passionately to reclaim British sovereignty appear not to have the first idea about their country’s long-established constitutional arrangements.
It is a fundamental principle of British democracy that parliament is sovereign. Not the government. Not the executive or a self-selecting clique within it. Certainly not this prime minister, who lacks a personal mandate. Sovereign power resides with our elected, representative parliament. This state of affairs did not come about by chance. A power struggle between the crown and its subjects raged almost unceasingly in the centuries following Magna Carta. The proposition that the monarch cannot rule without parliament’s consent lay at the heart of England’s serial 17th-century civil wars. The question was settled by the parliamentarians’ victory at the battle of Worcester in 1651. Parliament’s ascendancy was legally established in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which spawned the landmark Bill of Rights.
It is also a long-established fact of British constitutional life that the country’s senior judges do not make domestic law. Their independent role is to interpret laws agreed by parliament, say what they mean and how and if they may be legally implemented. When Britain joined what was then the EEC, the European Communities Act, passed by parliament in 1972, incorporated many European laws into domestic law. Thus it is both illogical and ignorant to castigate the high court for doing its job and stating the constitutionally obvious: that having passed the act, only parliament can override it by consenting to activate article 50 of the Lisbon treaty.
Yet castigating the judges and by extension, anybody who has the effrontery to agree with them, is exactly what the hard Tory Brexiters and their accomplices in the lie factories of Fleet Street have resorted to with a venom, vindictiveness and vituperation remarkable even by their standards. The will of the people has been thwarted by an “activist” judiciary. These bewigged, closet Remainers, members of the fabled “well-heeled liberal metropolitan elite”, are “enemies of the people”, they shriek. Some of these sleaze-peddlers even dipped into homophobia, highlighting the sexual orientation of one of the judges. Inexcusable.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/06/high-court-ruling-brexit-not-sabotaging-parliamentary-democracy-best-deal-britain
A blistering editorial from today's Observer (the headline in my post topic is the one on the hard-copy version).
The situation highlights the cowardice and directionlessness of May and her government. It should be unquestionable that they respect the views of our judiciary even if they disagree with them. Any other way lies the slippery slope to lawlessness and tyranny.
By failing to speak out and condemn the abuse being doled out, they effectively condone it. Vocally expressed extreme public opinion is not something that should (or, I'm sure, will) influence the judgment in December of our supreme court, which was only a few years ago granted independence from the government (the House of Lords used to be the ultimate reviewing chamber).
Mouthing platitudes about "the will of the people" is all very well, but if that will is currently reflected in racist, homophobic and anti-democratic outbursts and May & Co. choose to allow them to run unchallenged and uncondemned, they might see that as an electorally canny move - they fear the unwashed masses they patronize by claiming to understand and want to help - but it will come back to bite them in the arse. Again.
Again, because they and the media (and too often parties in opposition) have pandered to and supported the worst aspects of the British temperament for many years. That's why UKIP had its day in the sun and we're in the mess we're in now and those who appear foreign walk with less confidence on our streets. How much worse will they allow this to get before they stop tacitly encouraging it?
Enough. Govern - responsibly - or get off the pot.
How Macedonia Became A Global Hub For Pro-Trump Misinformation
Source: BuzzfeedNews
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Over the past year, the central Macedonian town of Veles (population 45,000) has experienced a digital gold rush as locals launched at least 140 US politics websites. These sites have American-sounding domain names such as WorldPoliticus.com, TrumpVision365.com, USConservativeToday.com, DonaldTrumpNews.co, and USADailyPolitics.com. They almost all publish aggressively pro-Trump content aimed at conservatives and Trump supporters in the US.
The young Macedonians who run these sites don’t care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of U.S. display advertising — a declining market for American publishers — goes a long way in Veles. Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook — and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters.
As a result, this strange hub of pro-Trump sites in Macedonia is now playing a significant role in propagating the kind of false and misleading content that was identified in a recent BuzzFeed News analysis of hyperpartisan Facebook pages. These sites open a window into the economic incentives behind producing misinformation specifically for the wealthiest advertising markets and specifically for Facebook, the world’s largest social network, as well as within online advertising networks such as Google AdSense.
“Yes, the info in the blogs is bad, false, and misleading but the rationale is that ‘if it gets the people to click on it and engage, then use it,’” said a university student in Veles who started a US politics site, and who agreed to speak on the condition that BuzzFeed News not use his name.
Read more: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo
Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?
This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting.The greatest miracle of the Internet is that it exists—the second greatest is that it persists. Every so often we’re reminded that bad actors wield great skill and have little conscience about the harm they inflict on the world’s digital nervous system. They invent viruses, botnets, and sundry species of malware. There’s good money to be made deflecting these incursions. But a small, tightly-knit community of computer scientists who pursue such work—some at cyber-security firms, some in academia, some with close ties to three-letter federal agencies—is also spurred by a sense of shared idealism and considers itself the benevolent posse that chases off the rogues and rogue states that try to purloin sensitive data and infect the Internet with their bugs. “We’re the Union of Concerned Nerds,” in the wry formulation of the Indiana University computer scientist L. Jean Camp.
In late spring, this community of malware hunters placed itself in a high state of alarm. Word arrived that Russian hackers had infiltrated the servers of the Democratic National Committee, an attack persuasively detailed by the respected cyber-security firm CrowdStrike. The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work.
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In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.
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The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.html
Britain Is Becoming an Emerging Market
Breaking up is hard to do — especially after a 43-year marriage. Which is why the notion that the United Kingdom might engineer a “soft Brexit” from the European Union, the innocent hope of many investors and some Brits, was always a delusion. Instead, Britain’s plunging pound, which has swooned to a staggering 168-year low against a benchmark of other major currencies, is just a taste of the economic deterioration to come.
Instead of the pro-Brexit camp’s promise that the vote was a push for independence from European red tape, the drive for sovereignty has turned into a quixotic exercise in isolationism that shows few signs of ending well. In effect, the United Kingdom has abdicated its chief source of economic and political clout — its close association with the European Union, the world’s largest economy. In so doing, Britain may be on the way to looking more like an emerging market, where suddenly political risk, currency volatility, and uncertainty about the future are the new normal. And if you’re thinking that long-term investment and private spending might suffer as a result, you’re bloody well right.
Despite a raft of warnings, Brexiteers were quick to claim victory in the months following the momentous June referendum. “To me, Brexit is easy,” said a confident Nigel Farage, leader of the pro-Brexit UK Independence Party. Sure, the pound was falling a tad rapidly. But, hey, the economic data didn’t fall off a cliff, and the stock market even hit a new record. But that was the summer sun talking.
The arrival of autumn has brought the onset of reality. One leaked government report estimated the mere cost of the process at an eye-popping $22 billion. That’s substantially more than the U.K.’s yearly contribution to the EU budget, which was supposed to be a source of savings post-Brexit.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/17/britain-is-becoming-an-emerging-market-brexit-europe-united-kingdom-article-50-currency
FBI's Comey opposed naming Russians, citing election timing: Source
Source: CNBC
FBI Director James Comey argued privately that it was too close to Election Day for the United States government to name Russia as meddling in the U.S. election and ultimately ensured that the FBI's name was not on the document that the U.S. government put out, a former FBI official tells CNBC.
The official said some government insiders are perplexed as to why Comey would have election timing concerns with the Russian disclosure but not with the Huma Abedin email discovery disclosure he made Friday.
In the end, the Department of Homeland Security and The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued the statement on Oct. 7, saying "The U.S. intelligence community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations…These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process."
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According to the former official, Comey agreed with the conclusion the intelligence community came to: "A foreign power was trying to undermine the election. He believed it to be true, but was against putting it out before the election." Comey's position, this official said, was "if it is said, it shouldn't come from the FBI, which as you'll recall it did not."
Read more: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/31/fbis-comey-opposed-naming-russians-citing-election-timing-source.html
Donald Trump is refusing to pay his campaign pollster three-quarters of a million dollars
Source: The Washington Post
Donald Trump's hiring of pollster Tony Fabrizio in May was viewed as a sign that the real estate mogul was finally bringing seasoned operatives into his insurgent operation.
But the Republican presidential nominee appears to have taken issue with some of the services provided by the veteran GOP strategist, who has advised candidates from 1996 GOP nominee Bob Dole to Florida Gov. Rick Scott. The Trump campaign's latest Federal Election Commission report shows that it is disputing nearly $767,000 that Fabrizio's firm says it is still owed for polling.
Trump campaign officials declined to provide details about the reason the campaign has declined to pay the sum to Fabrizio Lee, the pollster's Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based firm. “This is an administrative issue that we're resolving internally,” said senior communications adviser Jason Miller. Fabrizio did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Fabrizio was an ally of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who persuaded a skeptical Trump in the spring that he needed a professional pollster. The abrupt departure of Manafort in August and Trump's hiring of pollster Kellyanne Conway to be his campaign manager raised questions about whether Fabrizio would stay on. There have also been multiple reports that Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner have rejected Fabrizio's advice.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/10/31/donald-trump-is-refusing-to-pay-his-campaign-pollster-nearly-three-quarters-of-a-million-dollars/
Donald Trump's Companies Destroyed Emails in Defiance of Court Orders
Source: Newsweek
Over the course of decades, Donald Trump’s companies have systematically destroyed or hidden thousands of emails, digital records and paper documents demanded in official proceedings, often in defiance of court orders. These tactics—exposed by a Newsweek review of thousands of pages of court filings, judicial orders and affidavits from an array of court cases—have enraged judges, prosecutors, opposing lawyers and the many ordinary citizens entangled in litigation with Trump. In each instance, Trump and entities he controlled also erected numerous hurdles that made lawsuits drag on for years, forcing courtroom opponents to spend huge sums of money in legal fees as they struggled—sometimes in vain—to obtain records.
This behavior is of particular import given Trump’s frequent condemnations of Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, for having deleted more than 30,000 emails from a server she used during her time as secretary of state. While Clinton and her lawyers have said all of those emails were personal, Trump has suggested repeatedly on the campaign trail that they were government documents Clinton was trying to hide and that destroying them constituted a crime. The allegation—which the FBI concluded was not supported by any evidence—is a crowd-pleaser at Trump rallies, often greeted by supporters chanting, “Lock her up!”
Trump’s use of deception and untruthful affidavits, as well as the hiding or improper destruction of documents, dates back to at least 1973, when the Republican nominee, his father and their real estate company battled the federal government over civil charges that they refused to rent apartments to African-Americans. The Trump strategy was simple: deny, impede and delay, while destroying documents the court had ordered them to hand over.
Shortly after the government filed its case in October, Trump attacked: He falsely declared to reporters that the feds had no evidence he and his father discriminated against minorities, but instead were attempting to force them to lease to welfare recipients who couldn’t pay their rent.
Read more: http://europe.newsweek.com/donald-trump-companies-destroyed-emails-documents-515120
Nissan warned government on fate of Sunderland without deal
During talks that led to a meeting between Theresa May and Nissan chief Carlos Ghosn, the Japanese carmaker said it was prepared to shift production to its Spanish and French factories in a move that would lead to the closure of its British plant and other UK sites.
Government assurances offered to Nissan led to its decision this week to locate two new cars at the plant from 2019, safeguarding more than 30,000 jobs at the site and in its supply chain.
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Rival carmakers are now demanding the same assurances offered to Nissan to shield them from the impact of Brexit. While technology and pharmaceuticals companies are prioritising visas for skilled workers, other exporters including chemicals manufacturers have set tariff-free access to the EU as a priority.
https://www.ft.com/content/21346414-9d25-11e6-a6e4-8b8e77dd083a
And so it begins.
The government (whatever arm of it we're talking about here, as communication and co-ordination between the various departments so far has seemed particularly ineffective - No. 10 currently denies that May and Ghosn discussed the potential closure at their meeting, which beggars belief) has apparently made some pretty rash, desperate promises to Nissan: "the carmaker would face no change in its trading conditions following Britain’s exit from the EU".
Either this is bullshit, or May's willing, despite all the bluster, to eventually settle for any deal with the EU that will fulfil these conditions (a far softer Brexit than has been hinted at so far), or she's willing to throw however much money and other inducements at them as ends up being necessary to keep them sweet and on British soil (which would require some nifty accounting to avoid falling foul of WTO and other trading bloc rules).
The FT article speculates that Nissan deciding to leave the UK "would have ... set a precedent for other carmakers to locate future work outside Britain", and other major employers might have followed in their wake. Now instead, May's set another precedent, and every significant industry that could relocate will be after its own preferential treatment.
Maybe we should all join the queue with our caps in hand. If enough if us can get these assurances, it'll be as if we never left ...
Tony Blair's call to mobilise against Brexit sparks mixed response
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In his first major intervention on Brexit since the referendum campaign, Blair called for a new movement born from the 48% of the electorate who wanted to remain in the EU, saying: “We have to build the capability to mobilise and to organise.”
Writing in the New European, Blair said: “The issue is not whether we ignore the will of the people, but whether, as information becomes available, and facts take the place of claims, the ‘will’ of the people shifts. Maybe it won’t, in which case people like me will have to accept it.
“But surely we are entitled to try to persuade, to make the argument, and not to be whipped into line to support a decision we genuinely believe is a catastrophe for the country we love.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/28/tony-blair-remain-voters-to-mobilise-against-brexit
(Largely) the right message, wrong messenger, I fear.
Still, it keeps the idea alive that we Brexitsceptics needn't heed the predictable calls from some of the wannabe neofascist media: "Just fuck off and go and live in Europe if you love it so much."
What Theresa May really thinks about Brexit shown in leaked recording
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Speaking at the bank in London on 26 May, the then home secretary appeared to go further than her public remarks to explain more clearly the economic benefits of staying in the EU. She told staff it was time the UK took a lead in Europe, and that she hoped voters would look to the future rather than the past.
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“I think the economic arguments are clear,” she said. “I think being part of a 500-million trading bloc is significant for us. I think, as I was saying to you a little earlier, that one of the issues is that a lot of people will invest here in the UK because it is the UK in Europe.
“If we were not in Europe, I think there would be firms and companies who would be looking to say, do they need to develop a mainland Europe presence rather than a UK presence? So I think there are definite benefits for us in economic terms.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/25/exclusive-leaked-recording-shows-what-theresa-may-really-thinks-about-brexit
Commentary on above: The Goldman Sachs tape shows May is not leading on Brexit, but following
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