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In recent times, and probably since the establishment of universal voting, presidents-elect have systematically violated or broken their promises to their supporters.

This essay begins with the campaign promises of the outgoing President Barack Obama and the President-Elect Donald Trump. We will then examine the reasons why rhetorical populist, peaceful and democratic promises always accompany campaigns and are immediately followed by the victor appointing cabinet members who are committed to elite-driven, militarist and authoritarian policies – so far from the expectations of the voters.

Obama: Style and Substance

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According to unnamed officials a classified assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) blames the Russian government for, among other things, providing WikiLeaks with hacked emails during the run-up to 2016 presidential election. One source referred to this conclusion as the “consensus view” of the intelligence community. Though if that’s the case, then someone forgot to tell all those agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who, in their desire to obtain proof beyond a reasonable doubt (imagine that), have up to now declined to make a definitive statement. Ditto that for the Office of the Director …

In of itself, technological development is benign.  But behind every use is a human agent, and behind that agent is a motive, an inspiration, an agenda. Monitoring one’s employees has become the great mainstay of what companies claim is a productive exercise. The watched employee will have incentives to behave, to prosper, and to fulfil the ethos of the company.

Management at the mining giant Rio Tinto have ambitions to take the technology of monitoring employees to another level – quite literally.  Proud to have been at the forefront of various technical innovations in the employment field, the recently proposed surveillance …

Any jackass can knock down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one. LBJ

There will be a million takes on the election results, on the first 100 days in office, and on what four years will play out for the US of A. Towns where I live and work in — Portland, OR, Vancouver and Spokane, WA — sometimes profess that the head of the “free” (sic) world makes no difference to their respective metropolitan and county politics and doings.
We know it’s not true, and many times in this column space with DV, I take the microcosmic …

In three days, from December 11-13, 1981, U.S.-trained troops in Central America’s smallest, most densely populated republic, El Salvador, rounded up and killed over a thousand unarmed civilians in the hamlet of El Mozote, in Morazán province, near the Honduran border. This massacre, I believe, still has the dubious distinction of being the largest mass killing of civilians by state forces in the Western Hemisphere in the 20th century.

Most people who know anything about the Central American civil wars in the last decades of the Cold War know that they were U.S. proxy wars, the Reagan Administration’s “line in the …

Each generation carries its own revolution. For years, gun violence has dramatically impacted communities around the United States and a movement for gun violence prevention has emerged to respond. Now, as we reel and rebuild from the results of the election, it is the time for a new generation of organizers to metamorph this movement into one that is intersectional, inclusive and diverse. Young organizers and activists have been left behind by a movement that has focused strongly on background checks but needs to also strategically focus on responses that address the intersectional oppressions linked to gun violence.

My experience with …

Let’s welcome our new Commander in Chief by demonstrating how little he knows about the Constitution of the United States. Each incoming president is required on inauguration day to take the oath of office, affirming to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” But Trump proved his ignorance of this document when he recently wrote, “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or a year in jail!” The Supreme Court, however, thinks otherwise. It has twice ruled that burning the national flag is not a crime …

Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.

— Blaise Pascal, in Pensées (1658)

One year before meeting with Tycho Brahe in 1600, Johannes Kepler had determined to make use of the Danish nobleman’s highly valuable astronomical instruments. He revealed his game plan in a letter to his mentor:

Any single instrument of his cost more than my and my whole family’s fortune put together…. My opinion of Tycho is this: he is superlatively rich, but he knows not how to make proper use of it as is the case …

(Full article …)

To provide for the consideration of a definition of anti-Semitism for the enforcement of Federal antidiscrimination laws concerning education programs or activities

Apparently American Jews, although they comprise only about 2% of the American population, send so many shekels to Congress that when a bill benefiting them comes up, Congress drops everything else to pass the bill immediately. And the reason I say it is that I am stunned at how after eight years of Congressional do-nothing grid-lock, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act was introduced into the Senate last Thursday, December 01, and passed the very same day. Unanimously, without amendment.

And what …

The man-made environmental catastrophe is the severest issue facing humanity. It should be the number one priority for governments, but despite repeated calls from scientists, environmental groups and concerned citizens for years, short-term policies and economic self-interest are consistently given priority over the integrity of the planet and the health of the population.

Environmental inequality

Contaminated air is the world’s greatest preventable environmental health risk, and, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), is responsible for the premature deaths of an estimated 6.5 million people annually (11.6% of global deaths) – an average of six every minute. And unless there is substantial …

Given the founding of the nation in vicious ethnic cleansing of the original inhabitants and the forced immigration of kidnapped Africans in chains, racism, the false notion that humans are members of different races with some superior or inferior by virtue of skin tone, has taken hold of the minds of most Americans. Given the taught and learned rationalization of that material ugliness of national origins as being natural divisions among humans, this is understandable. But when racism becomes a fetish used to keep divisions among people that ensure minority wealth’s continued dominance of what is supposed to be a …