Reflectii

I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.

–Theodor Adorno 1959

Rule of law, transparency, accountability and citizenship rights are fundamental pillars of constitutional democracy. These pillars are eroding rapidly. The democratic cultures based on equality, liberty, justice, reason, science, secularism, tolerance and mutual respect for dissenting and diverse opinions are declining across the globe. The corporatisation of electoral campaigns, market command over political parties, corporate control over political processes and policies are mortal threat to the citizenship rights and democratic polity. The capitalist assault on democratic governance is creating conditions of political, economic, social and cultural crises, and giving rise to reactionary forces. Major democracies in Europe, Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania are facing the crisis of legitimacy and citizens are losing trust over their own states and governments.

It is hard to feel good about this report, but with wage growth slowing sharply in the last six months to around 4.0 percent (compared to 3.4 percent in 2019), it’s hard to see how an inflation rate north of 9.0 percent can be sustained. The overall CPI was up 1.3 percent in June, core rose 0.7 percent; 9.1 percent and 5.9 percent year-over-year, respectively.

The Mediterranean region in question

The Mediterranean is etymologically the “sea in the middle of the land“. (1) The Romans called it Mare Magnum (‘Great Sea’) or Mare Internum (‘Internal Sea’) and, starting with the Roman Empire, Mare Nostrum (‘Our Sea’). The term Mare Mediterrāneum appears later in the work of Gaius Julius Solinus in the 3rd century, (2) but the earliest extant witness to it is in the 6th century, in Isidore of Seville. (3)

Generally speaking, younger people trust in governments and the EU more than older age cohorts. Governments, however, are doing little to prove themselves worthy of that trust.

Socially and economically, young people have suffered disproportionately in the crises of the past decade and a half.

As the US energy sector’s reliance on digitalization grows, its vulnerability to cyberattacks also increases. To better understand current and future threats, the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center convened the Atlantic Council Task Force on Cybersecurity and the Energy Transition to develop a cybersecurity framework designed to protect US energy infrastructure—and by extension, national security—against cyberattacks.

In the recent Wall Street Journal article “Inflation Surge Earns Monetarism Another Look,” Greg Ip writes that a recent surge in inflation is not likely to bring authorities to reembrace monetarism. According to Ip, money supply had a poor record of predicting US inflation because of conceptual and definitional problems that haven’t gone away.

Η απόφαση του ΕΔΔΑ εκθέτει ανεπανόρθωτα την κυβέρνηση Σαμαρά, για πρακτικές που εφαρμόζει και σήμερα το Μαξίμου ● Γράφουν στην «Εφ.Συν.» εκπρόσωποι των τριών από τις πέντε οργανώσεις που προσέφυγαν στο ΕΔΔΑ για λογαριασμό των επιζώντων.

The United States maintains a list of countries that it considers as “state sponsors of terrorism.” There are currently four countries on that list: Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Syria. The basic idea behind this list is that the U.S. State Department determines that these countries have “provided support for acts of international terrorism.” Evidence about those “acts” are not provided by the U.S. government. For Cuba, there is not one shred of evidence that the government has offered any such support to terrorism activities, in fact, Cuba has—since 1959—been a victim of acts of terrorism by the United States, including an attempted invasion in 1961 (Bay of Pigs) and repeated assassination attempts against its leaders (638 times against Fidel Castro).

“The alarming amendments offered by the Biden Administration to the WHO’s International Health Regulations would grant new unilateral authority to [WHO] Director-General Tedros to declare a public health crisis in the United States or other sovereign nations, without any consultation with the U.S. or any other WHO member. Specifically, the Biden Amendment would strike the current regulation that requires the WHO to ‘consult with and attempt to obtain verification from the State Party in whose territory the event is allegedly occurring in,’ ceding the United States’ ability to declare and respond to an infectious disease outbreak within the United States, dependent on the judgment of a corrupt and complicit UN bureaucracy.” — Rep. Chris Smith, ranking member of the House Global Health Subcommittee, May 18, 2022.