Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Sick of Hearing About Electability? It Will Take Organizing To Expand Our Political Imagination.

Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign with impossible promises, from erecting a massive, Mexican-funded border wall to revitalizing dying industries. Instead of being dismissed as a huckster, he raised Republican voters’ expectations of the possible and normalized the party’s shift to its extreme. Trump’s victory seemed to turn on its head the conventional wisdom that only centrists win general elections.

Centrist Democrats are nonetheless clinging to that conventional wisdom, undermining popular progressive candidates and policies on the grounds that one of their own is the most likely to unseat Donald Trump. As one of Joe Biden’s supporters and fundraisers, South Carolina state Sen. Dick Harpootlian, told Vanity Fair, “This [election] isn’t a battle of ideologies or identity or Medicare for All or a Green New Whatever. It’s all about who can stop this juvenile narcissist from getting a second term.”

To an extent, the Democratic establishment has polling on its side. Biden consistently leads in primary polling, and a Quinnipiac poll from May shows 61% of registered Pennsylvania Democrats think Biden is the most likely to beat Trump. Bernie Sanders is a distant second at 6%; Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris are tied at 3%.

In response, the Left can point out that policies such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal—which Biden does not support, and which several other candidates do—poll well with voters. We can also remind Democrats that campaigning on centrism did not work for John Kerry or Hillary Clinton. It may be early enough in the election cycle that an examination of Biden’s long history of conservative positions, coupled with his current dismissal of millennials and progressive policies, will be enough to dampen perceptions of his electability.

But given the strength of the centrist media establishment, it’s also possible these perceptions will not change. Through week two of Biden’s campaign, for instance, FiveThirtyEight showed him receiving almost as much media coverage as every other Democratic candidate combined. Left media can and should make the case against Biden, but we simply do not have the megaphone needed to counteract the influence of broadcast and cable news.

Instead, we need to find other ways to reach ordinary voters (and nonvoters). Organizing around non-presidential candidates and issues is one way to build relationships, start face-to-face conversations and engage in political education, which can build power and raise consciousness for 2020, 2024 and beyond—not to mention achieve bigger social goals.

That could mean lobbying with National Nurses United on Medicare for All, organizing strikes with the Fight for 15, supporting Black Youth Project 100 in their work against the prison-industrial complex, donating to organizations in hard-hit communities (like Milwaukee’s Black Leaders Organizing for Communities), or volunteering for the Sunrise Movement. Alongside the victories of politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), these actions can challenge perceptions about what is possible and who is electable.

Labor organizing should be key to this approach. Many unions engage in political education with their membership, and drive money and volunteers with their endorsements. In 2008, 59% of union households supported Barack Obama—a relative political unknown then running on anti-establishment populism—over John McCain; in 2012, 58% of union households supported Obama over Mitt Romney. But in 2016, union support for Hillary Clinton—seen as a centrist establishment candidate—dropped to 51%.

The question of electability may not be answered until voters go to the polls next year. But if history is any indicator, an “electable” centrist could very well win the primary and fail in the general. Since the formation of the moderate Coalition for a Democratic Majority—more than 40 years ago, in the wake of progressive George McGovern’s loss to Richard Nixon—centrist Democrats have used so-called electability as a weapon. It may take consistent, grassroots organizing to liberate ourselves from it.

Bernie Sanders Has Laid Out the Stakes of the 2020 Election: Democratic Socialism or Barbarism

The opening salvo of Donald Trump’s reelection campaign came not in a defamatory speech or presidential tweetstorm, but in an overlooked report put out in October 2018 by his White House Council of Economic Advisers titled “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism.”

The bizarre document featured a mash-up of Margaret Thatcher quotes, paeans to Nordic truck drivers and allegories about Christmas sweaters, but its central conceit—that a socialist menace haunted the American public—has come to animate Trump’s talking points as he sets his sights on 2020.

In his State of the Union address in February, Trump thundered, “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.” At the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, he claimed, "We believe in the American dream, not the socialist nightmare." During a National Republican Campaign Committee fundraiser in April, he said “I love the idea of ‘Keep America Great,’ because you know what it says is we’ve made it great. Now we’re going to keep it great, because these socialists will destroy it.”

Such fear mongering is not new. Barack Obama was consistently derided as a freedom-hating socialist by everyone from billionaire David Koch to former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Indeed, from William Jennings Bryan in the 1890s to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s to Bill Clinton in the 1990s, conservatives have attempted to tar Democratic presidential candidates as socialist agents.

The difference in 2020 is that this time around, one of the Democratic front runners embraces the socialist label. On Wednesday, at George Washington University, Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered an unwavering defense of democratic socialism in a major campaign speech.

“Democratic socialism to me requires achieving political and economic freedom in every community in this country,” said Sanders.

Presenting a defense that tethered the principles of democratic socialism to battles throughout U.S. history to expand freedom and provide a better life for the American people, Sanders said that the task today is to “take up the unfinished business of the New Deal and carry it to completion.”

But Sanders made clear that his vision goes beyond that of FDR’s. "We must recognize that in the 21st century, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights," Sanders said, making a case for enshrining not only healthcare as a right, but also education, employment, housing and the ability to live in a “clean environment.”   

This conception of democratic socialism sees such basic human needs as inalienable, and demands they not be subject to market forces. During the speech, Sanders raised the question of whether people are truly free if they can’t afford to go to the doctor, or if they have to work 80 hours a week to make a living.  

With inequality levels mirroring those of the Gilded Age, and corporate profits at an all-time high, democratic socialism is finding a fervent audience: More than 6 in 10 Americans are unhappy with the current size and influence of corporations, and the same proportion say the current distribution of money and wealth in our society is unfair. Medicare for All, Sanders' trademark proposal, is now backed by 70 percent of Americans, and his calls for a jobs guarantee, tuition-free college and a Green New Deal all boast majority support. How would such programs be paid for? More than 75 percent of Americans say we should soak the rich.

Sanders has similarly proposed a democratic socialist approach to workers’ rights. He advocates expanding union rights, increasing employee ownership and creating a worker-run fund that would pay them out dividends.

If the constituent parts of Sanders’ socialist vision are increasingly popular, so is the term itself. Despite the Right’s best attempts to stigmatize socialism, 4 in 10 Americans now say they would rather live in a socialist country than a capitalist one, and majorities of women, young people and Democrats all now say they favor socialism over capitalism.

In his speech, Sanders did more than repeat his calls for a more egalitarian politics and bold left-wing policies. He argued that we are up against an oligarchy that has captured our political system, and that we must stand in solidarity with the movements of working people who are demanding fundamental change—from striking teachers, to climate justice organizers to women fighting for reproductive freedom.

Sanders made the case that the term “free market” is an oxymoron. Citing the Wall Street bailouts of 2008 and subsidies heaped each year on the fossil fuel industry and monopolistic enterprises like Amazon, Sanders said that Trump and his fellow oligarchs have long engaged in a form of “corporate socialism” that uses the power of the state to guarantee their continued profitability. Quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said “this country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor,” Sanders argued that nothing short of a full-fledged economic transformation can reverse this arrangement.

By reframing the debate around socialism to rebuke the greed of Trump and corporate America, Sanders attempted to turn the tables on critics who dismiss his democratic socialist agenda. "The issue of unfettered capitalism is not just an academic debate,” he said. “Poverty, economic distress and despair are life-threatening issues for millions of working people in the country."

He linked the turn toward oligarchy and authoritarianism in America to the pantheon of rightwing authoritarian leaders who have consolidated power around the world. He named names: Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Muhammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and America’s own Donald Trump.

“These leaders meld corporatist economics with xenophobia and authoritarianism,” said Sanders. “They redirect popular anger about inequality and declining economic conditions into violent rage against minorities—whether they are immigrants, racial minorities, religious minorities or the LGBT community. And to suppress dissent, they are cracking down on democracy and human rights.”

In contrast to such hate-mongering, Sanders counterposed democratic socialism which he said seeks “a higher path, a path of compassion, justice and love.”

With hate crimes on the rise across the country, and the Trump administration engaging in such policies as the caging of migrant children, Sanders made clear that democratic socialism is not some radical philosophy to be feared, but rather the antidote to the growing dogmas of bigotry—one that could overcome the hate-filled fantasies of the Steve Bannons of the world.

Trump has made his game plan for 2020 abundantly clear: attack the Democrats as the party of socialism. No matter who wins the nomination, whether it’s Sanders, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, they will surely be smeared as socialists. With his full-throated defense of democratic socialism, Sanders welcomed such a debate, trusting that the American people will be on his side.

Never in modern U.S. history has there been a more clear-cut contest between the forces of “socialism and barbarism,” as the old Marxist idiom goes. If Sanders’ speech is any indication, it’s a fight he’s eager to have.

Finally, a Climate Change Documentary That Will Get You Excited to Fix It
https://earther.gizmodo.com/finally-a-climate-change-documentary-that-will-get-you-1835448238 #climatechange #climatecrisis

I think today marks the day I've received my first ever racist & homophobic reply on the fediverse.

On the one hand it's impressive it actually took more than a year for it to happen, on the other hand it's just mind-blowing what fucked-up reactions a simple photo of a pink park bench can provoke in some people. 🙄

House Democrats Hold Trump Officials in Contempt for Withholding Census Documents

The House Oversight Committee voted on Wednesday to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress for withholding key documents about why the Trump administration added a controversial question about citizenship to the 2020 census. The resolution passed by a vote of 24-15, with every Democrat and Rep. Justin Amash […]

Reaching and grasping: Learning fine motor coordination changes the brain

When we train the reaching for and grasping of objects, we also train our brain. In other words, this action brings about changes in the connections of a certain neuronal population in the red nucleus, a region of the midbrain. Researchers have discovered this group of nerve cells in the red nucleus. They have also shown how fine motor tasks promote plastic reorganization of this brain region.

The short life of Must Farm: The final decades of the Bronze Age in Britain

An extraordinarily well-preserved Late Bronze Age settlement in Cambridgeshire provides exceptional opportunity to investigate the everyday lives of people in the final decades of the Bronze Age in Britain.

Fifty years later, DDT lingers in lake ecosystems

To control pest outbreaks, airplanes sprayed more than 6,280 tons of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) onto forests in New Brunswick, Canada, between 1952 and 1968, according to Environment Canada. By 1970, growing awareness of the harmful effects of DDT on wildlife led to curtailed use of the insecticide in the area. However, researchers have now shown that DDT lingers in sediments from New Brunswick lakes, where it could alter zooplankton communities.

Released #libhandy v0.0.10 - a #gtk based widget library for mobile devices:

https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libhandy/tags/v0.0.10

@purism #handy

M$ with it's issues again... https://thehackernews.com/2019/06/windows-june-updates.html?m=1

Why Smart Cards Are Smart
If you use GPG keys, learn about the benefits to storing them on a smart card.
By @kyle https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/why-smart-cards-are-smart
#encryption #security #privacy

Mysterious holes in Antarctic sea ice explained by years of robotic data

Why did a giant hole appear in the sea ice off Antarctica in 2016 and 2017, after decades of more typical sea ice cover? Years of Southern Ocean data have explained the phenomenon, helping oceanographers to better predict these features and study their role in global ocean cycles.

How the latest Purism commercial was made with entirely with GNU/Linux, Free Software, and Librem laptops.

Storyboarding, motion design, color grading, video editing... We do it all with Freedom in mind.

https://puri.sm/posts/see-your-junk-behind-the-scenes/

How Border Patrol Occupied the Tohono O’odham Nation

TOHONO O'ODHAM NATION, ARIZ.—In March 2018, Joaquin Estevan was on his way back home to Sells, Ariz., after a routine journey to fetch three pots for ceremonial use from the Tohono O’odham community of Kom Wahia in Sonora, Mexico (where he grew up)—a trek his ancestors have made for thousands of years. His cousin dropped him off on the Mexico side of the San Miguel border gate, and he could see the community van of the Tohono O’odham Nation waiting for him just beyond.

But when Estevan handed over his tribal card for identification, as he had done for years, to the stationed Border Patrol agent, he was accused of carrying a fraudulent ID, denied entry to Arizona and sent back to Mexico.

Tohono O’odham aboriginal land, in what is now southern Arizona, historically extended 175 miles into Mexico, before being sliced off—without the tribe’s consent—by the 1853 Gadsden Purchase. As many as 2,500 of the tribe’s more than 30,000 members still live on the Mexico side. Tohono O’odham people used to travel between the United States and Mexico fairly easily on roads without checkpoints to visit family, go to school, visit a doctor or, like Estevan, a traditional dancer, perform ceremonial duties.

But incidents of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) aggression toward members of the Tohono O’odham Nation have become increasingly frequent since 9/11, as Border Patrol has doubled in size and further militarized its border enforcement. In 2007 and 2008, the United States built vehicle barriers on the Tohono O’odham Nation’s stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, and restricted crossings.

The Tohono O’odham’s struggles with Border Patrol received little attention, however, until President Donald Trump took office and pushed forward his vision for a wall along the border. Verlon Jose, Tohono O’odham vice chairman, announced in 2016 that the wall would be built “over my dead body,” a quote that went viral.

What the border wall debate has obscured, however, is the existing 650 miles of walls and barriers on the U.S. international divide with Mexico, including the 62 miles of border that run through the Tohono O’odham Nation. An increasingly significant part of that wall is “virtual,” a network of surveillance cameras, sensors and radar systems that let Border Patrol agents from California to Texas monitor the remote desert stretches where border crossers have been deliberately pushed—a strategy that has led to thousands of migrant deaths in the dangerous desert terrain. The virtual wall expands away from the international boundary, deep into the interior of the country.

As Trump fights Congress and the courts to get $5 billion in “emergency funding” for a border wall, Border Patrol is already tapping into existing funds to expand both physical and virtual walls. While new border barrier construction on the Tohono O’odham Nation remains in limbo, new surveillance infrastructure is moving onto the reservation.

On March 22, the Tohono O’odham Legislative Council passed a resolution allowing CBP to contract the Israeli company Elbit Systems to build 10 integrated fixed towers, or IFTs, on the Nation’s land, surveillance infrastructure that many on the reservation see as a high-tech occupation. 

The IFTs, says Amy Juan, Tohono O’odham member and Tucson office manager at the International Indian Treaty Council, will make the Nation “the most militarized community in the United States of America.”

Tohono O’odham Nation activist Amy Juan watches the sunset over Kitt Peak in southern Arizona, a sacred mountain known to the O’odham as loligam Doag. (Photo by Raechel Running) 

Amy Juan and Nellie Jo David, members of the Tohono O’odham Hemajkam Rights Network (TOHRN), joined a delegation to the West Bank in October 2017 convened by the Palestinian organization Stop the Wall. It was a relief, Juan says, to talk “with people who understand our fears … who are dealing with militarization and technology.”

Juan and David told a group of women in the Palestinian community about the planned IFTs, and they responded unequivocally: “Tell them no. Don’t let them build them.”

The group was very familiar with these particular towers. Elbit Systems pioneered the towers in the West Bank. “They said that the IFTs were first tested on them and used against them,” says David. Community members described the constant buzzing sounds and the sense of being constantly watched.

These IFTs are part of a broader surveillance apparatus that zigzags for hundreds of miles through the West Bank and includes motion sensor systems, cameras, radar, aerial surveillance and observation posts. In distant control rooms, soldiers monitor the feeds. The principal architect, former Israeli Col. Danny Tirza, explained in 2016, “It’s not enough to construct a wall. You have to construct all the system around it.”

That is happening now in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

The massive post-9/11 bolstering of border enforcement dramatically changed life on the Tohono O’odham Nation. At a UN hearing in January on the rights of indigenous peoples in the context of borders, immigration and displacement, Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Edward Manuel testified that when he came back to the Nation in 2009 after six years living off-reservation, it had become “a military state.”

Border Patrol has jurisdiction 100 miles inland from U.S. borders, giving it access to the entirety of the reservation. Drones fly overhead, and motion sensors track foot traffic. Vehicle barriers and surveillance cameras and trucks appeared near burial grounds and on hilltops amid ancient saguaro forests, which are sacred to the Tohono O’odham. 

“Imagine a bulldozer parking on your family graveyard, turning up bones,” then-Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Ned Norris Jr. testified to Congress in 2008. “This is our reality.”

Around 2007, CBP began installing interior checkpoints that monitored every exit from the reservation—not just on the U.S.-Mexico border, but toward Tucson and Phoenix.

“As a person who once could move freely on our land, this was very new,” Amy Juan says. “We have no choice but to go through the armed agents, dogs and cameras. We are put through the traumatic experience every day just to go to work, movies, grocery shopping, to take your children to school.”

Juan calls this “checkpoint trauma.” The most severe impact is on children, she says, recalling one case in which two kids “wet themselves” approaching a checkpoint. Previously the children had been forcefully pulled out of a car by Border Patrol agents during a secondary inspection.

Pulling people out of their vehicles is one in a long list of abuses alleged against the Border Patrol agents on the Tohono O’odham Nation, including tailing cars, pepper spraying people and hitting them with batons. Closer to the border, people have complained about agents entering their homes without a warrant.

In March 2014, a Border Patrol agent shot and injured two Tohono O’odham men after their truck sideswiped his vehicle. (The driver said he was swerving to avoid a bush and misjudged; Border Patrol charged him with assault with a deadly weapon.) In 2002, a Border Patrol agent ran over and killed a Tohono O’odham teenager.

Between checkpoints and surveillance, there is a feeling of being “watched all the time,” Tohono O’odham member Joseph Flores told Tucson television station KVOA.

“I’ve gotten flat tires, then when I come to the checkpoint the agents made comments about me having a flat earlier in the day,” says Joshua Garcia, a member of TOHRN. “I felt like they were trying to intimidate me.”

An anonymous respondent to TOHRN’s O’odham Border Patrol Story Project said, “One time a BP told me, ‘We own the night,’ meaning that they have so much surveillance cameras and equipment on the rez, they can see everything we do all the time.”

Undocumented migrants are the ostensible targets, but agents have long indicated that Tohono O’odham are also in the crosshairs. One Tohono O’odham youth (who wishes to remain anonymous because of fears of reprisal) says that when they complained to a Border Patrol agent in February about a camera near their house, the agent responded, “It’s your own people that are smuggling, so you really need to ask yourself what is going on in that area for a camera to be set up in the first place.” That perception is common. Geographer Kenneth Madsen quotes an agent who believed as many as 80% to 90% of residents were involved in drug or human smuggling. Madsen believes the numbers could only be that high if agents were counting humanitarian acts, such as giving water to thirsty border-crossers.

Elder and former tribal councilman David Garcia acknowledges some “smuggling that involves tribal members.” As Tohono O’odham member Jay Juan told ABC News, there is “the enticement of easy money” in a place with a poverty rate over 40%.

Nation Vice Chairman Verlon Jose also told ABC, “Maybe there are some of our members who may get tangled up in this web. ... But the issues of border security are created by the drugs ... intended for your citizen[s’] towns across America.”

After a trip to Mexico to retrieve some ceremonial items, Tohono O’odham member Joaquin Estevan’s tribal ID card was rejected by U.S. Border Patrol agents, leaving him stranded. (Photo by David Garcia) 

Estevan knew the agent who turned him back at the border—it was the same agent who had accused him of smuggling drugs years prior and who had ransacked his car in the search, finding nothing and leaving Estevan to do the repairs. A few days after being turned away, Estevan tried again to get home, crossing into the United States at a place known as the Vamori Wash—one of the planned locations for an IFT. He got a ride north from a friend (the kind of favor that Border Patrol might consider human smuggling). Eleven miles from the border on the crumbling Route 19, the same agent flashed his lights and pulled them over. According to Estevan, the agent yanked him out of the car, saying, “I told you that you were not supposed to come here,” and handcuffed him.

Estevan was transported to a short-term detention cell at Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson, where he was stripped of everything “except my T-shirt and pants,” he says. The holding cell was frigid, and Border Patrol issued him what he describes as a “paper blanket.” Estevan contracted bronchitis as he was shuffled around for days, having his biometrics and picture taken for facial recognition—Border Patrol’s standard practice for updating its database.

At one point, Estevan faced a judge and attempted to talk to a lawyer. But because he was not supplied a Tohono O’odham interpreter, he had only a vague idea of what was going on. Later, Estevan was taken 74 miles north to a detention center in Florence, Ariz., where the private company CoreCivic holds many of the people arrested by Border Patrol. Estevan was formally deported and banished from the United States. He was dropped off in the late afternoon in Nogales, Mexico.

Estevan is far from the only Tohono O’odham from Mexico to say they have been deported, although there has not been an official count. The Supreme Council of the O’odham of Mexico—which represents the Tohono O’odham who live on the Mexican side of the border—made an official complaint to the Tohono O’odham Nation’s government in May 2018, saying the Nation was “allowing the deportation of our people from our own lands.”

Some members of the Nation, such as Ofelia Rivas, of the Gu-Vo district, have long contended that the Legislative Council is too cozy with Border Patrol. Rivas said in a 2006 interview that the Nation “has allowed the federal government to control the northern territory [in the U.S.] and allows human rights violations to occur.” The Nation has received grants from the federal government for its police department through a program known as Operation Stonegarden. Over the years, the Legislative Council has voted to allow a checkpoint, surveillance tech and two Border Patrol substations (one a Forward Operating Base) on the reservation.

These tensions resurfaced again around the IFTs. 

In 2006, Border Patrol began to use southern Arizona as a testing ground for its “virtual wall.” The agency awarded the Boeing Company a contract for a technology plan known as SBInet, which would build 80-foot surveillance towers in the Arizona desert.

When Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano cancelled the plan in 2011, complaining about cost, delays and ineffectiveness, CBP launched a new project, the 2011 Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan. As part of it, Elbit Systems won a $145 million contract to construct 53 IFTs in 2014. As CBP’s Chief Acquisition Officer Mark Borkowski explained in 2017 at the San Antonio Border Security Expo, CBP sought technology that “already existed” elsewhere. Elbit, with its towers in the West Bank, fit the bill.

The IFTs take the all-seeing eye of Border Patrol to a whole new level. Jacob Stukenberg, a Border Patrol public information officer, tells In These Times they are “far superior than anything else we’ve had before,” adding that “one agent can surveil an area that it might take 100 agents on foot to surveil.”

The IFT system has high-definition cameras with night vision and a 7.5-mile radius, along with thermal sensors and a 360-degree ground-sweeping radar. The data feeds into command centers where agents are alerted if any of thousands of motion sensors are tripped. In an interview in May with the Los Angeles Times, Border Patrol tribal liaison Rafael Castillo compared IFTs to “turning on a light in a dark room.”

As with other monitoring, the towers—some as tall as 140 feet and placed very visibly on the tops of hills—have already driven migrants into more desolate and deadly places, according to a January paper in the Journal of Borderlands Studies. The first IFT went up in January 2015, just outside of Nogales, Ariz. By 2017, according to Borkowski, nearly all the towers had been built or were about to be built around Nogales, Tucson, Douglas, Sonoita and Ajo. The holdout was the Tohono O’odham Nation.

Between 2015 and 2018, Joshua Garcia of TOHRN gave more than 30 presentations around the Nation raising the negatives of the IFTs, including federal government encroachment on their lands, the loss of control over local roads, the potential health consequences and racism in border policing. “I didn’t expect people necessarily to agree with me,” Garcia says, “but I was surprised at how much the presentations resonated.”

Garcia joined other tribal and community members and Sierra Club Borderlands in contesting CBP’s 2016 draft environmental assessment—required for construction to begin—which claimed the IFTs would have “no significant impact” on Tohono O’odham land. Garcia listed the sites that new roads would threaten, like a saguaro fruit-harvesting camp and his own family’s cemetery.

The Sierra Club argued the assessment had failed to properly look at the impacts on endangered species, such as the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl and the lesser longnosed bat, and hadn’t adequately studied how electro-magnetic radiation from the towers might affect people, birds and other wildlife. CBP agreed that more study was needed of the “avian brain,” but issued its final report in March 2017: no significant impact. 

In July 2017, the Gu-Vo district passed a resolution in opposition to the IFTs. “Having the land remain open, undeveloped and home to food production and wildlife, and carbon sequestration with natural water storage is crucial to the community,” the statement read.

At the March 22 Legislative Council meeting, Garcia, the tribal elder (and a close relative of Estevan), implored the Council not to approve the IFTs. He looked to Councilman Edward Manuel, who had two months earlier described the Border Patrol presence on the Nation as a “military state,” and said, “Veto it, if it passes.”

The resolution passed, without veto, although with a number of stipulations, including compensation for leased land.

Nation Vice Chairman Jose told the Los Angeles Times that the vote was intended to be a compromise to dissuade the federal government from building the wall. The Nation is “only as sovereign as the federal government allows us to be,” Jose said.

A Border Patrol spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times, however, that there are no plans to reduce agents, and that the IFTs do not eliminate the need for a wall.

Garcia and other resisters are up against an enormous system. Trump’s plan has never been just about a border wall: The administration wants to fortify a massive surveillance apparatus built over multiple presidencies. Asked in February what he thought about the focus on the wall, Border Patrol’s Stukenberg said it was just one component of border infrastructure. Three things are required—fence, technology and personnel, he said, to build a “very solid system.”

The endeavor is certainly very profitable. Boeing received more than $1 billion for the cancelled SBInet technology plan. For the 49 mobile surveillance trucks now patrolling the border, CBP awarded contracts to the U.S.-based private companies FLIR Systems and Telephonics. Another contract went to General Dynamics to upgrade CBP’s Remote Video Surveillance Systems, composed of towers and monitoring systems. As of 2017, 71 such towers had been deployed in desolate areas of southern Arizona, including one on the Tohono O’odham Nation. Other major companies that have received CBP contracts include Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and KBR (a former Halliburton subsidiary).

These companies wield tremendous lobbying power in Washington. In 2018, General Dynamics spent more than $12 million on lobbying and gave $143,000 in campaign contributions to members of the House Homeland Security Committee. To compare, the Tohono O’odham Nation spent $230,000 on lobbying and $6,900 on campaign contributions to the committee members in 2018.

Meanwhile, at the UN hearing in January, Serena Padilla, of the nearby Akimel O’odham Nation, described an incident in which Border Patrol agents held a group of youth at gunpoint. She ended her testimony: “As a woman who is 65 years old with four children, 15 grandchildren, 33 great-grandchildren—I’ll be damned if I won’t go down fighting for my future great-great-grandchildren.”

David Garcia, former Tohono O’odham tribal councilman and member of the O’odham Elder Council, holds the flag of the American Indian Movement, founded in 1968. Garcia sees the flag as a symbol of Native rights and continued resistance, from Wounded Knee to the borderlands. (Photo by Raechel Running)

Mastodon is now on the translation platform Crowdin. So far it seems like a much better interface for translating

You can help by either submitting translations or proofreading existing ones!

https://crowdin.com/project/mastodon #mastodev

Social Media Platforms Increase Transparency About Content Removal Requests, But Many Keep Users in the Dark When Their Speech Is Censored, EFF Report Shows

Who Has Your Back Spotlights Good, and Not So Good, Content Moderation Policies

San Francisco and Tunis, Tunisia—While social media platforms are increasingly giving users the opportunity to appeal decisions to censor their posts or shut down their accounts, very few platforms comprehensively commit to notifying users that their content has been removed in the first place, raising questions about their accountability and transparency, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a new report.
How users are supposed to challenge content removals that they’ve never been told about is among the key issues illuminated by EFF in the second installment of its Who Has Your Back: Censorship Edition report. The paper comes amid a wave of new government regulations and actions around the world meant to rid platforms of extremist content. But in response to calls to remove objectionable content, social media companies and platforms have all too oftencensored valuable speech.
EFF examined the content moderation policies of 16 platforms and app stores, including Facebook, Twitter, the Apple App Store, and Instagram. Only four companies—Facebook, Reddit, Apple, and GitHub—commit to notifying users when any content is censored and specifying the legal request or community guideline violation that led to the removal. While Twitter notifies users when tweets are removed, it carves out an exception for tweets related to “terrorism,” a class of content that is difficult to accurately identify and can include counter-speech or documentation of war crimes. Notably, Facebook and GitHub were found to have more comprehensive notice policies than their peers.
“Providing an appeals process is great for users, but its utility is undermined by the fact that users can’t count on companies to tell them when or why their content is taken down,” said Gennie Gebhart, EFF associate director of research, who co-authored the report. “Notifying people when their content has been removed or censored is a challenge when your users number in the millions or billions, but social media platforms should be making investments to provide meaningful notice.”
In the report, EFF awarded stars in six categories, including transparency reporting of government takedown requests, providing meaningful notice to users when content or accounts are removed, allowing users to appeal removal decisions, and public support of the Santa Clara Principles, a set of guidelines for speech moderation based on a human rights framework. The report was released today at the RightsCon summit on human rights in the digital age, held in Tunis, Tunisia.
Reddit leads the pack with six stars, followed by Apple’s App Store and GitHub with five stars, and Medium, Google Play, and YouTube with four stars. Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest and Snap each improved their scores over the past year since our inaugural censorship edition of Who Has Your Back in 2018.  Nine companies meet our criteria for transparency reporting of takedown requests from governments, and 11 have appeals policies, but only one—Reddit—discloses the number of appeals it receives. Reddit also takes the extra step of disclosing the percentage of appeals resolved in favor of or against the appeal.
Importantly, 12 companies are publicly supporting the Santa Clara Principles, which outline a set of minimum content moderation policy standards in three areas: transparency, notice, and appeals.
“Our goal in publishing Who Has Your Back is to inform users about how transparent social media companies are about content removal and encourage improved content moderation practices across the industry,” said EFF Director of International Free Expression Jillian York. “People around the world rely heavily on social media platforms to communicate and share ideas, including activists, dissidents, journalists, and struggling communities. So it’s important for tech companies to disclose the extent to which governments censor speech, and which governments are doing it.”
For the report:
https://www.eff.org/wp/who-has-your-back-2019
For more on platform censorship:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/05/christchurch-call-good-not-so-good-and-ugly

Contact:  Gennie Gebhart Associate Director of Research gennie@eff.org Andrew Crocker Senior Staff Attorney andrew@eff.org

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