Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Record Refugees

The number of people forced from homes by conflict has hit a record 70 million.

“It’s a Slap in the Face”: Liberal Organizers Are Not Happy with Pelosi Dissing AOC

On Wednesday evening, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made headlines when she called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “outright disrespectful” for the criticism she’s lately flung at the New York congresswoman and her so-called “squad” of freshman lawmakers—Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). “The persistent” mud-slinging, Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview with […]

Sanctions Are Economic Warfare

On May 8, nearly a year to the day since the U.S. pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, the Trump administration slapped a fresh round of sanctions on Iran, whose economy is already reeling.

The Iran sanctions are but the most recent example of a U.S. foreign policy tool that consistently causes or exacerbates humanitarian crises. For a preview of what Iran is likely to suffer, we can look to another country currently in U.S. crosshairs: Venezuela.

The devastating effects of the Trump administration’s broad economic sanctions, first imposed against Venezuela in 2017, were exposed in a paper released on April 25 by economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs—who has served as a special advisor to three UN Secretaries-General—on behalf of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The sanctions have deprived the Venezuelan economy of “billions of dollars of foreign exchange needed to pay for essential and life-saving imports,” the report explains. The result was a staggering 40,000 total deaths in 2017 and 2018 and more than 300,000 Venezuelans put at health risk due to a lack of access to medicine or treatment. The paper received brief press coverage in the last week of April of this year, but was quickly overshadowed by opposition leader and self-declared interim president Juan Guaidó’s third failed coup attempt.

Hurting civilians

Sanctions against Venezuelan officials, individuals and companies go back for more than a decade, with the Obama administration paving the way for the Trump administration’s significant escalation today. In 2015, the Obama administration declared a “national emergency” around Venezuela and labeled it a threat to “national security.”

Using the same rhetoric of emergency, the Trump administration extended the sanctions to target Venezuela’s financial institutions. The administration froze billions of dollars of Venezuelan government assets held in the U.S., from gold reserves to trade credits to oil funds from CITGO. At the same time, the U.S. impeded Venezuela’s ability to restructure its debt and perform routine financial activities; prohibited Americans from doing business with Venezuela’s oil company, PDVSA; and pressured other international actors like India to enforce Venezuela’s economic isolation.

While the sanctions ostensibly target government officials and assets, the burden falls not on the government “but on the civilian population,” according to Weisbrot and Sachs. The sanctions have pushed inflation into hyperinflation and will cause Venezuela’s GDP to drop by 37.4 percent in 2019, the authors estimate.

Juan Carlos Rosales, a father of five from just north of Caracas, has experienced the toll of sanctions firsthand. Rosales’ 14-year-old son broke his arm weeks ago and has been unable to obtain surgery due to a shortage of medical supplies. The crisis has touched the family in other ways. Thanks to hyperinflation, the money that once covered a month’s worth of education, medicine and food “does not even cover a piece of candy,” Rosales says. Unable to afford food, Rosales depends on the government’s Local Committees for Food Distribution and Production, better known by their Spanish acronym CLAP. The “public services subsidized by the state,” he says, have made the crisis “less painful.” Unfortunately, in late May, the U.S. prepared to sanction the food aid program, accusing officials of using it to launder money.

It must be noted, as Keymer Ávila, a professor of criminology at the Central University of Venezuela told In These Times via email, the U.S. sanctions are not the original cause of Venezuela’s crisis. The “collapse of oil prices,” most recently in 2014, in a “rentier” state that relies almost exclusively on the nationalized oil industry for revenue, was merely the trigger, Ávila argues. The collapse was worsened, Ávila says, by “decades of improvised decisions,” a “lack of transparency,” “clientelism,” and “corruption and widespread embezzlement” on the part of various Venezuelan governments, from before Chávez to Maduro. None of this, however, should be used to whitewash the history of U.S. intervention in Venezuela or the violence of the domestic opposition, on display, for example, in the 2017 helicopter attack on the Supreme Court. Nor does it invalidate the successes of the Chávez regime, chief among which, as Greg Grandin notes, are drastic reductions in “poverty, inequality, illiteracy, child mortality rates and malnutrition.”

Rather, a crucial task of the Left is to recognize the current failures of the Venezuelan state while defending its sovereignty. Part of the latter is recognizing the consistently devastating effects of sanctions.

A violent history

Sanctions have a long history of worsening conditions for those that they purport to protect. While they are often billed as “targeted” or “smart” to minimize civilian damage, the brunt of the burden falls upon the most vulnerable, as the CEPR report makes clear is the case in Venezuela.

Perhaps the most notorious case of the deadly application of sanctions was against Iraq in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990. Resolution 661, enacted by the UN Security Council on August 6, demanded that UN Member States refrain from trading or carrying out financial transactions with Iraq. After the Persian Gulf War ended in late February 1991, these sanctions were codified in Security Council Resolution 687. President George H.W. Bush made clear that the UN sanctions would not be lifted “as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.”

As evidence mounted over the next five years that the sanctions were killing hundreds of thousands of children, the U.S. continued to pressure increasingly skeptical Security Council members into compliance. Asked in 1996 about the death of as many as 500,000 children due to malnutrition exacerbated by the sanctions, then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright infamously replied, “[The] price is worth it.”

While later studies would revise the estimate downward—a 1999 analysis found that as many as 227,000 children under 5 were killed as a result of the war, the great majority due to sanctions—and highlight the role of Hussein in aggravating the conditions, the figures remain stark. Many point out that the supposed alternative to military intervention killed more civilians between 1990 and 2000 than did the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011. One UN official described the effects as “genocide.” The sanctions were only lifted in 2003, after the original U.S. goal, regime change, was successful.

When the call comes from within

To be sure, sanctions can sometimes be a tool of social movements, as in the anti-apartheid sanctions on South Africa, officially imposed by the U.S. in 1986 yet called for much earlier by activists around the world. The crucial distinction, says Garrick Ruiz, former North America Regional Coordinator for the Palestinian BDS National Committee, is, “Who is asking for sanctions?” In the case of South Africa, Ruiz says, sanctions were “a way for the international community to engage in solidarity with the people of the country.” A strong international grassroots movement pressured companies, universities and governments to comply. In the end, the New York Times noted in 1993, the sanctions “helped hasten the end of apartheid through a combination of psychological and economic pain.”

Ruiz and others channel the legacy of that fight in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. The 2005 Palestinian call for BDS was “signed by just a huge swath of Palestinian civil society,” Ruiz says. It called upon civil society organizations and “people of conscience” to impose “broad boycotts” and “divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa.” Following the call, the Palestinian BDS National Committee was formed as the coordinating body for the BDS campaign. Activists, seizing on the momentum of the movement, pressured a wide range of actors to divest their resources from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation, from universities, to Norwegian pension funds, to multinational telecommunication companies. Ruiz contrasts the “bottom-up call for sanctions” with the U.S. government's “top-down form of sanctions.”

Generating discontent

One irony of U.S. sanctions is that they fail to achieve even the (often imperialist) goals of the U.S. government. In Iraq, the U.S. government’s repeated affirmations that sanctions would not be lifted unless Saddam Hussein stepped down made clear that the goal was to trigger the disaffected masses to overthrow Hussein. This did not happen. Rather, many Iraqis saw their crisis as exacerbated by U.S. aggression: As an Iraqi Army officer told the New York Times, “Most people thought, 'Saddam is feeding us while the Americans are trying to starve us to death.''' Saddam Hussein played on this perception with a media campaign that broadcast and exaggerated the effects of the sanctions. At one point, Hussein instructed doctors to wait to bury individual children until there had been enough deaths to stage a mass funeral and generate outrage. The effectiveness of this campaign and the brutality of the sanctions led to long-lasting anti-American sentiment. Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 attacks were in part motivated by the sanctions. In the wake of President George H.W. Bush’s 2018 passing, bitter Iraqis, asked by journalists about his legacy, denounced “Mr. Embargo.”

The case of Iraq makes clear that the impoverished, hungry and sick victims of sanctions are not ideal candidates to overthrow their governments. Nor are they easily misled into blaming those governments for the effects of external sanctions. In the last month, Iranians and Cubans have taken to the streets in massive numbers to protest U.S. sanctions. In Venezuela, Juan Carlos Rosales knows whom to blame as well: “Ever since the executive decree, the situation here has been lethal.”

Restoring suffering, not democracy

Regardless of their devastating results, the use of sanctions against “unruly” countries is a frequent U.S. foreign policy tactic, often posed as the only alternative to an invasion. The Trump administration has eagerly embraced this approach. On April 30, President Trump threatened to impose a “full and complete embargo” and the “highest-level sanctions” on Cuba for supporting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. These threats were concurrent with an escalation of Iranian sanctions, first in the lifting of waivers that had previously allowed major buyers of Iranian oil to continue importing the product, then in the new round of sanctions on May 8 that targeted the export of the industrial metals that make up 10% of Iran’s export economy. These actions joined existing Trump administration sanctions against Iranian “individuals, entities, aircraft and vessels."

History shows the consequences of these sanctions will not predominantly fall on the Iranian government, but on the Iranian people, who have suffered under U.S. sanctions since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Although there has not yet been a comprehensive study of the toll of the Trump administration sanctions on Iran, Iranians report that their everyday lives have become more difficult, in the form of drug shortages, increased air pollution, job loss and long food lines. This most recent round of sanctions will only tighten the noose.

Trump’s talk of a potential “military option,” and his administration’s shockingly cavalier admission that the Venezuela sanctions are meant to “increase pain and suffering,” should rid us of any notion that the U.S. is imposing sanctions to “restore democracy” or “respect human rights,” as the Trump administration claims. Moving forward, we must see the use of deadly sanctions as mere cover for a march toward regime change—a ruse that will claim thousands of lives.

The Media Uses Coal Miners To Attack the Green New Deal—Then Ignores Their Pension Fight

Anna Attie, Eleanor Colbert and Daniel Fernandez contributed research to this report.

To stave off the worst effects of the climate crisis, at least 80 percent of coal reserves must stay in the ground, according to a conservative estimate in the journal Nature. This means that coal miners would see their already declining industry all but disappear. The Green New Deal, the resolution put forward by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) for an economy-wide mobilization to address the climate crisis, call for a “just transition” that guarantees good new jobs for coal miners. Some insist that the “just transition” start now, which is why they are supporting the American Miners Act.

Introduced in the Senate on January 3, the Act protects the pensions of more than 100,000 coal miners whose retirement fund was depleted by the 2008 crash. It also rescues the healthcare benefits of miners whose companies went bankrupt last year.

But you wouldn’t know about this bill, or its sister legislation in the House, from reading the New York Times, the Washington Post or Politico, three influential outlets within the Beltway. None have reported on—or mentioned—the legislation since it was introduced in early January, even though it has the support of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and high-profile cosponsors like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ocasio-Cortez.

Yet these outlets have given considerable space to coal miners and unions to advance other narratives. In a four month period this spring and summer (February 25 to June 25), the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico have published 34 articles and opinion pieces that touch on coal miners or their unions. Collectively, they paint coal miners primarily as a source of votes, and assume that the sole political motivation of that bloc is opposing environmental policies that would close mines.

Our brains appear uniquely tuned for musical pitch

Results of a study involving primates suggest that speech and music may have shaped the human brain's hearing circuits.

Possible link between sugary drinks and cancer

Findings from a new study suggest that limiting sugary drinks might contribute to a reduction in cancer cases, say researchers.

Amy McGrath Is Challenging Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. She’s Everything Wrong With the Democratic Party.

McGrath can’t simply be blamed on the deformed strategic thinking of Democratic leaders.

The post Amy McGrath Is Challenging Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. She’s Everything Wrong With the Democratic Party. appeared first on The Intercept.

Tell Rep. Adam Schiff to remove this dangerous secrecy provision from this year’s intelligence bill

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff is reportedly responsible for inserting a provision in this year's intelligence bill that threatens press freedom.

Largely unnoticed until yesterday, the CIA is pushing Congress to pass a bill that will vastly expand secrecy laws, threaten press freedom, and prevent accountability for intelligence officials who violate the law.

This year’s Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) contains a provision that would radically expand the definition of employees in the CIA and other intelligence agencies that can be considered “covert.” Right now, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) only applies to covert officers who are stationed overseas within the last five years. As Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press explained, “if the changes advocated by the CIA are adopted, the law would indefinitely criminalize the disclosure of the identity of anyone with a classified relationship to an intelligence agency regardless of whether they have ever served abroad.”

This provision was inserted into the intelligence bill by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and someone who claims to be a strong supporter of press freedom.

Critically, the bill would allow the Trump administration—and all future administrations—the ability to prosecute reporters who reveal these officers’ names, even if those officers have tortured innocent people in clear violation of the law. In fact, the CIA literally cites media revelations about the CIA’s torture program in its justification to Congress to pass the bill. That type of important reporting could be subject to prosecution if the IAA provision is allowed to move forward.

Dozens of press freedom and open government groups have sent a letter to Congress protesting the bill.

Freedom of the Press Foundation’s executive director Trevor Timm released the following statement about the controversial provision.

The press is critical in holding intelligence agencies like the CIA accountable for breaking the law, and this bill is a clear attempt to stifle press freedom. It’s an open invitation to the Trump administration to hide government criminality behind official secrecy and potentially prosecute reporters for revealing it. Anyone in Congress who cares about press freedom should vigorously oppose this dangerous bill. We urge Rep. Adam Schiff to do everything in his power to withdraw this misguided provision.

Please contact Rep. Schiff's office and tell him to remove the dangerous provision and stand up for press freedom ahead of next week’s vote. The contact information for Rep. Schiff and his office are below. The House may vote on the IAA as soon as early next week.

Phone: (202) 225-4176
Twitter: @RepAdamSchiff or @AdamSchiff

Mattresses could emit higher levels of VOCs during sleep

Hundreds of household items, including furniture, paint and electronics, emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which at high levels can pose health risks. Now, researchers have measured the emission rates of the gaseous compounds released by several types of polyurethane mattresses under simulated sleeping conditions, finding levels of some VOCs that could be worrisome for children and infants. However, so far there is no evidence of adverse health effects.

Fossil fuels increasingly offer a poor return on energy investment

Researchers have calculated the EROI for fossil fuels over a 16 year period and found that at the finished fuel stage, the ratios are much closer to those of renewable energy sources -- roughly 6:1, and potentially as low as 3:1 in the case of electricity.

Global farming trends threaten food security

Citrus fruits, coffee and avocados: the food on our tables has become more diverse in recent decades. However, global agriculture does not reflect this trend. Monocultures are increasing worldwide, taking up more land than ever. At the same time, many of the crops being grown rely on pollination by insects and other animals. This puts food security at increased risk.

Isn't this lovely... #morningreading #coffeetime https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/whatsapp-android-malware.html

Meet the Thai Woman Ensuring Your Seafood Dinner Isn’t Harvested By Slaves

Ghost Fleet is a gripping new documentary about modern-day slaves in the Thai fishing industry. The film delves into the sordid labor practices of an industry that supplies the United States, Europe, and Asia with seafood, but it does so by focusing on the compelling work of Bangkok-based Patima Tungpuchayakul, an abolitionist who has devoted […]

The Trump Administration Is Using Secretive Gang Databases to Detain Migrants and Separate Families

This story was originally published by ProPublica. With scant public notice, federal immigration officials are relying on databases run by foreign police and militaries to check whether migrants crossing the United States border have gang affiliations, which would allow officials to detain and eventually deport them. The information is being provided through a new “fusion” […]

How U.S. Tech Giants Are Helping to Build China’s Surveillance State

A nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives is working with Semptian, whose technology is monitoring the internet activity of 200 million people in China.

The post How U.S. Tech Giants Are Helping to Build China’s Surveillance State appeared first on The Intercept.

House Democrats Are Panicked About Primaries, but New York Shows How Potent They Can Be

Cynthia Nixon won, actually.

The post House Democrats Are Panicked About Primaries, but New York Shows How Potent They Can Be appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump Lashes Out at Tech Companies and Lavishes Self-Praise: “So Great Looking and Smart”

The White House is set to host its first social media summit where right-wing extremists and trolls will gather on Thursday to allege an anti-conservative bias by the world’s leading tech companies. Notably, Google, Facebook, and Twitter were shut out of attending the event. But while President Donald Trump declined to directly name them, the […]

Green Hypocrisy

Life-Altering Copyright Lawsuits Could Come to Regular Internet Users Under a New Law Moving in the Senate

The Senate Judiciary Committee intends to vote on the CASE Act, legislation that would create a brand new quasi-court for copyright infringement claims. We have expressed numerous concerns with the legislation, and serious problems inherent with the bill have not been remedied by Congress before moving it forward. In short, the bill would supercharge a “copyright troll” industry dedicated to filing as many “small claims” on as many Internet users as possible in order to make money through the bill’s statutory damages provisions. Every single person who uses the Internet and regularly interacts with copyrighted works (that’s everyone) should contact their Senators to oppose this bill.

Take Action

Tell the Senate Not to Enable Copyright Trolls

Easy $5,000 Copyright Infringement Tickets Won’t Fix Copyright Law

Making it so easy to sue Internet users for allegedly infringing a copyrighted work that an infringement claim comes to resemble a traffic ticket is a terrible idea. This bill creates a situation where Internet users could easily be on the hook for multiple $5,000 copyright infringement judgments without many of the traditional legal safeguards or rights of appeal our justice system provides.

The legislation would allow the Copyright Office to create a “determination” process for claims seeking up to $5,000 in damages:

Regulations For Smaller Claims.—The Register of Copyrights shall establish regulations to provide for the consideration and determination, by at least one Copyright Claims Officer, of any claim under this chapter in which total damages sought do not exceed $5,000 (exclusive of attorneys’ fees and costs). A determination issued under this subsection shall have the same effect as a determination issued by the entire Copyright Claims Board.

This could be read as permission for the Copyright Office to dispense with even the meager procedural protections provided elsewhere in the bill when a rightsholder asks for $5000 or less. In essence, what this means is any Internet user who uploads a copyrighted work could find themselves subject to a largely unappealable $5,000 penalty without anything resembling a trial or evidentiary hearing. Ever share a meme, share a photo that isn’t yours, or download a photo you didn’t create? Under this legislation, you could easily find yourself stuck with a $5,000 judgment debt following the most trivial nod towards due process.

Every Internet User Could Face Life-Altering Money Judgments Thanks to Statutory Damages

Proponents of the legislation argue that the bill’s cap on statutory damages in a new “small claims” tribunal will protect accused infringers. But the limits imposed by the CASE Act of  $15,000 per work are far higher than the damages caps in most state small claims courts—and they don’t require any proof of harm or illicit profit. The Register of Copyrights would be free to raise that cap at any time. And the CASE Act would also remove a vital rule that protects Internet users – the registration precondition on statutory damages.

Today, someone who is going to sue a person for copyright infringement has to register their work with the Copyright Office before the infringement began, or within three months of first publication, in order to be entitled to statutory damages. Without a timely registration, violating someone’s copyright would only put an infringer on the hook for what the violation actually cost the copyright holder (called “actual damages”), or the infringer’s profits. This is a key protection for the public because copyright is ubiquitous: it automatically covers nearly every creative work from the moment it’s set down in tangible form. But not every scribble, snapshot, or notepad is eligible for statutory damages—only the ones that U.S. authors make a small effort to protect up front by filing for registration. But if Congress passes this bill, the timely registration requirement will no longer be a requirement for no-proof statutory damages of up to $7,500 per work. In other words, nearly every photo, video, or bit of text on the Internet can suddenly carry a $7,500 price tag if uploaded, downloaded, or shared even if the actual harm from that copying is nil.

For many Americans, where the median income is $57,652 per year, this $7,500 price tag for what has become regular Internet behavior would result in life-altering lawsuits from copyright trolls that will exploit this new law. That is what happens when you eliminate the processes that tend to ensure only a truly motivated copyright holder can obtain statutory damages.

Censorship of Speech Will Become More Pervasive Under this Legislation

Another major problem with the CASE Act is how it transforms a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Notice into a long-term censorship tool. Under current law, if a copyright holder submits a takedown notice to an online platform alleging that your post infringed their copyright, you have a right to file a counter-notice if you disagree. There are many times when false takedown claims occur on the Internet and perfectly lawful speech is suppressed, and counter-notices are an important, though flawed, check on abuse. But the CASE Act would allow a party that filed a takedown notice to also bring a claim with the new “small claims” tribunal. When they do so, the Internet platform doesn’t have to honor the counter-notice by putting the posted material back online within 14 days. Already, some of the worst abuses of the DMCA occur with time-sensitive material, as even a false infringement notice can effectively censor that material for up to two weeks during a newsworthy event, for example. The CASE Act would allow unscrupulous filers to extend that period by months, for a small filing fee.

If all these outcomes sound terrible to you and you want to send a clear message to Congress not to move forward, then you need to contact your Senators right away to tell them you oppose the CASE Act (S. 1273) and want them to oppose it on your behalf.

Take Action

Tell the Senate Not to Enable Copyright Trolls

Researchers discover ice is sliding toward edges off Greenland Ice Sheet

Ice on the Greenland Ice Sheet doesn't just melt. The ice actually slides rapidly across its bed toward the ice sheet's edges. As a result, because ice motion is from sliding as opposed to ice deformation, ice is being moved to the high-melt marginal zones more rapidly than previously thought.