Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Amid Conservative Assault on Organized Labor, Democratic Lawmakers Are Advancing Laws to Expand Workers’ Rights

Nevada and Delaware passed laws this summer giving public-sector workers the right to collectively bargain. Colorado is expected to follow suit next year.

The post Amid Conservative Assault on Organized Labor, Democratic Lawmakers Are Advancing Laws to Expand Workers’ Rights appeared first on The Intercept.

Americans Trust Scientists, Until Politics Gets in the Way

This story was originally published by Wired. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Nothing’s more American than a science-hero—an indomitable, big-brained hasher-out of ideas that change the world, that make the impossible possible. At least since Ben Franklin sat with the founders, and certainly since Vannevar Bush explicitly connected the US’ future to federal funding of […]

After El Paso, We Can No Longer Ignore Trump’s Role in Inspiring Mass Shootings

The United States saw two mass shootings in the span of 24 hours. At least one of them appears to have been inspired by Donald Trump.

The post After El Paso, We Can No Longer Ignore Trump’s Role in Inspiring Mass Shootings appeared first on The Intercept.

Joe Biden and the Perils of Bipartisanship

The Democratic presidential campaign playbook has, for decades, included grand promises to reach out to the GOP to solve the nation’s ills.

In 2020, some candidates are throwing that playbook out the window.

“If the Republicans are going to try to block us on key pieces that we’re trying to move forward, then you better believe we gotta keep all the options on the table,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said, referring to the possibility of eliminating the filibuster. In a speech to the 2019 California Democratic Convention, Sen. Bernie Sanders (IVt.) pledged “no middle ground” on issues dear to progressives. Even centrist Michael Bennet, at the June Democratic debate, acknowledged that working with Republicans would be impossible in 2021: “Gridlock will not magically disappear.”

Four progressive lawmakers elected in 2018— Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—model what a rebellious Democratic approach can look like. The “squad,” as they’re known, has proposed far-reaching measures like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal while combating right-wing attacks and calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump. While mainstream Democrats still pledge to build bridges, this new generation is more likely to occupy them.

It’s a remarkable turnaround. If worship of the U.S. Constitution is an American civic religion, with the Founders as prophets and Capitol Hill as a place of worship, then bipartisanship has become its holy sacrament.

This uncompromising approach from young progressive legislators and presidential candidates like Warren and Sanders is also an implicit rebuke of former Vice President Joe Biden, who is campaigning on the promise of an outstretched, bipartisan hand.

For Biden and his generation of Democratic lawmakers, bipartisanship has long been hailed as a worthy end in its own right, no matter the result. He has pledged that a new day will dawn once Trump is removed from the White House. “This nation cannot function without generating consensus,” Biden said in May. “You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”

But as moderator Chuck Todd told Biden at the first Democratic debate, “It does sound as if you haven’t seen what’s been happening in the United States Senate over the last 12 years.”

An increasingly far-right GOP has ruthlessly obstructed Democrats while dangling cooperation to lure them rightward. The outcome has been a disaster for progressives. The parties have cooperated to water down or kill left-leaning measures and advance a right-wing agenda, from shredding the New Deal to ramping up deportation, turning the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama into graveyards of progressive policies. Democrats increasingly understand that, if they want to generate consensus, they’ll have to do it some other way than meeting a right-moving GOP in the “middle.”

In the first round of the Democratic primary debates, Biden was the only candidate (besides little-known centrist John Delaney) to say “bipartisan.”

Biden, however, is not the only one clinging to faith in cross-party cooperation.

In April 2017, New York Times columnist David Brooks speculated that, assuming the departure of Trump in 2020, Congress would again enjoy a “world with the possibility of bipartisanship.” Politico Magazine’s Michael Grunwald explained that Biden’s “bipartisan friendships, Washington experience and genial Uncle Joe approach really can help produce results.”

Indeed, “discomfort with open division is part of the DNA of the nation,” says historian Rick Perlstein, author of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. “It’s all about repressing this original fissure: Slavery. The entire history, for the first half of the 19th century, is this all consuming attempt to keep this genie in the bottle.”

To get slave-owners to at least pay lip service to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the Founders compromised that three out of every five slaves would be counted in a state’s population when apportioning congressional seats. Slave states wielded this inflated electoral power to ensure slavery continued in the new republic, while the Compromise of 1850 facilitated slavery’s westward spread and made the federal government responsible for recovering “fugitive” slaves.

These compromises “came at a tremendous cost,” says historian Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. “If you think of slavery as a gross abuse of human rights, then compromise doesn’t sound so good.”

This compromising dynamic outlived slavery. The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction, made room for Jim Crow and, by pulling federal troops out of the South, gave a green light to racist terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan.

Yet Biden and others who yearn for the “pragmatism” of days past aren’t inventing things. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first 100 days—so consequential they would turn that number into a measure of success for every president thereafter—likely would have failed had he not secured pivotal support from Republicans and even put several in his cabinet. Four-fifths of Republicans in Congress voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act signed by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson.

All of this was possible, says historian Thomas Frank, in part because “there was a time when the parties were not divided by ideology or by their place on the political spectrum. The parties were regional and ethnic.”

In the early 20th century, Republicans dominated politics as a party of the Northeast, white Protestants, business owners, African Americans and the middle class, while Democrats foundered as a largely agrarian party of the South and Great Plains. Things changed when Roosevelt cobbled together an ultimately unstable coalition of Southerners, Catholic immigrants in urban areas, bluecollar workers and, crucially, African Americans, who fled the GOP as they began economically benefiting from the New Deal. In practice, this meant progressive politicians from both parties could work together to get things passed.

So what happened? Commentators across the spectrum name one culprit: Partisanship.

“Too much estrangement on both sides,” groused Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) in 2018. A 2017 Atlantic Council report on U.S. political dysfunction blamed a “dangerously codependent” partisan divide birthed by gerrymandering that made officials accountable to partisan radicals. Bruce Wolpe, who worked on the Democratic staff in Congress during the first Obama administration, charged that Congress was beset by “hyperpartisanship” defined by “no compromise, no consensus” and “no working together in the national interest.”

In June, Biden echoed these sentiments, bemoaning the loss of “civility” that marked his salad days in Congress when he worked with segregationists despite disagreements.

“We got things done,” Biden said. “We got it finished.”

These analyses omit, however, the key agent of this growing political polarization: the GOP.

Soon after FDR took office in 1933, a coterie of conservative intellectuals, prominent political figures and wealthy businessmen (such as the Du Pont brothers) began organizing against what they saw as the “socialistic” overreach of the New Deal. With a messianic resolve and a seemingly bottomless pit of cash, they created think tanks, books, periodicals, colleges, television and radio programming and more. The result was an alternative intellectual landscape that demonized government and deified the free market.

Electoral politics followed. Frustrated with the “dimestore New Deal”-ism of the postwar GOP, what came to be called the “New Right” engineered a grassroots takeover of the Republican Party, resulting in the 1964 presidential nomination of hardline conservative Barry Goldwater. While Goldwater lost spectacularly, liberalism’s triumphs only fueled right-wing organizing. A well-cultivated conservative and evangelical backlash against the civil rights victories of the 1960s and the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision culminated in the 1980 victory of Ronald Reagan, previously viewed largely as an unelectable ideologue out of step with the times.

“The election of Ronald Reagan was a symbol of the eclipse of the Rockefeller Republicans by the Barry Goldwater wing, sending a signal to the party to get on board,” says Corey Robin, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Reagan used his bully pulpit to popularize the idea of getting “the government off the backs of the people.”

“The conservative wing of the GOP established hegemony over not just the Republican Party, but the American political order,” says Robin.

Testimonies from the conservative Hoover Institution at the close of Reagan’s presidency attest to that fact. As historian Stephen Ambrose put it, while Reagan “failed to break the Democratic hold on Congress, he did force the Democratic Party to move to the right.” Historian Karl O’Lessker wrote that “Reaganomics may well have caused a fundamental shift in the political community’s approach to fiscal policy. … There has been little if any disposition among congressional Democrats to advocate, still less vote for, big new spending or taxation programs.” 

The GOP came to explicitly align itself with the agenda of super-rich, right-wing patrons like the Koch brothers, while the Democrats, shell-shocked from electoral defeats, began relying on big-dollar fundraisers that hastened a rightward turn.

“[Republican Party patrons have] turned the GOP into a kind of Leninist party of the Right, one in which no dissent is allowed after the course has been set,” says historian Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. “It wants to dramatically diminish the power of the federal government in order to remove the reins from capitalists.” And yet, she says, “We are still operating as a nation as if there is a Republican Party.”

The newer, more strident class of Republicans who entered Congress in 1979 “had not been exposed to the demoralizing impact of Watergate, the Agnew and Nixon resignations, the Ford defeat, and maneuvering in a Congress dominated by two-to-one Democrats,” read a 1979-1980 internal report commissioned by GOP congressional leadership. “Where older members saw persistence and shrewdness, the freshmen saw timidity and indecision.” Newt Gingrich was one of them. In the 1990s, he would continue the process that Reagan began by spearheading the tactic of obstructionism by the minority.

Gingrich fancied himself “the most serious, systematic revolutionary of modern times” and called for “large-scale, radical change.” Working to polarize debate between the parties, he pioneered the threat of a government shutdown as a political strategy. He calculated that obstructionism would nurture popular contempt toward the institution of Congress, which would serve the Right’s anti-government agenda.

Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who served as House Majority Whip when Gingrich was Speaker, later wrote about the GOP’s strategy under Clinton. Knowing that Clinton and the Senate would tack to the center, he explained, the GOP would “start every policy initiative from as far to the political right as we could” to move “the center farther to the right” and achieve a “much greater success rate than we had ever known.” DeLay boasted in his memoirs, “We moved the whole of American governance to the right.”

The old-guard Republicans joined in. Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole pioneered the filibuster-threat strategy now synonymous with Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), making 60 votes necessary for anything to get done, from healthcare reform to a stimulus package.

This rightward shift led scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein—at the Brookings Institution and the conservative American Enterprise Institute, respectively— to declare in 2012 that the GOP had “become an insurgent outlier.” The party was “ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.”

Joe Biden’s political career is an exemplar of the price the Democratic Party paid as the Right slid into the dark reaches of the political spectrum.

As overt racism faded in polite society after the 1960s, those committed to beating back the advance of civil rights found proxy issues to dog whistle a racist tune: crime, drugs, welfare and busing. They found a willing partner in a 30-year-old freshman senator: Biden.

Biden hailed from Delaware, whose culture and borders straddled the Mason-Dixon line and whose political and economic life was dominated for decades by the Du Pont family that had helped jumpstart the rebellion against the New Deal. (As Biden would later assure a Republican Rotary Club in South Carolina in advance of his 2008 presidential run, Delaware, a slave state, had only “fought beside the North. … because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South.”)

As conflict over court-ordered busing roiled his home state, Biden led a crusade against the civil rights measure, later boasting that he made it politically acceptable for other liberals to oppose it. He built alliances with Republican racists like Sen. Jesse Helms (N.C.) and Sen. Strom Thurmond (S.C.), the record-holder for longest filibuster in history, a 24-hour attempt to stall the Civil Rights Act of 1957. During the Reagan administration, Biden, Helms and Thurmond would help usher in an era of mass incarceration, working together to establish racist crack cocaine sentencing guidelines and harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences.

Biden also led the way on budget-slashing: In 1984, with Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Nancy Kassebaum (Kan.), Biden put forward a budget “freeze” that cut deficits by $100 billion more than Reagan proposed and eliminated scheduled increases to Social Security and Medicare. Biden also ranked among the sizable number of Democrats who gave their stamp of approval to signature Reagan victories like increased military spending, privatization and lower taxes for the rich.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was cutting his teeth in this same punishing era. In 1980, Clinton lost his bid for reelection as governor of Arkansas after raising car license fees to fund highway repairs and trying to rein in the timber industry. The loss taught Clinton to eschew challenging corporate power and, instead, embrace what Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial page editor Paul Greenberg termed “the politics of ultraconsensus.”

While Clinton’s presidency is remembered as a time of partisan warfare, bipartisan consensus was a quiet fixture throughout. Clinton brought in his own personal Rasputin in the form of political operative Dick Morris, who laid his strategy out in a memo: “fast-forward the Gingrich agenda” to make “Republican issues less appealing” and take the wind out of their sails. Unbeknownst to Clinton, Morris also created a back channel to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), a former client, whom he giddily told: “We’ll pass everything.”

“Everything” meant measures like welfare reform, a balanced budget, cuts to Medicare and an immigration overhaul that helped create the deportation state currently operated by Trump.

Biden was an important player in these bipartisan deals. As Senate Judiciary Chair under Clinton, Biden led the passage of the infamous 1994 Crime Bill and worked to make sure Clinton would fulfill his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” With Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (Penn.), Biden lamented “the polarizing partisanship and presidential politics that have permeated the issue” and insisted that a “tough, bipartisan welfare reform bill is easily within reach.” In 1996, the Senate passed welfare reform (what Lott described as “the Holy Grail of [the GOP’s] legislative master plan”) thanks to the votes of 51 Republicans and 23 Democrats.

“These were great monuments to consensus in Washington,” says Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? “They were just downstream of racism.”

Bipartisanship reached its apogee after September 11, when Biden swiftly became one of the most prominent Democrats to hitch himself to President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. The terrorist attacks created a stunning uniformity of opinion, and Biden, up for reelection in 2002, would soon be heavily criticized in the Delaware press for a speech that appeared dovish. Biden told reporters they should count him “in the 90%” of voters who backed Bush. He stacked a hearing on Iraq with pro-war voices and made regular TV appearances parroting the administration’s talking points about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. And, like 28 other Democratic senators, Biden voted to authorize the war in Iraq.

In 2008, Vice President Biden found a home with “postpartisan” Obama, who, Perlstein says, “was wedded to the myths of consensus in a way that a lot of his supporters hadn’t realized at the time.”

Obama had risen to stardom with his 2004 convention speech denying the existence of a “red” and “blue” America, a feeling that suffused Democratic politics. Nary a 2008 primary debate went by without Sen. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.), for example, pledging something or other of a bipartisan nature: a “bipartisan process” to tackle Social Security, a “bipartisan way” on immigration reform, even “bipartisan diplomacy” headed by “bipartisan emissaries.”

But once president, “Republicans used Obama’s own longing for consensus and bipartisanship against him,” says Frank.

Obama ran aground upon a decidedly partisan opposition that took advantage of racist sentiments against him. He tried for months to secure minimal Republican buy-in on Obamacare so he could slap a “bipartisan” label on it, only for “moderate” Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) to use it as leverage to endlessly delay and erode the bill. Obama ramped up deportations as a bipartisan gesture, and the GOP continued to obstruct immigration reform.

Nothing spoke more to Obama’s futile attempt to reach common ground with Republicans than his 2011 attempt at a “grand bargain” on cutting the deficit. Biden was dispatched to negotiate with a radically anti-tax, anti-government GOP. He capitulated to every Republican demand, including cuts to food stamps, Medicare and Social Security, while agreeing to rule out new taxes. Ironically, it was only thanks to the Tea Partiers’ obstinacy that the deal did not pass.

The public was not so lucky in 2010, when Biden made a deal with Sen. McConnell to extend unemployment insurance in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts and cutting the estate tax. The deal was so lopsided that it outraged even conservative Democrats like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and prompted an eight-hour filibuster by Bernie Sanders. Two months later, in the midst of affectionately paying tribute to McConnell at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center (named for the senator), Biden pointed to the deal as “the only truly bipartisan event that occurred in the first two years of our administration.”

“We both got beat up, but we knew we were doing the right thing,” Biden said. “The process worked.”

He explained to the audience that, whether they were liberals, conservatives, Tea Partiers or Blue Dogs, little actually divided members of Congress.

“We basically all agree on the nature of the problems we face,” Biden said, as McConnell, leading a historically radical campaign of obstructionism against the Obama administration, looked on.

A continuing faith in compromise may well be the last gasp of a dying era.

“A lot of the things that made bipartisanship sound attractive are now vestigial,” Perlstein says. “Like a lot of neuroses, it was a response that was useful for dealing with trauma that was present and important at the time, but has outlasted its usefulness.”

Or, as Robin says, bipartisanship is “a mourning for a neoliberal accord between Democratic and Republican party elites.”

Today’s Democrats increasingly recognize the folly of seeking progressive change by partnering with a GOP that’s fundamentally opposed to it. A new generation of Democratic lawmakers is taking a combative, unflinchingly progressive approach reminiscent of the 1979 class of freshmen GOP legislators that included Gingrich.

As Ocasio-Cortez told journalist Ryan Grim, “The older members really cling to the idea that things are going to go ‘back to normal’ [after Trump]. For us, it’s never been normal, and before that, the bipartisanship was shitty anyway and gave us the War on Drugs, [the Defense of Marriage Act] and stripping the leg[islative] branch of everything.”

These young progressives are backed by social movements whose adherents have no desire to cooperate with nativists and corporatists. Together, they are seeking to remake the existing governing consensus in their image, just as Reagan managed to do four decades prior. The irony is, they’d be following the Right’s own road to success.

“The rise of the Right is the closest thing we have to an example of a political success story in our time in America, and it was largely achieved by smashing consensus,” Frank says.

But MacLean warns it would be a mistake to believe that obstructionism alone is a path to victory. “The radical Right is winning now because its chief architects played a very sophisticated, well-funded, integrated long game and built a vast infrastructure that is well-aligned to achieve their agenda,” MacLean says.

For inspiration, today’s progressives might look back to the anti-slavery movement, which went from a relatively small band of uncompromising, “radical” activists to controlling the presidency and Congress. 

“Abolitionists were never anywhere near a majority in the North or anywhere else,” says Eric Foner, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University. “They were a vanguard.”

Abolitionists worked at both the grassroots and official levels to enact change, whether through legislation and court decisions or direct action and education. They made pioneering use of cutting-edge technology such as the printing press, the railroad and the telegram to spread their message. Their efforts helped lead Abraham Lincoln to drastically shift his thinking, jettisoning ideas like gradual emancipation and instead embracing black citizenship. 

“Abolitionists and radicals were able to shift the pendulum to the left, and were able to make moderates inhabit radical ground,” says Sinha. “In the end, it wasn’t the abolitionists who abolished slavery,” Foner says. “It was more moderate people like Abraham Lincoln. But without the abolitionists, there’s no Lincoln. There’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Political shifts require years of movement building, but change ultimately happens suddenly. Thirty years after the abolitionist movement took off, there were nearly 2 million more slaves in the United States. Three years later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. 

“The abolitionist movement lasted for a long, long time, and for a long time failed abysmally,” Foner says. “Radicals have to not give up.”

The time is looking ripe for another hegemonic shift. The Trump administration has sparked a wave of political activism and organizing by Americans previously disengaged from politics. A bevy of socialist intellectual organs and figures have risen to newfound prominence, their arguments cited by mainstream news outlets and shared quickly and easily over the internet, much like the cheap, ephemeral books and magazines passed around by conservatives in the mid-20th Century. Workers are showing a renewed militancy, from the teachers who went on strike in red states across the country to the flight attendants who helped end the government shutdown in January.

Polls suggest the public has moved left, supporting everything from Medicare for All and the Green New Deal to a much higher minimum wage. Even as Trump stokes a racist anti-immigrant campaign, polling shows a public more pro-immigrant than ever.

Republicans will demonize these movements. The Democratic establishment will try to ignore them. But as the ranks of today’s radicals grow, and the more a concerted movement to remake the country expands, the harder it will be for even the most committed centrists to hew to their vision of consensus. As Biden told the audience at the McConnell Center eight years ago: “Reality has a way of intruding on one’s tightly held view.”

A Teen Scientist Figured out How to Suck Microplastics from the Ocean. There May Be Hope for Humanity.

On Monday, Fionn Ferreira, an 18-year-old from Ireland, took home the top prize—which includes, in addition to a lifetime of bragging rights, a $50,000 educational scholarship—at the Google Science Fair for his project on microplastic pollution. Microplastics are plastic fragments less than 5 millimeters in size and they pose serious environmental and a public health risks. They […]

Amazon quietly removed a line from its transparency report saying it had "never participated" in the NSA's PRISM program.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/01/amazon-prism-transparency-data/

The Big Idea: Right to Repair

right to re• pair

noun

1. The principle that people should be allowed to fix their own stuff

“Right to repair just basically says, ‘Hey guys, you got to make the information and the parts available.’" —Elizabeth Warren, speaking on All In With Chris Hayes on March 27

Wait, we don’t have the right to repair stuff now? 

Maybe no one’s physically stopping you, but they sure are making it hard—and the implications are huge, from consumer electronics to farm equipment.

Many manufacturers are putting up obstacles one way or another, from special service codes meant to halt third-party repairs to creating proprietary parts that tinkerers can’t get without skirting patent law.

And when you do take a broken item back to the manufacturer, you are often encouraged to just buy a new one, or at least buy expensive replacement parts, when the original part would be perfectly possible to fix.

Beyond being annoying, what’s the impact? 

For one thing, electronics are the fastest growing part of our waste stream and often include toxic elements that get thrown out. Recycling programs, which often just ship the waste to poor countries, aren’t the answer, either. 

And while a few hundred dollars to repair a phone may simply be a nuisance for some, it can be a major burden for others. Manufacturers’ monopolies on repairs can be even more damaging when someone’s livelihood depends on the equipment—which is a huge problem for farmers right now.

So that’s why Bernie and Warren have been talking about John Deere tractors? 

Yep! John Deere has made the extremely bold claim that people who buy their equipment don’t own it, they’re just, like, renting it. Some farmers are forced to scrape together thousands of dollars for repairs during their narrow planting and harvesting seasons—because the equipment software locks up, and only John Deere holds the key. 

Sanders and Warren have both endorsed a “national right to repair” in the ag industry, which requires making repair instructions and equipment parts available.

Right to repair for cars and trucks passed in Massachusetts in 2012, and the auto industry agreed to implement the same standards nationwide. This year, 20 states considered right-to-repair legislation, though opposition from Apple and other corporations makes victories hard to come by.

So for anyone who’s ever felt irrational rage toward a broken inanimate object, it’s worth remembering: You don’t hate your cracked iPhone screen; you hate capitalism.

This is part of “The Big Idea,” a monthly series offering brief introductions to progressive theories, policies, tools and strategies that can help us envision a world beyond capitalism. For recent In These Times coverage of right to repair, see, “Apple Doesn't Want You To Be Able To Fix Your iPhone—Here's Why.”

How an Investigative Journalism Center Helped Oust Puerto Rican Gov. Rosselló

On July 24, following nearly two weeks of massive protests, Puerto Rico’s embattled Gov. Ricardo Rosselló announced that he would resign. The shocking development followed the release of secret chats that showed Rosselló and other members of the government using sexist and homophobic language to refer to political rivals and victims of the deadly Hurricane Maria. It also marked the first time in Puerto Rico’s history that a governor was removed from office without an election.  

The cache of secret chats was released through Puerto Rico’s Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI), an organization that has long been at the forefront of battles for public information. The CPI has become a safe haven for journalists who share a commitment for government transparency and who have been pushed out of news outlets that have either eliminated or significantly downsized their investigative reporting units.

Recent CPI reports have revealed government corruption and neglect of marginalized groups, as well as the real death toll of Hurricane María. These reports have challenged the Rosselló administration’s culture of obscurity, fuelling the protests against the Rosselló administration.

In These Times recently spoke with Carla Minet, executive director of the CPI, about the organization’s role in the protests, the importance of government transparency, and what’s next for Puerto Rico.

One of the things that led to the current uprising in Puerto Rico was an almost 900-page chat that was leaked, and that was administered by Gov. Ricardo Rosselló himself, alongside some of his top aides. Your organization, CPI, was one of the outlets that published the chats and was the first outlet to publish it in its entirety. When did you realize what you had with this leak?

CM: *Laughs* As soon as we were able to scroll down the document, I think it took, like, maybe 10 to 15 minutes to understand, you know, the implications of the documents. At that point we had seen the previous leaked pages.

I think that small leaks that have happened at points were not, they didn't have the impact of the whole document. They were like pieces that didn't communicate how deep the problem was, in terms of possible offenses, in terms of ethics and violations of not only the law but protocols and, of course, common sense.

At that point when we saw the whole document, we were really astonished. We were like, “What is this? How this has happened?” So we were in shock, let's say. And immediately we knew that we had to start working on a story and report on the patterns that we saw in the documents. We have been already investigating some of these figures who were close to the governor, so we had a lot of background on each of them. Besides the name-calling and the bullying, and the insults, all of which are important, the leaks show the character of the officials in government.

Did you expect an uprising to come out of this leak?

CM: No, never. At the point when we published the documents there had been protests because of the previous partial leaks, but we hadn’t even thought about this, to be very frank. We only thought about the importance of people knowing how their officials were behaving among these potential conflicts and these potential breaches. This is like the tip of the iceberg in terms of corruption—a very big and deep corruption scheme within the government.

How do you think this will affect the ongoing debt negotiations, which you wrote about in 2017 for In These Times?

This has affected the governance of the country at all levels. Any important officials who dealt with the fiscal control board and the negotiation process are now out of the government. And the governor is going out. And still we don't know who will replace him. So I think this will delay the processes. Will it be favorable? I don't have an answer to that. I really have no idea if this will benefit or make that process worse. Because things are very fluid and it is very difficult right now to predict where things are going.

What is the mission of the CPI moving forward?

After these revelations, we've had a very heavy process in terms of not only the workload but also the sudden recognition of our journalists, and the amount of tapes we are getting. So we have our hands full right now, trying to just think—what is the best way in which we can contribute to this stage of the process that the country is going through?

We are trying to work hard, but I think the future is a little bit blurry right now. We just know that we are doing our best. We were in the right place in the right moment. We are grateful for that, because we think this has been an important process for our country.

How has investigative journalism been suppressed in other local news outlets in Puerto Rico?

There is no investigative news outlet in Puerto Rico besides the CPI. Local media does very little reporting. El Nuevo Día newspaper has developed an investigative unit, but if you see the trajectory of that unit, you'll see that they have published very few stories. They've only had like two journalists for that unit, who do also daily coverage sometimes. So it's not a real effort to do investigations. In television, there are a few efforts, but that's what we have.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the CPI engaged in a series of investigations, many of which were subject to a series of blockages from the Puerto Rican government. The center had to sue the government to gain access to public records. Can you talk to us about some of those efforts?

CM: During the Ricardo Rosselló administration, we've been to court five times. One of those occasions was the case of the death database. Following Hurricane Maria, we were also in court for asking for the emergency plans of the government before and after the hurricane. We were also in court for the documents exchange between the government of Puerto Rico and the fiscal control board. We were also in court for asking for lists of lobbyists. And most recently, we were in court for the implementation plans and the progress reports for all agencies produced by the government of Puerto Rico to the fiscal control board.

All those efforts have made a point in terms of public opinion about how difficult it is to get public records here, and how unfair it is that we have to go to court to get documents which are public. We've been successful in all the lawsuits. In the end, we've gotten the documents. Only one of those lawsuits is still in process. But the rest have been successful. So I think it shows that there is a culture of opacity in the government and they have a culture of denying documents for no reason.

They make us use our very few resources to go to court, sometimes for six months. It’s a waste of public money, just a waste.

Making all of this public is a way for the people to understand that we need policies and protocols or even laws that expand and enforce the right we have to public documents in the Puerto Rican Constitution.

The CPI has been incredibly successful with gaining access to this information for the public interest. How has this success served as an example for other states that may or may not have open records acts or sunshine laws, among other kinds of mechanisms by which they can gain access to information?

CM: To be fair, in the U.S. there is no constitutional right to public information as there is in Puerto Rico, so I think that puts us in a better position to go to court. But in the U.S. certainly there is a culture in terms of open government, in terms of using technology, that is not so well developed in Puerto Rico. And even this [Rosselló ] administration that came to power with the promise of open government and transparency definitely has done nothing in that matter.

Hacked Emails Show GOP Demands on Border Security Were Crafted by Industry Lobbyists

Demands that CBP spend millions to upgrade cameras used to read license plates were orchestrated in part by a company that hoped to profit.

The post Hacked Emails Show GOP Demands on Border Security Were Crafted by Industry Lobbyists appeared first on The Intercept.

After 2 Decades, Democrats Still Don’t Agree on When to Leave Afghanistan

Two Democratic candidates who served in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made unambiguous pledges during this week’s debates: They promised to bring home the roughly 14,000 US troops in Afghanistan by the end of their first year in office. Those two veterans—South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard—are the only Democratic […]

McKinsey and Company Is an Elitist Cult. Why Is Buttigieg Defending It?

Pete Buttigieg has emerged as one of the most talked-about candidates of the 2020 election cycle. With his glittering resume—Harvard, a Rhodes, a stint in the military—and his compelling story as the young gay mayor of an Indiana city, Buttigieg has appeared on the covers of Timeand New York. While a small-city mayor may be an unlikely presidential contender, Buttigieg continues making headway, polling fourth in Iowa and New Hampshire in a notoriously crowded field. The New York Timesreports that “voters and donors in the party” embrace him “with steadily growing enthusiasm,” noting the keen interest from Wall Street.

While Buttigieg sometimes speaks the language of the Left on the campaign trail and will likely embrace some crowd-pleasing progressive policy plans, one chapter of his past raises the question: Is Mayor Pete someone who will challenge the status quo?

After graduating Oxford, any career path in the world was open to him, and Buttigieg chose McKinsey & Company, the cult-like management consulting firm. Buttigieg writes in his memoir, Shortest Way Home, that he became a consultant because he “wanted to get an education in the real world.” The real world exists in many places on this planet; McKinsey & Company is not one of them. People seek to join the world’s number one consulting behemoth to secure a place in the ranks of the American elite.

In 1993, Fortunemagazine put it this way: “These fellows from McKinsey sincerely do believe they are better than everybody else. Like several less purposeful organizations—Mensa, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones, the Banquet of the Golden Plate—McKinsey is elitist by design.” 

The firm has produced at least 70 Fortune 500 CEOs. Buttigieg’s three-year stint is par for the course at an organization that takes pride in “counseling out” 4 in 5 hires before they become partner. They then proudly join what McKinsey calls its “alumni network,” and what Duff McDonald, author of The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business, calls “the McKinsey Mafia.” As they fan out among the world’s C-suites and B-suites, they remain McKinsey loyalists. “There is no McKinsey boneyard, in other words; you’re still McKinsey after you’ve left,” McDonald writes. “Perhaps the only alumni network with more reach and lifelong relevance to its members is that of Harvard University.”

McKinsey’s internal churn fits perfectly with the company’s consulting philosophy. McKinsey, which in 2003 advised 100 of the world’s top 150 firms, “may be the single greatest legitimizer of mass layoffs,” writes McDonald. “Its advice: Identify your bottom 10 percent or 25 percent or 33 percent, and get rid of them as soon as possible.”

McKinsey is also an infamous mercenary for the world’s most unethical corporations and authoritarian governments, from China to Saudi Arabia. McKinsey allegedly advised Purdue Pharma, the progenitor of today’s opioid crisis, on how to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales and keep users hooked.

“We are now living with the consequences of the world McKinsey created,” writes a former McKinsey consultant in an exposé for Current Affairs. “Market fundamentalism is the default mode for businesses and governments the world over.”

So what kind of presidency would the McKinsey mindset produce? Former McKinsey consultant Anand Giridharadas observes, in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, business consultants ignore how political and economic power actually works. “These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action,” Giridharadas writes. “And that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.”

As McKinsey comes under heavier scrutiny for its role in the crimes of governments and powerful corporations, any “progressive” who worked there and wants to be taken seriously should have a rather critical perspective. Buttigieg has shown no such reflection. Instead, he calls his time at McKinsey his most “intellectually informing experience”; he left only because it “could not furnish that deep level of purpose that I craved.” Buttigieg has said he didn’t follow the story of McKinsey’s OxyContin push. On McKinsey’s Saudi and South African government ties, he said: “I think you have a lot of smart, well-intentioned people who sometimes view the world in a very innocent way. I wrote my thesis on Graham Greene, who said that innocence is like a dumb leper that has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

This excuse is remarkable. Buttigieg suggests that the savvy Harvard grads who populate McKinsey are childlike innocents who simply don’t notice they’re working for Mohammed bin Salman.

It is not terribly surprising that Wall Street has embraced Buttigieg, a product of their world. But anyone who hopes to be president should have a better-tuned moral sense. They should have no doubt where they stand on that old labor question, “Which side are you on?” Buttigieg’s roots in elite consulting suggest, at best, he doesn’t know; at worst, that he’s chosen poorly. 

Here’s how AG Barr is going to get encryption 'backdoors'
https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/31/how-ag-barr-is-going-to-get-encryption-backdoors/ #privacy #security

CNN Should Have Asked About Ranked-Choice Voting. It’s Not Too Late.

The second round of Democratic presidential debates continues tonight in Detroit. We at FairVote certainly hope that CNN’s moderators ask the 10 candidates on stage this evening about electoral reform and ranked choice voting (RCV). 

It’s an especially important topic, considering six Democratic primaries and caucuses will use RCV next year—and also because RCV would ensure that the crowded primary field ultimately produces a nominee with true majority support. 

These debates provide more than two hours of thoughtful plans on complicated issues that could well be dead on arrival in a highly polarized Congress consumed by partisanship. RCV would help provide the structural change that would incentivize politicians of all stripes to push beyond our current dysfunction, seek consensus and solve problems.

While democracy issues did not come up during Tuesday night’s discussion, just in case moderators Dana Bash, Don Lemon and Jake Tapper—or any of us—need a last-minute primer, here’s what we already know about the 2020 Democratic hopefuls and RCV. 

The candidates

By FairVote’s count, there are four Democratic candidates who actively advocate for RCV, five candidates who are supportive and two candidates who are receptive to the method. Only two candidates have expressed indifference. The other 12 major Democratic candidates have not commented publicly on RCV.  

Additionally, Republican presidential hopeful Bill Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts, has backed RCV. While it's too early to know who will be the nominees of other parties like the Green Party and Libertarian Party, we can anticipate their support for RCV; in 2016, for example, both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein backed RCV.

Advocates (candidates who have a policy pushing ranked choice voting):

Andrew Yang, entrepreneur: Yang has called on the “DNC to adopt a ranked-choice voting model for all democratic primaries [and to] [w]ork with Congress to adopt ranked-choice voting for all federal elections.” He has posted this plan on Twitter and pushed it in multiple forums.
Michael Bennet, Colorado U.S. Senator: Bennet, as part of his comprehensive governmental reform plan, has called for the federal government to "support state and local governments that transition to ranked choice voting."
Seth Moulton, Massachusetts U.S. Congressman: As a congressman, Moulton publicly indicated strong support for RCV, saying, "If the Founding Fathers had understood ranked choice voting, they would have put it in the Constitution."
Mike Gravel, former Alaska U.S. Senator: Gravel has made ranked choice voting a key tenet of his policy platform, calling for the federal government to "institute a ranked-choice voting procedure for any and all elections currently functioning on the first-past-the-post system."
Bill Weld, former Massachusetts Governor: When Weld was recently asked about RCV at a forum, his response was unwavering and instant: “I love ranked choice voting.”

Supporters (candidate who have expressed positive sentiment toward RCV):

Bernie Sanders, Vermont U.S. Senator: In 2007 testimony to Vermont’s state legislature, Sanders indicated his support for a bill to establish RCV for U.S. Senate and U.S. House elections, announcing that the public should "Count me in as someone who strongly supports Instant Runoff." 
Kirsten Gillibrand, New York U.S. Senator: At a June New Hampshire forum hosted by Equal Citizens, Gillibrand said, "I support ranked choice voting. I think it's a very interesting reform that's worked in some places well."
Marianne Williamson, Author: Numerous times, Williamson has indicated support for RCV, saying "I think ranked choice voting is great," and tweeting “If only we had ranked choice voting.”
Pete Buttigieg, Mayor of South Bend, Indiana: According to Equal Citizens, Buttigieg supports ranked choice voting. He has also indicated that he would sign a RCV bill if it came across his desk as president. 
Tulsi Gabbard, Hawaii U.S. Congresswoman: At a New Hampshire event, Gabbard was asked about eliminating the electoral college and utilizing a ranked voting system for president. She indicated her support for RCV, saying RCV can “make sure our voices are heard accurately and represented through our elections.” (The 30:48 mark in the video.)
Cory Booker, New Jersey U.S. Senator: Booker has indicated support for RCV for many years. He told a Voter Choice Massachusetts activist on July 12 that he supports RCV and won an RCV election in college.

Receptive (candidates who are open to adopting RCV):

Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts U.S. Senator: In a Voxpodcast, Warren cited the momentum behind RCV as evidence that "democracy itself is reinventing,” also saying that “"there's a lot to be said for [RCV]."
Beto O’Rourke, former Texas U.S. Congressman: O’Rourke was asked at a May town hall in New Hampshire where he stood on RCV, and he responded with an informed discussion of the ways in which RCV leads to a more civil campaign. “We’ve got all these great candidates running right now. We’ve got to do everything in our power not to demean or denigrate or weaken them, compromise them, in any way that would make them anything less than the strongest possible candidate against Trump,” he said. “Ranked choice voting provides another inducement to making sure you don’t do that to those other candidates. … It would not hurt in this very divided, highly polarized democracy to employ [RCV] as a matter of course going forward.”

Indifferent (candidates who are ambivalent about RCV):

Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota U.S. Senator: When Ellen Read, a New Hampshire activist, asked Klobuchar about RCV, Klobuchar’s response was described in this article as “noncommittal.” A Klobuchar staffer did note that Minnesota, Klobuchar’s home state, has a very strong record with RCV.
Bill de Blasio, Mayor of New York City:  De Blasio was most recently quoted as saying, "The jury's still out on ranked-choice voting...I think it has strengths and I think it has weaknesses. And I’d sure like to see a lot more research on it. But there’s a lot of people who believe it might be very beneficial in New York City.” Accordingly, it should be noted that he has provided tacit support for (or at least no active opposition against) the New York City charter commission’s decision to place RCV for primary and special elections on the 2019 ballot.  

It is clear that a large slice of the Democratic primary field is open to adopting ranked choice voting. In fact, we don’t know of any candidate for president in 2020 who opposes RCV, and please let us know if you hear of candidates taking a position.

Now, let’s look at the states that adopted RCV in the candidate selection process.

The states

After the contentious 2016 primary fight, the Democratic National Committee called on its state affiliates to make the presidential candidate selection process more accessible to voters. Six states—Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, Nevada, Iowa, and Wyoming— will turn to RCV to heed that call. Here’s how:

In Iowa, the state Democratic Party has proposed a ‘virtual caucus’ which would allow voters unable to participate in the Feb. 3 in-person caucus to cast their support over the phone or online via ranked choice voting. In both the online and over-the-phone plans, caucus-goers will be able to rank five preferred candidates. For the online component, voters should simply be able to state their ranked preferences by entering their rankings on an interface. For the over-the-phone component, an operator will read the candidate names in alphabetical order, giving phone-caucus-goers adequate time to respond with their preferences.

According to the plan, there would be six designated times to “virtually caucus” in the five days preceding the election—with the sixth “virtual caucus” occurring at the same time as the in-person caucus, 7:00 P.M. on February 3rd.

In Nevada, early voters and those who are voting-by-phone will have the opportunity to rank their top preferences. While the details are still being ironed out, voters will be afforded multiple opportunities to confirm their selections the in-person and over-the-phone manifestations.

In Kansas, the state Democratic Party has ditched its traditional caucus in favor of a ranked choice voting primary. According to state party secretary George Hanna, adopting ranked choice voting will not actually be much of a shock for Kansans—because RCV resembles Kansas’s typical caucus process.

“Rank[ed] choice voting essentially is caucusing by paper. You are going to pick your first choice of the candidates that are available, your next choice … and rank them.” Hanna said.

In Alaska and Hawaii, voters will show up on primary day and use ranked choice voting to cast their ballots. Wyoming Democrats, while they have not yet submitted a formal proposal, have indicated that they plan to follow a similar path.

Although the preliminary proposals indicate some states plan to implement RCV in slightly different manners, all plans adhere to the rules set by the Democratic Party: all candidates above the 15% threshold will accrue delegates. Accordingly, as FairVote Senior Fellow David Daley put it, using RCV means that “last-place candidates will be eliminated and backers of those candidates will have their vote count toward their next choice until all remaining candidates are above the 15% vote threshold to win delegates.”

While these plans are all preliminary until they are formally accepted by the DNC, it is heartening to see ranked choice voting adopted as a viable alternative to the current winner-take-all system—especially in a field this crowded.
 

Debate Protesters Push Candidates To “Make Detroit the Engine of a Green New Deal”

Tuesday afternoon, as the Democratic presidential candidates were getting ready to take the stage at the Fox Theater in Detroit, hundreds of people converged on a public park less than a mile away to rally for a Green New Deal. They put the candidates on notice that there’s no time to waste in starting a just transition from fossil fuels, and emphasized the potential role of polluted and disinvested communities in Detroit in powering a new green economy.

Speaking at the rally, Varshini Prakash—executive director and co-founder of the youth climate organization the Sunrise Movement— made a direct appeal to the candidates. “If you want to claim the mantle of leadership in this country then you have to embrace a Green New Deal. And not just any Green New Deal—one that stops the water shutoffs, that ends the violence of prisons and poverty and pollution.”

Looking out over the crowd of youth, union members, and black, brown and indigenous activists living in communities on the front lines of environmental injustice, Prakash declared, “Right here we have the coalition that will bring America back from the greed and the hate and the division of people like Donald Trump.”

Since its founding two years ago, the Sunrise Movement’s youth activists have challenged politics as usual in Washington with such urgency, anger and moral indignation that it has rocketed the looming climate crisis into the public’s consciousness like never before, making it the number two priority among Democratic primary voters (behind healthcare). These activists have upended assumptions not only about what’s politically possible, but about the very complexion and ownership of the environmental movement.

“Learn and listen from the communities that have been fighting for generations and make Detroit the engine of the Green New Deal!” Prakash exclaimed to cheers.

Traditionally, the environmental movement has struggled to attract people of color. But yesterday’s rally and march showcased a more diverse and progressive movement. It brought together young Sunrise activists from around the country with a coalition of several Detroit union, environmental and social justice organizations called Frontline Detroit, which took the lead in hosting the event.

To organizers, Detroit is a logical place to start the brave new experiments into a Green New Deal. For one, the city is in need of relief from recent economic and environmental travails, a trait it shares with frontline communities around the country. In addition, organizers also point to Detroit’s fabled history of industrial prowess and radical labor movements.

“When we talk about the Green New Deal, we talk about union jobs because that is part of what made Detroit what it is,” Kim Hunter, social justice coordinator with Engage Michigan, said in an interview. “Radical union movements fought for racial equity on the shop floor and inside the union.”

It’s a point Theodor Spencer also pursued on stage, revving up the crowd with a round of call and response: “Detroit is?  Union Town! Detroit is? Union Town!”

Spencer also believes Detroit can lead the way. He is a member of Sunrise and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 58, who will become a journeyman next summer.

“We have truly been the engine of the world since the industrial age. We have the infrastructure. We have the people. We have the passion. We have the courage. We have the pride. Everything we build we build it with pride,” he told the crowd. “Give us an opportunity. These are our demands for a Green New Deal.”

The same emphasis was lacking on the debate stage—Sunrise lamented in a press release that climate change made up only 12 minutes of the three-hour debate, calling it “outrageous and disappointing.” Sunrise and other climate activists have demanded a presidential debate exclusively addressing climate change, but so far the Democratic National Committee has refused (although it will vote on August 22). Last week, however, CNN announced plans to host a climate crisis town hall with eight Presidential candidates and MSNBC and Georgetown University announced plans for a multi-day climate forum. Sunrise welcomes these developments, but continues to push for a climate debate.

Part of this urgency stems from the fact that climate, environmental and social justice concerns are real and immediate for many of those present at the rally. Many in the crowd live on the front lines of pollution from Detroit’s Marathon Petroleum Corps. oil refinery and 32 other polluting industries.

Nayyirah Shariff, director of Flint Rising, reminded the crowd that yesterday marked 1,923 days since the water crisis began in Flint, a city 68 miles north of Detroit. There is no end in sight, Shariff said, not only to the practical matters of replacing underground pipes and household plumbing but the chronic health problems caused by drinking contaminated water.

Others who came out were motivated by environmental awakenings of their own. For Aisha Soofi, it was the 2014 flood that deluged her grandmother’s Detroit neighborhood with raw sewage.

“It destroyed everything,” says Soofi, who remembers the piles of trash outside of every house in the neighborhood, where several other family members were also flooded out. Eventually her grandmother was able to come up with the $35,000 to make the repairs, she says, but most of her neighbors couldn’t afford a cleanup and ended up living with toxic mold and feces in their basements. The experience, she says, made her more aware of the environmental face of social injustice. Due to inadequate government response, she adds, “Community members had to drain the streets themselves. Neighbors had to push cars out of the water.”

Now 19 years old, the Ann Arbor resident is a political science major at Eastern Michigan University and runs one of Sunrise’s 200+ local hubs around the country.

“If we don’t do anything,” she says, such so-called “once in a lifetime” floods like the one that ruined her grandmother’s kitchen “are going to just keep on happening. It’s going to be a lifetime of destruction.”

When people tell her the Green New Deal is a pipedream that will never happen, she asks: “Why is aspirational such a bad thing?” Besides, she adds, “We don’t have time. … If we don’t do anything within these next 11 years, there will be irreversible damage to our world.”

That was the general sentiment as the crowd picked up their handmade signs and union placards, hoisting banners and a series of giant cardboard upraised fists bearing climate justice demands, and set off down the road to the Fox Theatre to the pulsing of drums and the resounding sound of a thousand voices chanting, “I believe that we will win!”

Organizers estimated the crowd at more than 1,000 people. A group of black and brown activists, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), took the lead.  

Once the march reached the general vicinity of the theater, they were stopped by police within about a block of the theater, where other activists clustered in small groups—including Trump supporters, many hoisting blatantly racist and sexist signs, who were being serenaded by a rock-and-roll cover band comprised of a group of gangly young white guys.

Despite taunts from these and other Trump supporters—including a small band of black T-shirted men who arrived later, marching up the street in a military-style procession and waving American flags and Trump banners—the Frontline Detroit group maintained the joyful vibe, eventually making it past a set of police barriers and walking on past the Fox Theatre. Tensions flared with police when they tried to turn around to walk back down the other side of the street, directly in front of the theater. Eventually, organizers directed marchers to return to Cass Park, where the march had begun.

Someone Is Suing Companies for Using SMS Messages in 2019

Anuwave’s Suit Against Coinbase Demonstrates a Longstanding Flaw in the Patent System

This month’s Stupid Patent of the Month deals with SMS (short messaging service), a technology that goes back to the mid-1980s. Modern-day SMS messages, typically bundled with mobile phone services, have been around since 1992, but one company believes that you should have to pay a licensing fee simply to incorporate them into your app or service.

That company is Anuwave, which recently sued cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (PDF) for infringement of US Patent 8,295,862. That’s only the most recent suit: Anuwave has sued dozens of companies since 2015 for alleged infringement of the patent—Symantec, Avast, and Bitdefender, just to name a few that have faced lawsuits.

Anuwave’s patent is on a software application using SMS to check for information—for example, for use on a device that can send and receive SMS messages, but doesn’t have an Internet connection. Anuwave alleges that Coinbase infringed the patent by letting users perform tasks like checking their balance via SMS.

Here’s the first claim of the patent:

A method of enabling communication through SMS communication channel, comprising:

listing all services at a terminal station that are available with an SMS gateway according to meta information available at the terminal station;

upon selecting a service, a network aware application displaying associated parameters that a user needs to select or enter;

upon user selection, submitting a request to the SMS gateway; and

the SMS gateway responding back with a response,

wherein the associated parameters include the parameters listed at the terminal station and the parameters desired by the user and not listed at the terminal station.

Coinbase is not the first company to use SMS messages to perform basic software commands. Unified Patents filed a complaint in 2017 with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board to invalidate Anuwave’s patent (PDF), and Unified’s complaint identifies three different provisional patent applications as prior art. (Unfortunately, the PTAB never made a decision: Unified reached a settlement with Anuwave and dropped the complaint.)

In the world of software, combining existing technologies or processes happens every day as a matter of course.

According to the law, a person isn’t entitled to a patent if the claimed invention already existed when the application was filed or would have been obvious to someone skilled in the relevant technology area. The Supreme Court has held that a combination of existing inventions can be ruled obvious even if that particular combination didn’t previously exist before the patent was issued.

In the world of software, combining existing technologies or processes happens every day as a matter of course. As patent expert Charles Duan wrote, “Non-proprietary software developers and other innovation communities value interoperability and combinability of software. Thus, the legal assumption that new combinations are uncommon and often worthy of patents conflicts with the experiences of those software developers, for whom new combinations are routine and expected.”

But let’s put aside the question of whether combining SMS with other services would have been obvious before Anuwave’s patent was granted. It really shouldn’t have been issued for a much more basic reason: it’s not an invention.

The landmark Supreme Court opinion Alice v. CLS Bank says that an abstract idea does not become a patentable invention simply by being implemented on a computer. At its core, Anuwave’s patent is on the idea of using SMS messages to provide information to a device. It’s clearly vulnerable to a challenge under Alice.

Anuwave v. Coinbase is one of the first patent lawsuits ever in the blockchain world, so we expect that the cryptocurrency community will be watching it closely. But it tells an all-too-common story about how low-quality software patents all too often undermine innovation: a company that does not produce anything wields an overly broad software patent against an entire field of actual, practicing companies. This is only the most recent example.

Today, some members of Congress are bent on undermining the Alice decision, destroying the most valuable tool that innovators can use against these stupid software patents. Please take a moment to write your members of Congress and urge them to reject the Tillis-Coons proposal.

Take Action

Tell Congress not to open the floodgates to stupid patents

Corporate Democrats Have Been in the Driver’s Seat for 30 Years. Not Anymore.

For the past three decades, the Democratic Party has been living with a debilitating trauma that’s left it a shell of what it once was. But if Tuesday night’s debate is any indication, the Democrats may finally be moving into the home stretch of a long, painful recovery.

Rather than sticking to the longtime script of Democrats pandering to the center, the two highest polling candidates on the stage—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—articulated a clear-eyed left-wing vision of the direction the party should take. Sanders railed against the “ruling class” while advocating enshrining universal economic rights, as Warren warned that “we’re not going to solve the urgent problems we face with small ideas and spinelessness.” Sanders agreed, claiming: “I get a little bit tired of Democrats afraid of big ideas.”

Ever since the Clinton years of the 1990s, the party’s officials and apparatchiks have internalized the belief that being too bold or too far left is a ticket to political oblivion. After enjoying a near-unbroken hold on the White House from 1932 to 1968, the following 24 years saw Democratic presidential nominee after nominee go down in landslides against ever more right-wing Republican opponents. Peace candidate George McGovern, who called for pulling troops out of Vietnam within 90 days in 1972, had been too far left to win, went the conventional wisdom. So had Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis in 1984 and 1988, respectively, conveniently ignoring the reality that both had campaigned as centrists pledging to cut the deficit and reform welfare.

This set of lessons, combined with Bill Clinton’s two presidential victories, led the party to an increasingly ruinous set of choices. Clinton’s “triangulation”—collaborating with Republicans to deregulate banks, cut social programs and empower large financial institutions—helped hollow out unions and working-class support for the party, while setting the stage for the 2008 financial crisis. The Democrats’ choice of safe “moderate” candidate John Kerry in 2004 saw a vulnerable George W. Bush return to the White House for another four years. And Barack Obama finished the job Clinton had begun, with his fear of appearing too radical or—heaven forbid—a “socialist,” leading to a less-than-aggressive response to the financial crisis, creating, in turn, a wipeout of black working-class wealth and a sluggish economic recovery that helped President Trump ride a wave of rage and apathy to the White House in 2016.

Paralyzed by caution, and its worst instincts justified through a gradual takeover by corporate interests, the Democratic Party has in many ways been its own worst enemy. Rather than proposing far-reaching redistributive policies, national Democrats have by and large moved to the right while pushing means-tested, tepid proposals meant not to offend corporate backers or scare off mythical “Reagan Democrats.” The result has been a party that’s failed to inspire its core constituency—working-class voters—to show up at the polls. Just look at the Obama years, during which the party lost over 1,000 seats nationwide.   

Yet Tuesday night’s battle between, on the side, Sanders and Warren—the two most progressive candidates in the field—and, on the other, the conservative Democrats misleadingly labeled “moderates” by much of the media suggest things may be finally changing.

The debate saw a conservative onslaught on the ideas and vision of the party’s surging left wing. Sanders and Warren—both tribunes for progressive energy during the Obama years—faced right-wing attacks and skepticism from not just their conservative opponents, but CNN’s panel of moderators as well.

Former Maryland Rep. John Delaney opened the debate by derisively referring to Sanders and Warren’s “bad policies” and “impossible promises” of Medicare for All and “free everything,” questioning why the Democrats were being “the party of taking something away from people,” in this case, private health insurance. Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan suggested that Sanders’ Medicare for All bill would make things worse for union members. Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper stressed that incremental reform (“evolution, not revolution”) and giving Americans “choice” promised a better way forward. Moderator Jake Tapper demanded to know if Warren and Sanders planned on raising taxes for the middle class.

The two senators responded combatively, batting away the attacks in an often fiery fashion. “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” an exasperated Warren told Delaney. “You’re wrong,” Sanders said, responding to Delaney’s charge that Medicare for All was “political suicide.”

Warren pointed out to Hickenlooper that incremental reforms had already been tried to no avail, and admonished the other candidates for “using Republican talking points.” Sanders leveled the same accusation at Tapper before charging that “the health care industry will be advertising tonight on this program … with that talking point,” a prediction that came at least partially true: PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying arm, was one of a number of pharmaceutical entities to air ads during subsequent commercial breaks.

And this was all during just the first half-hour. Healthcare reared its head again later in the debate once the conversation turned to immigration, with the moderators suggesting that Sanders’ plan to allow undocumented immigrants to access care under Medicare for All would encourage a deluge of migrants. A number of other questions implied that Sanders was too radical to beat Trump, or, as one put it, that he was indistinguishable from the far-right president because they both said they wanted to end wars. At one point, the moderators pushed the candidates to affirm they would maintain the United States’ first-use of nuclear weapons, a stance Warren bravely rejected, paralleling UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s own stance on the matter.

Perhaps most significantly, both Sanders and Warren tied signature policies like Medicare for All, a wealth tax, free tertiary education and student debt cancellation to their broader vision of political change, rebuking Democrats’ three-decade-long strategy of scurrying in fear at the sight of their own shadow. Warren thundered that the Democrats need to be the party “of big, structural change.” Sanders argued that "to win this election and to defeat Donald Trump … we need to have a campaign of energy and excitement and of vision. We need to bring millions of young people into the political process in a way that we have never seen.” For his part, Delaney fell back on the Democratic establishment’s classic warning that McGovern’s 1972 loss showed moving to the left was the electoral equivalent of drinking rat poison.

Meanwhile, Warren and Sanders’ criticisms of their conservative challengers were rooted in more than a kernel of truth. Sanders’ charge that Delaney, while opposing Medicare for All, “made money off of healthcare” wasn’t wrong. Besides being a conservative “New Democrat” who, while in the House, supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership and backed Obama’s entitlement-cutting Bowles-Simpson commission, Delaney was one of the richest members of Congress thanks to his career at the head of a company that lent money to the healthcare sector. As Sludge has reported, his latest financial disclosure, filed in 2019, shows Delaney has $3.2 million invested in the healthcare sector and funds with holdings in the industry.

The same goes for Warren’s suggestion that the candidates assailing Medicare for All lacked the “political will” to fight for it, which Hickenlooper emphatically denied. Yet in 2016, as governor of Colorado, he—along with fellow 2020 candidate, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet—opposed Amendment 69, a ballot measure that would have instituted a single-payer system in the state. At the time, Hickenlooper claimed that it was “premature” to reform the healthcare system. Behind closed doors, he told the Colorado Forum, an assembly of business leaders and political operatives that comprised one of Colorado’s most powerful lobbies, that a “couple large healthcare-related companies that are looking at moving their headquarters to Colorado” had “paused” when they learned about the measure.

While post-debate polling is still to come, it’s been clear that the unambitious, conservative approach championed by figures like Delaney and Hickenlooper is no longer welcome among the Democratic grassroots. Both candidates were booed at the California Democratic Convention this year for rebuking single-payer healthcare and socialism. In most polls, both candidates are ranking somewhere between 0 and 1 percent. Hickenlooper, whose campaign began hemorrhaging staff in early July, recently celebrated triumphantly when he hit a mere 2 percent, in one of this election’s most unintentionally hilarious tweets so far: “You did this. This campaign is gaining serious momentum and we’re just getting started.”

The Democratic Party’s recovery from their 30-year trauma isn’t over yet. After all, Joe Biden, one of the original neoliberal Democrats who abandoned the New Deal in the 1980s and is currently running a campaign based on attacking Medicare for All while being lavished with corporate money, is still the frontrunner.

But Warren and Sanders’ performance in Tuesday night’s debate, coupled with the crowd’s raucous cheers for their defiant retorts to the party’s withering conservative wing, hints that the healing process is well underway.

Dozens of press freedom groups denounce the threats against journalist Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept Brazil

In the past week, journalist Glenn Greenwald has been repeatedly threatened with jail time by right-wing Bralizian president Jair Bolsonaro. Multiple members of Brazil’s Congress have called for him to be arrested or his articles censored. Justice Minister Sergio Moro implied on Twitter Greenwald should be deported. Greenwald, his family, and his colleagues at The Intercept Brazil have also received countless death threats over the past six weeks.

All of these intimidation tactics stem from a series of important investigative articles published by The Intercept Brazil and other prominent Brazilian publications over the past month and a half. The stories have detailed confidential conversations then-judge Moro had with federal prosecutors that raise serious ethical and legal issues surrounding prominent corruption cases and the 2018 Brazilian election.

The only “crime” Greenwald and The Intercept Brazil have been accused of is the same type of action that countless news outlets around the world engage in every day: publishing news stories in the public interest, based on information from a confidential source.

Today, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and dozens of other international press freedom and human rights organizations have released an open letter forcefully condemning these threats and intimidation tactics, and are calling on the Brazilian government to protect the press freedom rights of all the reporters involved.

The letter states “the attempts to undermine and attack the credibility of The Intercept Brazil and its partners are viewed by the signatories of this appeal as a grave threat to the freedom to inform. Not only are they designed to deflect the public’s attention from the content of the revelations but above all, they reinforce an increasingly hostile work environment for the media and especially for investigative journalism.”

The letter goes on to state: “Freedom of the press and information are pillars of democracy. They transcend political divisions and must be protected and guaranteed at all costs.”

Greenwald is a founding board member of Freedom of the Press Foundation. We stand fully behind our friend and colleague and demand that the Brazilian government and its officials cease their dangerous threats to core press freedom rights that should be guaranteed to every journalist.

The full letter can be read below.

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Climate change alters tree demography in northern forests

The rise in temperature and precipitation levels in summer in northern Japan has negatively affected the growth of conifers and resulted in their gradual decline, according to a 38-year-long study in which mixed forests of conifers and broad-leaved trees were monitored.

Encapsulated Indian medicinal herb shows anti-diabetic properties in mice

Extracts of the herb Withania coagulans, or Paneer dodi, are used in traditional Indian medicine. Although some healers claim that W. coagulans can help treat diabetes, the bitter-tasting plant hasn't been studied extensively by scientists. Now, researchers have found that herbal extracts packaged in polymers derived from natural substances can reduce blood glucose levels in diabetic mice.