Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Committing to the Bit

The bigoted-comedian-to-right-wing-welfare pipeline gets a new applicant.

GM Can Take Away Our Health Insurance, But They Can’t Stop Our Strike

Just after midnight on September 15, nearly 50,000 members of The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) walked off their jobs at 33 General Motors (GM) plants across the Midwest and South. For two days, workers have been picketing against GM’s dismal wages and two-tier contracts. Steve Frisque was among them. Frisque is a full-time union steward and committee lead at the GM parts plant in Hudson, Wisconsin.

The Trump Administration Will Prevent California From Setting Its Own Fuel Efficiency Standards

The Trump administration is expected to announce on Wednesday that it will strip California from having any legal authority to require stricter tailpipe pollution standards than the federal government, the New York Times reported Tuesday. The Times reports: The formal revocation of California’s authority to set its own rules on tailpipe pollution—the United States’ largest […]

Trump’s Junk Insurance Is a Windfall for Scammy Insurance Companies

Back in 2017 Republicans did their level best to destroy Obamacare. They failed, and in a final act of pique Donald Trump issued an executive order related to junk insurance plans. These were bare-bones plans limited to three months and meant as a short bridge for emergencies. Trump’s order allowed them to last as long […]

Saudi First: Trump Wants to Start a War With Iran When MBS Gives the Order

Why is Trump deferring to Riyadh? Questions need to be asked about his financial ties with Saudis who bailed him out during the 1990s.

The post Saudi First: Trump Wants to Start a War With Iran When MBS Gives the Order appeared first on The Intercept.

Billions of license plate scans are part of a private surveillance database
https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/17/repo-drivers-scan-license-plates/ #privacy #security

49,000 Striking Auto Workers Should Vote No on “Two-Tier.” Here’s Why.

Auto workers on strike since midnight at General Motors are between a rock and a hard place—a hugely profitable company making outrageous demands for concessions and a union leadership that made no plan for winning a strike and has not even told members what they’re going out for. Picket signs say simply “UAW on Strike.”

Researchers see need for action on forest fire risk

How do humans affect forest fires? An international team of researchers has now shown for a region in north-eastern Poland that forest fires increasingly occurred there after the end of the 18th century with the change to organized forestry. The increased number of fires subsequently made it necessary to manage and maintain the forests differently. In the wake of climate change, the researchers suggest new strategies for the fight against forest fires.

Every time you think: "But what about all the good things he did", consider: "What about all the people and potentially great contributions we lost because of him."

#RMS #FreeSoftware

We don't need leaders any more. We never did.

Do you have an idea for a Librem 5 app? Here’s a guide to setup your local development environment https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Boards/emulators.html and an app design tutorial to get you started https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-app-design-tutorial-naming-your-app/ #purism #linuxphone #mobilelinux

New models show that the earth is warming faster than first thought
https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/17/new-models-earth-warming-faster-climate-change/ #climatechange #climatecrisis

Whose Grid? Our Grid! Chicago’s Campaign To Put Electricity Under Public Control

This article is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story. 

CHICAGO—Among the many vendors at the Logan Square Farmers Market on August 18 sat three young people peddling neither organic vegetables, gourmet cheese nor handmade crafts. Instead, they offered liberation from capitalism.

Representatives of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America (CDSA) engaged marketgoers in discussions about the campaigns they are involved in, from lifting the ban on rent con- trol to establishing single-pay- er healthcare. But one effort in particular seemed to catch the most attention.

“We’re trying to bring ComEd under municipal control,” CDSA member Matthew Cason told Patrick Petranek, a Logan Square resident whose eyes lit up at the prospect of Chicago’s largest electricity provider, Com- monwealth Edison, being taken over by the city. Petranek said he supports more transparency around fees and signed a petition in support of the campaign.

ComEd’s franchise agreement with Chicago is up for renegotiation at the end of 2020. The agreement, established in 1947, allows ComEd to access the city’s public areas to build electric infrastructure—and form a practical monopoly over Chicago’s electricity.

“Electric power is a critical function in everyday life, and we can’t go without it,” Cason tells In These Times. “Yet, it’s controlled by a private monopoly, and that private monopoly is minimally accountable, not transparent and just is outside of our public control.”

Cason argues that a democratically controlled utility would help Chicago reach its goal of 100-percent clean and renewable energy by 2035, which City Council set in April. If the city— not a profit-driven corporation— is responsible for sourcing its own energy, Cason says, it will make decisions to satisfy its residents instead of investors.

CDSA launched its #DemocratizeComEd campaign in June, part of a wave of municipalization efforts heating up across the country. DSA and other grassroots organizations are mounting campaigns from San Francisco to Maine. In July, after a heat wave forced two power shutdowns in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio floated the idea of taking over ConEd, the city’s investor-owned electric utility.

In late July, Chicago alderman and CDSA member Daniel La Spata introduced a City Council order calling for a feasibility study to examine the potential impacts—environmental, social and economic—of bringing ComEd under public control. Cason expects the proposal to easily pass through the Committee on Environmental Protection and Energy, after which it would be up for review by the whole Council. The study, due to come out in December if authorized, would then outline paths to municipalization.

Twenty-two of Chicago’s 50 aldermen have indicated support for the study so far. While a plan for Chicago’s potential ComEd takeover would be detailed in the study, Cason points out that Illinois makes it particularly easy for local governments to municipalize utilities. One way is through a Public Utility Certificate, a special low-interest bond that enables cities to purchase utility assets, including equipment and infrastructure, while paying back the loan only with revenue generated from the utility. ComEd’s assets would then be managed by a board of elected officials, rather than answering to profit-driven shareholders.

Johanna Bozuwa, co-manager of the climate and energy program at The Democracy Collaborative and an advocate for municipalization, allows that “publicly owned utilities have [not] always been perfect”—for instance, poor power infrastructure will cause blackouts regardless of who owns the utility. But, she adds, democratizing utilities creates “many more levers in order to enact change in a way that we can’t do in a corporate monopoly entity.” Public utilities can prioritize community over profit, she says. “We have agency in a way that we may not otherwise.”

Burlington, Vt., for instance, used its public power grid to become the first U.S. city to be powered by 100% renewable energy. Red-state Nebraska is currently the only U.S. state with a completely publicly owned power system—and has been since the 1940s, when private utilities thought powering rural areas was too expensive. Today, Nebraska residents pay some of the lowest electric rates in the country.

Chicago Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, also a CDSA member, made a case for municipalization on the public TV show Chicago Tonight in early July, noting there is local precedent: In 1947, Chicago took ownership of the private train lines that made up its famous “L” mass transit system, democratizing public transit.

“We want to make sure we’re pushing forward the socialist cause,” Ramirez-Rosa said. In addition to tabling at the farmers market, CDSA is canvassing neighborhoods and talking to City Council members to generate support for municipalization. Cason says talking to Chicagoans about the effort has been surprisingly easy. “Everyone knows what ComEd is,” Cason says. “Everyone knows what electricity is. Everyone has a power bill.”

But what most speaks to people he canvasses, Cason says, is the principle of having a basic necessity managed by an entity beholden to Chicago residents, rather than profit.

“We believe that critical public and social functions should be under public control,” he tells In These Times. “You don’t want to leave something you need up to the whims of private shareholders, private investors ... things that are not accountable to the public.”

The Untold Story: Joe Biden Pushed Ronald Reagan to Ramp Up Incarceration — Not the Other Way Around

Biden has argued that the focus on his 1994 Crime Bill as a driver of mass incarceration is misplaced. He's right -- it was his earlier push that was responsible.

The post The Untold Story: Joe Biden Pushed Ronald Reagan to Ramp Up Incarceration — Not the Other Way Around appeared first on The Intercept.

Party Animals

We’re stuck with Brett Kavanaugh. And we know who to thank.

As the Dumb World Turns...

Time for another installment of LIFE IN THE STUPIDVERSE

Up in Smoke

America’s children are unsafe. It’s time to take serious action to ban what’s killing our kids.

To address hunger, many countries may have to increase carbon footprint

Achieving an adequate, healthy diet in most low- and middle-income countries will require a substantial increase in greenhouse gas emissions and water use due to food production, according to new research.

Private Equity Is Working Hard to Keep Surprise Medical Bills High

One of the most outrageous aspects of American health care is surprise out-of-network billing. Most people, if they go to a hospital that’s “in-network,” quite reasonably assume that this means “the hospital’s doctors are in-network.” But that’s not the case. Sometimes hospitals contract with doctors who aren’t part of your insurance network, and these doctors […]

New technology allows fleets to double fishing capacity -- and deplete fish stocks faster

Technological advances are allowing commercial fishing fleets to double their fishing power every 35 years and put even more pressure on dwindling fish stocks, new research has found.

Naomi Klein on How Climate Change Fuels the Rise of White Supremacy

This story originally appeared in theGuardian. It is republished here as part of In These Times' partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

Read an extract from Naomi Klein's new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, here.

Why are you publishing this book now?

I still feel that the way that we talk about climate change is too compartmentalised, too siloed from the other crises we face. A really strong theme running through the book is the links between it and the crisis of rising white supremacy, the various forms of nationalism and the fact that so many people are being forced from their homelands, and the war that is waged on our attention spans. These are intersecting and interconnecting crises and so the solutions have to be as well.

The book collects essays from the last decade, have you changed your mind about anything?

When I look back, I don’t think I placed enough emphasis on the challenge climate change poses to the left. It’s more obvious the way the climate crisis challenges a rightwing dominant worldview, and the cult of serious centrism that never wants to do anything big, that’s always looking to split the difference. But this is also a challenge to a left worldview that is essentially only interested in redistributing the spoils of extractivism [the process of extracting natural resources from the earth] and not reckoning with the limits of endless consumption.

What’s stopping the left doing this?

In a North American context, it’s the greatest taboo of all to actually admit that there are going to be limits. You see that in the way Fox News has gone after the Green New Deal – they are coming after your hamburgers! It cuts to the heart of the American dream – every generation gets more than the last, there is always a new frontier to expand to, the whole idea of settler colonial nations like ours. When somebody comes along and says, actually, there are limits, we’ve got some tough decisions, we need to figure out how to manage what’s left, we’ve got to share equitably – it is a psychic attack. And so the response [on the left] has been to avoid, and say no, no, we’re not coming to take away your stuff, there are going to be all kinds of benefits. And there are going to be benefits: we’ll have more livable cities, we’ll have less polluted air, we’ll spend less time stuck in traffic, we can design happier, richer lives in so many ways. But we are going to have to contract on the endless, disposable consumption side.

Do you feel encouraged by talk of the Green New Deal?

I feel a tremendous excitement and a sense of relief, that we are finally talking about solutions on the scale of the crisis we face. That we’re not talking about a little carbon tax or a cap and trade scheme as a silver bullet. We’re talking about transforming our economy. This system is failing the majority of people anyway, which is why we’re in this period of such profound political destabilisation – that is giving us the Trumps and the Brexits, and all of these strongman leaders – so why don’t we figure out how to change everything from bottom to top, and do it in a way that addresses all of these other crises at the same time? There is every chance we will miss the mark, but every fraction of a degree warming that we are able to hold off is a victory and every policy that we are able to win that makes our societies more humane, the more we will weather the inevitable shocks and storms to come without slipping into barbarism. Because what really terrifies me is what we are seeing at our borders in Europe and North America and Australia – I don’t think it’s coincidental that the settler colonial states and the countries that are the engines of that colonialism are at the forefront of this. We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism. We saw it in Christchurch, we saw it in El Paso, where you have this marrying of white supremacist violence with vicious anti-immigrant racism.

That is one of the most chilling sections of your book: I think that’s a link a lot of people haven’t made.

This pattern has been clear for a while. White supremacy emerged not just because people felt like thinking up ideas that were going to get a lot of people killed but because it was useful to protect barbaric but highly profitable actions. The age of scientific racism begins alongside the transatlantic slave trade, it is a rationale for that brutality. If we are going to respond to climate change by fortressing our borders, then of course the theories that would justify that, that create these hierarchies of humanity, will come surging back. There have been signs of that for years, but it is getting harder to deny because you have killers who are screaming it from the rooftops.

One criticism you hear about the environment movement is that it is dominated by white people. How do you address that?

When you have a movement that is overwhelmingly representative of the most privileged sector of society then the approach is going to be much more fearful of change, because people who have a lot to lose tend to be more fearful of change, whereas people who have a lot to gain will tend to fight harder for it. That’s the big benefit of having an approach to climate change that links it to those so called bread and butter issues: how are we going to get better paid jobs, affordable housing, a way for people to take care of their families? I have had many conversations with environmentalists over the years where they seem really to believe that by linking fighting climate change with fighting poverty, or fighting for racial justice, it’s going to make the fight harder. We have to get out of this “my crisis is bigger than your crisis: first we save the planet and then we fight poverty and racism, and violence against women”. That doesn’t work. That alienates the people who would fight hardest for change. This debate has shifted a huge amount in the US because of the leadership of the climate justice movement and because it is congresswomen of colour who are championing the Green New Deal. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaibcome from communities that have gotten such a raw deal under the years of neoliberalism and longer, and are determined to represent, truly represent, the interests of those communities. They’re not afraid of deep change because their communities desperately need it.

In the book, you write: “The hard truth is that the answer to the question ‘What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?’ is: nothing.” Do you still believe that?

In terms of the carbon, the individual decisions that we make are not going to add up to anything like the kind of scale of change that we need. And I do believe that the fact that for so many people it’s so much more comfortable to talk about our own personal consumption, than to talk about systemic change, is a product of neoliberalism, that we have been trained to see ourselves as consumers first. To me that’s the benefit of bringing up these historical analogies, like the New Deal or the Marshall Plan – it brings our minds back to a time when we were able to think of change on that scale. Because we’ve been trained to think very small. It is incredibly significant that Greta Thunberg has turned her life into a living emergency.

Yes, she set sail for the UN climate summit in New York on a zero carbon yacht ...

Exactly. But this isn’t about what Greta is doing as an individual. It’s about what Greta is broadcasting in the choices that she makes as an activist, and I absolutely respect that. I think it’s magnificent. She is using the power that she has to broadcast that this is an emergency, and trying to inspire politicians to treat it as an emergency. I don’t think anybody is exempt from scrutinising their own decisions and behaviours but I think it is possible to overemphasise the individual choices. I have made a choice – and this has been true since I wrote No Logo, and I started getting these “what should I buy, where should I shop, what are the ethical clothes?” questions. My answer continues to be that I am not a lifestyle adviser, I am not anyone’s shopping guru, and I make these decisions in my own life but I’m under no illusion that these decisions are going to make the difference.

Some people are choosing to go on birth strikes. What do you think about that?

I’m happy these discussions are coming into the public domain as opposed to being furtive issues we’re afraid to talk about. It’s been very isolating for people. It certainly was for me. One of the reasons I waited as long as I did to try and get pregnant, and I would say this to my partner all the time – what, you want to have a Mad Max water warrior fighting with their friends for food and water? It wasn’t until I was part of the climate justice movement and I could see a path forward that I could even imagine having a kid. But I would never tell anybody how to answer this most intimate of questions. As a feminist who knows the brutal history of forced sterilisation and the ways in which women’s bodies become battle zones when policymakers decide that they are going to try and control population, I think that the idea that there are regulatory solutions when it comes to whether or not to have kids is catastrophically ahistorical. We need to be struggling with our climate grief together and our climate fears together, through whatever decision we decide to make, but the discussion we need to have is how do we build a world so that those kids can have thriving, zero-carbon lives?

Over the summer, you encouraged people to read Richard Powers’s novel, The Overstory. Why?

It’s been incredibly important to me and I’m happy that so many people have written to me since. What Powers is writing about trees: that trees live in communities and are in communication, and plan and react together, and we’ve been completely wrong in the way we conceptualise them. It’s the same conversation we’re having about whether we are going to solve this as individuals or whether we are going to save the collective organism. It’s also rare, in good fiction, to valorise activism, to treat it with real respect, failures and all, to acknowledge the heroism of the people who put their bodies on the line. I thought Powers did that in a really extraordinary way.

What are you views on what Extinction Rebellion has achieved?

One thing they have done so well is break us out of this classic campaign model we have been in for a long time, where you tell someone something scary, you ask them to click on something to do something about it, you skip out the whole phase where we need to grieve together and feel together and process what it is that we just saw. Because what I hear a lot from people is, ok, maybe those people back in the 1930s or 40s could organise neighbourhood by neighbourhood or workplace by workplace but we can’t. We believe we’ve been so downgraded as a species that we are incapable of that. The only thing that is going to change that belief is getting face to face, in community, having experiences, off our screens, with one another on the streets and in nature, and winning some things and feeling that power.

You talk about stamina in the book. How do you keep going? Do you feel hopeful?

I have complicated feelings about the hope question. Not a day goes by that I don’t have a moment of sheer panic, raw terror, complete conviction that we are doomed, and then I do pull myself out of it. I’m renewed by this new generation that is so determined, so forceful. I’m inspired by the willingness to engage in electoral politics, because my generation, when we were in our 20s and 30s, there was so much suspicion around getting our hands dirty with electoral politics that we lost a lot of opportunities. What gives me the most hope right now is that we’ve finally got the vision for what we want instead, or at least the first rough draft of it. This is the first time this has happened in my lifetime. And also, I did decide to have kids. I have a seven year old who is so completely obsessed and in love with the natural world. When I think about him, after we’ve spent an entire summer talking about the role of salmon in feeding the forests where he was born in British Columbia, and how they are linked to the health of the trees and the soil and the bears and the orcas and this entire magnificent ecosystem, and I think about what it would be like to have to tell him that there are no more salmon, it kills me. So that motivates me. And slays me.