Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The #radicale project (selfhosting carddav/caldav solution) is currently looking for some new core maintainers.

If you would like to work on an awesome #opensource project and (in best case) you are familar with #python please join us.

https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/issues/997

Please re-toot and share it in your community if you want to help.

The Real America

Join us as we take a journey to the HEARTLAND to talk to some REAL voters!

Facebook's 2020 Election Plan Is What George Orwell Warned Us About

With its 2020 election policy, Facebook is shaping up to be the Big Brother George Orwell warned you about in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

https://www.ccn.com/is-facebooks-2020-election-plan-orwellian/ #DeleteFacebook

Solar and wind energy preserve groundwater for drought, agriculture
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191106083624.htm #climatechange #climatecrisis

Why is Australia trying to shut down climate activists?

A surge of climate activism is flooding Australia as the country falls behind on its promise to reduce emissions — effectively ignoring the Paris Agreement the Trump administration just abandoned. Prime Minister Scott Morrison is arguing that the government should outlaw “indulgent and selfish” efforts by environmental groups to rattle businesses with rallies and boycotts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/world/australia/australia-climate-protests-coal.html #climatechange #climatecrisis

Started training a bot that tries to analyze and identify hate-speech on Twitter.

A few things became quite apparent after only a few days:

1. There are huge networks of (seemingly) fake accounts that like and retweet each other's posts. Someone is operating this at a _massive_ scale.

2. Reporting and banning fake accounts seems futile. You're fighting a hydra that spawns new accounts quicker than one can report them.

3. I'm feeling sick to my stomach just browsing through the logs.

Trashing Teachers and Red-Baiting: How a Republican Governor Lost in Kentucky

When Kentucky teachers staged a series of walkouts in February and March, shutting down school districts across the state, their message was clear: Stop the attacks on workers and fund public education. It had become a common refrain as a series of teachers strikes swept the country, starting with the historic statewide walkout in West Virginia last February, which soon spread to Oklahoma, Arizona, California and other states.

But Kentucky educators were up against a singularly odious adversary: Republican Gov. Matt Bevin. The least popular governor in the country, Bevin made the incendiary accusation that  teachers abetted sexual assault of children through their labor action, telling local station WDRB-TV: "I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them. I guarantee you somewhere today a child was physically harmed or ingested poison because they were home alone because a single parent didn't have any money to take care of them."

The teachers, who were protesting cuts to their pensions as well as school privatization scams, were furious. J.P. LaVertu, a Shelby County teacher, called Bevin “a disgrace to our state." Kentucky Education Association President Stephanie Winkler said she was “appalled” by his comments. Even Republican state Sen. Max Wise said Bevin’s accusations were “reprehensible.”

And on Tuesday night, Kentucky voters showed Gov. Bevin the door. Losing a widely watched race to his Democratic opponent, Andy Beshear, Bevin proved that viscously assailing and insulting working people while throwing your arms around President Trump is a recipe for electoral disaster, even in one of the reddest states in the nation.

On Monday, Trump visited Kentucky to rally voters behind Bevin, saying, "If you lose, they're going to say Trump suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world. This was the greatest. You can't let that happen to me!"

Despite Bevin’s refusal to concede, that defeat did indeed happen to the scandal-engulfed president. And while anger toward Trump isn’t the only reason Bevin went down in flames, turnout in some of the most progressive areas of the state soared on Tuesday, suggesting that voters fed up with a president on the verge of impeachment and a Republican Party deadset on implementing a craven anti-worker agenda fueled Beshear’s victory.    

In addition to being one of the most Republican states, Kentucky is also one of the poorest. In 2017, over 17% of state residents were living in poverty (the fourth highest rate in the country) and nearly 15% faced food insecurity (the seventh highest). A report released earlier this year shows that Kentucky is the worst state to retire in.

It was under these stark conditions that Gov. Bevin in 2018 chose to implement work requirements in order for residents to receive Medicaid, which would cut the healthcare coverage of at least 95,000 Kentuckians. When a federal court blocked the plan, Bevin pivoted to unilaterally taking away Medicaid recipients vision and dental coverage, which impacted 460,000 people.     

Beshear has pledged to reverse these plans, protecting Medicaid coverage while strengthening the Affordable Care Act. On the issue of education, Beshear campaigned on “expanding early childhood education, ending a teacher shortage and increasing mental health services for children.” He also called for fully funding public education in the state while proposing a $2,000 pay raise for all of Kentucky’s public school teachers and making sure none make less than $40,000. As Beshear said, “We’re going to be the best administration for public education that this state has ever seen.”

Ahead of the election, Republicans attempted to paint Beshear and fellow Democrats as “socialists,” and Gov. Bevin claimed his opponent was “in line with Bernie Sanders” and “spreading his hateful class warfare and communist ideology." Sanders, for his part, said in 2016, “I understand your new governor Gov. Bevin is busy cutting health care and cutting education. So if you can imagine the kind of governor Gov. Bevin is, think about Bernie Sanders as a president doing exactly the opposite.”

While Beshear’s politics are far more moderate than Sanders, such attacks should make clear that Republicans will try to tar any and all Democrats as radical socialists ahead of 2020, no matter their actual platforms.

The fact that Democrats won across the country on Tuesday night, retaking the Virginia state legislature while coming up big in the Philadelphia suburbs, indicates that this red-baiting is not a winning strategy—especially considering that open democratic socialists themselves had a good night.

It’s no surprise that Gov. Bevin and his fellow Republicans would use their power to strip working people of healthcare and pensions while vilifying teachers—the vanguard of the growing working-class insurgency. But just as attempts to peg Democrats as subversive threats to American democracy have failed to protect the GOP, so too will the continued attacks on public school educators.

During their walkouts earlier this year, “Remember in November” became the teachers’ rallying cry. Tuesday’s results suggest that they meant it.     

#Bones of #ape living 12m years ago point to genesis of #upright #walking | #Science | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/nov/06/bones-of-ape-living-12m-years-point-to-genesis-of-upright-walking

#Biology #Zoology #Primatology #Anthropology #Palaeontology #Evolution

Labor Needs To Embrace Social Justice Unionism

Proponents of the “rank-and-file strategy” (RFS) emphasize the need to lay the foundations of a revitalized labor movement through rank-and-file workers—as opposed to union staff or leadership. As Laura Gabby notes, this idea has a long history: In the 1970s, for instance, thousands of leftists (myself included) of both working-class origin and otherwise entered the workforce to build a real working-class Left and rebuild organized labor.

Though this rank-and-file emphasis is more of an orientation than a full strategy, it is good in that it encourages people on the Left to engage as rank and filers—to enter into the working class as coworkers rather than staff. The idea is not, as Andrew Dobbyn argues, elitist; instead, it suggests fellow workers have something to teach, rather than simply being vessels for knowledge from leftists.

But the current discussion has certain important blind spots. First, the mostly white socialists discussing the RFS often fail to recognize that leftist formations composed mostly or entirely of people of color have historically been instrumental in developing and leading efforts to retool the labor movement. The direction and character of these formations has frequently differed from that of white-led formations.

Peter Shapiro presents one example in his Jacobin article, “On the Clock and Off,” drawing on his work with the League of Revolutionary Struggle. He writes about the Mexican immigrant women who emerged as rank-and-file leaders in the 1985–87 frozen food strike in Watsonville, Calif. They were not part of their union’s progressive reform caucus, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, nor would they have been considered part of any conventional “militant minority”—which is why, Shapiro writes, “some strike supporters on the Left viewed them skeptically.” But these women established their own informal infrastructure, bound together through the solidarity of not just working together but the shared experience of racial and gender oppression, and propelled the strike to victory.

More broadly, proponents of the rank-and-file strategy must look beyond the clear, identifiable base of organic leaders and leftists and assess the forces within any workplace, including conservatives and pragmatists. As Fernando Gapasin and I write in our book, Solidarity Divided, to defeat the conservative elements, the Left must pull the center along. Advocates of a “militant minority” can be skeptical of such alliances, but this is a mistake.

William Z. Foster, a brilliant trade unionist who led the Communist Party USA, advocated a militant minority strategy but later adjusted his approach to pursue a “Left-Center Alliance,” recognizing that, even in the militant 1930s, the Left was not sufficiently powerful to act alone. Workers will not necessarily agree with the total program of a leftist, so it is unlikely that leftists will be organizing workers around an exclusively left-wing program. To the extent to which we ignore the center we cede territory to conservative forces that will build their own alliances to crush the Left.

Leftists in the labor movement must also look beyond the narrow objectives of trade unionism as we know it, centered on making gains within the workplace. In fact, the Left needs an alternative framework, a “social justice unionism,” with objectives focused on the larger working class—which includes, for instance, what Stephen Lerner and others refer to as “bargaining for the common good.” Here, the union takes issues of the larger community to the bargaining table. Unions, too, might provide active support to or establish shared agendas with other worker or progressive community organizations.

Lastly, rebuilding the labor movement requires recognition that labor, as Andrew points out, is not only trade unions. The rise of so-called alt-labor, such as worker centers and domestic worker organizations, is part of this rebuilding. Leftists play a major role in this sector, which is disproportionately workers of color. Unions can and should provide direct material assistance to this organizing; the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, for instance, has worked to ally with informal economy workers.

A Left without a working class base is not a Left, but a collection of advocates for change. Our mission is to rebuild that base, transforming the Left and the labor movement together.

For alternate perspectives on the rank-and-file strategy, see "Want To Build the Labor Movement? Get a Job at a Union Workplace."and "90% of Workers Aren't in a Union. Labor's Future Depends on Them."

Want To Build the Labor Movement? Get a Job at a Union Workplace.

Only workers themselves have the power to transform society, and workers must organize themselves to do so. Union staff and elected leadership can play important and sometimes pivotal roles, but in the fight against capital to win substantive, lasting gains, workers must be in the driver’s seat.

When workers are sidelined, at best we get staff-driven mobilizing, which Jane McAlevey describes as “dedicated activists who show up over and over … but [lack] the full mass of their coworkers or community behind them.” With an organized rank-and-file base, by contrast, ordinary workers themselves are the change agents, deeply involved in developing an analysis of what’s wrong in the workplace and a strategy for how to fight the boss (and, ultimately, capitalism). Their power comes from building majorities large enough to leverage militant action. Wins are less likely to be rolled back when a majority puts its own sweat into the process and stands ready to defend its gains.

The widespread teachers’ strikes of 2018 and 2019 and the Chicago Teachers Union strike of 2012 illuminate the potential power of worker-led organizing, as they were primarily led and initiated by rank-and-file union members.

This deep organizing, however, does not yet exist in most industries. To build it, unionists and labor movement activists can look to the “rank-and-file strategy” (RFS). The phrase was coined by Kim Moody in 2000 but takes inspiration from 20th-century labor upheavals like those led by the Minnesota Teamsters in the 1930s and black workers at a Chrysler assembly plant in Detroit in the 1970s, when radical unionists and socialists were at the heart of big gains.

What socialist rank-and-file activists such as Moody identified was a gulf between the Left and the organized working class, developed under McCarthyism. The class character of this gulf—with leftists more often in the middle class and disconnected from the day-to-day struggles of the working class—has weakened the Left and the labor movement.

When class conflict and labor struggles arise, as they inevitably do under capitalism, they can expose underlying capitalist ideology—an opportunity for people in these struggles to actively raise working-class consciousness. RFS proponents have sought to close the Left-labor gulf by building a layer of workplace organizers—including socialists joining the labor movement and respected workplace leaders of all political persuasions—to heighten class conflict and develop this consciousness.

Part of the answer to overcoming the inertia that ails the labor movement may lie in a new, young and energetic Left—which already shows signs of being closer to the broader working class than other recent generations of leftists. However, this Left remains largely divorced from the organized working class, where RFS suggests young leftists would best be able to exercise real power alongside coworkers. (While young workers are fast joining unions, 2017 data shows only 7.7% of workers between the ages 16 and 34 were union members.)

Evidence suggests that young leftists are already playing key roles in labor struggles that produce wins and raise class consciousness. As Eric Blanc notes, “Though few in number, young socialists inspired by the Bernie Sanders campaign played an outsized role [in the teachers’ strikes].”

But radical unionists acting by themselves aren’t enough to win.

At the core of any success are rank-and-file leaders, the ones coworkers respect and come to for advice. What’s necessary is a mix, working in coordination: organic, workplace leaders—able to move coworkers and fellow union members to action—and socialists, who can bring a broader analysis and organizing experience, and who are sometimes workplace leaders themselves. This layer of activists and rank-and-file leaders is sometimes called the “militant minority.”

The militant minority organizes and wins campaigns around workplace issues to grow its ranks and raise class consciousness through these practical struggles, and it fights for the demands of the broader working class by creating an ever-larger group of worker-organizers with a shared vision of class-struggle unionism.

The militant minority seeks to build supermajorities in the workplace. And supermajorities are necessary to raise class consciousness, fight capital, strike and win.

For alternate perspectives on the rank-and-file strategy, see "90% of Workers Aren't in a Union. Labor's Future Depends on Them." and "Labor Needs To Embrace Social Justice Unionism."

90% of Workers Aren’t in a Union. Labor’s Future Depends on Them.

My comrade Laura Gabby says that “supermajorities are necessary to raise class consciousness, fight capital, strike and win,” and I agree. But we diverge on how to get there.

She and other rank-and-file strategy (RFS) supporters suggest realigning internal union politics from the inside out through a “militant minority.” As Kim Moody argues in his seminal pamphlet about RFS, unions have to “take a central role … by virtue of their size and their place at the heart of capitalist accumulation.”But, in practice, attempts at union realignment through RFS have mixed results, while most workers remain without a union. What’s needed, instead, is a broad “yes, and” approach with an emphasis on new organizing.

Many unionists were first exposed to RFS in August through a series of unfortunate articles in Politico and the New York Times, detailing activities from the Labor Branch of New York City’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. (Laura is a member.) These DSAers called for socialists to get union jobs in specific “strategic industries” to form a “militant minority” and change unions internally. This strategy was reiterated in the national RFS DSA resolution and in a pamphlet, put out by Young Democratic Socialists of America and Democratic Socialist Labor Commission, titled, “Why Socialists Should Become Teachers.”

While the news articles unfairly portray RFS as a devious plot, they highlight real failures in political strategy. NYC-DSA is, anecdotally, disproportionately white; the optics aren’t good for them to take over unions with membership that is mostly people of color.

Organic worker-leaders built our movement; if socialists want to lead, they must become organic leaders, not tack themselves on like some gaudy ideological accessory. Laura says organic leaders and socialists must work together, but the problem remains: The union realignment strategy treats union members as constituencies to be managed, rather than organic partners. 

The strategy also leads to a militant minority divorced from the larger union, leaving the efforts of RFS reform caucuses decidedly mixed. While the rank-and-file caucus in the Chicago Teachers Union has seen success, New York’s Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) has seen less. MORE is a favorite of NYC-DSA Labor Branch members, yet its vote share in the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) presidential election dropped from roughly 10,000 in 2016 to less than 2,500 in 2019, and the incumbent UFT Unity Caucus captured all 102 seats on the executive board.

If leftists want to transform the labor movement, there’s a much easier route: Unionize the unorganized. Surveys show that at least 48% of workers would like a union, but 90% do not have one. Unions enjoy high levels of public support, and millennials are joining in disproportionately large numbers.There is no better time for the Left to organize new unions or add new bargaining units. Leftists should focus on developing organizing committees before a union steps in, ensuring unions will actually commit resources to finish the job and that the workers joining do so on their own terms.

A partnership between the progressive International Longshore and Warehouse Workers (ILWU) and DSA San Francisco shows how this organizing can be done. DSA members spent months with Anchor Brewing workers developing the organizing committee, researching unions and writing the campaign plan, and only then reached out to the ILWU, chosen because of its democratic practices and militant politics. Together, they won.

As Moody himself admits, the conservative craft unionism of the Teamsters, for example, only changed because leftists organized huge swathes of new workers. These leftists weren’t outsiders, but organized their neighbors and coworkers. As the Anchor group put it, “We can’t be outsiders helping the labor movement; we have to be organic partners.”

The nature of new organizing reveals why this works: Because workers must take huge risks to form unions, newly organized unionists are likely to be active, politically astute and militant. The bonds forged in this struggle, between leftists and their coworkers, build the relationships necessary to transform the labor movement.

If we want to change the labor movement, our goal shouldn’t be internal realignment, but new unions for the 90%.

For alternate perspectives on the rank-and-file strategy, see "Want To Build the Labor Movement? Get a Job at a Union Workplace." and "Labor Needs To Embrace Social Justice Unionism."

Put on a Happy Face

Facebook has a PR problem. Enter: FACEBOOK.

Started generating little QR code stickers for my 3D prints, which connects them to a database with all kinds of metadata: the printer it was printed on, the filament that was used, as well as the specific print settings. May even add the actual gcode eventually.

#3dprinting

The Buck Staps Here

Don Jr. says the Democrats are using “Gestapo tactics.”

Opt-out by default would be huge:

"Under the terms of the OPA, individuals would have the right to obtain, correct, and delete data collected about them by covered entities, as well as to request "a human review" of automated decisions. Users would also have to opt-in to having their personal data used for training machine learning algorithms." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/new-bill-would-create-digital-privacy-agency-to-enforce-privacy-rights/

#IFS: #UK's #richest people exploiting #loophole to cut #tax rate | #Business | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/05/thousands-of-uks-richest-people-exploiting-loophole-to-cut-tax-rate

#TaxAvoidance

The Climate Strikers Walked Out of School. Next, Let’s Walk Off the Job.

This September, the world erupted when over 7 million people — young and old—poured into the streets for the Global Climate Strike. The mass action, which made a Green New Deal a top demand, was sparked in the lead-up to Sweden’s 2018 general election, when teen activist Greta Thunberg began ditching school to protest Sweden’s inaction on climate change. Greta, who was already inspiring more student strikes through social media, catalyzed the Fridays for Future movement when she decided to continue striking on Fridays after the general election. Over the past year, young leaders —particularly youth of color—have been on the forefront of building Friday Climate Strikes into a worldwide student civil disobedience movement, taking aim at the political failure to address the climate emergency.

What we can learn from Indigenous land management

First Nations peoples' world view and connection to Country provide a rich source of knowledge and innovations for better land and water management policies when Indigenous decision-making is enacted, Australian researchers say. Incorporating the spirit and principles of Aboriginal people's appreciation and deep understanding of the landscape and its features has been overlooked or sidelined in the past - to the detriment of the environment, the report says.