Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Update: Kashmir Hill's piece in the NYTimes today describes a US startup that's providing law enforcement the exact kind of facial recognition tech I was warning about in China. China's present surveillance state is becoming our future. #privacy https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

Low doses of radiation used in medical imaging lead to mutations in cell cultures

Common medical imaging procedures use low doses of radiation that are believed to be safe. A new study, however, finds that in human cell cultures, these doses create breaks that allow extra bits of DNA to integrate into the chromosome.

The #librem5 devkit driving it's internal panel via DSI and an external screen via HDMI at the same time.

#etnaviv #mesa #imx8

An Upcoming Supreme Court Ruling Could Starve Public Schools—In Favor of Religious Ones

On January 22, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, a case that could result in the massive expansion of public funding for private religious schools. The petitioners in the case—which will be litigated by the conservative law group, Institute for Justice—are asking that the court rule unconstitutional the denial of "public funds' to religious schools, invoking the First Amendment "freedom of exercise" clause to defend the position. In the event that the court rules in favor of the petitioner, the result, argue its detractors, would be tantamount to a mandate for religious voucher programs in every state.

Iranian users in Iran and abroad are getting kicked off of U.S. platforms due to ambiguous sanctions. We call on the Department of Treasury to issue guidance to tech companies, and on tech companies to offer clearer notifications to users https://eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/iranian-tech-users-are-getting-knocked-web-sanctions

@kyle mastercard sells realtime transaction data: https://www.mastercardservices.com/en/data-analytics

There was some way to opt out per card, but you need to look that up.

The President Is Crazy. Someone Should Do Something.

Everyone agrees that President Trump seems to have been exposed as unfit for office in the week of his rash assassination of a top Iranian general. But who is going to act? The public is scared because they know that protest doesn’t work and that it often turns protesters into targets of surveillance. Congress won’t […]

Slow-motion interplate slip detected in the Nankai Trough near Japan

Researchers used a Global Navigation Satellite System-Acoustic ranging combination technique to detect signals due to slow slip events in the Nankai Trough with seafloor deformations of 5 cm or more and durations on the order of one year. These events generally occurred on the shallow sides of regions with strong interplate coupling and represent variations in interplate friction conditions, which may help simulate the occurrence of megathrust earthquakes originating from this subduction zone and contribute earthquake disaster prevention.

The Multinational Trying To Bankrupt the Dock Workers Union Has a Sordid Past

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) is facing an existential crisis.

Founded by the militant labor icon Harry Bridges, the ILWU has made a name for itself as the take-no-crap West Coast dockers union, one that has engaged in work stoppages and other tactics both to protect their jobs and benefits, but also to oppose war and racism.

How anti-sprawl policies may be harming water quality

Urban growth boundaries are created by governments in an effort to concentrate urban development -- buildings, roads and the utilities that support them -- within a defined area. These boundaries are intended to decrease negative impacts on people and the environment. However, according to a researcher, policies that aim to reduce urban sprawl may be increasing water pollution.

Walnuts may be good for the gut and help promote heart health

Researchers found that eating walnuts daily as part of a healthy diet was associated with increases in certain bacteria that can help promote health. Additionally, those changes in gut bacteria were associated with improvements in some risk factors for heart disease.

The Trump Administration Just Opened a New Immigrant Prison in Rural Michigan

From his office at the Cristo Rey Church in Lansing, Mich., Oscar Castañeda runs a campaign against a new federal immigrant prison, part of President Donald Trump’s escalation of immigration enforcement.

In May 2019, the Trump administration awarded a ten-year, $398 million contract to The GEO Group, the largest private prison corporation in the country, to reopen a shuttered Michigan prison. Located in rural Baldwin, Mich., the North Lake Correctional Facility opened in late 2019 with a capacity of 1,800.

At Cristo Rey, Castañeda convenes weekly meetings of No Detention Centers in Michigan, a coalition of organizations and individuals fighting to keep the state free of any immigrant incarceration facilities—including the North Lake prison. The issue has attracted a “huge variety of people,” Castañeda says. “For the first time, we’re achieving some state-level unity.”

Unlike detention centers, which are managed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the North Lake facility is a Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) prison, which are managed by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). These facilities are specifically for non-citizens who have been convicted of federal crimes. Often, the crime is “felony reentry,” or a second unauthorized border crossing, which carries a typical sentence of two years (more for those with prior criminal records). After they serve their time, they are still deported.

“We call them shadow prisons,” says Bárbara Suárez Galeano, organizing director with Detention Watch Network. Often located in rural areas, CAR prisons are “hidden away from the public eye,” Galeano says, and further shielded from public scrutiny by their private administration.

Castañeda works as a part-time organizer with Action of Greater Lansing, an assembly of congregations in the Lansing area, housed at Cristo Rey. In addition to addressing the everyday needs, like legal services, of immigrants who visit his office, he frequently speaks at immigration rallies and appears on radio programs on behalf of the campaign against the North Lake prison.

Sitting in his office, Castañeda says, “a couple months ago it was difficult and hurtful to understand that we would not be able to prevent the North Lake prison from opening.” But today he is hopeful about winning the battle to shut down the prison, “because every week we learn news about financial companies cutting ties with The GEO Group. American citizens are getting to understand how this corporation operates.”

Shadow Prisons

CAR prisons are a relatively new outgrowth of modern mass incarceration. As the War on Drugs exploded the prison population, President Bill Clinton began segregating non-citizens convicted of federal crimes, such as drug trafficking, in privately run CAR prisons contracted through the BOP. The idea was that prisoners who weren’t slated to return to the United States didn’t need educational programming or services like drug treatment, and could be incarcerated more cheaply.

No Detention Centers in Michigan protests the opening of the GEO-Group-run North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Mich., on Oct 1., 2019. Three protesters were arrested. Photo by Theresa Rosado

Judy Greene, executive director of Justice Strategies, has been a national leader in trying to bring more public attention to CAR prisons. Between 2001 and 2014, Greene recalls, “I watched with horror” as 13 CAR prisons were built—a pace of nearly one per year.

After 9/11, the federal government turned its focus from drug crimes to national security. Immigration, previously treated as a civil legal matter, became criminalized. The newly formed Department of Homeland Security ramped up prosecutions for improper entry (a petty misdemeanor) and re-entry (a felony offense).

Those charged with the misdemeanor often plead guilty and are returned to their home country. If caught in the United States a second time, they can be charged with felony re-entry. As felony reentry prosecutions rose, so did the number of people incarcerated in federal prisons for immigration-related offenses, growing from 15,000 in 2001 to 20,000 to 2014.

Trump’s announcement is a reversal of the Obama administration’s effort to scale back the federal reliance on private prisons due to poor conditions. In August 2016, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates released a memo announcing the phaseout of private prison contracts. Greene recalls “popping champagne corks” when hearing the news of the Yates memo. GEO Group stock prices dropped precipitously.

Private prison companies donated generously to put Trump in the White House. The GEO Group and CoreCivic, the second-largest private prison company, gave more than half a million dollars to Trump’s election campaign, plus an additional $250,000 for his inauguration party. A month after Trump took office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the Yates memo, stating it impaired the “future needs” of the federal correctional system. Sessions and Trump also instituted a “zero tolerance” policy for border crossing, demanding that everyone arrested be prosecuted.

After Trump has taken office, stocks for private prison companies rebounded. The GEO Group recently opened a new headquarters building in Boca Raton, Florida at a cost of $57 million. In April 2017, the Justice Department issued a new round of bids for CAR prisons, and two years later announced that The GEO Group was the winner of the contracts in Baldwin, and reopening two of the three facilities at the Reeves County Detention Complex in Texas, which had been slated to be phased out by Obama.

Previously, Reeves was the largest privately-run prison in the world and named one of the top ten worst prisons in the United States by Mother Jones. In 2008-9, Reeves experienced a spate of five deaths, and two large riots. Incidents were sparked by the death of 32-year-old Manuel Galindo who suffered a series of epileptic seizures inside the prison. Staff responded by giving him Tylenol. “I already told them that I have been here for one month alone and I have gotten sick twice,” Galindo wrote to his mother just before dying. “I've already asked if they can place me with someone else so I won't be by myself anymore.”

The BOP did not return requests for comment for this story.

Oscar Castañeda protests Geo Group's North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Mich/, on Oct. 1, 2019. Photo credit: Theresa Rosado)

A Perfect Location

The opening of the CAR prison in Baldwin could easily have flown under the radar. Baldwin is a small town in northern Michigan with a population of approximately 1,200. Michigan state politics are Democratic-leaning because of strong union support in Detroit, but rural areas like Baldwin are Trump country.

Cam Brown, age 29, who grew up nearby, shot his first deer just outside of Baldwin. After Trump was elected, Brown started a local chapter of the of the Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-fascist group. His intention was to “use my skills with firearms, talk to my neighbors and prevent them from becoming more reactionary.” He travelled Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 to oppose the “Unite the Right” rally, where a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of protesters. The chapter organized several actions, including a protest of the village president of Kalkaska in Northern Michigan, who had called for the death of all Muslims, and a demonstration against an appearance by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer at Michigan State University in Lansing.

Since then, the chapter decided to leave the network and give more attention to their local community. Forming Northern Michigan Mutual Action, Brown says, “we still do firearms trainings, counter-recruitment work, rural outreach, and mutual aid projects.”

As Brown explains, the group changed its focus because “as anti-fascists and abolitionists we believe we must shut down the refugee and immigrant concentration camps and welcome these people here in our communities.” There are about 10 members working on the fight against the North Lake prison.

Baldwin is in the middle of Lake County, the poorest county in Michigan, making it the “perfect location” for a private prison, says Brown, because of the jobs it provides. A destination for hunting and fishing, Baldwin relies heavily on tourism. During the summer, tourists rent cottages and shop at a few stores. But even still, there aren’t many jobs available in the town.

Trained as a mason, Brown does chimney rebuilds, as well as stone and brick work. He is busy in the summer months, but during the winter jobs are “nonexistent,” and he is forced to collect unemployment. “It’s hard,” he says.

Promising about 300 new jobs, the prison was promoted as bringing economic prosperity to the region. The GEO Group (then named Wackenhut Corrections Corporation) built the North Lake Correctional Facility in 1999, originally to house juveniles. Referred to in the media as a “punk prison,” it was built during a panic over youth violence in Detroit and other major Michigan cities. The state pulled out of the deal in 2005 after reports of neglect. Except for brief contracts with the states of California and Vermont, the prison has mostly sat empty.

The contract with the Bureau of Prisons for the North Lake Correctional Facility allowed for “reactivation” of the site, as GEO Group announced in a press release. It will enable the company to make up for millions in lost revenue.

Members of the local government are overwhelmingly behind the prison. “They’re being manipulated by the money the GEO Group brings,” Brown says. Activists have been trying to reach out to members of the local community. Most of the people who live there are “apathetic,” Brown says. “They don’t have many options.”

A True Community Response

No Detention Centers in Michigan first formed in 2018 to oppose a private detention center slated for Ionia, located midway between Lansing and Grand Rapids.

The coalition “formed quickly,” says Laura Sager, who lives in Lansing and works as a volunteer with Justice Strategies, a national anti-immigrant-detention group that provided the coalition with support. “It was a true community response to the threat of a new facility.” The center was to hold between 500 and 600 detainees for ICE. The deal was brokered under then-Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican. In 2019, when Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, was elected Governor, she promptly blocked the proposal.

There was little time for coalition members to celebrate. “The week that we found out that Gretchen Whitmer was stopping the ICE jail,” Castañeda says, the coalition got a tip about the GEO Group prison being proposed in Baldwin. “Next thing we know, we’re in a campaign again.”

The North Lake prison in Baldwin cannot be stopped so easily by state or local government action, as it is a privately-owned facility, and sits on private land. Still, activists are not giving up.

Duncan Tarr, a member of the Michigan coalition, says says the group is now focused on a divestment campaign to cut off “streams of funding” to The GEO Group. They organized a protest in August 2019 outside the head offices of Prudential Financial, one of GEO Group’s 10 largest shareholders, based in Troy, Michigan.

“Our hope is to eventually choke it and make the prison as less profitable as possible,” Castañeda says. “And hope that Trump is not the president in a year.”

Want to inform your community about digital rights and privacy? Check out the Electronic Frontier Alliance Tips for Organizing Public Events. https://www.eff.org/electronic-frontier-alliance/events-tips

Virginia: You have a big chance to fight "SLAPP" lawsuits, which are filed to chill speech or harass people. Tell your lawmaker you want to pass H.B. 759, and protect free speech in Virginia. https://act.eff.org/action/virginia-needs-a-strong-anti-slapp-law-to-stop-bogus-lawsuits

It's not a shortage!
It's a greed crisis!!
@moms4housing@twitter.com

Amy Klobuchar Says She Wants to Protect Obamacare—But Has Worked to Undermine It

In the ongoing intra-Democratic Party debate over the way forward on healthcare, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) has staked out a centrist position, conforming with her finely honed image as a practical pragmatist. Calling the Medicare for All bill championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) a “bad idea,” Klobuchar has refused to co-sponsor it, positioning herself as an opponent of single-payer who prefers instead to “build on the work of the Affordable Care Act.”

In the October Democratic debate, Klobuchar told Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that “we owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the invoice,” and urged Democrats not to “trash Obamacare.” She repeated that point in Tuesday night’s debate, saying that to be “practical and progressive … you have to show how you’re going to pay for it.” Deriding her more progressive rivals’ universalist policies as “things that sound good on a bumper sticker” and promises of a “free car,” Klobuchar insists Democrats “have an obligation as a party to be, yes, fiscally responsible,” and “be honest with [voters] about what we can pay for.” Unsurprisingly, Klobuchar has been a proponent of austere “pay-as-you-go” budgeting rules since her first Senate run in 2006, continuing to push the idea on the campaign trail in 2019.

As she makes this pitch, Klobuchar may well hope voters stay unaware of some of her past votes on Obamacare. Over the previous decade, Klobuchar has repeatedly joined forces with Republicans to repeal key Obamacare taxes specifically instituted to ensure the plan’s ongoing fiscal responsibility, sometimes against the wishes of former President Barack Obama. Some of these votes were viewed by both Republicans and the press as building momentum for the dismantling of Obamacare, typically due to pressure from business interests. And in an added irony, it was Sanders who typically voted against those same repeals.

Siding with big business

In 2011, Klobuchar helped lead the effort to successfully repeal an aspect of Obamacare for the very first time, barely a year after the bill was signed into law. Requiring businesses to report on a tax form any time they paid a vendor or independent contractor $600 or more a year, the measure was meant to raise $22 billion over ten years, key to Obama’s promise that healthcare reform would be fiscally responsible and reduce the deficit. Unfortunately, it also proved unpopular with business owners.

Repealing the measure was an 8-month-long effort—and Klobuchar led the way. Not only was she one of 12 Democrats to co-sponsor the bill that ultimately passed, but she and two other Democratic senators—Nebraska’s Ben Nelson and Washington’s Maria Cantwell—wrote then-Republican House Speaker John Boehner a letter urging him to have the Republican-controlled House repeal the provision so they could do the same in the Senate.

“We have heard from small business men and women in our states who have voiced concern that this provision is burdensome and unnecessary, and could potentially undermine our nation’s economic recovery,” Klobuchar, Nelson and Cantwell wrote to Boehner. They added that the provision’s repeal “would be an important and practical way to improve the Affordable Care Act.”

Klobuchar first voted for a repeal bill that would have plugged the resulting fiscal hole with unused federal funds. But the version that ultimately passed, with the votes of Klobuchar and 86 other senators, dealt with this funding gap instead by shifting the onus from business owners to ordinary taxpayers. As a result, low-and middle-income Americans who unexpectedly earned over a certain income threshold were forced to pay back more of the law’s health insurance subsidies than they had to previously. Sanders, meanwhile, voted against both bills.

Despite signing the bill into law in April 2011, the Obama White House was far from thrilled with this cost offset, declaring it had “serious concerns” about it, and charging in a March Statement of Administration Policy that it would “result in tax increases on certain middle-class families that incur unexpected tax liabilities.” In both the Senate and the House, where 112 of 188 Democrats voted against the measure, many Democrats—including even more conservative members like Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Joe Crowley, who would be ousted from his seat by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seven years later—complained the measure constituted a tax increase on lower- and middle-income families.

The Consumers Union did the same, expressing “fear that this proposal would have a chilling effect on many families' willingness to use the tax credits to purchase insurance,” and urging “the Senate to find a better way of paying for this change to the law without penalizing those families who can least afford it.” To soften the blow, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) put forward an amendment that would have put a brake on paying back the subsidies if they were found to increase insurance premiums or the number of uninsured individuals, which was defeated by the votes of Klobuchar and 57 other senators. (Sanders voted for it).

These lawmakers concerns’ were borne out in the years to come. Whether due to the government’s own accounting errors, or taxpayers who had relied on the subsidies suddenly receiving a bonus, raise, or moving from joblessness to employment, these healthcare customers now had to scramble and even dip into their savings to pay back unexpectedly hefty tax bills that could cost thousands of dollars, after having previously drawn on government subsidies.

“Oh my goodness, this is just not right,” one Sacramento resident told Kaiser Health News in 2015 after being put through this ordeal. “This is supposed to be a safety net healthcare and I am getting burned left and right by having used it.”

The result of Klobuchar’s vote was clear. The 1099 repeal she championed pulled the rug out from low- and middle-income Americans who were capriciously forced to pay unexpectedly high tax bills, while also denting the popularity of Obamacare among the voting public, making it more vulnerable to Republican attacks.

Protecting the medical device industry

In 2012, Klobuchar took aim at the 2.3% medical device excise tax, another revenue-raising measure included in the Affordable Care Act to ensure its fiscal responsibility. Her efforts were again driven by business interests, in this case, those of the medical device industry, which has a significant presence in Klobuchar’s home state of Minnesota where it employs around 30,000 people and is one of her primary campaign contributors.

Chief among them is the world’s largest medical device company, Medtronic, which enjoys a notably close relationship with Klobuchar. The company was Klobuchar’s third-largest contributor between 2011 and 2016, and in 2013, its director of corporate development told attendees at a medical device industry conference that the company was “working closely with Senator Klobuchar” on efforts to repeal the tax. In 2011, Klobuchar invited the company’s chairman and CEO, William Hawkins, to that year’s State of the Union address, a fact she touted on her official Senate website, where she stressed: “it is important that Washington hear from business leaders like Bill.”

In 2012, Klobuchar sent a letter along with her then-Senate counterpart Al Franken and 16 other Democrats urging then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to delay implementation of the tax as part of that year’s fiscal cliff negotiations—“in a fiscally responsible manner,” of course. The following year, she and the Minnesota House delegation backed repealing the tax outright, and voted for a symbolic budget amendment calling for an end to the tax. Only 20 senators voted against the amendment put forward by the virulently anti-Obamacare Republican Orrin Hatch, all of them Democrats, except for Sanders.

“Today’s action shows there is strong bipartisan support for repealing the medical device tax, with Democrats and Republicans uniting behind our effort,” Klobuchar said. “I will continue to work to get rid of this harmful tax so Minnesota’s medical device businesses can continue to create good jobs in our state and improve patients’ lives.” Her words were echoed by then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who called the vote “an important step in the right direction” and labeled Obamacare “a job-killer” that “slows the economy.”

Klobuchar wasn’t alone. Several Democrats who took a shot at the 2020 Democratic nomination voted the same way, including Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who dropped out in August 2019, and Elizabeth Warren, currently a frontrunner. Yet even the Washington Post editorial board—which closed out 2019 by extolling Klobuchar’s centrist, bipartisan vision and charging that Sanders and Warren’s progressive programs “would fail at the polls” and “carry extreme risks” if implemented—called it a “shortsighted vote” at the time.

Undermining universal healthcare

Though in the debate over healthcare, Klobuchar has tried to portray herself as the hard-nosed, fiscally responsible pragmatist trying to protect Obama’s legacy and looking out for the American middle class, her record tells a different story. Rather, Klobuchar has repeatedly gone to bat for business interests when it comes to Obamacare, in the process effectively raising taxes on working Americans, undermining the public standing of Obamacare and violating her own demands of fiscal responsibility.

Healthcare is perhaps the major issue of the Democratic primary. It has been cited by the largest share of Americans as the biggest issue facing the United States throughout 2019. A November Kaiser Family Foundation poll found 24% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents want to hear the candidates discuss the issue more than any other—twice that of the environment, the next top issue. And though it has weathered fierce attacks from business-friendly candidates like Klobuchar, Medicare for All has continued to garner majority support in public opinion polling.

Much of the mainstream media have already fallen for Klobuchar, who has received plaudits for debate performances, and is already being talked up as a potential hit with early state voters at this 11th hour. But the public should look past the branding and glowing press to her record, and decide if they truly like what they see.