Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

A Win Against Voter Suppression

RALEIGH, N.C.—“Being an old Baptist preacher, you know how we are,” Floyd Johnson drawls with apologetic humor to the North Carolina State Board of Elections (BOE) in late December 2019, at the end of its final meeting of the year. Johnson, who chairs the Cumberland County BOE, traveled to the capital with a simple request: include Smith Recreation Center in Fayetteville, steps from the historically Black Fayetteville State University (FSU), as an early voting site for the 2020 primary.

Smith Rec not only serves FSU but sits in “one of the heaviest poverty-struck areas of Cumberland County … centered in the heart of the Afro-American community,” Johnson says. Indeed, the site serves a predominantly Black, working-class neighborhood, where the median annual income is below the poverty level for a family of four. For students and residents alike, having an early voting site nearby can mean the difference between voting and sitting out.

Of the county BOE’s five members, the two Republicans opposed the idea, requiring state BOE approval to move forward. Linda Devore, one of the Republican members, cited low voter turnout (disputed by advocates) among her reasons to oppose the inclusion of Smith Rec, but the state BOE sided with Johnson and the 500 signatures he delivered from Fayetteville residents and students. In February, they will be able to vote, early, where they live, work and study.

“This is a victory for the community around Smith Rec,” says Manuel Mejia Diaz, 25, who lives nearby. Mejia Diaz is the southeastern regional managing organizer for Democracy NC, an advocacy organization. When Common Cause NC, another advocacy group, began the petition effort, Mejia Diaz joined in.

Without early voting, “people would have to wait for the bus, they would have to go all the way to downtown, wait, and maybe a problem would arise and they’d have to handle that, then they have to wait for another bus, come back,” Mejia Diaz says, running out of breath. “It creates a lot of hassle” for working people.

Voter suppression continues to be a problem across the South. In December 2019, Republican lawmakers in Georgia purged more than 300,000 voters from its rolls, many of them low-income and people of color.

After North Carolina expanded early voting in the early 2000s, the Washington Post reported Black voter participation “skyrocketed from 41.9% in 2000 to 68.5% in 2012.” In 2008, the Charlotte Observer reported Black voters accounted for “36% of those casting ballots on the first day of early voting,” despite making up 22% of registered voters.

In 2013, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Republican lawmakers overhauled North Carolina’s election procedures, repressing Black voter turnout. In the name of fighting voter fraud (which reportedly amounts to less than a rounding error), the state adopted strict voter ID requirements and curtailed early voting, among other measures—all of which a federal judge struck down in 2014, saying it targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.” Subsequently, the state passed another voter ID law, which a different federal judge struck down on Dec. 31, 2019, citing the state’s “sordid history of racial discrimination and voter suppression.”

The Smith Rec voting site had survived the 2013 cuts and was open for early voting in 2014 and 2016, but the county BOE opted not to open it for the 2018 midterms and its fate remained uncertain ahead of 2020.

When Mejia Diaz learned in November 2019 that Smith Rec was again likely to be left out, he hit the pavement with FSU senior Kristian Carlyle, 21, a fellow with Common Cause NC. In a single week, organizers collected around 500 signatures and encouraged residents to voice their support at an upcoming county BOE meeting. Residents flooded the board’s offices in downtown Fayetteville. “The room was packed,” Mejia Diaz says.

Carlyle has fought for students’ voting rights since arriving at FSU. “It shouldn’t be difficult to exercise what is—what should be—a simple right,” she says.

Mejia Diaz says door-to-door organizing “may not be fancy, but it’s a good way to get people engaged.” And it works: In addition to winning Smith Rec, residents pushed county BOEs to open early voting sites at Winston-Salem State University and North Carolina A&T State University, also historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU), largely thanks to grassroots organizing.

For students at FSU, the stakes of voting in this election are high. HBCU students graduate with significantly more debt than their peers and have a harder time paying it off. In April 2019, presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren proposed investing $50 billion in HBCUs, and in November 2019, Bernie Sanders released a multi-billion dollar plan to make HBCUs tuition-free and erase loan debt.

“HBCUs got Obama elected,” Carlyle says. Their students, as well as the communities they serve, could very well shape the outcome of this election. 

How Medicare for All Could Improve—and Save—the Lives of Transgender People

Arya Serenity started using GoFundMe in 2018, just before being released from prison. With the help of people on the outside, she ran two campaigns to raise a few thousand dollars to defray the cost of housing, re-entry, and buying women’s clothing and cosmetics for the first time. A year later, she returned to the platform again to pay for facial hair removal.

Arya is a transgender woman, someone who was assigned male at birth and identifies as a woman. She’s also part of a growing cohort of gender diverse individuals who are turning to online platforms like GoFundMe to ask their communities for direct assistance in covering the costs of their transitions. A quick search for “top surgery” on the website will turn up over 27,000 results, and “bottom surgery” yields some 16,000 more. There are also thousands more campaigns from people asking for aid to cover the cost of hormones, gender confirmation surgeries, laser hair removal, and other expenses related to medical transition.

These services can quickly add up to tens of thousands of dollars. Arya scoffs at the thought of being able to afford the full scope of gender affirming care that she would like: “Hell no. I can barely pay my rent.”

But with Medicare for All maintaining broad popular support and its chief political proponent—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—surging to the lead in the Democratic primary, that calculation may soon change. 

The proposed policy would be a major intervention in a system where over 1.3 million Americans who identify as transgender or gender diverse are systematically shut out of health care coverage. Currently, only 19 states and the District of Columbia require government insurance to cover gender affirming care, and nine states explicitly exclude it. The gender diverse community is uninsured at more than double the percentage of the general population. And in a system where health insurance is tied to employment, gender diverse people are three times more likely to be unemployed than cisgender people, whose gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth. According to the National Center for Trangender Equality, “More than one in four transgender people have lost a job due to bias, and more than three-fourths have experienced workplace discrimination.” This reality is even worse for transgender people of color, with nearly half of Black transgender Americans reporting harassment at work.

With Medicare for All, these coverage disparities could instantly disappear. 

Sen.  Sanders, who introduced the Medicare for All bill in Congress in 2019 Congress, describes the program as a “single-payer, national health insurance program to provide everyone in America with comprehensive health care coverage, free at the point of service.” The Sanders campaign told In These Times over email that Medicare for All “would not only confront the massive health disparities faced by the LGBTQ+ community, it would also cover gender affirming surgeries, increase access to PrEP, remove barriers to mental health care and bolster suicide prevention efforts. Sanders’ plan clearly states that LGBTQ+ people cannot be discriminated against by providers or denied health benefits.”

For her part, Elizabeth Warren, the only other presidential hopeful to make Medicare for All part of their official platform, has also promised to expand health care access for sexual and gender minorities. Her website states that a Warren administration would ensure coverage for “all medically necessary care for LGBTQ+ patients under Medicare for All, and [allow] providers discretion to deem gender-affirming procedures as medically necessary based on an individualized assessment.” Some, however, have questioned whether she actually plans to make Medicare for All a legislative priority, given that her timeline for achieving it stretches deep into the second half of her hypothetical term.

Daniel Merrill is a transgender woman and co-chair of the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. She says that a strong Medicare for All program would be life-saving, noting that access to gender-affirming care “significantly lowers the suicide rate among transgender people and significantly reduces the rate at which they are violently accosted by people in public.” With life expectancy for transgender women of color currently as low as 35 due to high rates of racist and transphobic violence, Merrill’s comments reveal another layer of health disparities faced by transgender and gender nonconforming populations, one that Medicare for All could help alleviate.

Under the current system, privately insured Americans seeking gender affirming care can easily fall through the cracks. Coverage varies widely between policies, and in some cases, insurance carriers will simply deny coverage for procedures that are ostensibly covered in their policies. Arya Serenity says she discovered this when she tried to get facial feminization surgery (FFS) last year. After leaving prison, she says she found work at a support center for transgender people. Through that position, Serenity says she has been covered with Blue Cross Blue Shield’s Platinum PPO plan, which she says she specifically chose because it covers FFS. Despite this, Serenity’s insurance has repeatedly denied her FFS requests, she says. (The company did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)

“They consider it cosmetic,” she says. “For them to be able to determine that for someone else is beyond me.” She added, “It’s so angering.” 

She says she once tried to get authorization from a specialist, but he told her not to bother, because insurance wouldn’t cover it. Besides, the specialist said, she looked feminine enough already. The whole visit lasted less than 15 minutes and left Serenity thinking to herself, “Wow, this is what I signed up for?”

With current iterations of Medicaid, gender diverse people also can struggle to access care. This was the case for Theo Strachan, a transgender man who is insured through Medicaid in Maryland. Strachan says he was forced to pay out of pocket for a visit to the OB/GYN because Medicaid flagged the request for gynecological care for a man as fraudulent. Strachan says that when he called the Maryland Department of Health to clear things up, “it got very invasive very quickly.” According to Strachan, the department official with whom he spoke asked  about his anatomy and began talking to him about god. He says the entire experience was “humiliating.” (The Maryland Department of Health did not immediately return a request for comment.)

It could get even worse. Last summer, the Trump administration proposed a dramatic revision of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act that would eliminate nondiscrimination protections based on gender identity, sex, and association in programs that receive federal funding. While it is not entirely clear what such changes would entail, many are concerned that, if implemented, the rollback could lead to an increase in discrimination against transgender and gender divrese people.

For Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, who is the principal investigator of the federally funded National LGBT Health Education Center and the director of the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Psychiatry Gender Identity Program, anecdotes of denial of care are a big concern. “We have national data indicating that adverse experiences within the health care system—being misgendered or invalidated or denied treatments related to your gender identity—is a reason many transgender and gender diverse people cite for not engaging in needed urgent or preventative medical care.” Keuroghlian says this dynamic leads directly to health inequities down the line. 

As for insurance difficulties, Keuroghlian says, “We hear it all the time. It ends up being a lot of extra work for health centers or care teams for clinicians to do that kind of work—processing appeals and advocacy—and a lot of extra work and emotional labor for the patients.” 

Under Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal, such discrimination would be explicitly banned, and courts would be able to award damages if this ban was violated. Warren says she will "immediately work to repeal the Trump Administration’s terrible proposed rule permitting discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in health care."

According to Jessica Halem, LGBTQ outreach and engagement director at Harvard Medical School, Medicare for All creates another important opportunity to improve access to gender affirming care: It would release providers from having to fight with insurance companies over patient care and reduce time spent on administrative work by streamlining paperwork and electronic records. As Halem puts it, “Medicare for All is an opportunity to free up doctors to do what they do best.”

Furthermore, says Halem, having a federal policy that validates best practices for gender affirming care would create a “trickle down effect” that would lead to greater acceptance for gender diversity throughout society. “Because you’ve got this beloved expert in our culture,” says Halem. “We put [doctors] on this pedestal.” Halem says that when doctors affirm gender diversity, “then everyone else falls in line.”

Keuroghlian says that training is key to ensuring access to gender affirming care. “The thing is clinicians aren’t trained to provide this care,” he says. “We need to reform medical education, nursing education, social work education. You can have the coverage, but if you don’t have enough care teams who know how to deliver this care, it’s not going to get delivered.” 

Some argue that the medical system requires deep cultural intervention, as well as structural change. Danny Waxwing, attorney and director of the Trans in Prison Justice Project at Disability Rights Washington, says “a lot of issues come about because we’re still using the framework of medical necessity in a conversation that is fundamentally about self-determination.” As Arya Serenity experienced when she was denied FFS on the grounds that it was cosmetic, what constitutes “medical necessity” is not ultimately up to the transgender or gender diverse person who is seeking care. To meet the needs of gender diverse people, advocates say a Medicare for All system would have to ensure that individuals have agency and voice in determining the care they need. 

Daniel Merrill, a supporter of Medicare for All, says of the proposed program, “I'd like to see more protections for adolescents in gaining access to puberty blocking treatments, particularly autonomy in making choices regarding their gender identity from their parents.” Neither Warren nor Sanders directly addresses this point in their plans, despite the fact that more than a dozen states across the country are advancing bills that target transgender youth, either by banning certain kinds of gender-related medical care or barring them from playing on school sports teams associated with their gender identities. On January 30, South Dakota’s House of Representatives approved a bill that would make it a misdemeanor for doctors to provide gender affirming care like puberty blockers to patients under the age of 16 years old. While only a minority of gender diverse youth currently receive this treatment, a recent study found that the therapy can have significant benefits for the mental health of those who do. 

Of course, if one cannot afford to go to the doctor to seek care in the first place, none of this matters. Theo Strachan, pointing to Medicare for All’s ability to make health care accessible for transgender people of color who are living in poverty, says, “I’m for it.”

Arya Serenity says she’s cynical that Medicare for All would deliver, asking, “Who’s going to pay for that?” She’s determined to move forward with her transition, and to do her best to get the care she needs. When she walks down the street, she says, she wants people to think “Damn, she’s cute. Or damn, she’s ugly, but at least it’s a ‘she.’” That, she says, would “change everything.”

Merrill, on the other hand, emphasizes that the relief that Medicare for All would bring cannot be overstated. She says there’s a person she wants to be, but for a long time she assumed she would never be able to afford it. With Medicare for All on the table, she underscores, “It’s the first time I’ve believed that it’s possible.”

How to Game the Popularity Voter Whores

In the same way that Google Maps suggests a short cut around a traffic jam and thus causes more traffic on the alternate route, voters who chase the most popular candidate end up having unforeseen effects on political races.,

github is literally archiving shit without notifying users

once again they prove themselves to be a dumpster fire

so uh, if you're concerned about archivists being garbage and doing this without your explicit consent, please make your gits private and or consider moving elsewhere (like a private gitea, i believe some people on the fedi have some you can sign up for; you can also self-host a gitea)

Do Ring Cameras Violate Wiretapping Laws? New Hampshire Is About to Find Out
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a8k79/do-ring-cameras-violate-wiretapping-laws-new-hampshire-is-about-to-find-out

Wow. Even medical software can't escape #adware corruption. Opiod maker paid a million dollars so software would show pop-ups recommending opiods to doctors.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-01-30/health-records-company-pushed-opioids-to-doctors-in-secret-deal

Update: Avast has shut down the subsidiary company that was capturing and selling customer data due to all the backlash. One down, a few thousand to go. #privacy

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/01/avast-kills-off-jumpshot-the-subsidiary-that-sold-all-your-web-data/

The alcoholic beverage from Mexico showed a surge in Google searches in the past week, along with the term “corona beer virus” and “beer virus.”

😂😂😂

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2020/01/29/coronavirus-corona-beer-surges-on-google-trends-as-virus-spreads/4606997002/

Why Many Uber Drivers Couldn’t Afford To Stay Home During Australia’s Fires

Australia’s bushfire crisis has killed tens and incinerated an area two-thirds the size of Illinois. The resulting blanket of smog reduced air quality in the nation's capital, Canberra, to third worst among all major cities. But the latest manifestation of the climate crisis has hurt an already hard-done by group: gig workers delivering food for Uber Eats. While state governments have advised people to stay home, for gig workers relying on Uber to survive that’s tantamount to asking them to starve, miss rent, or fall behind on loans. All Uber has done, according to these workers, is warn them that going outside hurts their health. Concerning itself as little as possible with its employees' well-being is a central part of Uber’s business model, defining its workers as independent contractors so it can skimp on providing health care, benefits, or a minimum wage.

But viciously exploiting its drivers—or changing the 'norms' that led to a "culture of sexual harrasment" at the company—didn’t stop Uber from losing $1.2 billion between July and September of last year. Their balance sheet from the three months prior to that had them $5.2 billion in the red. Despite never fulfilling the capitalist imperative to turn a profit, ridesharing services like Uber have managed to remake urban life, destroying the licensed taxi industry at a substantial human cost and worsening traffic in major American cities. As the numbers show, the daily reality of Uber drivers is no more rational or fair than one would expect from a company that loses billions while awarding its CEO a $3 million salary.

3,900,000 - Uber drivers worldwide in 2019
36% - U.S. adults who say they used a ride-hailing service in 2018
30% - Uber’s cut of each driver’s fares as of 2019
$9.73 - Estimated hourly net income (including tips) of Uber drivers in 2018, factoring in vehicle expenses and Uber’s cut
13 - Major U.S. markets where Uber drivers’ hourly compensation (before taxes) was below the mandated minimum wage in 2018, including the three largest: Chicago, Los Angeles and New York
$20,000 - Estimated annual salary, after expenses but before taxes, for an Uber driver working 40 hours per week in 2018
$20 million - Amount the Federal Trade Commission fined Uber for falsely claiming its NYC drivers could make $90,000/year in 2017; the company couldn’t produce a single driver who made that much
$143 million - Total compensation for Uber’s top five executives in 2018
$90 million - Amount pledged by Uber, Lyft and DoorDash to fight a 2019 California law that would classify rideshare workers as employees rather than contractors 
0 - Latinx or Black employees who held Uber tech leadership roles in 2018

Barbara Ehrenreich on Her Endorsement of Bernie Sanders and Why Socialism Should Be Fun

Barbara Ehrenreich is an activist, journalist and author of over 20 books, including her classic 2001 title Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. Ehrenreich is a contributing editor to In These Times where her work first appeared in 1977.

She, along with John Ehrenreich, coined the term “professional-managerial class” (PMC) in a famous 1977 essay to describe a class of “salaried mental workers” separate from the working class, whose main function is to reproduce capitalist culture and class relations.

Ehrenreich recently endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic race. She spoke with In These Times about the upcoming elections, socialism and the climate crisis. 

IO: You recently endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 race. What made you decide to do so?

BE: The same reason I endorsed him the first time around. He’s the candidate that most represents me.

IO: How so?

BE: Well, he’s a democratic socialist. There’s nobody closer to me that’s running.

IO: Do you think we’ll see a rise in union membership or union militancy if Bernie Sanders wins the election?

BE: I think so. I don’t think that’ll be a completely direct effect, but it will be an indirect effect where people begin to see that a radically different direction is possible, and begin to feel their own agency, their own power.

IO: What’s your response to Hillary Clinton’s recent comments that “nobody likes Bernie,” that he’s a “career politician,” and opening the door to not backing him if he’s the Democratic nominee?

BE: I worry about Hillary. I can’t understand why she would be doing this. And I don’t want to speculate. It’s just sheer meanness.

IO: Why do you think she lost in 2016?

BE: It’s attributable to her. Specific things about her. A kind of visible elitism best represented with that statement about “deplorables.” But the deeper reason is that the Democrats have, in recent years, betrayed the working class. They have not fought strongly for issues that are important to people who are not upper-middle class or richer, and there’s a sense of betrayal.

IO: President Trump, even if he didn’t win the popular vote, still has some pretty committed supporters. What do you think is energizing his base?

BE: Well, what I just said. This sense that Democrats really have nothing to offer. And liberalism comes across to many people as a kind of elitist stance. It’s not “here are the people who are going to join with me in improving conditions,” but rather, “here are the people who are going to criticize us for being politically incorrect.” And it’s just heartbreaking.

IO: What do you make of the recent New York Times endorsement of Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, whom the editorial board described as the “radical” and “realist” models?

BE: You know, I don’t know. I have no idea what went on with that. What goes through their minds? Who knows. Klobuchar is kind of a mystery to me. I’m willing to learn a lot more. She’s certainly been galvanizing and she is definitely to the right of Warren and Sanders.

IO: A lot of the rhetoric around the election has been framed as ‘can a woman beat Trump’ and not ‘what kind of woman candidate can beat Trump.’ What do you attribute that to?

BE: Sexism for one thing. I mean, you just put it very well, but mainly we have to beat Trump, and I would love to see a woman do it and I don’t see a reason why a woman couldn’t do it. I really think we have moved on quite a bit. I can remember when Geraldine Ferraro was running for vice president with Walter Mondale and the criticism that was raised was that she was of a menopausal age and “could a menopausal person make decisions?” That was the level of discourse. I think we have moved on from there. Don’t you?

IO: I do. My concern is that, even on the Left, people want a woman to be president but some are more concerned about a candidate being a woman and less concerned about what kind of woman she is—like whether she’s a Hillary Clinton type, for example. They want to see a woman represented, and they care a little bit less about the platform she’s bringing because she’s a woman.

BE: I’m obviously not in that camp. In 2016, I voted for Hillary in the end, but there were so many reasons to distrust her. For me, it all started in the 1990s with welfare reform which Bill Clinton gets credit for—and Hillary enthusiastically supported. It plunged a lot of people living in poverty into extreme poverty. It was just very distasteful to me that she was, with her politics, the Democratic candidate. Also, her stance on bankruptcy, which I guess she modified over time. The Iraq war. On and on and on. So I did not see her as the right candidate of either sex, that I would be interested in.

IO: Liberal pundits, when they’re speaking about the candidates, often lump Warren and Sanders into the same camp. How would you describe their differences and the differences between their supporters?

BE: *laughs* I don’t know. I haven’t done a study of this. I understand that there has been some talk on the left that Warren is the candidate of what John Ehrenreich and I describe as the PMC, whereas Sanders is potentially more the candidate of the working class. But, you know, I think that’s getting a little bit silly. People can come from different classes and change their class allegiances. So I’m not interested in that kind of essentialist thinking. Somebody’s from a wealthy background or white so that determines everything about their politics? I don’t think so.

IO: Would you note any differences between the PMC from when you wrote that essay in 1977 versus today?

BE: Oh, for sure. And I’ve written about those differences and so has John Ehrenreich. We have seen vast swaths of the professional managerial class dumped down to the level of the working class. This is the big lesson of Occupy. There were homeless blue collar workers with graduate students who knew they were going nowhere or who had PhDs even and were going nowhere. So there’s been a huge demotion for traditional PMC professions such as college teaching, which is over 70% adjunct now. Opportunities have just shrunk in so many areas. I feel it particularly as a journalist and writer. You must feel it, too, I should think. At one point, a long time ago, when I was starting out and my kids were small, I could pretty much support us—with child support—but as a freelance writer. Now, could you do that today?

IO: *laughs* No, I bartend.

BE: That’s one of the things I actually thought of at times, but in those days, this would be in the ’80s, I could still get jobs, not decent-paying jobs, but I could get outside jobs and I could patch those things together with the freelance assignments and the freelance assignments paid at least a dollar a word. And as my name became better known, it went up to like $3 a word.

You can’t get that now. This is why I instigated the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which is a little group that encourages low-income people to write and we will work with them from the initial idea and framing it into a pitch and finding a place to get it published. And then we also raise money so that we can pay the writer and make sure the writer gets $1 a word.

IO: That’s incredible.

BE: You know, we’ve been doing things for In These Times, recently. And we’re always looking for people who have a great story to tell and hopefully an original way of telling it and getting them into both mainstream media like the New York Times, for example, and in local newspapers. The path that existed for me—the upward path—is gone. The fact that I could make a thousand dollars for a thousand-word piece was decisive in allowing me to also be an activist and also write about things that I didn’t care if I got paid for.

IO: How would you explain this rise in precarity, not even just among people who formerly had union jobs or industrial jobs that were shipped overseas, but in general, for things like journalism?

BE: The big media outlets are owned by billionaires who, in most cases, have no real interest in the content of the journalism or the quality of the journalism that they are helping manage. If you eliminate half the people in the newsroom of a newspaper, they don’t care. To them, it’s just another profit source. That’s what happened—capitalism ate it up.

IO: Even outside of media, for example, teachers’ jobs are under attack. It feels like the economy keeps growing but there is still less and less work for all of us.

BE: Well, teachers are actually a very hopeful side. In the last couple of years, the number of teacher strikes, including with radical demands like for affordable housing for the families of the students they teach—this is unprecedented. It’s amazing. I feel very hopeful about them. I think that they’re a great example of some sort of resistance. But you know, it’s been relentless.

And I don’t have to tell somebody at In These Times that huge volumes of money and managerial effort go into preventing unionization or collective action of any kind by workers. I don’t want to limit the forms that that action could take to official unions. There are other ways people can resist, other forms of organization people have been creating, like the National Domestic Workers Alliance—there’s just a lot of things going on and experimenting, which is exciting.

IO: What do you think we need to stop this upsurge in right-wing populism? Is it a left-wing populism or is it something else?

BE: Well, yes of course. The short answer is a left-wing populism. But something I would want to add to that is, and this may sound a little weird to say in a straightforward political interview, but we need to offer a vision of the joy of collective accomplishment, the joy of working together. The joy of working together across lines of race or other things that separate people. We have to be not just the side that’s about gloom, which is what I feel, but about possibility and good feelings.

My favorite organizing project in this country is the Workers’ Project of Fort Wayne, Indiana. They organize workers and community, too. They do a lot of their organizing through fun things: Picnics and parties that draw hundreds and thousands of people. People love it because we don’t have that kind of thing in our lives.

IO: I think the best vision of a future with any kind of joy in it is being provided by the Green New Deal. People are starting to talk about a shorter workweek, leisure time, a jobs guarantee, publicly funding the arts.

BE: There are just so many things that could be done. We could be increasing public spaces where people gather for festivities and entertainment. We’re instead limiting public spaces more and more and segregating more and more by class and race. We could be having a good time together. And we need to radiate that a little bit.

Socialism, to affluent people, often sounds like privation. Oh, they’re going to take stuff from me and give it to somebody else. Suppose what you got in exchange is just a more joyous and convivial world. Where you talk to people on the street, where maybe people start dancing in the street—whatever!

And I’m serious about this. I wrote a book called Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, about the intertwining of festivities, historically, with political movements. One of the greatest examples would be the slave uprisings in the Caribbean in the 19th century. They would use the occasion of Carnival for the uprising for some practical reasons: there’s a lot of noise going on and people can be masked. But also, what makes people want to do things? It’s not just all antagonism and anger—there’s a lot of that. It’s also the joy of doing it.

IO: What do you think it will take to get to that joyous world?

BE: Practice. I just want to see that become part of what the Left does. Everything we do should have some thought for the pleasure of doing it.

IO. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) went from around 6,000 members in 2015 to almost 60,000 today. What do you make of DSA’s recent growth?

BE: Oh! It’s wonderful. It was the most heartening thing that happened after the election in 2016. I feel great about it.

IO: Could you speak a little bit about your time in DSA? What was it like when it was first founded? How has it changed?

BE: There was a lot of discord from the beginning. And I am, I guess, a good example of it because I was part of the NAM contingent, New American Movement, that merged with DSCO, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. And I had not been enthusiastic about the merger. What happened was they said, ‘would you like to be the co-chair of this organization?’ I said okay not realizing how much I was putting myself in a very difficult situation politically because there were such big differences between me, for example, and Michael Harrington. And I came to feel something like a token, which I was.

In those days it was totally different. You could not bring up the question of Palestine. You’d be quickly silenced. Certain things were just off limits. You could not criticize union leadership. We were supposed to always identify with union leadership which was, at the time, often quite progressive, like Bill Winpisinger of the Machinists’ Union, but we were very limited in what we could talk about. DSOC came from a tradition in the American left where politics was all about class and class was represented by the Democratic Party and the unions. And so, things like women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, were just seen as distractions. You must run into that sometimes, still.

IO: Definitely. Within the Left there are people who view class too narrowly, in the way you were just describing, and are criticized heavily for it and go back and forth with others between ‘your understanding of the world isn’t intersectional’ and ‘you’re focusing on identity politics.’

BE: It’s kind of crazy. So-called identity politics, like the feminist movement, grew out of larger movements—how much larger can you get than women? We came into feminism with anger about racism, about the war in Vietnam, about all these other things. It was never, ‘Hey, look at us. We’re women.’ I mean, yeah there was some of that. That was important, but to narrow it down is to misunderstand. We had a much more inclusive notion of what we were going about. It’s always been true.

IO: I think a lot of the liberal left misses that when they say I want a woman president and don’t factor in what material interests that candidate has in mind. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was recently disparaged for pointing out that in any other country she and Joe Biden would not be in the same party. She later added that the United States does not have a left party and, at best, the Democratic Party is a center or center-conservative party. What do you make of this cleavage between establishment Democrats on the one hand and the progressive wave pushing the party towards the left on the other? Do you think the left will be able to capture the Democratic Party?

BE: Oh, god. We used to debate this so much in the old DSA! I never had a strong feeling. I’m sort of an opportunistic person when it comes to this kind of thing. If you have a local Democratic Party that is very progressive, then go with that. I don’t know, I’m not a strategic person in that sense.

IO. Could you imagine a future where capitalism can somehow adapt to the climate crisis, but we still all survive?

BE: There’s no time to wait and see. There isn’t enough time. I would have to say socialism takes a lot of defining. And I think people will be going about it all kinds of different ways. So it’s not like Oh, here’s what you do. Here’s the starter kit for society.

IO: How would you define socialism?

BE: Well, it has to start with the knowledge and the faith that we can solve problems when we work together. Which means it has to start with some sort of work as well as an understanding of how totally mutually dependent we are. The issue is no longer the Left versus the Right. It’s those who want as many people as possible to survive this crisis and those who will be satisfied to get a few hundred thousand billionaires safely tucked away in their missile silos turned into mansions.

That’s one outcome, is that you do have some survivors but the great majority of people die off. That’s the right wing. And the outlook, judging from the Trumps and Bolsonaros of the world, seems to be grab what you can while the grabbing is good. Let’s burn the Amazon. Let's get everything we can out of this situation and those of us that are very, very super rich will survive, perhaps, in lunar colonies or in old missile silos.

IO: What do you think it will take to avert the climate crisis? To a place where we live in an inhabitable society?

BE: Well, we have to have less reliance on things, objects, fossil fuels and more reliance on each other. For example, in growing food, in entertaining ourselves, all sorts of things. We have to see ourselves as each other’s resources. In the frame of mind I’m in today, whatever I think about politically, whether it’s Democratic primary candidates or anything, has to be in the context of the coming apocalypse—no, really. This is no time to fool around. I will keep trying. That’s all. Until the last gasp.

Anti-solar cells: A photovoltaic cell that works at night

What if solar cells worked at night? That's no joke. In fact, a specially designed photovoltaic cell could generate up to 50 watts of power per square meter under ideal conditions at night, about a quarter of what a conventional solar panel can generate in daytime, according to a recent concept article.

Quick update regarding passwords:

"12345" is commonly considered unsafe since 2012.

According to experts "1234567" will still be safe until 2023, at which point you should probably change all your passwords to "12345678".

Scientists find far higher than expected rate of underwater glacial melting

Tidewater glaciers, the massive rivers of ice that end in the ocean, may be melting underwater much faster than previously thought, according to a new study that used robotic kayaks. The findings, which challenge current frameworks for analyzing ocean-glacier interactions, have implications for the rest of the world's tidewater glaciers, whose rapid retreat is contributing to sea-level rise.

Patented designs are supposed to be useless, but they’re not supposed to be basic and conventional—like this month’s Stupid Patent. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/design-patents-are-useless-so-why-are-they-getting-boost-dc

RT @eff: BREAKING: We’ve confirmed that the Ring doorbell app on Android covertly shares personally identifiable information on its users w…