Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

BREAKING: The California State Auditor's office has released the results of its seven-month investigation into automated license plate readers. Here's the summary: https://www.auditor.ca.gov/reports/2019-118/summary.html https://t.co/IE2oDowvUN

Chicago Teachers Won Public Support for Their Strike. Here’s How.

As 35,000 Chicago teachers, school support staff, and park district workers are set to begin a major strike on October 17, they boast the backing of students, parents, community organizations, and local unions who see the potential work stoppage as a crucial battle in the fight for a more just and equitable city. Thanks to the solidarity efforts of community and labor groups, more Chicagoans support the possible strike than oppose it, according to a recent poll by the Chicago Sun-Times.  

The Longest Strike in America Needs a Political Savior

The longest ongoing strike in America today is happening in the media capital of the world. It involves the people who install and repair the cables that bring the news to many of the most influential people in America. But after three long years, the Spectrum workers of New York City are beginning to feel as though everyone has forgotten about them. For those who soldier on, the fight has become much bigger than a contract dispute. It is a fight that can only be won with a wholesale reimagining of public control over corporate power.

Mass #melting of #Antarctic #ice sheet led to three metre #SeaLevel rise 120,000 years ago | World news | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/13/mass-melting-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-led-to-three-metre-sea-level-rise-120000-years-ago

#HistoricClimateChange

Montpelier, VT: Demonstration in Solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en https://itsgoingdown.org/montpelier-solidarity-with-the-wetsuweten/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

The First Amendment protects your right to speak anonymously about your employer https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/12/kracken_cryptocurrency_eff_glassdoor/

FSF is currently seeking comment about how it should handle its relationship with GNU now that RMS is no longer FSF president. I sent them my feedback, and in the interest of transparency I will be posting it here. it's a bit long so this is gonna be a thread.

Buttigieg and Centrist Dems Want a Military Response to Climate Change. That’s Dangerous.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg says that if he were elected president, he would use the Department of Defense to fight climate change by creating a “a senior climate security role in the Secretary of Defense’s office responsible for managing climate security risks” and boosting the Pentagon’s budget to “allow our military leaders to build resilience for military bases and installations.” 

A similar ethos was reflected in the $738 billion National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 signed by President Trump in December 2019. One provision, based on legislation introduced by centrist democratic Rep. Denny Heck (Wash.), will create a “Climate Security Advisory Council” instructed to improve coordination between intelligence, defense and government agencies in analyzing “climate security.” 

These efforts to address climate change through a national security lens are deeply worrisome. If an ethic of fear and national self-interest—and not justice and solidarity—shapes the U.S. response to climate change, it could unleash a number of frightening actions, in which the U.S. fortresses its borders, protects its military bases and slams the door on those its emissions have harmed.

Yet as Trump has rolled back scant Obama-era climate protections, including the Clean Power Act, and instructed all agencies to set aside efforts at climate preparedness, many centrist Democrats have looked to the national security establishment—particularly the Department of Defense—as an ally, because it is the arm of the executive branch that purports to take climate change most seriously. The NDAA measure is based on legislation introduced by Rep. Denny Heck (Wash.), a centrist Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee and has championed the role of the “intelligence community” in addressing climate threats. Buttigieg, who has flaunted his military credentials throughout his campaign, insists that the Department of Defense must be involved in addressing the “security challenge of our era.” He writes that “Climate security must be deeply integrated into all aspects of national security planning.” 

The Climate Security Advisory Council provision flew under the radar, eclipsed by more troubling measures that increased funding for nuclear weapons and F-35s. But the implications should give pause. The NDAA instructs the council to define “climate security” primarily in terms of how climate change affects the United States and its allies. The language zeroes in on protecting “national security infrastructure” and “the security of allies and partners of the United States,” and warns of ‘‘ongoing or potential political violence, including unrest, rioting, guerrilla warfare, insurgency, terrorism, rebellion, revolution, civil war and interstate war.”

Many of the countries not deemed “allies” of the United States are on the front lines of changing weather patterns, whether heat waves, droughts or increasingly severe storms. Are we to assume that, under the rubric of the council, the suffering of people living in Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba or Nicaragua is to be discounted? What about those living in countries that are allied but deemed less strategically central to U.S. national security, like the Marshall Islands, which are already suffering the severe effects of climate change? 

It is also deeply troubling to imagine the U.S. military—the world’s most violent institution, and itself a climate villain—taking a leadership role in shaping the response to a crisis that could subject countless people to illness, food insecurity, severe storms and human displacement. The NDAA language has no acknowledgement of climate victims except through the lens of “ongoing or potential political violence.” As Michael Klare notes in his book All Hell Breaking Loose, when Gen. John F. Kelly was commander of U.S. Southern Command, he established a “Joint Task Force - Migrant Operations” in Guantanamo Bay, which held exercises to prepare for “mass migration events.” One such exercise, staged in 2015, responded to a fake scenario that involved “mass migration of people from multiple Caribbean islands after a series of hurricanes devastate the area,” a reporter noted at the time. “The goal of the exercise scenario was to effectively interdict and repatriate the migrants at sea who were attempting to enter the United States.” 

Lindsay Koshgarian is the program director for the Institute for Policy Studies’ National Priorities Project, a budget-focused nonprofit. She tells In These Times, “The U.S. tendency will already be to respond to refugee crises and unrest caused by climate destabilization as military problems with a military solution, and I'm afraid this is just evidence of that. There is too much danger that climate change will become just another justification for bigger Pentagon budgets, and more troops and more bases in more places."

The Pentagon has long evaluated climate change through the lens of U.S. military interests, including the effects on roughly 800 U.S. military bases that span the planet. “If extreme weather makes our critical facilities unusable or necessitate costly or manpower-intensive work-arounds, that is an unacceptable impact,” states a Department of Defense climate risk assessment from January 2018. This view is in line with the ethos of an ever-expanding U.S. military empire: Such “extreme weather” is “unacceptable” not because it indicates that people around the world are suffering severe consequences of climate change, but because it threatens the military’s global foothold.

The Pentagon’s lens precludes other ways of understanding a potential U.S. response to the climate crisis: namely, as justice and reparations for U.S. wrongdoing. The United States is disproportionately driving the climate crisis as the biggest per-capita emitter of greenhouse gases, while China is the overall highest emitter. A 2016 study published in the journal Scientific Reports found that the countries most responsible for driving climate change are the ones least harmed by it in the immediate term. “‘Free rider’ countries contribute disproportionately to global GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions with only limited vulnerability to the effects of the resulting climate change, while ‘forced rider’ countries are most vulnerable to climate change but have contributed little to its genesis,” the study finds.

Climate change is in motion and will require a mass mobilization—both to mitigate the crisis globally and to help people survive it. Will the U.S. response be steered by xenophobia, premised on fortressing U.S. borders and forcibly repatriating people to places that are in crisis? Or will the response be rooted in solidarity and internationalism, premised on the principle that one’s life shouldn’t be tossed aside simply because of where one was born? The only way to ensure a response rooted in solidarity is cast off narrow notions of “national security” and make sure any climate response is firmly under the control of civilians. If the national security establishment is steering the ship, much of humanity will not be on board.

Why Clearview AI is a threat to us all
https://www.engadget.com/2020/02/12/clearview-ai-police-surveillance-explained/ #privacy #security

Labor Unions Were Crucial in Bernie Sanders’ New Hampshire Victory

Sen. Bernie Sanders has emerged victorious following the nation’s first Democratic primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday. The win further solidifies Sanders’ position as the frontrunner in the race to take on President Trump in November’s general election.

My wife just told me that as she was walking past a bunch of youths in a narrow lane, they shouted “Coronavirus” at her. Yes, she is of Chinese origin but such overtly bigoted behaviour is shameful for a so-called civilized country. I can’t believe it’s happening so overtly in this day and age amongst the young.

#Racism #UK

There are thousands of bad software patents out there. We need efficient ways to challenge them that don’t cost millions of dollars. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/happy-birthday-alice-four-years-busting-software-patents

This Is America #106: Riot Police Attack Wildcat Strike at UC Santa Cruz https://itsgoingdown.org/this-is-america-106-riot-police-attack-wildcat-strike-at-uc-santa-cruz/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

I love it when a person emails me a Word Document attachment with the name "Document 1.docx"

The sheer imagination and effort of naming files are just too much for some of us.

The LFS documentation is really amazingly good!

If you're interested in GNU/Linux I can only recommend doing this once in your life, you'll learn a lot!

http://linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/downloads/stable/LFS-BOOK-9.0-NOCHUNKS.html

Anti-ICE Activists in Florida Re-Arrested on Felony Charges Months After Protest Against For Profit Prison Company, GEO Group https://itsgoingdown.org/florida-geo9-arrests/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

SAPRA would make the much-needed reform of entirely removing the Call Detail Records authority and clarifying that Section 215 cannot be used to collect any type of records on an ongoing basis. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/new-bill-would-make-needed-steps-toward-curbing-mass-surveillance

We Talk About One U.S.-Backed Coup. Hondurans Talk About Three.

In the last three weeks, two groups totaling over 4,000 peopleattempted to flee Honduras. At the same time, Indigenous groups back in Honduras are engaged in fighting a new law they say will increase their displacement and the violence that is aimed against them. It is clear the crisis in Honduras that has pushed caravan after caravan to seek refuge in the United States is nowhere near an end.

These events are driven by the same thing: A 2009 coup in Honduras aided and abetted by the United States. A little over 10 years ago, the United States had the opportunity to stop much of the misery and human rights abuses occurring regularly today in Honduras by officially denouncing the forced removal of the president as a coup or by refusing to recognize the results of post-coup elections that many Hondurans and observers considered illegitimate. These actions would have ideally triggered automatic repercussions by cutting military aid from the United States and would have significantly weakened the right wing forces perpetuating the coup.

In June 2009, when President Manuel Zelaya proposed a popular assembly to change the constitution in response to demands by Indigenous, feminist and peasant movements, the ballot initiative was used as an excuse by the military and right wing forces to remove him from office. They claimed Zelaya would use the initiative, a tool that had been used previously by socialist regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia, to allow himself a second term, strictly forbidden by the Honduran constitution.

At this point, the White House and the State Department made the decision not to declare the forced removal of elected President Manuel Zelaya by the Honduran military (with some U.S. military support) a coup d’état—although the Obama administration came close to doing so. But pressure from allies of the involved Honduran generals who were trained at the U.S. School of the Americas (renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) combined with the potential political and economic benefits of a regime change to the United States to keep the administration on the fence about where to side. The 2009 coup stopped the “pink tide” of socialist governments spreading across Latin America from sweeping Honduras: Zelaya was toppled from power before he was able to implement the leftward turn he was headed in.

Despite ample evidence of extreme human rights abuses in the immediate aftermath of Zelaya’s removal, the United States decided to support elections widely considered questionable held in November 2009. In a familiar Cold War move, apparently any outcome but Zelaya was preferred in order to contain the pink tide.

Although it may seem like nothing can be done once a coup has already happened, recent Honduran history demonstrates just the opposite. Community activists like Miriam Miranda refer to not just one but three coups in Honduras between 2009 and 2019—meaning there were multiple watershed moments for the U.S. government to support better human rights outcomes.

Miranda represents the Afro-Indigenous Garífuna people in her capacity as the leader of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), a federation of the Garífuna people dedicated to the defense of their territory and cultural rights as a minority population in Honduras. She knows firsthand how devastating the coups in Honduras have been: The Garífuna community has been one of the most targeted by the land grabs and violent displacement that have followed them. Miranda herself has been subject to constantdeath threats. Since 2010, Honduras has consistently been on the list of most dangerous countries in the world for land and human rights defenders.

The “second coup” came in 2012 when then-president of the Congress Juan Orlando Hernández removed four out of five Supreme Court justices on the constitutional panel who ruled “model cities” to be unconstitutional. The model cities are fully privatized municipalities, the brainchild of economist Paul Romer, scheduled to be imposed along the northern coast in the Garífuna’s ancestral territory and one of the drivers of their displacement.

The “third coup” happened in November 2017. Juan Orlando Hernández was elected for the second time in what was widely considered to be a fraudulent result. (The Hernández-appointed Court ruled that Honduran presidents could run for a second term after all.) Two days later, with the election results still in dispute, the U.S. State Department certified the human rights record of Honduras, opening the way for continuing military aid. More than 30 people died in the post-electoral violence alone.

Each of these events has been followed by tacit or overt approval from the U.S. government, along with continued military aid. The total amount of aid is difficult to track because of the way it is appropriated across multiple agencies and given in kind as well as in dollars. The Washington Office on Latin America estimated that in 2017 $4.5 million alone was given directly for military equipment, while aid to Honduran security forces was sprinkled throughout most areas of the budget.

According to a trial in New York last fall, at least some of that military aid seems to be supporting drug trafficking. The president’s brother, Tony Hernández, was convicted of using the power of the Honduran military and state institutions to traffic 200,000 kilograms of cocaine into the United States. And the corruption goes right to the top: Mexican cartel leader Joaquín Guzman, better known as “El Chapo,” gave $1 million to Juan Orlando Hernández’s election campaign. Yet the United States has not distanced itself from the relationship, referring to Juan Orlando regularly as a “reliable partner,” and even certifying Honduras as a country designated to receive asylum seekers from Cuba and Nicaragua.

A call for solidarity

Shortly after the conviction of Tony Hernández, Miriam Miranda toured the United States and Europe seeking to build a movement for justice in the face of what her community sees as an extermination threat. Eight Garífuna community members were murdered in September and October 2019, many of them women political leaders. In a November 1, 2019 public conversation with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—also regularly targeted for her political leadership)—Miranda described how the location of the Garífuna’s ancestral territory on coastal drug trafficking routes and their organized resistance makes them targets for violence.

Now Miranda and OFRANEH are confronting the “Nájera Law,” nicknamed after the legislator who proposed it in Honduras, which they say will make it even easier for the Honduran government to expropriate their ancestral territory for mega-development projects. According to Óscar Nájera and its other supporters in the government, the law will encode the international standard of “free, prior and informed consent” in Honduran law. But in an interview with In These Times, Miranda says that it “does not benefit us as Indigenous people.” She says the law itself is “imposed by the state,” and along with other Indigenous groups, points to the fact that the law does not allow Indigenous people the right to veto a project as part of the “consultation” process. The Indigenous groups worry it is another way that the Honduran government is legitimating itself to the international community in a context of steadily worsening human rights abuses.

Crises in Honduras like the dispossession and violence faced by the Garífuna people are not natural disasters but the result of a series of political decisions, including foreign policy decisions made here in the United States. That means U.S.-based solidarity movements have an important role to play as well. More than 40 Honduran social movements, including OFRANEH, are calling for the passage of the Berta Cáceres Act, a congressional bill in the United States originally introduced in 2016 by Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) that calls on the United States to suspend all “security assistance to Honduran military and police until such time as human rights violations by Honduran state security forces cease and their perpetrators are brought to justice.”

Honduran journalist, feminist and organizer for environmental justice, Karla Lara, spoke with In These Times about what international solidarity should really mean: “The thing I want most in my life is that we can construct solidarity based on rights … from the basis of a person that also drinks water," she said. "It’s not just about the north giving to the south."

Both Lara and Miranda emphasize that global solidarity must be intersectional—meaning it accounts for differences within as well as between groups—and be premised on boosting the organizing and support of rank-and-file movement organizers in the global south. According to Lara, international solidarity must be grounded in a deep understanding not only of nation, but class, race, indigeneity and gender. Careful attention must be paid to voices on the ground in order to distinguish, for example, which laws are merely covers for more land grabs rather than actual systems of consultation.

Miranda says that “international support is vital to make sure that information doesn’t disappear and the pressure remains on the governments.” But she also emphasizes, “just as important as the people doing the urgent, necessary work of making our struggle visible … There are also really serious problems that we’re confronting here in the south that are deeply related to the same problems that you’re confronting there in the north.”

The end of January was the two-year anniversary of Juan Orlando Hernández’s second inauguration, and Hondurans once again took the risk of protesting. The call from Miranda, Lara and other activists in Honduras is for solidarity activists in the United States to move forward by constantly building confidence, trust and personal relationships—and to take responsibility for the results of the foreign policy decisions of the U.S. government. And, as Miranda says, activists are calling on people in the United States to answer for their own government’s role in driving the cycle of crisis, human rights abuse and migration in Honduras.