Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Today Linux Journal shut its doors for good. All staff were laid off and the company is left with no operating funds to continue in any capacity... https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-publication-awkward-goodbye

Chicago Teachers Are Threatening to Strike Against New Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Here’s Why.

In 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) took to the streets with thousands of supporters in a seven-day strike that was ultimately seen as a victory against “Mayor 1%” Rahm Emanuel.

A lot has changed since then. The recent wave of teachers strikes and walkouts across the country—from West Virginia to California—has won significant gains, not only in compensation for teachers but also in student resources and overall respect for public education. Back in Chicago, Emanuel and his hand-picked corporate school board have been replaced by Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a black lesbian whose campaign platform on education largely mirrored the CTU’s agenda, and a school board comprised largely of educators and community leaders.

Second Circuit Rules That Section 230 Bars Civil Terrorism Claims Against Facebook

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit last week became the first federal appellate court to rule that Section 230 bars civil terrorism claims against a social media company. The plaintiffs, who were victims of Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, argued that Facebook should be liable for hosting content posted by Hamas members, which allegedly inspired the attackers who ultimately harmed the plaintiffs.

EFF filed an amicus brief in the case, Force v. Facebook, arguing that both Section 230 and the First Amendment prevent lawsuits under the Anti-Terrorism Act that seek to hold online platforms liable for content posted by their users—even if some of those users are pro-terrorism or terrorists themselves. We’ve been concerned that without definitive rulings that these types of cases cannot stand under existing law, they would continue to threaten the availability of open online forums and Internet users’ ability to access information.

The Second Circuit’s decision is in contrast to that of the Ninth Circuit in Fields v. Twitter and the Sixth Circuit in Crosby v. Twitter, where both courts held only that the plaintiffs in those cases—victims of an ISIS attack in Jordan and the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida, respectively—could not show a sufficient causal link between the social media companies and the harm suffered by the plaintiffs. Thus, the Ninth and Sixth Circuit rulings are concerning because they tacitly suggest that better pleaded complaints against social media companies for hosting pro-terrorism content might survive judicial scrutiny in the future.

The facts underlying all of these cases are tragic and we have the utmost sympathy for the plight of the victims and their families. The law appropriately allows victims to seek compensation from the perpetrators of terrorism themselves. But holding online platforms liable for what terrorists and their supporters post online—and the violence they ultimately perpetrate—would have dire repercussions: if online platforms no longer have Section 230 immunity in this context, those forums and services will take aggressive action to screen their users, review and censor content, and potentially prohibit anonymous speech. The end result would be sanitized online platforms that would not permit discussion and research about terrorism, a prominent and vexing political and social issue. As we have chronicled, existing efforts by companies to filter extremist online speech have exacted collateral damage by silencing human rights defenders.

There have been several cases filed in federal courts that seek to hold social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube civilly liable for providing material support to terrorists or aiding and abetting terrorists by allowing terrorist content on their platforms. We hope that the Second Circuit’s ruling will inspire other courts to ensure through their rulings that all Internet users will continue to be able to discuss and access information about controversial topics.

These 7 Prominent Conservatives Have Nothing in Common With White Supremacists, Nothing at All

Please don't tie Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Laura Ingraham, John Cornyn, Candace Owens, Stephen Miller, or Donald Trump to white supremacy.

The post These 7 Prominent Conservatives Have Nothing in Common With White Supremacists, Nothing at All appeared first on The Intercept.

At some point I'll have to ask for my money back...

Researchers discover new security flaw in all modern Intel processors:

https://thenextweb.com/security/2019/08/06/researchers-discover-troubling-new-security-flaw-in-all-modern-intel-processors/

Purism CTO, Nicole Faerber, nominated for “CTO of the Year” by Women in IT Awards.

https://puri.sm/posts/nicole-faerber-nominated-for-cto-of-the-year-by-women-in-it-awards/

Opening the Door for Censorship: New Trademark Enforcement Mechanisms Added for Top-Level Domains

With so much dissatisfaction over how companies like Facebook and YouTube moderate user speech, you might think that the groups that run the Internet’s infrastructure would want to stay far away from the speech-policing business. Sadly, two groups that control an important piece of the Internet’s infrastructure have decided to jump right in. 

The organization that governs the .org top-level domain, known as Public Interest Registry (PIR), and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) are expanding their role as speech regulators through a new agreement, negotiated behind closed doors. And they’re doing it despite the nearly unanimous opposition of nonprofit and civil society groups—the people who use .org domains. EFF is asking ICANN’s board to reconsider.

ICANN makes policies for resolving disputes over domain names, which are enforced through a web of contracts. Best-known is the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which allows trademark holders to challenge bad-faith use of their trademarks in a domain name (specifically, cybersquatting or trademark infringement). UDRP offers a cheaper, faster alternative to domain name disputes than court. When ICANN began to add many new top-level domains beyond the traditional ones (.com, .net, .org, and a few others), major commercial brands and their trademark attorneys predicted a plague of bad-faith registrations and threatened to hold up creation of these new top-level domains, including much-needed domains in non-Latin scripts such as Chinese, Arabic, and Cyrillic.

In response, the community allowed trademark interests to create more enforcement mechanisms, but solely for these new top-level domains. One of these was Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS), a faster, cheaper version of UDRP. URS is a summary procedure designed for slam-dunk cases of cybersquatting or trademark infringement. it features shorter deadlines for responding to challenges, and its decisionmakers are paid much less than the panelists who decide UDRP cases.

In a move that has drawn lots of criticism, ICANN announced that it is requiring the use of URS in the .org domain, along with other rules that were developed specifically for the newer domains.

URS is a bad fit for .org, the third most-used domain and home to millions of nonprofit organizations (including, of course, eff.org). The .org domain has been around since 1985, long before ICANN was created. And with over ten million names already registered, there’s no reason to expect a “land rush” of people snatching up the names of popular brands and holding them for ransom.

When nonprofit organizations use brand names and other commercial trademarks, it’s often to call out corporations for their misdeeds—a classic First Amendment-protected activity. That means challenges to domain names in .org need more careful, thorough consideration than URS can provide. Adding URS to the .org domain puts nonprofit organizations who strive to hold powerful corporations and governments accountable at risk of losing their domain names, effectively removing those organizations from the Internet until they can register a new name and teach the public how to find it. Losing a domain name means losing search engine placement, breaking every inbound link to the website, and knocking email and other vital services offline.

Beyond URS, the new .org agreement gives Public Interest Registry carte blanche to “implement additional protections of the legal rights of third parties” whenever it chooses to. These aren’t necessarily limited to cases where a court has found a violation of law and orders a domain name suspended. And it could reach beyond disputes over domain names to include challenges to the content of a website, effectively making PIR a censorship bureau.

This form of content regulation has already happened in some TLDs. Donuts and Radix, which operate hundreds of top-level domains, already suspend websites’ domain names based on accusations of copyright infringement from the Motion Picture Association of America, without a court order. Some registries also take down the domain names of pharmacy-related websites based on requests from private groups affiliated with U.S. pharmaceutical companies, again without a court order or due process.

PIR, the operator of .org, has previously proposed to build its own copyright enforcement system. PIR quickly walked back that proposal after EFF spotlighted it. But PIR’s new agreement with ICANN provides a legal foundation for bringing back that proposal, or other forms of content regulation. And the existence of these contract terms could make it harder for PIR and registrars to say “No” the next time an industry group like MPAA, or a law enforcement agency from anywhere in the world, comes demanding that they act as judge, jury, and executioner of “bad” websites.

Bypassing Users’ Input

The process that led to these changes was problematic, too. The multistakeholder process, which is supposed to account for the views and needs of all groups affected by a policy change, was simply bypassed. ICANN did announce the new .org contract and provided for a period of public comment. But this seems to have been a hollow gesture.

The Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group, a group that represents many hundreds of the organizations that have .org domain names, filed a comment laying out why that domain shouldn’t have the URS system and other “rights protection mechanisms” beyond the UDRP. EFF and the Domain Name Rights Coalition also filed a comment, which was joined by top academics and activists on domain name policy.

An extraordinary and unprecedented 3,250 others filed comments opposing the new .org contract, mainly on the grounds that it removed price caps from .org registrations, potentially allowing Public Interest Registry to increase the fees it charges millions of nonprofit organizations. In contrast, only six commenters, including groups representing trademark holder interests and incumbent registries, filed supportive comments. But ICANN made no meaningful changes in response to these comments from the actual users of .org domain names. The contract they concluded on July 30th was the same as the one they proposed at the start of the public comment period. The ICANN Staff seem to think they can make any policies they choose by contract.

What Comes Next?

EFF has asked the ICANN board to reconsider their new contract, to submit the issue to the ICANN community for a decision, and to remove URS from the .org domain. Public Interest Registry has not yet created any new enforcement mechanisms, nor returned to the copyright enforcement proposal it made and shelved in 2016—but if the new contract stands, it will give them legal cover for doing so. It’s important that Internet users, especially nonprofits, make clear to ICANN, PIR, and PIR’s parent organization, the Internet Society, that nonprofits don’t need new, accelerated trademark enforcement or new forms of content regulation. After all, there’s no reason to think that these organizations will regulate the speech of Internet users any better than Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other prominent social networks have done. It would be best if they stay out of that role entirely.

The Case for Enthusiasm Over “Electability”—Or, Why We Don’t Need Another John Kerry.

A disastrous Republican administration in the White House. A varied field of Democratic candidates, ranging from a Vermont progressive who opposed the Iraq War to a more moderate frontrunner who voted to authorize it. A mobilized progressive base torn between the desire for ambitious policies and the need to win the general election.

We speak, of course, of 2004, and the Democratic campaign to unseat President George W. Bush. Writing in the magazine after Sen. John Kerry (Mass.) won the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, In These Times’ David Moberg argued that “intense assaults” on the electability of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, then running as a progressive, helped pave the way for Kerry’s success: 

[Voters'] desire to be with a winner certainly helps Kerry, especially since at least one Newsweek poll just before the New Hampshire primary showed him beating Bush by a small margin. Primary voters this year have often sounded more like professional campaign strategists than citizens picking leaders who champion their issues. In that way the Democratic primary resembles economist John Maynard Keynes’ description of stock markets. Rather than picking a company based on its intrinsic merits, Keynes argued, the successful stock-picker guesses which stock is most likely to be picked by other people. In the primary, voters are partly deciding not on the basis of which candidate they like but on whom they believe a majority of Americans will like next November. 

Moberg himself was disinclined to take this sort of risk, warning that “supporting a candidate because he is ‘electable’ is a coolly calculated and ephemeral political commitment. Any passion for Kerry, for example, seems to come less for the man himself than that he represents a vehicle to defeat Bush.” This lack of passion, Moberg argued, could hinder Kerry’s chances: 

Electability arguments too often are framed defensively—how a particular Democratic candidate can withstand divisive Republican appeals on religion and conservative values, military toughness, gun ownership and cutting taxes. But the best defense may be a strong offense. Candidates on the offensive have a chance of defining the debate—as Dean did on the war and … in appealing to class interests that bring together black and white voters. Democrats can also be proactive by attacking corporate abuses of power. … [Many] New Hampshire voters said they backed the candidate who most stands up for what he believes in—and Dean won their support over Kerry by more than a 2-to-1 margin. But Kerry overwhelmingly won [the] vote when it came to electability. One-fifth of voters said they backed the candidate who could best defeat George Bush—a margin Kerry won almost 6-to-1 over Dean. With electability looming so large, the odds favor victory by the candidate who best can stand up to Bush. Although Kerry was on a roll, many Democrats still did not have a clear idea of what he stands for—and his early victories do not prove he is that candidate.

On the note of fake followers, before I blocked gab.com on our https://m.abunchtell.com instance I noticed very bot-like behavior from seemingly real accounts on that instance -- very reminiscent of birdsite bots.

Definitely worth thinking about how we guard against misinformation and astroturfing in the #fediverse as this gets more prevalent. Domain blocks alone probably won't be enough -- the classic social media features we include or leave out matter, too.

There is no evil like reCAPTCHA at https://thestoic.me/there-is-no-evil-like-recaptcha - discuss at https://freepo.st/freepost.cgi/post/oyjgjbi3yw #freepost

Subhumans release “Thought Is Free” ahead of new album

Veteran UK anarcho-punks Subhumans release their first album in over ten years, Crisis Point, next month via Pirates Press Records. The first track from the album has surfaced. Have a listen to “Thought Is Free” below. The band are to embark on an East Coast tour in September.

The post Subhumans release “Thought Is Free” ahead of new album appeared first on Dying Scene.

Grade 2 sign to Hellcat to release LP

Isle of Wight, UK street punk trio Grade 2 have signed to Hellcat. The band are to release their third album, Graveyard Island, via the label on October 11th. The album was produced by Tim Armstrong himself. To mark the announcement, a video for the title track from the album has been released. Have a […]

The post Grade 2 sign to Hellcat to release LP appeared first on Dying Scene.

Scientists can now manipulate brain cells using smartphone

A team of scientists have invented a device that can control neural circuits using a tiny brain implant controlled by a smartphone. The device could speed up efforts to uncover brain diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, addiction, depression, and pain.

The Bad-Apple Myth of Policing https://prismo.xyz/posts/93f7ad8e-0fd3-4a54-a614-5d8c7cc782a3

Joe Biden Didn’t Just Vote for the Iraq Invasion—He Helped Lead the March to War

AS THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S SABER-RATTLING TOWARD IRAN THREATENS ANOTHER DISASTROUS WAR in the Middle East, foreign policy has gained newfound focus in the 2020 presidential race. And former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2002 vote in favor of the Iraq War leaves him with a particularly glaring vulnerability.

Biden’s vote had already become a sticking point in the race before President Trump began his provocations toward Iran in earnest. Bernie Sanders has used Biden’s record to draw a contrast with his own opposition to the Iraq War. Rep. Seth Moulton, another 2020 candidate, has called for Biden to admit he was wrong for casting the vote. And a recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll showed more than 40 percent of respondents between 18 and 29 were less likely to back Biden because of it.

But to say the now-Democratic frontrunner voted for the Iraq War doesn't fully describe his role in what has come to be widely acknowledged as the most disastrous foreign policy decision of the 21st century. A review of the historical record shows Biden didn't just vote for the war—he was a leading Democratic voice in its favor, and played an important role in persuading the public of its necessity and, more broadly, laying the groundwork for Bush's invasion.

In the wake of September 11th, Biden stood as a leading Democratic voice on foreign policy, chairing the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As President Bush attempted to sell the U.S. public on the war, Biden became one of the administration’s steadfast allies in this cause, backing claims about the supposed threat posed by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and insisting on the necessity of removing him from power.

Biden did attempt to placate Democrats by criticizing Bush on procedural grounds while largely affirming his case for war, even as he painted himself as an opponent of Bush and the war in front of liberal audiences. In the months leading up to and following the invasion, Biden would make repeated, contradictory statements about his position on the issue, eventually casting himself as an unrepentant backer of the war effort just as the public and his own party began to sour on it.

FROM DOVE TO HAWK

Biden hadn't always been a hawk on Iraq. He had voted against the first Gulf War in 1991, though even his opposition to that war had been tepid at best, focused mainly on badgering George H.W. Bush into having Congress rubber stamp a war Bush had already made clear he was intent on waging with or without its approval.

In 1996 Biden criticized Republican claims that then-President Bill Clinton wasn’t being tough enough on Iraq amid calls to remove Saddam Hussein from power, labeling an ouster “not a doable policy.” Before the War on Terror drove U.S. foreign policy, Biden criticized Bush during his first year in office for the then-president’s hawkish position on missile defense.

September 11th changed all this. Only one day before the attacks, at a speech in front of the National Press Club, Biden had called Bush’s foreign policy ideas “absolute lunacy” and charged that his missile defense system proposal would “begin a news arms race.” But the  nearly 3,000 Americans who were killed on U.S. soil that day upended the political consensus. Bush’s approval rating shot up to a historic 90 percent, and any elected officials who failed to match the president’s zeal for military retribution became vulnerable to accusations of being “soft on terror.”

“Count me in the 90 percent,” Biden said in the weeks after the attack. There was “total cohesion,” he said, between Democrats and Republicans in the challenges ahead. “There is no daylight between us.”

In November 2002, just a little over a year following the World Trade Center attacks, Biden faced re-election amidst a political climate in which the Bush administration had incited nationalist sentiment over the issue of terrorism. In October 2001, Biden had been criticized in Delaware newspapers for comments that were perceived as potentially weak, warning that the United States could be seen as a “high-tech bully” if it failed to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan and instead relied on a protracted bombing campaign to oust the Taliban.

Consequently, Biden, then deemed by the New Republic as the Democratic Party’s “de facto spokesman on the war against terrorism,” quickly became a close ally of the Bush administration in its prosecution of that war. The White House installed a special secure phone line to Biden’s home, and he and three other members of Congress met privately with Bush in October 2001 to come up with a positive public relations message for the war in Afghanistan.

Biden’s stance on Iraq soon began to change, too. In November 2001, Biden had batted away suggestions of regime change, saying the United States should defeat al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden before thinking about other targets. By February 2002, he appeared to have creaked opened the door to the possibility of an invasion.

“If Saddam Hussein is still there five years from now, we are in big trouble,” he told a crowd of 400 Delaware National Guard officers that month at the annual Officers Call event.

“It would be unrealistic, if not downright foolish, to believe we can claim victory in the war on terrorism if Saddam is still in power,” he said around the same time, echoing the language of hawks like Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman.

Biden soon developed the position he would hold for the following 13 months leading into Bush’s March 2003 invasion of Iraq: While the Bush administration was entirely justified in its plans to remove Hussein from power in Iraq, it had to do a better job of selling the inevitable war to the U.S. public and the international community.

“There is overwhelming support for the proposition that Saddam Hussein should be removed from power,” he said in March 2002, while noting that divisions remained about how exactly that would be done. If the administration wanted his support, Biden continued, they would have to make “a complete and thorough case” that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and to outline what they envisioned a post-Hussein Iraq would look like.

It was a stance well-calibrated for the political climate. Biden could continue to point to disagreements with the administration for liberal audiences, even if they were merely procedural, while putting his weight behind the ultimate goal of war with Iraq. At the same time, Biden’s apparent criticisms doubled as advice for the administration: If you want buy-in from liberals for your war, this is what you’ll have to do.

“I don't know a single informed person who is suggesting you can take down Saddam and not be prepared to stay for two, four, five years to give the country a chance to be held together,” Biden recounted telling Bush privately in June 2002. It was a talking point he would repeat often over the next year, that regime change in Iraq was the correct thing to do, but would require a long-term commitment from the United States after Hussein’s removal.

SETTING THE GROUND RULES

During frequent television appearances, Biden didn’t just insist on the necessity of removing Hussein from power, but appeared to signal to the Bush administration on what grounds it could safely seek military action against Iraq.

When Bush’s directive to the CIA to step up support for Iraqi opposition groups and even possibly capture and kill Hussein was leaked to the Washington Post in June, Biden gave it his approval. Asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” if the plan gave him any pause, Biden replied: “Only if it doesn't work.”

"If the covert action doesn't work, we'd better be prepared to move forward with another action, an overt action, and it seems to me that we can't afford to miss," he added.

“Prominent Democrats endorse administration plan to remove Iraqi leader from power,” ran the subsequent Associated Press headline.

A month later in July, Biden affirmed that Congress would back Bush in a pre-emptive strike on Iraq in the event of a “clear and present danger” and if “the president can make the case that we’re about to be attacked.”

Asked on “Fox News Sunday” the same month if a discovery that Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda would justify an invasion, Biden replied: “If he can prove that, yes, he would have the authority in my view.”

“And this will be the first time ever in the history of the United States of America that we have essentially invaded another country preemptively to take out a leadership, I think justifiably given the case being made.”

These themes would be used by the Bush administration in the months ahead to sell the war to the American public. The non-existent ties between Hussein and al-Qaeda became one of the most high-profile talking points for the war’s proponents. And the Bush administration would publicize the supposedly imminent threat Hussein posed to the United States, including then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s infamous September declaration that “we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

By July Biden appeared to rule out a diplomatic solution to the conflict. “Dialogue with Saddam is useless,” he said.

 

NOT A SKEPTIC TO BE HEARD

It was also in July 2002 that Biden carried out one of his most consequential actions in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when he held several days of congressional hearings about the then-potential invasion.

Biden stressed the hearings weren’t meant to antagonize the White House. Rather, as he explained, they would inform the American people about the stakes of the conflict and the logistical issues involved in waging it.

At the time, the pro-war stance shared between the administration, much of the press, and Democrats like Biden was by no means unanimous. Many of the United States’ closest allies in Europe (apart from Tony Blair’s British government) were wary of the war drums beating from Washington, as were many Arab states. In July, King Abdullah II of Jordan, a U.S. ally in the Middle East, called the idea of an invasion “somewhat ludicrous.”

The same month, the Houston Chronicle reported, based on interviews with anonymous officials, that a number of senior military officials, including members of the joint chiefs of staff, were in disagreement with the White House’s drive for war with Iraq, and believed that Hussein posed no immediate threat to the United States. The day before the hearings, Scott Ritter, the former chief weapons inspector at the UN, cautioned that it was far from “inevitable” that Iraq had restarted its weapons program, and warned that “Biden's open embrace of regime removal in Baghdad” threatened to make the hearings “devolve into a political cover” for Congress to authorize Bush’s war.

Yet as Stephen Zunes reported for The Progressive in April 2019, none of these views were aired at Biden’s hearings, which opened with Biden stating that WMDs “must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power,” and that “if we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear, it could be too late.” Ritter himself was never invited to testify.

Neither were other experts critical of the Bush narrative on Iraq, including Rolf Ekéus, the former executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission, the inspection regime set up after the Gulf War to deal with WMDs, and former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Von Sponeck, who complained that he was “very agitated by the deliberate distortions and misrepresentations” that made it “look to the average person in the U.S. as if Iraq is a threat to their security.” According to Biden, Bush later thanked him for the hearings.

By Zunes’ count, none of the 18 witnesses who were called objected to the idea that Hussein had WMDs, and all three witnesses who testified on the subject of al-Qaeda claimed the organization received direct support from Iraq—the very red line Biden had said would give Bush the authority to invade the country. Out of the 12 witnesses who discussed an invasion, half were in favor and only two opposed. Biden himself said throughout the hearings that Iraq was a national security threat.

It was largely up to Republicans on the committee—namely Lincoln Chafee and Chuck Hagel—to voice skepticism about a war effort. Ritter accused Biden and other members of congress of having “preordained a conclusion that seeks to remove Saddam Hussein from power regardless of the facts.” Indeed, on the day of the hearings, Biden had co-authored a New York Times op-ed suggesting that continued “containment” of Hussein “raises the risk that Mr. Hussein will play cat-and-mouse with inspectors while building more weapons,” and that “if we wait for the danger to become clear and present, it may be too late.”

Having given a platform to pro-war talking points, Biden then hit the talk show circuit to cite the lopsided testimony he himself had arranged in order to argue for war. Determining Hussein’s intentions was “like reading the entrails of goats,” Biden told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and what mattered more was Hussein’s ability to use WMDs, whatever those intentions might be. He pointed to testimony in the July hearings to argue it was clear that Iraq had such weapons.

“We have no choice but to eliminate the threat,” he said. “This is a guy who’s an extreme danger to the world.”

While the mainstream press featured few skeptical and anti-war voices at the time, a number of them assailed Biden for going along with the Bush administration.

“Biden apparently believes that he fulfills the constitutional function of advise and consent by merely being the cheerleader for the administration's rising chorus demanding war with Iraq,” wrote Stanley Kutler in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “When and how are the only questions in his repertoire.”

 

“A COURSE OF MODERATION AND DELIBERATION”

By fall 2002, Bush appeared to have heeded Biden’s frequent exhortations for how to sell the war.

On September 12, almost a year to the day of the terrorist attacks that had sparked the march to war, Bush went before the UN to make a case for an invasion directly to the international community. Biden praised him for doing “a very good job” in making that case with a “brilliant” speech, and again stressed that “this is the world’s fight,” though cautioning that “the worst option is going it alone, but it is an option.”

That September, Bush also finally asked Congress for a war authorization. While the president backed an expansive resolution in the House, Biden and fellow Foreign Relations Committee member Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) put forward their own rival resolution in the Senate that scaled back some of the House version’s more alarming language and stressed the themes Biden had been articulating for the better part of a year. The Senate resolution limited the use of force to Iraq, made dismantling WMDs the primary justification for war, and stressed the importance of international support (though reserving the right to act unilaterally if the UN Security Council moved too slowly).

“We are trying to give the president the power that he needs and get a large vote,” Biden explained.

Bush quickly routed Biden by making a compromise with Democratic House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt that swung momentum behind the House resolution. Deciding it was too late, and that there was no way of stopping its passage, Biden simply resigned himself to the compromise House resolution.

“In this place, everybody's pretty practical at the end of the day,” he said.

Bush ultimately won over Biden by incorporating several of his suggestions into the final resolution and a speech he gave on October 7, 2002, in which he painted Iraq as a “grave threat to peace” creating an “arsenal of terror.” He had “made a compelling case,” said Biden, who was “very pleased with his rationale that he laid out.”

While Biden reportedly wavered at the last moment on his promise to cast his vote, he ultimately fell in line, arguing the resolution would “give the president the kind of momentum he needs” to get Security Council backing. On October 11, Biden was one of 77 senators who voted to give Bush the authorization to wage war on Iraq, joining fellow Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein. Twenty-one Democratic senators, including Dick Durbin, Ron Wyden and Patrick Leahy, voted against it.

“At each pivotal moment, [President Bush] has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation,” Biden said on the Senate floor. “I believe he will continue to do so … the president has made it clear that war is neither imminent nor inevitable.”

A month later, Biden sailed to a sixth term to the Senate with 58 percent of the vote.

“POWERFUL AND IRREFUTABLE”

Biden wasn’t as eager to tout his leading role in the lead-up to the Iraq War in front of all audiences.

On November 11, 2002, Biden gave a speech at a meeting of the Trotter Group, an organization of African-American columnists. Perhaps owing to strong black opposition to the war, including the NAACP board’s October 28, 2002, adoption of a resolution opposing the invasion, Biden sounded very different notes in front of the audience. He denied there was a direct link between Hussein and al-Qaeda (“I don’t consider the war on Iraq the war on terror”) and struck a less hawkish note (“My hope is that we don’t need to go into Iraq”).

After chairing hearings filled with pro-war testimony, Biden told the Trotter Group crowd that “the guys who have to fight this war don't think it's a good idea,” and that doing so would be “the dumbest thing in the world.” Discussing the war authorization he had voted for, he claimed that Republicans had taken “something that nobody, including the president, believes is an imminent danger and moved it up in the election cycle,” and that he reluctantly supported the final resolution in order to give then-Secretary of State Colin Powell leverage to get a resolution out of the UN that would slow the administration’s march to war.

Yet even as he painted himself as a war opponent, Biden’s role in making the war happen wasn’t finished.

In December 2002, Biden embarked on a trip to Germany and the Middle East with Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to cobble together a coalition for the impending war. He first flew to Germany to meet with an Iraqi resistance leader, then headed to Jordan to meet with its monarch, before stopping in Israel and Qatar. The Delaware Republican Party sent him its best wishes.

“We wish the senator good luck and hope he continues to support the president on foreign-policy matters,” its chairman said.

At one point, Biden spoke to the Kurd Parliament in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, carved out in the wake of the first Gulf War. Biden made clear to the Kurds, longtime opponents of Hussein’s regime, that the United States had their back.

“We will stand with you in your effort to build a united Iraq,” he told them, adding that “the mountains are not your only friends,” playing off a local saying.

As Colin Powell prepared to present supposed evidence of Iraq’s WMD program to the UN in February—a factually flawed address that Powell two years later would call a “blot” on his record—Biden hyped the presentation to the press, saying the administration “has evidence now that can change people's minds.”

“I know there's enough circumstantial evidence that if this were a jury trial, I could convict you,” he said. After Powell’s address, Biden called his case “very powerful and I think irrefutable,” and told him, “I am proud to be associated with you.”

At the same time, Biden spent much of the rest of the month leading up to invasion painting himself as its opponent. He criticized Bush for everything but the actual decision to remove Hussein: for failing to make a sufficiently strong case to the public, for not securing more international buy-in for the invasion, for keeping Congress out of the loop and for grossly lackluster planning for postwar Iraq.

“As every hour goes by, I think the chance of war is increasing,” he said in early March, five months after voting to give Bush the power to invade Iraq. “I was hoping it wasn't, hoping there was a shot at doing this peacefully, but that looks slimmer and slimmer.”

Yet even after Bush failed to secure the international cooperation Biden had spent months insisting was necessary, the lack of support wasn’t enough to convince Biden to abandon his support. As Bush issued an ultimatum to Hussein on March 17—leave or be invaded—Biden was behind him.

“I support the president,” he said after meeting with Bush and other officials before the ultimatum. “Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead. ... I do not see any alternative. It is not as if we can back away now.”

Biden portrayed himself as someone who had been powerless to stop the conflict.

“A lot of Americans, myself included, are really concerned about how we got to this stage and about all the lost opportunities for diplomacy,” he said. “But we are where we are. ... Let loose the dogs of war. I'm confident we will win.” He and the rest of the Democrats voted to pass a Senate resolution 99-0 supporting Bush and commending the troops.

Months after the war was launched and Hussein was deposed, any reservations Biden claimed to have had about the war appeared to melt away.

“I, for one, thought we should have gone in Iraq,” he told CNN in June 2003, while noting that not all Democrats had been as enthusiastic about invading the country.

With the much-ballyhooed WMDs failing to materialize, Biden cast himself as a skeptic about the administration’s claims about their existence.

“I also said at the time, as far back as August, that I thought the administration was exaggerating the threat of weapons of mass destruction,” he told CNN.

During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” later that month, he told host Tony Snow that he had never believed the Bush administration’s rhetoric on the issue, and that it had erred in exaggerating the threat, as there was sufficient grounds to invade Iraq based on the weapons it was reported to have in 1998.

“So you think, looking back on it, still, that it was a just war, in your opinion?” asked Snow.

“Oh, I do think it was a just war,” said Biden.

After playing a clip of then-presidential candidate Howard Dean boasting of his opposition to the war even at the height of its popularity, Snow asked Biden if Dean’s position should be the consensus view of the Democratic Party.

 “No,” Biden flatly replied.

Even as the war effort rapidly went awry in the months that followed, with U.S. soldier deaths continuing to climb after major combat operations were declared over on May 1 and terrorist attacks becoming a regular feature of Iraqi life, Biden continued to insist that war had been the right course of action.

“I voted to go into Iraq, and I'd vote to do it again,” he said at a July 2003 hearing.           

As growing numbers of Democrats, and even members of the general public, turned against the war, Biden rebuked them, implicitly and explicitly.

“In my view, anyone who can't acknowledge that the world is better off without [Hussein] is out of touch,” he said two days later.

“Contrary to what some in my party might think, Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with sooner rather than later,” he insisted.

An increasingly lonely voice in a party that would soon make common cause with the growing anti-war movement, Biden continued to back Bush.

“The president made [the case against Saddam] well,” he concluded on July 31. “I commend the president.”

NO REGRETS

In the eyes of the public, a vote for the resolution that gave Bush the authority to wage war on Iraq is enough to cast serious doubt on a candidate’s judgment, as Hillary Clinton learned in 2016. But the fact is, Joe Biden did a lot more than cast a vote.

As an experienced and respected voice on foreign policy, a powerful Democrat, and someone widely perceived as a dove due to his opposition to the Vietnam war, Biden’s backing of regime change in Iraq was crucial to Bush’s effort of selling the public on the war. Biden’s insistence that Hussein posed a serious threat to the United States, possessed WMDs and needed to be removed from power helped create momentum for the rising pro-war campaign. And as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, rather than question the prominent voices of doubt, including senior members of the U.S. military, Biden stacked his Iraq hearings with voices in agreement with Bush’s fallacious case for war.

Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness—including her vote for the Iraq war—was one of several factors that likely contributed to her 2016 loss to Donald Trump in key traditional Democratic states. But beyond arguments about electability, the next president will inherit a volatile world on the brink of several different conflicts, including a possible showdown with Iran. When voters chose the next Democratic nominee, they’ll have to decide whether someone who helped lead the march to war in Iraq is really the best person to take on Trump—and guide U.S. foreign policy as president. 

This investigation was supported by the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting. 

 

Alexander Herbert Announces Dates For “What About Tomorrow? An Oral History of Russian Punk From The Soviet Era To Pussy Riot” Book Tour

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The post Alexander Herbert Announces Dates For “What About Tomorrow? An Oral History of Russian Punk From The Soviet Era To Pussy Riot” Book Tour appeared first on Dying Scene.

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On July 29, coal miners in Cumberland, Kentucky began blocking a train carrying over $1 million worth of coal to protest their former employer, Blackjewel LLC, which declared bankruptcy on July 1. According toCNN, the company wrote bad checks to 350 miners in Harlan County alone, prompting the workers to stage the protest until they are paid what they are owed. Holding signs that say, “No pay, we stay,” the coal miners have been buoyed by community support, with churches and restaurants donating food and supplies. They say they will stay on the tracks until they get the wages they’re owed for the work they’ve already done. While Harlan County stands as the site of militant coal-miner labor struggles in the 1930s and 1970s, these workers are all non-union.

Socialists of Color to the Front

One evening in late May, upward of 50 grassroots organizers from different groups around the country gathered at a union hall in Dorchester, Mass. They were grappling with some of the Left’s age-old questions: In a future where the Left wins political power, what would we like to see happen? And more pragmatically: What would it take to get there?

A local community organizer sets the scene: “It’s 2019. Burning issues are facing our communities.” She lists off galloping inequality, a trigger-happy white nationalist movement, looming environmental disaster. It’s urgent, she says, to do “more cross-fertilization work” to harness progressive forces (like the striking teachers around the country) to build solidarity across issues.

This discussion of base-building to include more different types of people is typical of many Left gatherings. But what’s noteworthy is the faces in the room, who reflect the kind of diverse base the Left has aspired to build for decades.

That’s by design. The meeting host is LeftRoots, a five-year-old socialist group that offers a hub for on-the-ground organizers around the country to strategize together. LeftRoots’ membership includes “super-majorities both of people of color, and of women and other gender-oppressed people.” Co-founder NTanya Lee says this isn’t “just a racial critique that the contemporary U.S. Left is too white” (though “that is a fact,” she adds). Instead, it’s vital, she says, that any movement to transform the world be “rooted in the struggles of working-class communities of color who are the ones who have the most at stake in defeating the system and winning the liberation that we really want.”

In the American political imagination, talk of the working class still conjures an image of gruff, salt-of-the-earth white men in the Rust Belt. While they’re certainly out there, at 59% of 25–64-year-olds, white people (and white men, especially) make up a declining share of the working class. The Economic Policy Institute projects that, by 2032, a majority of the American working class will be people of color. Women already make up nearly half of working-class adults in the country at 46%.

That LeftRoots even exists might send much of established media stumbling back on their heels. The chattering classes have been quick to interpret the surging interest in socialism as a fad for a loud (but small!) band of white millennials. (A snarky New York magazine piece published in March reports on the silly quirks of the “young socialist power elite” in Brooklyn, who supposedly live on Twitter and believe socialism to be “sexy” without really knowing what it means.)

Of course, there’s a long history of socialism in communities of color in America, from what historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz calls pre-colonial “indigenous socialism” (and its radical heir, the American Indian Movement) to spirited traditions of Chinese American socialism in San Francisco in the early 20th century and the radical Chicano movements of the Southwest in the late 20th century. Black socialists have been a pain in the ass to many of their white counterparts for more than a century, relentlessly insisting that white supremacy is chief among the Goliaths that socialism must slay. In a 1913 essay, noted socialist W.E.B. Du Bois famously described “The Negro Problem” as “the great test of the American Socialist.”

Lee launched LeftRoots in 2014 with a crew of three other San Francisco Bay Area organizers who thought the political Left was failing to bridge the gap between urgent, daily, in-the-trenches action and a longer-term vision and strategy. “It wasn’t enough to cross our fingers and be like, ‘One day this shit is all going to get connected and we’re going to win,’ ” says Lee, 50, the former executive director of San Francisco-based community organizing group Coleman Advocates.

It’s worth emphasizing what LeftRoots is not. LeftRoots does not initiate or run campaigns, whether issue-based or electoral, like the Democratic Socialists of America and many other socialist groups. Nor does it organize protests. LeftRoots’ focus is simply on its stated purpose: to strategize around “21st-century socialism” and then bring people together to help get there.

LeftRoots offers regular branch meetings and other training events. Members also work through an online curriculum they call the Little Red School, covering topics from political economy to cultural hegemony to strategies for building organizational power. This breadth is also apparent in LeftRoots’ Out to Win! journal. At 150 pages, it makes references from Engels and Marx to American Idol, includes quotes from Paulo Freire to Langston Hughes and Grace Lee Boggs, and explores ideas from cis-heteropatriarchy to neoliberalism, all while citing sources and marking points of debate.

Today, LeftRoots has more than 200 members spread across seven branches—Boston, Philadelphia, New York, the Bay Area, Los Angeles and two at-large branches that meet online. While their numbers may seem small, their influence is multiplied by the simple fact that nearly everyone is already involved in other grassroots work aimed at improving their communities. Members say LeftRoots has deeply informed that work.

Sometimes when you’re in the day-to-day of the work, you’re [only] focused on what’s right in front of you,” says Mike Leyba, 31, an electoral strategist and organizer in Boston who sits on the LeftRoots National Coordinating Committee. It’s LeftRoots’ job “to zoom out and … see where our potential for really strategic action is.”

Leyba, who spent his formative years in Compton, Calif., became a political organizer in 2008, when he joined the fight against a California ballot proposal banning same-sex marriage. He joined LeftRoots in April 2016. For Leyba, LeftRoots has “really honed my political strategy around electoral work.” Since 2010, he has staffed or managed four local electoral campaigns in Massachusetts and California, including state house races and a Boston mayoral campaign.

(Activist Mike Leyba says his work with LeftRoots keeps him from becoming “much more cynical” about electoral politics. Electoral campaigns, he now says, can help build a socialist base. Photo by Flavio DeBarros.)

“If I weren’t a part of LeftRoots, I probably would be much more cynical about working in electoral politics,” Leyba says. “If progressive candidates, once elected, don’t always deliver,” he says, the feeling becomes, “I worked so freaking hard for this person and they didn’t do shit for me or my people, and we’re still in crisis.”

But Leyba says LeftRoots helped him see that electoral campaigns can be a way to build a socialist base, regardless of the election’s outcome or how the official performs once elected. For example, Leyba “deep canvasses” Boston neighborhoods; rather than just reciting a candidate’s biography to potential voters, he now asks questions rooted in race and class, such as, “When was the last time you got a rent increase?” Those conversations can spin out into deeper discussions about rent control or funding public schools. He says “It’s putting an ear to the ground and seeing where people are at. Where are they feeling the squeeze? Where should we be focusing our energy? Where is the transformative potential?

“Now multiply this by tens of thousands of conversations. You’re able to see much bigger than any particular candidate. Whoever wins will have very real limits on their power. But there aren’t the same limits on social movements.”

Paige Kümm, 32, another member of the LeftRoots National Coordinating Committee, serves as a national organizer with Right to the City, an alliance of social justice organizations that aims to offer “a unified response to gentrification” nationwide. At a March staff retreat in Brooklyn, Right to the City discussed LeftRoots’ newly expanded working definition of class, laid out in the first issue of Out to Win. Here, LeftRoots sees potential allies for working-class issues in the lower tiers of the ownership class, like taxi drivers and corner store owners. While the upper layer of capitalists (“the executives, board members and major shareholders”) may fight socialist change tooth and nail, this lower-tier group still faces significant hardship and could be moved to join a movement to redistribute wealth and power.

LeftRoots’ layered definition of class helped Right to the City “better understand the layers of the working class,” says Kümm. Some homeowners may technically be landlords, in that they rent to tenants and depend on rent to make their payments to the bank, but these homeowners are still “bank tenants,” as Kümm describes them, who face foreclosure if they fall on hard times. LeftRoots’ definition was a helpful reminder to not pit these homeowner-tenants against subtenants, Kümm says, since both have interests in fighting the power that banks have to make them homeless.

“We’re trying to better understand: What are the different strata of the working class and how can we speak to their interest?” Kümm says. “How can we make them feel like they are a part of this movement?”

There are two ways to join LeftRoots, which holds no membership drives and no purity tests beyond its “points of unity,” which includes notes like “socialism is the future” and “the planet is not a commodity.” The first is as a “compa” (from the Spanish for “friend”), an ongoing financial and political supporter, important for an organization that doesn’t apply for philanthropic foundation grants. 

The second way to become a member is by invitation only. To be eligible, you must complete the General Baker bootcamp, named after a giant of Black socialist organizing in Detroit. In one-day sessions over eight weeks, held simultaneously around the country and online, participants share their ideas about socialism and their own journeys as activists. Afterward, some are invited to become full-fledged members, called cadre.

That word, “cadre,” may be off-putting for those who remember it mainly as a description of various leftist factions with top-down leadership structures, the kind that aspired to be revolutionary vanguards—an elite tier supposedly most qualified to lead radical change—in the 1960s and 1970s. These groups based themselves on a particular interpretation of socialist theories of change in which a leadership role in working-class politics was guaranteed by devotion to a particular ideology and intellectual rank, rather than earned by a practice in mass struggle to help forge and unleash the power of workers and oppressed peoples.

Most on the Left now reject that particular version of cadreism as both fundamentally anti-democratic and doomed to failure—and the dozen or so LeftRoots cadres I spoke with agree. They use the term in a much more generic sense, to mean the activists who believe in a political project; devote a considerable portion of their time, energy and talent to moving it forward; and are serious about developing the intellectual and practical skills to do so effectively. Thus they see no contradiction between the importance of developing revolutionary cadre and rejecting the vanguardist practices of the past. In fact, the LeftRoots website has an explicit “against vanguardism” section: “Challenging the practice of many 20th century cadre organizations on the Party Left, we reject the vanguardism and the associated practices of operating secretly within mass organizations while trying to control them; creating front groups; or being opportunist and leeching onto authentic mass struggles to avoid doing the long hard work of building a real base.”

LeftRoots insists that “the people that are doing the strategy” should be “really grounded in the work,” Leyba says. “Otherwise, you’re just an armchair activist and we don’t need more of those.”

Instead, LeftRoots refers to a cadre as a committed member who “willingly makes sacrifices, learns skills and plays roles that are required in order to fight for the change we wish to see.” Here, “cadre” acts as a small way to highlight, yet again, that isolation can be overcome, because the walls that separate those who are hungry for an egalitarian world are thinner than they imagine.

LeftRoots doesn't see itself as the final home of this 21st-century socialism. Rather, it is “attempting to lay the groundwork for the launching of a political instrument in the future,” Kümm says. LeftRoots, she says, is a way to “train up social movement leftists to be prepared to take part in the launching of that political instrument.” LeftRoots folks are candid about how far the Left has to travel before it can flex its political muscle the same way as robust cadre movements of the past (the radical Black socialist autoworkers in Detroit in the late 1960s and 1970s, for example). But LeftRoots intends, after a couple years of rigorous study, experimentation and analysis, to draw a clearer picture of the sorts of vehicles the Left needs to bring its vision to life.

In that union hall near Boston (which LeftRoots requested not be named, out of “an abundance of caution” about redbaiting), close to 100 area organizers also participated, representing groups like City Life/Vida Urbana, Dominican Development Center, New England United for Justice, Boston Liberation Health and Right to the City Boston, groups fighting for everything from racial, economic and environmental justice to land, labor and housing rights.

The discussion closed with long-term questions: Should the Left prepare to launch a third party or commit to a takeover of the Democratic Party? And speaking of takeovers, how cool would it be if workers in weapons factories just took the damn things over and retrofit them for green purposes?

After decades in the political wilderness, the American Left is aware of the obstacles to a more egalitarian world. But in rooms like this, where political imagination and analytic rigor walk hand in hand, you can see possibilities unfold, a tapestry of radical hopes and ideas. In an increasingly desperate moment, it’s a refreshing revival: an old socialist tradition being built upon and refined and expanded to ensure meaningful participation for all, particularly working-class communities—of color, especially.