Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Utility Executives Kept Flint's Tainted Water a Secret | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/utility-executives-kept-flints-tainted-water-a-secret/

So the Washington Examiner ran a "Bernie sanders is antisemitic" piece as a test because the center and the right are going to lean into that with the idea that it beat Corbyn, so it'll work here. That Sanders is Jewish is irrelevant because none of these people have any sort of mooring to things like "principles" or "political philosophy." All of this is just amoral tactics to them.

The French Occitanie region adopts the open source GOFast platform as an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint and Office365 https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/occitanie-chooses-open-source

The U.S. and Other Rich Countries Stonewalled $300 Billion Climate Relief Fund

MADRID—With climate-related disasters happening “at the rate of one a week,” according to the United Nations, more than 150 civil society organizations around the world are using the UN climate negotiations this week to stand with the Global South. They are pushing for demands set out in an open letter to negotiators in November, including a new global climate fund to aid poor countries in the midst of climate catastrophes.

The organizations say it’s about time for a rethink of climate financing as climate-related disasters like extreme storms, droughts, floods and famines take a mounting economic toll on poor countries. Worldwide costs are estimated to grow to between $300 and $700 billion a year by 2030. To cover the costs, poor countries must increasingly borrow from development aid, which is “pushing them into a debt trap,” says Harjeet Singh, global lead on climate change with ActionAid International, one of the 150-plus organizations that signed the letter.

The United States and other wealthy countries made a pledge in 2010 to commit $100 billion annually to assist poorer countries, but wealthier countries have consistently failed to pay in. The new proposal calls for a comprehensive and mandatory new fund to help poor countries recover that would make an additional $50 billion available by 2022 and gradually increase the amount to $300 billion a year by 2030.

The money would come from the wealthy countries that are responsible for the vast majority of the emissions behind climate change. Additional funds could be raised from taxes on air travel, fossil fuels and financial transactions. The money would go directly to local organizations working in frontline communities in the Global South to help with rebuilding, recovery and resilience efforts.

However, with negotiations still going on as nighttime fell in Madrid, all suggestion of additional mandatory climate funds have met stiff resistance from wealthy countries. The 47 members of the Least Developed Countries group pushed new “loss and damage” funding commitments, using much of the language culled from the environmental groups’ proposal. But the rich countries that would have to foot the bill, including the United States, Singh says, “would not even engage.”

Earlier in the week, Singh expressed optimism about proposals for beefing up climate recovery funding through something called The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage associated with Climate Change Impacts, or WIM. But by late Thursday, a draft of WIM circulating among negotiators included no mention of additional funding but merely urged developed countries and others to “scale up” their financial commitments. The reality, Singh said, is that a failure to mandate additional funding would merely spread existing funds around more thinly, thus “exposing more people to climate disasters.”

The lack of commitment to countries in the Global South has prompted unprecedented protests this year, both inside of the negotiating halls, led by youth and indigenous activists, and outside on the streets, where an estimated 500,000 people marched with Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg on Friday, December 6.  On Thursday more than 300 activists from around the globe protested just outside of the room where climate talks were taking place. Banging on pots and pans in a version of what is known in Latin America as a cacerolazo, they chanted slogans and yelled “Shame!” until security guards rounded them up, snatching conference IDs from around activists’ necks and herding them out of the building.

In response, UN officials threatened to bar all international observers from the talks, saying the protests were “illegal” under the UN’s code of conduct. After tense negotiations, UN officials agreed to let some but not all of the international observers back into the conference after extracting promises not to carry out any more so-called “illegal protests.” The Fridays for Future organization responded by calling an emergency climate strike this afternoon worldwide.

Activists have denounced the UN for allowing oil company executives to roam free while controlling the access of activists. “The UN should be kicking polluters out of the talks, but instead they are kicking people out,” says Sara Shaw, international program coordinator for climate justice and energy at Friends of the Earth International.

Oil companies and the U.S. government have emerged as the biggest villains of this year’s conference. Increasingly, companies are looking to profitable approaches like trading in carbon offset projects. While wining and dining negotiators over drinks and canapes, industry experts, corporate friendly environmental groups and corporate executives have outlined an array of “market-based solutions” to the climate crisis—despite warnings from scientific experts that it’s magical thinking to assume the world can trade its way out of more than a fraction of the necessary emissions reductions. This week’s industry proposals include plans to launch broad new markets in “natural climate solutions” that will involve investing in everything from mangrove preservation to sustainable farming and more.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration, which is in the process of withdrawing from the UN Paris climate agreement, has taken advantage of its waning negotiating power to push for renewed assurances that the United States and other big polluters can’t be held accountable for historic pollution. This "liability" issue—the same one assailing the world's fossil fuel companies—have been among the most contentious issues in past climate negotiations, which is what led to the "loss and damage" provision being included to help poor countries, in the first place. As negotiations continued Friday, U.S. delegates kept pushing for a liability and compensation waiver included in the final WIM document, a move that Taylor Billings of Corporate Accountability International referred to in Buzzfeed as “an ass-covering maneuver.”

“With this waiver, the U.S. is trying to torch critical elements of climate action on its way out of the Paris Agreement—and create an escape hatch for polluting countries and potentially corporations,” Billings told In These Times. “Across the negotiations, it’s obvious that the U.S. is attempting to gut the Paris Agreement of any promise and potential. That’s what they’ve always done in these talks. Shamefully, it’s not just the U.S.—the EU, Australia and Canada are helping the U.S. do its dirty work and cowering in Trump’s shadow when questioned about it.”

“The U.S. is lighting the house in fire as it's on its way out the door and Global North governments like the EU, Australia and Canada are backing it every step of the way,” said Billings’ colleague Sriram Madhusoodanan, deputy campaigns director of Corporate Accountability, at an ActionAid press conference on the final day of the climate talks Friday.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk on the record, one person involved in negotiations told In These Times that the United States and other developed countries have been unwilling to discuss additional funding beyond the existing commitments for climate adaptation and resilience, in part because they don’t want to open the door to further discussion about climate blame. It remains a thorny issue whether wealthy industrialized countries should pay more to mitigate the impacts of climate change since they are responsible for the bulk of fossil fuel emissions, dating back to the bringing of the Industrial Revolution.

“The U.S. has been very clear that it doesn’t want anything more beyond adaption funding, because if you start talking about ‘loss and damage’ it gets into the issue of who is responsible for the fossil fuel emissions that have created the climate crisis,” the negotiator says.

 “It is the U.S., EU, Canada, Japan and Australia not allowing any progress,” concurs Singh.

The agreement is expected to be finalized by Saturday. Some of the less costly ideas outlined in the open letter have found their way into the latest draft agreement. They include language stipulating a new “expert group” by 2020 to help poor countries grappling with climate damages and the creation of a “Santiago Network” for technical assistance, but without additional funding, those measures are expected to have limited effect.

Organizations that penned the open letter, which included 350.org, Friends of the Earth International and WWF International, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Indigenous Environmental Network and the Climate Justice Project, say they are not giving up and will continue to push a comprehensive new approach to climate finance even after this year’s negotiation’s wrap up. The proposal by ActionAid and the other 150-plus groups also backs a temporary interest-free moratorium on foreign debt payments of poor countries in the throes of climate disasters. But that idea didn’t even get discussed by negotiators this year.

Dylan Hamilton, a Fridays for Future activist from Scotland, said in a press conference in Madrid today that the UN process “has failed us again” and promising to bring an even bigger fight next year at the 26th annual conference in Glasgow, Scotland, a half hour from where Hamilton lives.

“Get ready,” she said. "We’re going to be even bigger next year.”

What the U.S. Left Can Learn From the Labour Party’s Epic Loss

The similarities are impossible to ignore. Both are aging Boomers with long resumes in the struggle for social justice. Both have campaigned on platforms of left populism that take aim at the rich and powerful. And both have helped spark social movements led by activists 50 years their junior. Yes, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders share much in common.

So, as we survey the rubble of the Labour Party’s epic defeat, which saw the largest Conservative landslide since Margaret Thatcher, it’s not unfair to ask: What went wrong? What can the the U.S. Left—and the Sanders campaign more specifically—learn from Corbyn’s loss? And, as the hot takes flood in from American pundits with little understanding of the British political system, it is equally important to ask: What should we not learn from this defeat, as well?

There are three key areas where learning will be essential, and contested:

Staving off character assassination

I knew from my time canvassing for Labour in the UK as well as from reading the polls: Jeremy Corbyn was the most unpopular opposition leader in British history.

Pundits will point to individual traits to explain his unpopularity, ranging from his personality (a hippie! with no charisma!) to his policies (he’s a Commie!) to his political allies (he cavorts with terrorists!) to his base of supporters (they’re anti-Semites, the lot of them).

But speak with many of the Labour supporters who hit the doors in this election, and they will tell you that hatred of Corbyn was far more amorphous, more ineffable, more atmospheric than this. If you were to ask a given voter why they hated Jeremy Corbyn—and I had the opportunity to ask many such voters—they were liable to say: “I just do.”

The electoral costs of such unpopularity were extreme. According to one post-election poll, 43% of respondents voted against Labour because of the party’s leadership, compared to just 17% for its stance on Brexit and 12% for its economic policies. 

What could have produced such an atmosphere of contempt? The short answer: a sustained campaign of character assassination in near every UK tabloid, mainstream newspaper and otherwise respectable publication against Jeremy Corbyn.

The case of anti-Semitism is an instructive one. Most British voters now believe that Corbyn is an anti-Semite, but few can point to an example of his anti-Semitism. Why, then, do they believe it? Because the claim was asserted, over and over, in the papers. If Corbyn weren’t anti-Semitic, voters were right to ask, why would so many stories get written about it so many months in a row? The prophecy was self-fulfilling.

Supporters of Bernie Sanders complain about his absence from mainstream reporting. CNN and MSNBC are liable to throw Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and even Elizabeth Warren onto their chyron, but ignore Sanders, despite his consistent polling near the top of the Democratic field.

But Sanders supporters appear unprepared for the next phase of this process, when he moves back into frame but straight into the crosshairs. It’s been said before but bears repeating: We have seen only a fraction of the stories that the press will use to bring down Bernie Sanders.

The U.S. Left needs to prepare for this, diligently and creatively. The Corbyn camp was far too quick to the bunker: “It’s a conspiracy by the billionaire media.” That may have been true. But the U.S. Left will need a much more proactive strategy for combatting such destructive stories and presenting an alternative vision of Sanders’ progressive personality.

Sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant—only a full-throated challenge to mounting controversy can kill it off. And that challenge may require progressive candidates to go on all available media outlets—including Fox News—and do it themselves.

Maintaining the coalition

The Labour Party electoral coalition is strikingly similar to that of the Democratic Party, in both its general composition and its direction of travel: working-class communities with low levels of education and, increasingly, wealthier city-dwellers with high levels of education.

It’s a coalition that fell to pieces in Thursday’s election. The Tory landslide was a working class wave: the Conservative Party broke through traditional Labour-voting working-class regions, formerly known as the ‘Red Wall,’ to win scores of new seats.

How did Boris Johnson—an Eton-educated, silver-spooned, elite-obsessed Tory—manage to make such gains against a Labour Party explicitly committed to the cause of the working class?

The short answer is Brexit. The question of European Union membership—or more accurately, of whether or not the British government would go ahead with the referendum decision to leave the EU—cut straight through the Labour coalition.

If the Labour Party had embraced Brexit and served as its parliamentary handmaiden, the Liberal Democrats were waiting in the wings to claim the urban middle classes as their own.

If the Labour Party moved to stymie Brexit, however, they would risk losing their Leave constituencies to a Conservative Party that promised to deliver Brexit faithfully. The Labour Party ultimately took the latter risk, and lost predictably as a result.

The good news for Democrats is, of course, that the United States has no Brexit. Nor is the Democratic Party threatened by an adjacent challenger like the Liberal Democrats.

But Americans do have an issue that closely resembles Brexit: the election of Donald Trump.

Many pundits will compare Boris Johnson and Trump, in style as in haircut. But the Brexit-Trump comparison is by far the more relevant. A vote for Trump, like a vote for Brexit, was meant to send a shock to the system and a middle finger to its political establishment. That is why Trump voters, like Brexit ones, rarely care for the immediate consequences of their vote choice: the vote was all that mattered.

If progressives are searching for lessons, then, impeachment may be a good place to start: a political strategy that could ultimately turn out to be both myopic and fruitless.

Like calling for a People’s Vote, impeaching President Trump could be seen as disrespectful to the rebel vote of the 2016 election, and could deepen the sense of discontent that gave rise to Trump in the first place. To keep its coalition together, Democrats will need to find a path to détente between its competing demographics. Impeachment alone is unlikely to be the answer.

Spin, not socialism

Finally, the S-word.

The commentariat is already swarming with takes about the peril of far-left policies. Socialism, the argument goes, was Corbyn’s Achilles heel. And it is likely to be much worse in the United States, where the S-word is wielded with much greater psychological power and historical weight.

The problem with this argument is that it’s wrong. Labour’s policies were their strongest pull—even, or especially, their most socialist ones: the nationalization of industry. A recent poll found 84% of respondents supported nationalizing the water industry. In another, 77% supported the same for energy and 76% for rail.

The issue was that, in the end, it didn’t really matter. The raft of policies that the Labour Party ushered into its manifesto—the stuff of a progressive wonk’s dreams, and the hard work of so many brilliant and creative young policy thinkers in the UK—simply did not bring people to the polls in their favor.

Simply put, socialism was not too strong an ideology, but too weak an electoral strategy.

No, spin still seems to dominate our politics: dirty, rotten spin. Johnson ran an outright corrupt campaign, disseminating lies, shirking accountability and banking on the likelihood that people wouldn’t care. It turns out that 43.6% of them didn’t—choosing to support the Tories anyway.

The lessons from this particular electoral injustice are vexed. But one is clear: Plans and policies do not deliver majorities—even if their details determine how you then govern. To win, then, progressive Democrats must get off of the page and into the street, with a message that is as simple as it is emotionally powerful.

Liberal pundits are going to stop at nothing to swing the Democratic Party back toward the center—and Corbyn’s loss will be powerful ammunition. Progressives cannot sweep it under the rug. The lessons are there, if we are willing to learn them. But in this moment of despair, those of us on the Left must keep repeating to ourselves, over and over: We can win, and we must.

Introducing the Working People Podcast

A podcast by, for, and about the working class today. Working People is a podcast about working-class lives in 21st-century America. In every episode you’ll hear interviews with workers from around the country, from all walks of life. We’ll talk about their life stories, their jobs, politics, and families, their joys and hopes and frustrations. Working People aims to share and celebrate the diverse stories of working-class people, to remind ourselves that our stories matter, and to build a sense of shared struggle and solidarity between workers around the country.

Working People is produced in partnership with In These Times magazine and supported entirely by listeners like you.

Human teeth used as jewellery in Turkey 8,500 years ago

At a prehistoric archaeological site in Turkey, researchers have discovered two 8,500-year-old human teeth, which had been used as pendants in a necklace or bracelet. Researchers have never documented this practice before in the prehistoric Near East, and the rarity of the find suggests that the human teeth were imbued with profound symbolic meaning for the people who wore them.

Uber Is Conspiring with Paris’ Bus and Metro Operator To Break France’s General Strike

For more than a week, hundreds of thousands of people have been taking to the streets of France in a general strike protesting the potential degradation of the country’s pension system. One of France’s largest public-sector strikes in recent history, the action has united a wide array of workers, including air-traffic controllers, teachers and hospital staffers.

The country currently has 42 separate pension plans for both private- and public-sector workers, based on occupation and region. Under a proposal from President Emmanuel Macron, these plans would be consolidated into a universal “points-based” model that would slash pensions, particularly for public-sector workers, and raise the retirement age for many workers.

As of December 5, 82% of rail conductors were participating in the work stoppage, with at least 90 percent of all regional rail services closed. In response, Paris’s bus and metro operator, Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP), is offering discounts on rides with 32 private transportation companies—including Uber’s e-bike and e-scooter vertical, JUMP and e-scooter company Lime—in an attempted strike break.

Under the pension proposal, transportation workers would face a substantial decline in their work benefits, as well as an acute threat to their mental and physical health. According to news site France 24, metro drivers can “in theory, retire at 50.8 years due to the particularly unhealthy environment they are subjected to, including pollution and the lack of daylight,” though metro workers’ average retirement age is 55.5. The official retirement age in France is 62, but the government’s proposal would raise the retirement age by at least two years, according to a recent speech by Prime Minister Édouard Philippe.

“It is very alarming that a public transportation agency would partner with private companies so as to undermine worker power,” Mostafa Maklad, a U.S.-based driver for Uber, Lyft and GrubHub, and organizer with Gig Workers Rising, told In These Times. 

Frédéric Ruiz, president of the CFE-CGC union, toldFrance 24 that the move sends a “bad signal” to workers for the RATP system, calling it a “provocation.”

This isn’t the first time Uber has sought to subvert a solidarity movement. Following President Donald Trump’s 2017 Muslim Ban, which restricted travel for people living in seven predominantly Muslim countries, protesters gathered at airports throughout the United States. While the New York Taxi Workers Alliance urged its members to avoid John F. Kennedy International Airport for one hour, Uber lowered fares to lure riders during the demonstrations, prompting widespread outrage. (In the wake of the backlash, the company offered to “support” drivers affected by the ban.)

Lime told In These Times, “Although the circumstances are unfortunate and exceptional, Lime is honored to have been selected by RATP to answer the increased demands for mobility during this period. We hope, nonetheless, for a rapid return to ‘business as usual,’ and we are committed to supporting Parisians throughout the social movement period.”

Uber did not respond to In These Times’ request for comment.

RATP’s move reflects the anti-worker ethos that has defined Macron’s governance. In 2017, the French president vowed to render France a country that “thinks and moves like a startup,” complete with slackened, pro-corporate labor and tax laws in the interest of tech-focused “innovation.” In 2018, as part of that campaign, Macron’s administration announced plans to privatize a utility company and two airports, reportedly to provide a fund for “entrepreneurs and startups.”

This raises another concern: The encroachment of private travel companies upon public transit systems. Rideshare companies have indicated ambitions to replace public transit. A 2019 New York Times op-ed noted that Uber claimed to find a “massive market opportunity” in public transit; the company stated that “a portion of our trips can be a substitute for public transportation.” Accordingly, Uber and Lyft have both introduced features encouraging riders to board cars at dedicated intersections—effectively “reinventing” the bus system. The companies have also partnered with municipal governments in the U.S., Canada, Australia and England to incentivize rideshare, e-bike, and e-scooter use in tandem with public transit.

“This is just another opportunity for a big, giant megacorp like Uber to come in like jackals and take advantage of a volatile situation,” Tyler Sandness, a U.S.-based Lyft driver and organizer with Rideshare Drivers United, told In These Times. “They’re viewing it as, ‘This is just another example of why public transportation doesn’t work very well. Obviously, we just need to get rid of public transit and just have Lyft and Uber companies, and that will fix everything,’ despite the fact that these transport workers are fighting for their rights.”

The transport strikes will continue indefinitely, until “the government comes to its senses,” according to Laurent Brun, head of France’s Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) railway union.

In the meantime, added Maklad, “workers must stand in solidarity with the public transport workers of Paris, and we must continue to demand better of our public agencies and government.”

Youth Activist to Chilean Leaders: Don’t Use the UN Climate Talks to Greenwash Your Repression of Us

MADRID—At a press conference at the UN climate negotiations in Spain this week, 25-year-old Angela Valenzuela, a climate activist from Chile, publicly denounced her country’s government for using this annual meeting of world leaders to “clean” its reputation and deflect attention from street protests that have left at least 18 people dead and fueled allegations of excessive force, torture and sexual assault by the country’s security services.

More than a million people have taken to the streets in the South American country since the protests began in October. They continue today. More than 11,000 people have been injured by security forces and business interests, and thousands more have been arrested in protests and looting initially sparked by a subway fare hike. The fare increase, reductions in public spending and other economic austerity measures were mandated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as conditions of a loan package aimed at stabilizing the country’s economy, which is suffering falling revenue from mining and other exports. But the underlining conditions that set the movement in motion go much deeper and are inextricably intertwined with the country’s climate change-driven ecological problems, as Valenzuela told a packed room of journalists from around the world.

“It’s not about 30 pesos; it’s about 30 years of democratic governments that failed to protect us and listen to our demands. Chile woke up. We said enough. We cannot sustain a system that sacrifices people and drives the climate crisis for the benefit of a few,” said Valenzuela, who is a coordinator with Fridays for Future in Chile. The event took place at a  convention center on the outskirts of Madrid, where this year’s climate negotiations were moved after Chile canceled due to the protests. The government of Chile still held the presidency and remained at the helm of the annual conference.

She was met with the cheers and whoops of other youth and indigenous climate activists, who have stormed the halls of the annual negotiations, now in their 25th year with little to show for them. Young people from around the world, including an indigenous delegation sent to the talks this year by the U.S.-based SustainUS, have shadowed oil company executives and dogged world leaders here to call attention to the failure of countries and governments to take bold action to arrest climate change.

Valenzuela told reporters at the press conference, which took place Monday, that it was outrageous to see “how the Chilean government paints its image with empty words while committing human rights violations every day. This must stop now.” She added, “we are fearless. We continue to flood the streets, even if we are risking our lives. We are really finding our future and pushing the limits of what we think is possible.”

While in Madrid on Wednesday, In These Times caught up with Valenzuela and asked her to elaborate on the connection between social unrest and climate change in Chile and respond to climate deniers in the United States, who have seized on the unrest in that South American country to spread the “fake news” that Chile’s climate policies—not climate change itself—drove up the cost of living leading to the massive street protests taking place there.

In These Times: At the press conference, you mentioned how the last 30 years of government policies had failed the Chilean people, creating the conditions that led to the street protests. Can you elaborate?

Angela Valenzuela: It’s an economic system based on social inequality. This is the same system that’s driving the ecological and climate crisis. That's the connection between the social crisis and the environmental crisis.

People are in the streets now in Chile because they are fighting for a dignified life, where basic social rights like access to education, health care, minimum wage and pension systems are provided by the state to ensure that people can develop and grow to the fullest potential, which is not the case in Chile.

And at the same time, we have 100% privatized water. This is even worse when we are facing the effects of the climate crisis. We’ve been having our worst drought for the last 10 years. And having access to water is even more difficult when water is privatized and in the hands of the corporations to exploit for mining and for the monocultural agricultural system. So we not only have to tackle the climate crisis but the very system that is driving us to climate chaos.

In These Times: In the United States, climate change deniers have seized on the protests in Chile, saying they were caused by expensive and unnecessary climate policies—not climate change itself. Earlier this month the Heartland Institute’s James Taylor penned an article claiming “climate alarmists killed their own UN conference” through “aggressive Chilean climate policies that have raised energy costs, raised transportation costs, and taken money out of Chilean household budgets.” The article has since made the rounds of an assortment of online climate denial outposts. What is your response to things like this?

Angela Valenzuela: There is a huge movement of climate deniers since the 1970s. We know that that science is saying climate change is a fact. So I’m not surprised there are these protests against the climate movement.

What would be my response to them is that they listen to the science rather than the fairytales of the system; that they take themselves out of their comfort zones and listen to science and also the basic rights of humans in the Global South to have access to a present and a future free of climate catastrophe.

In These Times: Speaking as a member of the international youth climate movement, what does the world need to do now to take action to bring down climate changing emissions? Are countries getting the job done at this UN climate meeting?

Angela Valenzuela: First the world needs to recognize that we are facing a climate emergency. It’s a climate crisis—an ecological breakdown. Once we can understand the scope of the problem, we will be able to find solutions that can address the urgency of it. As civil society, we need to strengthen our climate justice movement at the local and global levels in order to hold our leaders accountable. We are lacking the political will in order to have the changes necessary to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

We have the solutions. We know we have to cut fossil fuels and we have to transition to 100% renewable, non-conventional energy. But the world leaders don’t want to listen. Instead, they have focused their conversation on market-based mechanisms and loopholes on how to continue profiting out of the climate crisis. This is unacceptable. What is needed now is a global movement fighting to ensure we have a present and a future.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Who Pays For It?

Trump slashes food stamps, and Congress is set to vote on a $22 billion defense increase.

How Panama’s Guna People Fought Back

After 22 years of state-sponsored ethnocide, one of Panama’s largest indigenous groups took back their own heritage.

Every Christmas Commercial

Remember when the passing of time felt significant?

After Roe v. Wade, a Class Divide Between Abortion Haves and Havenots

The Supreme Court will almost certainly reverse Roe v. Wade, effectvely banning abortion on the federal level. Then it will become legal in liberal states and banned in right-wing ones. Then the class divide will reassert itself and the sturm and the drang will die down.

Bosses Are Charged with Breaking the Law in Over 40% of Union Campaigns

Labor unions are more popular than they’ve been in over 15 years. Yet a record-low number of workers belong to them. The gap between the public perception of unions and their actual membership illustrates just how difficult it’s become for workers to organize.

Yes, Trump’s Impeachment Is a Partisan Pursuit—Just As It Should Be

Turn on the news and you’ll likely hear GOP talking heads hammering on about how the impeachment inquiry into President Trump amounts to a “partisan witch hunt.” While some of Trump’s defenders may point to bipartisan support for former President Richard Nixon’s impeachment, that critique misses an important point: impeachment only serves a real function if there is a partisan split.

Without the Republican Party behind him, Trump would likely have been incapable of committing (and covering up) high crimes and misdemeanors, or the suborning of the republic. He would be as isolated as Nixon, who, unlike Trump, had no adoring party behind him to march upon the capital. If there is no partisan conflict, there is no danger. Term limits, or elections, are the tools used to oust a president who has no party behind him. It’s only when we can’t rely on elections—or indeed, be all that sure a majority of voters will defend the republic—that we need to resort to impeachment.   

The real case for impeachment is when there isn’t a bipartisan majority in Congress behind it. If impeachment is bipartisan, it’s beside the point: the republic will survive and elections or term limits will be enough to remove such a weakened president. The function of impeachment is to save the republic from a chief executive who can blow past these limits, because he has a loyal party behind him and so much of the country may well be indifferent as to whether he suborns the republic or not.

To think otherwise is to commit the error of George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley, one of the four constitutional law professors who testified before the House impeachment inquiry (and the one chosen by the GOP). Turley’s argument suggests we can only impeach a President who is willing to behave. More specifically, he argued against impeachment until there is testimony from all the “key witnesses,” namely, the palace guard of Republicans at the top of a party solidly behind Trump. It’s disingenuous to say that Republican appointees to the bench, more and more of them Trump’s own, will force these witnesses to testify. Even if these judges would enforce the subpoenas to show up, it is even more doubtful they would later override claims of executive privilege—or even get to the issue before Trump is done with a second term (should he win).

By the time the courts did enforce the testimony, if they ever did, there would be much less of a republic left to suborn. What Turley fails to grasp is that the entire Republican Party is behind Trump in flipping the bird at the Constitution and the rule of law. There is no reason Trump’s own appointees—who are all conservatives—will betray a rogue president who has the backing of his party. In effect, Turley’s argument holds that the more Trump can get away with suborning the republic, the more Congress loses the right to impeach him.

Trump is upfront with the voters: he said in 2016 that he would not accept the legitimacy of any election that he lost, promised to use his best effort to put Hillary Clinton in prison and openly called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to come to the aid of his election. And, knowing all of this, people voted for him. Given our cockeyed Electoral College system, you could argue that Trump has a “mandate” under the Constitution to suborn the Constitution. Is it proper to impeach Trump for doing what people expected him to do—namely, to subvert the election process in 2020 so that only his election can be deemed “legitimate”? And, as shown by that “perfect” call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, the prospect of losing in 2020 has already started to concentrate his mind. He has reason to believe that he has a mandate, or at least permission, from the people to undermine the republic in just the way he said he would in the 2016 campaign.

Of course, in many other countries, Trump would not even be a legitimate president since he lost the popular vote to Clinton by three million votes. He is “legitimate” only because of the Electoral College—but not otherwise under the Constitution’s own democratic norms. That makes impeachment even more defensible, for it means the Constitution, thanks to the Electoral College, includes structural bias in favor of those most likely to overthrow it: candidates like Trump who lose the popular vote and who are therefore most threatened by democratic norms.

What is the case in a democracy for removing Trump when he campaigned to commit high crimes and misdemeanors?

Well, the best case for impeachment is that the Constitution does not allow the will of the people to abandon the rule of the people. Elected leaders must follow the law, and abide by the Constitution—even the president. If they betray their responsibility and abuse their power, these leaders must face repercussions, and elections are not enough to ensure they’re removed from office. After all, most Americans didn’t vote for Trump, not just because he lost the popular vote but also because 100 million people sat the election out—nearly half of all eligible voters. The minority that supported Trump should not protect him from facing judgment under constitutional law.

So it is with impeachment: but it is a terrible judgment on the impeachers. For the impeaching party now defending the Constitution is also culpable for getting us to this state. It was the Democratic Party that lost much of its working-class base to Trump. And it’s that loss that makes Trump as dangerous as he is. Yet Trump’s impeachment would be in the interests of these very voters—because the best hope of the working class is the defense of the republic: it is always government of, by and for the people.   

Amnesty International calls Google and Facebook a threat to human rights. We believe that centralization of power in hands of #GAFAM is indeed extremely dangerous. #privacy #decentralization matter for a free society!
https://gizmodo.com/amnesty-international-google-and-facebook-are-a-threat-1839982963

First identified comet to visit our solar system from another star

Comet 2I/Borisov is a mysterious visitor from the depths of space -- the first identified comet to arrive here from another star. Hubble images capture the comet streaking though our solar system and on its way back to interstellar space. It's only the second interstellar object known to have passed through the solar system.

Deadly 'superbugs' destroyed by molecular drills

Motorized molecules activated by light target and drill through highly antibiotic resistant bacteria and kill them within minutes. The molecules can open bacteria to attack by drugs they previously resisted. The strategy could be applied to bacterial infections or diseases on the skin, in the lungs or in the gastrointestinal tract.

Pretty scary...

Ring camera hacker harasses Mississippi 8-year-old in her bedroom - The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/12/she-installed-ring-camera-her-childrens-room-peace-mind-hacker-accessed-it-harassed-her-year-old-daughter/