https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1jwxZONlsE
Wednesday, August 12, 2020
Israeli army again renews detention of BDS coordinator
Ali Abunimah Rights and Accountability 10 August 2020
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-army-again-renews-detention-bds-coordinator
An Israeli military court on Sunday extended for another eight days the detention of Mahmoud Nawajaa.
Nawajaa, the coordinator of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, was seized from his home near Ramallah by Israeli occupation forces in a night raid on 30 July.
Since then Israel has been holding him without charge or trial and is denying him access to a lawyer.
Addameer, the prisoners rights group whose lawyer is representing Nawajaa, said on Monday that it has filed a petition with Israel’s high court seeking to overturn the ban on him seeing a lawyer – which the military court extended until at least 11 August.
Previously, on 2 August, the Israeli military court extended Nawajaa’s detention for up to 15 days at the request of Israel’s Shin Bet secret police.
Prisoner of conscience
“This further extension of the illegal detention of Mahmoud by Israel’s military court system, which is notorious for its near 100 percent conviction rate of Palestinians, proves once more that only sustained international pressure, coupled with internal popular struggle, can help Palestinians achieve liberation from Israel’s apartheid and colonial system,” Stephanie Adams said on behalf of Palestine’s BDS National Committee.
The Ireland-based human rights group Front Line Defenders said on Monday that “Mahmoud Nawajaa’s family and colleagues are seriously concerned regarding his well-being as they have not heard from him since his arrest on 30 July.”
Last week, Amnesty International demanded that Israel release Nawajaa “immediately and unconditionally.”
“He has been detained solely for exercising his rights to freedom of expression and association and is therefore a prisoner of conscience,” the group added.
While the European Union stopped short of demanding Nawajaa’s release, it said that his detention inside Israel is unlawful.
“Transferring a prisoner to detention facilities outside the occupied Palestinian territories is a violation of article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention,” the bloc’s spokesperson told The Electronic Intifada.
EU dithering
It is notable that the EU statement sent directly to The Electronic Intifada came a full eight days after Nawajaa’s arrest, and after repeated requests.
No EU social media accounts have shared the statement or expressed any concern about Nawajaa’s arrest.
As Mick Wallace, a member of the European Parliament from Ireland, noted, the EU’s silence is in sharp contrast with its swift response to the arrest in Hong Kong on Monday of Jimmy Lai, the billionaire media mogul who bankrolls US-backed protesters.
Despite the EU’s recalcitrance, there are growing calls from parliamentarians, trade unions and solidarity groups for Nawajaa’s release – many using the hashtag #FreeMahmoud.
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions is urging the government of Ireland to respond to Israel’s arrest of Nawajaa, including by imposing “lawful, targeted sanctions to end Israel’s regime of oppression of the Palestinian people.”
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
‘We Get There First or White Supremacists Do’: How These Rural Canvassers Disrupt Racist Narratives
BY JORDAN GREEN
https://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/22415/peoples-action-rural-deep-canvas-trump-immigration-universal-healthcare
Alamance County, a rural industrial county in central North Carolina, has become a flashpoint in recent years for battles over immigrant rights and Confederate monuments.
The county is more than 70% white, and Donald Trump carried it easily in 2016, winning 54.6% of the vote. Sheriff Terry Johnson—whose office was sued by the U.S. Justice Department in 2012 for racial profiling—ran unopposed in 2018 to win his fifth term. Un-chastened by years of criticism, Johnson told county commissioners during a January 2019 meeting that criminal immigrants were “raping our citizens in many, many ways,” while asking them to allocate $2.8 million in federal funds to house inmates for ICE and the U.S. Marshals Service.
In short, Alamance County might seem like an unlikely place to try to build a progressive movement for multiracial solidarity and economic justice. But the stew of punitive policies and racial demagoguery was precisely why progressive organizers deemed Alamance County a crucial battleground in the wake of the 2016 election.
While the intertwined immigration and monument battles were playing out in Alamance, canvassers from Down Home North Carolina fanned out across the county, knocking on doors and holding conversations with residents about immigration and healthcare. (When Covid-19 hit the U.S. in mid-March, canvassers shifted from door knocks to phone calls.)
The canvassers were part of a research experiment launched in the spring of 2019 in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan to test whether a tool known as “deep canvassing” could disrupt anti-immigrant narratives in rural communities and shift voters to attitudes of solidarity with immigrants. Led by Assistant Professor Joshua Kalla at Yale University and Associate Professor David Broockman at UC Berkeley, the campaign was coordinated by the national advocacy organization People’s Action and conducted on the ground by the group’s member organizations—Down Home North Carolina in the Piedmont region west of Raleigh and Durham, Michigan United in Macomb County, north of Detroit, and Pennsylvania Stand Up in the lower Susquehanna River valley, west of Philadelphia. Adam Kruggel, the director of strategic initiatives at People’s Action, said the states were chosen because all have seen an uptick in anti-immigrant sentiment and white nationalist organizing and because they will be crucial battleground states in the 2020 election.
The results of the canvassing experiment were startling: Kalla and Broockman’s research found that the canvasses shifted about eight out of 100 respondents toward supporting a government program of expanded healthcare that would include undocumented immigrants, and that the results persisted for at least four and a half months. Those who shifted their opinions included both supporters and opponents of President Trump; registered Democrats, Republicans and independents; men and women. What’s more, a new report from People’s Action indicates that approval for Trump dropped by 1.2 points among respondents polled seven weeks after the canvass, even though the initial canvass did not include any questions about Trump.
Building on those promising results, People’s Action is launching what Kruggel calls a “massive” paid and volunteer campaign across six battleground states, expanding from the three pilot states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina to include Minnesota, Wisconsin and New Hampshire. The goal, Kruggel said, is to field at least 100 full-time, paid canvassers and 1,000 volunteers to complete 120,000 conversations across the six states before Election Day. People’s Action will also integrate deep canvassing into its campaigns in all of the 30 states where the group operates.
When the teams from North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania gathered to debrief in Burlington, N.C. in December 2019, they talked about what success would look like the morning after Election Day. Electing Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren as president was at the top of the list. While it’s clear that neither Sanders nor Warren will be at the top of the ballot this year, what the organizers couldn’t have predicted seven months ago is that Covid-19 and a global uprising against systemic racism would push Joe Biden to the left. And the other items on their wish list — the Democrats retaking the U.S. Senate and electing progressive candidates up and down the ballot — are looking ever more realistic.
The campaign merges deep canvassing, a technique developed about 10 years ago by Ella Barrett and Steve Deline of the New Conversation Initiative, with “the “Race-Class Narrative,” a blueprint for electoral organizing developed by law professor Ian Haney-López and communications strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio.
Deep canvassing emphasizes non-judgmentally soliciting respondents’ views and asking them to reflect on their personal experiences, while the canvasser also shares their own experiences. The Race-Class Narrative, as its name implies, insists on addressing both race and class.
“We need to specifically talk about race and class,” said Danny Timpona, an organizer with Down Home North Carolina. “The Democratic Party might talk about class or they might talk about race, but they’re not talking about both of these things and how they pull at each other. We’re specifically pointing it out. We’re naming that this is a weapon that is economically harming us, and that the alternative, the antidote, is multiracial solidarity.”
In contrast to conventional voter mobilization programs, which often rely on reductive messaging, deep canvassing allows more room for nuance and ambiguity.
“What we find with the majority of voters is they’re conflicted,” Kruggel said. “People carry all these contradictory beliefs. Often times, it’s more a matter of what is rising to the surface than a conflict in shared values. Deep canvassing helps slow people down. When you communicate, you create nonjudgmental space and lead with listening. You communicate through stories. It’s an effective way to de-polarize, to a certain extent.”
Rural areas have steadily trended more conservative and Republican over the past two decades. But since 2018 People’s Action has marked a promising shift in rural areas, with single white women and young white voters in particular moving towards the Democratic Party. And regardless of whether or not the deep canvassing campaign in the six battleground states helps defeat Trump in November, organizers argue that progressives need to make a long-term investment in rural America.
Trying to change the minds of conservative rural voters might sound like an uphill battle, but, as Down Home North Carolina campaigners are quick to point out, the alternative is far worse.
On the ground
In early December 2019, Sugelema Lynch, a former teacher, and Laura Marie Davis, another canvasser with Down Home North Carolina, set out for the Birch Bridge area, north of Burlington.
Knocking on the first door, she found an EMT with Alamance County Emergency Medical Services at home on lunch break. Mildly friendly and perhaps a little curious, he agreed to take the survey. Lynch first asked the man, who was white, to rate himself on a scale of 0 to 10 on his support for universal healthcare. He rated himself a 0.
“I don’t think we need any more government handouts,” the man said.
“Thank you for sharing that,” Lynch responded. “No, a lot of people feel the way you do. I’m a little more favorable to it.”
Unsurprisingly, the man also rated himself a 0 on universal healthcare that would include undocumented immigrants.
“I’m all for build the wall,” he said, quickly volunteering that he supports President Trump.
Lynch asked him to talk about his personal experiences with undocumented immigrants. The man said he used to own a landscaping business, and that his undocumented employees “would come on strong” but after payday they wouldn’t want to come to work because they were hung over. He also said he believes undocumented immigrants want to take advantage of government programs. But when Lynch asked for an example, he backtracked and said it wasn’t just undocumented people. He said he had worked since he was 18 years old, and people should work for what they have instead of asking for handouts.
Lynch took the opportunity to tell her own family’s story. Her parents came to the United States from Mexico as undocumented immigrants in the 1970s. She said her parents didn’t have a lot of education and most of their work experience was in agriculture. They landed in the Pacific Northwest. Since they moved every three months to follow harvests, Lynch said, her parents didn’t sign up for government assistance programs.
At the conclusion, Lynch asked the man if anything in the conversation had changed his views on either universal healthcare or universal healthcare that included undocumented immigrants. Not at all, he said.
As she walked along the gravel shoulder of the road toward the next house, Lynch reflected on the conversation.
“Sharing the humanity, maybe he’ll start thinking about undocumented immigrants differently,” she said. “I’m hoping I can make a lasting impression through telling my family’s story.”
Other respondents were already in sync with Down Home’s agenda, or proved to be persuadable.
An elderly white woman who was walking her dog to the mailbox readily agreed that universal healthcare should be extended to undocumented immigrants.
“I feel like you ought to help all that can’t help themselves,” she said.
Another neighbor, an elderly white man, told Davis that he supported universal healthcare and that he thought the government ought to make it easier for people to come to the United States legally, but said he wasn’t in favor of including undocumented immigrants in universal healthcare because, in his view, they don’t pay into the system.
Davis told the man that, in fact, undocumented people do pay taxes, even though they don’t receive Social Security.
The man re-evaluated his position.
“If they’re paying taxes, they ought to benefit,” he said.
A former school-bus driver, he and his wife had faced personal bankruptcy, he said. They had to sell their house, buy a single-wide trailer and then rent land to put the trailer on. He expressed sympathy for people who face medical-related financial challenges.
“I’m diabetic, so I’m walking on eggshells myself,” he said. “Everything is going up except my pay.”
‘Either we get there first or the white supremacists do’
Alamance County is a place where racial antagonism, historical and contemporary, is plainly visible. A month after Dylann Roof massacred nine African-American parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., about 4,000 people rallied to defend the Confederate monument in front of the Old Alamance County Courthouse.
In October 2019, only five blocks away from that courthouse, I observed Jessica Reavis, a Virginia-based organizer with the League of the South—a group that advocates the creation of a white ethno-state in the states of the former Confederacy—stoke the grievances of a group of conservative, white bystanders jeering a march for immigrant rights. As recently as last weekend, Reavis and two other League of the South members from Virginia joined counter-protesters to respond to a Black Lives Matter protest that called for the removal of the Confederate monument.
“They can have pride in who they are, but when we are proud to be white, we’re racists and Nazis,” Reavis complained during the October 2019 standoff. “We’re trying to protect our people. We have a right to preserve our people.”
Nearby, local resident Sharon Moon echoed Reavis’ sentiments in an interview with an alt-right YouTube personality.
“The problem is that you’ve got these white folks over here that believe in white privilege, that they’re being like, white privilege! We have white privilege!” Moon said, referring to the immigrant-rights protesters. “But the truth is that Mexicans and illegal immigrants have privilege.
“Look at this,” she continued, gesturing toward a strand of yellow police tape. “We’re stuck behind here; they’re over there speaking and blocking off the streets and not being arrested. That’s privilege.”
After the protest wound down, I caught up with Moon, away from Reavis and the other hecklers, and she shared with me that a friend and co-worker had joined the immigrant-rights protesters on the other side of the police line. Sharon and her husband, David, who works in construction, also acknowledged that they had half-seriously discussed whether they should harbor the co-worker’s parents in their attic to help them evade ICE.
When I mentioned my encounter with Moon to Down Home North Carolina organizer Danny Timpona a week later, he said it was an example of both the fluidity of people’s positions on immigration and the high stakes if progressives fail to engage with rural voters.
“We believe that organizing in rural spaces with progressive, multiracial solidarity messaging is the future,” he said. “Either we get there first or white supremacists get there first.
From Tractors to Phones, Companies Don’t Want You to Repair Stuff. Appalachians Are Fighting Back
BY CAROLINA NORMAN
https://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/22684/right-to-repair-movement-appalachian-john-deere-nikon-disposable-culture
Replacing your phone screen, turning the rotors on your car and fixing the shutter on your camera – for many people, it is hard to imagine that you could not be allowed to fix the things you own. But this is exactly what a lot of companies want: to prevent public access to the information and parts to make repairs.
Making it harder to fix items influences consumers to throw away everything from smartphones and televisions to dishwashers and tractors. But there is a nationwide mobilization to disrupt this linear, disposable system. In addition to promoting legislation that allows consumers the ability to repair their own devices, the right-to-repair movement is focused on defending the things we own against obsolescence. These efforts include several community groups focused on helping people repair their items as well as transform their relationship with their belongings into one that does not end with the landfill.
Repair Communities
One of these groups is the Repair Hub in Boone, N.C. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Repair Hub community hosted events each month where members of the public could bring items to volunteers who helped repair them for an optional donation. Andy Groothuis, who founded the Repair Hub in 2019, says the repair process involves aspects of reducing and reusing which, he says, “are two sides [of the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ waste hierarchy] that are usually, I find, overlooked.”
Groothuis states that when people have broken items, they either dump them in a drawer with the intention of fixing it “one day,” or, more often than not, he says, “they are going to throw them out, and that item probably could have been used.”
Similarly, the Cville TimeBank Repair Café in Charlottesville, Va., which started in 2015, hosts public events twice a year where participants can bring up to three items to be repaired for free. The president of the Repair Cafe, Kathy Kildea, says Repair Café is a community tool that gives people access to skills such as electrical work and sewing that they may not have the resources to access on their own.
Kildea says the project is about “utilizing those skills you have at your doorstep.”
One of the focuses of the Cville TimeBank Repair Cafe is education. People bringing in items are encouraged to sit with the “fixers” and watch repairs as they take place. There is also a “kids’ take-apart table,” where kids get to explore the inner-workings of items. These interactions foster curiosity and enable people to fix future goods that may break.
“If you think any repair is beyond your means or beyond your ability, you’re kind of sunk,” Kildea says. “But if you come at it from the point of, ‘Well, there’s just a piece in here that’s not functioning properly, I just need to figure out which one it is.’ Fostering that sense of curiosity is important not just for the kid, but for any customer that comes in with something they want to get fixed.”
Kildea discusses how customers often lament that when an item they bought inevitably breaks, they feel like their only options are to throw it away and buy a new one. Kildea says that most people are not happy about these options, but are not aware of any alternative.
“I think [Repair Café] reinforces that you may not know how to fix it, but there are people in the community that probably could. It’s a matter of getting them in the same place to work on those fixes,” she says.
Many of the items these two communities see tend to hold sentimental value — especially jewelry.
A Repair Hub volunteer in the jewelry department, Kim Miller, has been repairing and making jewelry for 15 years. She says that it is satisfying to see these cherished items repaired so they are able to “get passed along again.”
Miller also spoke of the volunteers’ efforts to keep the operation going.
“That’s pretty neat, too, to see people that interested and more than willing to offer their time to help keep things out of the dump,” she says.
For many people in Appalachia, repairing is second nature. Whether it is out of necessity or enjoyment of things like mechanical work and quilting, self-sufficiency has been a longtime practice. Ben Hollman is one of these fixers. A native of Todd, N.C., and a retired mechanic with the North Carolina Department of Transportation, Hollman raises cattle, harvests hay, plows gardens, and works on farm equipment.
Hollman speaks of his various projects, saying “I just like doing that kind of stuff, and we’ve always kept cows. We had to get people to do our hay for us years ago, then I started getting my own equipment and started doing it myself.”
He grew up with a lot of knowledge of how things are done around the farm and his father taught him how to do mechanical work. Hollman mostly repairs his own equipment, but neighbors know to call him if they need help with their gear.
“If I can and I’ve got the time, when something breaks I usually try to give [my neighbors] a helping hand,” Hollman says. “And I do go to their houses and change oil in their tractors for them to keep them going.”
With equipment becoming more computerized, Hollman says repairs have become more difficult to perform.
“That’s the reason I keep older model tractors,” he says. “I can work on them.”
Fair Repair Bills
Legislation known as “fair repair bills” aims to protect consumer rights by requiring manufacturers to provide customers and independent repair businesses with access to service information and affordable parts. At the federal level, this type of legislation only currently exists for cars, which is why you have the choice between taking your car to the dealership, your local mechanic or fixing it yourself when something goes wrong.
But the repair movement is bringing repair-focused legislation to the state level. In 2019, this type of legislation was introduced in 20 states. In West Virginia, an automotive repair bill was introduced in 2019 but did not move out of committee. Virginia legislators introduced a bill in 2020 dealing with the repair of digital devices that also failed to progress past committee.
These types of legislative proposals aim to release consumers from the corporate grip and provide affordable options to enable people to repair their goods. When companies intentionally design products with a limited expected lifespan and neglect to provide consumers the resources to repair their goods, a practice called “planned obsolescence,” consumers are forced to buy new items when the product fails.
Companies like John Deere and Nikon have taken measures to make it more difficult for people to repair their products. In 2012, Nikon decided to stop selling genuine parts to third-party repair shops. In March 2020, Nikon discontinued supplying parts to the few remaining authorized repair shops, restricting customers to sending their broken equipment to one of Nikon’s two repair facilities.
“The repair industry is facing unique challenges,” Kyle Wiens, CEO of online repair forum iFixit, states on the group’s website. “Integrated electronics are making it harder to fix things. And manufacturers keep restricting access to service documentation, parts, and software — which forces consumers into more expensive ‘manufacturer-authorized’ repairs and drives small repair shops out of business.”
In 2016, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries adopted a “Right to Reuse” position in support of recyclers’ ability to reuse products. The position stated, “Reuse provides an excellent environmental and economic benefit. Despite these benefits, product manufacturers limit the ability of recyclers to legitimately reuse products; for example, by limiting parts and parts information, manuals and utilizing digital locks that impede a product’s reuse.”
When something is tossed instead of repaired, it ends up in the landfill earlier than it might have otherwise. The United Nations estimates that 50 million tons of electronic waste are generated each year. This issue is amplified as many electronics have gotten more computerized, making it increasingly difficult for consumers to maintain products rather than buy new.
Repair communities are providing education and repair assistance for consumers who may not see options beyond disposal. Community provides a sense of empowerment that pushes consumers to reject planned obsolescence and move towards sustainability, affordability and self-sufficiency.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)