‘LET THE WORLD REMEMBER HOW WE LOST PALESTINE’

By Quds N.

November 2, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/let-the-world-remember-how-we-lost-palestine/



The 103rd Anniversary Of Balfour Declaration.

Occupied Palestine – Today, Palestinians and human rights advocates around the world are marking 103 years since the Balfour Declaration was issued on November 2, 1917.

Using the hashtag #Balfour103, Palestinian and pro-Palestine activists have called to participate in a campaign they launched to commemorate the 103rd anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, rejecting the ominous promise.

The Balfour Declaration was issued by Britain when Arthur James Balfour, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, sent a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, one of the leaders of the World Zionist movement, indicating the British government’s support for the establishment of a “national homeland for Jews” in Palestine.

It is simply the promise of “he who does not own, to he who does not deserve”, according to activists. The Balfour Declaration promised the Zionist movement to grant it Palestine where the natives made up more than 90 percent of the population while Jewish immigrants constituted less than 10 percent of the population at that time.

Upon the start of the British mandate, Britain began to facilitate the immigration of European Jews to Palestine. Between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population rose from 9 percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population.

HOW MAHER AL-AKHRAS IS RESISTING ISRAEL’S ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION

By Neve Gordon, Middle East Eye.

November 2, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/how-maher-al-akhras-is-resisting-israels-administrative-detention/



Refusing To Eat.

The Palestinian father of six has spent months on hunger strike to oppose administrative detention and, by extension, the colonial regime that enforces it.




Facing imminent death, 49-year-old Maher al-Akhras has been refusing to eat in prison for more than three months. The Palestinian father of six has been protesting his repeated arbitrary arrests; he is currently in administrative detention, without charge or trial.

Like many hunger strikers before him, Akhras does not seek death, although he is evidently prepared to die. The hunger strike is his way of refusing to become a modern-day Sisyphus, completing one administrative detention only to begin another. Reclaiming his body from the hands of Israeli authorities, he now wields his own life as a card to make a straightforward and just demand: Put me on trial or release me.

This demand is personal, but also deeply political. By asserting the cruelty and unfairness of administrative detention, Akhras gives voice to more than 350 Palestinians, including two minors, currently being held in Israeli prisons without charge or trial.

The irony is that Akhras and others share their animus towards administrative detention with at least one late influential Zionist leader. Not long after the state of Israel was established, Menachem Begin, years before he became prime minister, expressed concern that the Israeli government had adopted the British colonial practice of administrative detention within its own legal system.

“Does a bad law become a good one just because Jews apply it?” he queried in a 1951 Knesset committee discussion. “I say that this law is bad from its very foundation and does not become good because it is practiced by Jews … We oppose administrative detention in principle. There is no place for such detention.”

While Begin rejected administrative detention when he sat in the opposition, he did not follow through on his objections after becoming prime minister.

The use of administrative detention from 1948 until today is perhaps not surprising, but it is telling, dispelling the notion of a liberal Israel that was polluted only after the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. It underscores that due process for Palestinians was never on the table; from the beginning, Palestinians could not trust the legal apparatus.
Arsenal Of Resistance

Israel, in other words, had dramatically restricted the repositories of nonviolent Palestinian opposition – a fundamental, yet often overlooked, point when thinking of Palestinian resistance.

In prison, the arsenal of resistance is particularly limited, leaving inmates with very few options. Akhras has chosen one of the few methods of protest at his disposal – perhaps the most extreme. And he is by no means alone.

In his forthcoming book, Refusing to Eat, Nayan Shah, a historian at the University of Southern California, chronicles a century of hunger strikes, revealing how a profound commitment to social justice has motivated almost all of them. He explores suffragists pushing for women’s right to vote, Irish liberation fighters demanding independence, Indian activists aiming to end British colonial rule, Japanese Americans protesting their internment in camps during WWII, South Africans struggling against apartheid, and prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay.

Although every hunger strike is different, Shah points to a recurring dynamic: prisoners refuse to eat because they are treated as less than human, while prison authorities then reassert their power by force-feeding them or rejecting their demands. Over time, the strikers’ bodies weaken until, ultimately, some die. The struggle becomes a test of who will outlast whom.
Existential Commitment

It has become clear that Akhras will not back down. He has taken control of his body to resist administrative detention and, by extension, the colonial regime that deploys this form of imprisonment. He has, in the words of political theorist Banu Bargu, who studied hunger strikes in Turkish prisons, “weaponised his own life”, where his own self-destruction becomes a form of political resistance.

Ultimately, Akhras is refusing to live a life where he is repeatedly placed in administrative detention. This refusal constitutes an existential commitment to a different kind of life with a different political horizon. Israel realises this, and it appears set to make him pay with his life.

TRUMP FCC TURNED THE INTERNET INTO A ‘WILD WEST’ FOR THE TELECOMS

https://popularresistance.org/trump-fcc-turned-the-internet-into-a-wild-west-for-the-telecoms/



By Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG.

November 2, 2020
| PODCAST



Five years ago, the movement for internet freedom won an important victory when the Federal Communications Commission reclassified the internet as a common carrier, making it like a utility that everyone should have equal access to without discrimination. That was quickly reversed in 2017 under the new chair of the FCC, Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, who deregulated the internet giving the government no authority to oversee the internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T. I speak with Josh Stager of the Open Technology Institute about the ongoing fight to protect the internet and what we need to do next.

Listen here:
Subscribe to our show on iTunes, SoundCloud, MixCloud or Stitcher.

Review us on iTunes! Click here … Then click on “View in iTunes … Then click “Ratings and Reviews.”

Guest:

Joshua Stager is the senior policy counsel and government affairs lead at the Open Technology Institute. He specializes in telecommunications law and policy, including OTI’s efforts to protect net neutrality and promote broadband competition.

Prior to New America, Stager was Sen. Al Franken’s law fellow on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he focused on antitrust, consumer privacy, and surveillance law. He was previously a law clerk at the Department of Justice, a legislative aide in the House of Representatives, and an assistant editor at Congressional Quarterly.

Stager earned a J.D. from New York University and a B.A. in political communication and geography from George Washington University.

Republicans, Not Biden, Are About to Raise Your Taxes

Buried in Trump's 2017 Tax Cut Act are automatic tax increases every two years from 2021 to 2027. All taxpayers with incomes of $75,000 and under (about 65 percent of taxpayers) will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019. Elections matter.




November 2, 2020 Joseph E. Stiglitz NEW YORK TIMES




https://portside.org/2020-11-02/republicans-not-biden-are-about-raise-your-taxes




The Trump administration has a dirty little secret: It’s not just planning to increase taxes on most Americans. The increase has already been signed, sealed and delivered, buried in the pages of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.

For most, in fact, it’s a delayed tax increase dressed up as a tax cut. How many times have you heard Trump and his allies mention that? They surmised — correctly, so far — that if they waited to add the tax increases until after the 2020 election, few of the people most affected were likely to remember who was responsible.

Looking at the analyses of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation at the time the December 2017 tax bill was enacted, we see very clearly how different income groups are affected by the Trump tax plan. And it’s disturbing.The current poverty line for a family of four is $26,200: People with incomes between $10,000 and $30,000 — nearly one-quarter of Americans — are among those scheduled to pay a higher average tax rate in 2021 than in years before the tax “cut” was passed. The C.B.O. and Joint Committee estimated that those with an income of $20,000 to $30,000 would owe an extra $365 next year — these are people who are struggling just to pay rent and put food on the table.

Of course, the poor have never mattered much to the Republican Party, but those on the edge of poverty have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic and the recession it has caused, so Trump’s planned tax increases seem especially heartless, and impractical, when you consider that their higher tax payments, while a huge burden for them, will add little to the budget.

By 2027, when the law’s provisions are set to be fully enacted, with the stealth tax increases complete, the country will be neatly divided into two groups: Those making over $100,000 will on average get a tax cut. Those earning under $100,000 — an income bracket encompassing three-quarters of taxpayers — will not.

At the same time, Trump has given his peers, people with annual incomes in excess of $1 million dollars, or the top 0.3 percent in the country, a huge gift: The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the average tax rate in 2019 for this group to be 2.3 percentage points lower than before the tax cut, saving the average taxpayer in this group over $64,000 — more than the average American family makes in a year.

The tax loss and benefit estimates just described were calculated before the pandemic. Now, incomes for almost everyone but top earners have taken a hit, so the loser group will likely be considerably larger than anticipated; and with people like Jeff Bezos, the billionaire chief executive of Amazon, doing even better than expected, Trump’s gift to him is even bigger.

This analysis makes clear that the vast majority of Americans will be better off with the likely tax reforms that will emerge from a Biden administration than they would be by sticking with Mr. Trump’s ill-conceived tax bill. You might well ask: Why didn’t Mr. Trump just give everyone a tax cut? The Republicans — who suddenly lost their grasp on their self-described fiscal conservatism when they came into office in 2017 — saw a chance to give their rich friends and corporations a big thank you for campaign contributions. But the tax cuts they promised these donors produced projections that the resulting budget deficits were well beyond $1 trillion.

To reduce that stomach-churning amount, they had to phase-in higher taxes on ordinary Americans. While this kind of budget gimmickry has been used before under President George W. Bush’s administration, Mr. Trump carried it to a new level.

The Republicans have one more feeble defense: their old friend trickle-down economics. The tax cut to the corporations would, they promised, trickle-down to citizens at the bottom of the income ladder. We’ve now seen how that hasn’t happened. In fact the money gushed up to those at the very top in the form of stockholder dividends, chief executive bonuses and a record level of stock buybacks (nearly $1 trillion in 2018 alone.)

Some economic models predicted the Trump tax law would lead to significantly higher wages because of more investment and higher growth. But projections showed that when the 2017 bill’s temporary tax cuts changed to tax increases, growth would likely slow significantly and wage increases would be anemic. And those calculations were made before the pandemic hit.

Mark Zandi and Bernard Yaros of Moody’s Analytics have done the most credible and thorough analysis comparing the Biden and Trump plans, including Mr. Trump’s stealth increases and other promised tax and expenditure changes. Mr. Biden’s plan wins by an enormous margin: 7.4 million more jobs and a much quicker recovery from this recession. That means higher wages and incomes for most Americans.

Elections matter. Elections gave Republicans the power to enact these tax shenanigans. Neither conscience nor principles stopped them.

The problem now is that unless the Democrats win a majority in the House and the Senate and clinch the presidency, these Republican tax increases, already legislated, are likely to go into effect. The increases, unfairly aimed at the vast majority of Americans who are disproportionately suffering in the pandemic, will cause even more hardship.

They must be stopped.

Movements Mobilize To Interrupt a Coup

Three things are key: engaging as many people as possible in demonstrations and non-cooperation; asserting that we are the true defenders of democracy; and committing to strategic nonviolence.




November 2, 2020 Marcy Rein ORGANIZING UPGRADE




https://portside.org/2020-11-02/movements-mobilize-interrupt-coup




In this year of plague and evictions, of fires, floods, and hurricanes intensified by climate change, sober analysts and activists see a new peril: a real possibility that President Trump will refuse to accept the results or leave office if he loses the election. “I never thought I’d be organizing to stop a coup, in this country at least,” said Kimi Lee of Bay Resistance.

The threat stems partly from Trump’s weakness: polls slipping, cash dwindling, allies deserting. “A dying mule always kicks hardest,” as the Poor People’s Campaign says. But the white supremacist agenda Trump enacts is as strong as he is weak. It’s showing up in escalated levels of voter suppression, in Trump-led efforts to undermine the election with trash talk and lawsuits, in backlash to this year’s historic racial justice uprisings.

But these outpourings mobilized energy and shifted perspectives in ways that can feed resistance to attempts to bolster minority rule. “Like we saw a few months ago with the uprisings, there is still a core of people in this country who, when they witness governmental overreach, will respond and align with our side,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party.

All over the country, people are preparing to do just that. They are getting out the vote and voting. Preparing to protect polling places and demand that every vote be counted. Preparing to act if anyone attempts to overthrow the voters’ will. In planning sessions and trainings, they are grappling with the new strategies the moment demands: claiming the center, mobilizing in unprecedented numbers, and committing to strategic nonviolence.
SAY IT: ATTEMPTED COUP

“In the popular imagination, when most people think of a coup they think of a militarized moment when the military tries to overturn election results,” said Joshua Kahn Russell of Choose Democracy. “That’s not the situation we’re facing and that’s not how coups always happen. In many cases they can look like an abuse of courts or of the legislative process.”

President Trump’s smears on the election process are just one part of a right-wing power grab. The GOP has been fabricating allegations of voter fraud for two decades as cover for voter suppression. Their power grab has also involved gerrymandering to create unrepresentative state legislatures and congressional districts; ramming through judicial appointments, most recently Amy Coney Barrett’s; and stopping the census, so some people of color and poor people literally won’t count.

“The particular ways in which the threats to the election are being rolled out are consistent with Trump and the GOP’s overall strategy for maintaining power by building a cross-class alliance of white people as their base, keeping white supremacy as a tool for keeping poor and working class white people from joining black working class people and other people of color,” said Erin Heaney, director of Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ). It shows up in the way Trump uses issues, and in his “consistent and escalated reliance on alliances with white supremacist organizations,” Heaney said.
A SPIRITED OFFENSE: GOTV

“If we can win by a landslide, it will be harder for Trump to contest the election,” Kimi Lee said. Seed the Vote has exploded from fewer than 100 volunteers to more than 5,000 working towards a common goal with tens of thousands of others across the country.

Voters themselves are doing their part. Early voting numbers are cracking records all over, despite the hours-long lines in many places and various forms of intimidation.
VOTER INTIMIDATION

The U.S. history of violent attacks on Black people voting started with Reconstruction and continued through the murders of civil rights workers in the 1960s. Wilmington, North Carolina saw a white vigilante coup against a newly elected bi-racial government in 1898. As many as 250 Black people were killed and more than 100 Black elected officials and administrators were forced out of office. This year, echoes of those days are louder.

“Voter intimidation has a different tone and tenor than it has had before,” said Ría Thompson-Washington of the Center for Popular Democracy. “The current president has advised and encouraged his supporters to engage in and enact violence against voters.”

Already a ballot drop box has been torched in a majority Latino suburb of Los Angeles; the incident is being investigated as arson. An anti-mask rally in Colorado partly blocked early voters trying to enter a Colorado courthouse; the group that called the rally has militia ties. In Michigan, where militia plotted to kidnap the governor, a judge overturned the Secretary of State’s ban on open carry of weapons at the polls. Minnesota’s attorney general is investigating an out-of-state security firm that advertised for poll watchers with military experience.
PROTECTING VOTERS AT THE POLLS

In response to the threats, many non-partisan programs are gearing up to make sure that voting is safe and fair. The Election Protection project monitors voting rights issues inside polling places and runs the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline, a go-to resource on election rules and rights.

Several groups are tending to voter care outside the polling places. Among them are CPD Action, SURJ, and The Frontline, which is anchored by the Working Families Party and the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice Project.

The Frontline has enlisted 12,000 “Election Defenders” in all 50 states. “We serve all voters,” said Working Families’ Nelini Stamp. “We want to hand out masks, hand sanitizer, water, and in some cold states, hand warmers, and tell them to pay no mind to the angry people shouting. We will encourage people and thank them for voting. Yes, they may try to intimidate us. Yes, they try to bait us with fear. But with our joy, with our resistance, we will be there for our people,” she said. The Election Defenders are partnering with grassroot groups and networks in many states.

Given the potential for nastiness at the polls, election defense groups are doing in-depth de-escalation trainings – and emphasizing the importance of not involving the police.

“I don’t think having any sort of police even close to a polling location would be beneficial for our communities.,” said Alma Pérez Camarillo, Civic Engagement Organizer for the Arizona Center For Empowerment, which is working with CPD’s Voter Guardian program. “We see how police have taken advantage of their power to create a hostile environment,” said Pérez Camarillo. “I’ve seen police officers pull up into voting locations to check people’s plates and see if they have tickets. People voted in 2018 and got a ticket.”
NO CLEAR RESULTS ON ELECTION NIGHT

The surge of mail-in ballots will make it impossible to get clear results on Election Night. Some states start tabulating as soon as ballots are received. Three battleground states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan) can’t start counting until Election Day. Some states will count ballots postmarked on Election Day but received as much as ten days later.

The fight for the story will begin immediately. Media feeds on election-night drama and people have been conditioned to expect instant results. Trump will play to that expectation.

“Trump will be trying to claim victory, or challenge the legitimacy of the results, or both. Quickly establishing a counter narrative premised on the need to count every vote and have a peaceful transition of power will be essential to shape how the public and key powerholders view the ‘facts’ and how powerholders weigh the consequences and risks of action or inaction,” Protect the Results advised its more than 100 partner organizations.
COUNT EVERY VOTE

Protect the Results is coordinating mass mobilizations Nov. 4, the day after the election, to demand that every vote be counted. Events keep popping up on its interactive map—458 as of Oct. 30, in small towns and big cities and huge urban centers.

Indivisible and Stand Up America convened the coalition, which links groups ranging from Republicans for the Rule of Law to the Working Families Party. It includes two unions (Communications Workers of America and the Service Employees International Union); grassroots organizing networks including People’s Action and the Center for Popular Democracy: environmental groups from Friends of the Earth Action to Extinction Rebellion; civil rights and good government groups; SURJ and the Women’s March. Partners must commit to peaceful protest. The coalition offers training for groups who may be new to planning public events. It plans to continue its work throughout the first critical week after the election, and as long as necessary – because, important as Nov. 4 is, it is one point on a timeline that started before the election and could continue into January.

SURJ, for one, began organizing before the election to be sure that every vote counts, and plans to continue during and after. Its Election Defender teams had activated in 38 states as of mid-October. Working in coordination with local grassroots groups, they put particular emphasis on outreach to the county election officials who oversee the ballot counting. In October they began calling and emailing those officials in Ohio, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Georgia, asking them to pledge to count all the votes.

The Frontline will hold a mass call Nov. 4 at 8pm ET to assess next steps. It’s asking Election Defenders to be ready to offer the same sort of care and de-escalation at county offices as at the polls. As recently as 2000, a mob made up mostly of white men in suits stormed into the Miami-Dade County elections offices in the “Brooks Brothers Riot.” They forced the Florida recount to stop, the Supreme Court stepped in, and George W. Bush was selected over Al Gore.

Three current Supreme Court Justices- Chief Justice John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett- assisted the Bush legal team in Bush v. Gore. With more than three hundred lawsuits over election rules and rights in play, this does not bode well.
WHAT ELSE COULD GO WRONG?

The Electoral College, undemocratic in its origins, opens further possibilities for thwarting the voters’ will. The Constitutional Convention devised the College as a compromise to address some delegates’ fears of giving the people too much power, and Southern delegates’ fears of losing influence. “Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region [the South] would have less clout under a popular-vote system,” the Brennan Center’s Wilfred Codrington III wrote.

States name their electors, who will vote for president at the Electoral College meeting Dec. 14. Normally electors respect the popular vote. This year, it is possible that they will not. The GOP is considering asking state legislatures in battleground states where it holds a majority to bypass the popular vote. The new Congress will count the Electoral College votes Jan. 6. Normally this is routine. This year it may not be.

Much scenario planning has been done on what could go wrong, notably by the bi-partisan Transition Integrity Project. Activists and organizations with history and practice in nonviolent direct action have stepped up to offer guidance on dealing with escalated threats to democracy. They suggest that three things are key: engaging as many people as possible in demonstrations and non-cooperation; asserting that we are the true defenders of democracy; and committing to strategic nonviolence.
CLAIM THE CENTER, BRING OUT PEOPLE POWER

“Primarily what we’re entering into is a contest around legitimacy. To delegitimize the Trump administration in the event that a power grab happens, we need to be creating as broad-based an alliance as possible,” Choose Democracy’s Joshua Kahn Russell said. “This is a Big Tent, popular front strategy.” For many left and social justice activists, this is a distinct shift. It requires us to claim the center and defend the imperfect system we so often critique. But it is rooted in lessons from coups past.

“We’re in a unique movement moment that can draw on many lessons from our own experience,” George Lakey said at an online training offered by Choose Democracy. Lakey – who has been doing nonviolence training since Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964—sketched a few quick examples. In Argentina in 1987, mass mobilizations and a general strike kept a mutiny by disgruntled military officers from turning into a coup. In Thailand in 1992, 41 days of resistance by hundreds of thousands of people brought down the military junta that had taken power the year before. “Ten Things You Need to Know to Stop a Coup” distills some of those lessons and applies them to the moment.

Choose Democracy is a multi-racial, intergenerational group of activists with direct action experience from different movements, including labor, climate justice, and racial and economic justice. Its online pledge to defend democracy has gathered more than 36,000 signatures. Several other groups also offer resources, training, and networking. Among them: Hold the Line, with its “Commitment to Uphold Democracy” pledge; Shut Down DC, and The Disruption Project, with its “Stopping the Coup: The 2020 Guide.”
STRATEGIC NONVIOLENCE

Nonviolent discipline will be crucial in this moment where the narrative of violence is weaponized by the perpetrators.

“The right wing and the fascists are waiting for us to do anything that will play into their handbook,” Nelini Stamp said. “It’s important as people plan actions that we plan the tone, and think about what they’re already going to roll out on us. There must be conversations about strategic nonviolence. It’s about strategy, not about principle.”

At the same time, the moment demands mindfulness. “In our anxiety about this moment we may find fault and accuse those who are with us but whom we disagree with. That is human. But what will make it possible for us to win and to reclaim legacies of turning the tide towards liberation and humanity is our ability to bring the greatest number of people with us in that pursuit,” said Sara Kershnar, interim executive director of the San Francisco Branch of the National Lawyers Guild.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Leaders of an online training offered by Bay Resistance encouraged attendees to note their emotional states and recognize that those have a material impact. This moment is “an emotional rollercoaster. We’re frozen and gutted one moment, thrilled and exhilarated and inspired and empowered the next,” one trainer said. Demoralization can be deadly, she said, but “I don’t mean we should all be Ms. Toxic Positivity. But instead of saying, ‘something’s on fire, we’re all going to burn to death,’ say ‘something’s on fire, let’s get the water right now’.” Like labor organizers preparing people at a non-union workplace for typical employer tricks, she said, “We can prepare for what could go wrong with us, and talk about it.”
#COUNT ON US

At the end of each training, the next step is the same: find your people, find a network, stay alert. And new networks keep sprouting as we hurtle towards the election. Union activists have formed Labor Action to Defend Democracy. Four of largest millennial and Gen Z movement organizations—Dream Defenders Fight PAC, United We Dream Action PAC, March for Our Lives (Parkland), and the Sunrise Movement have formed a network. They call themselves “We Count On Us.” They chose the name to affirm their commitment as a generation—their commitment to beating Trump, leading a nonviolent strike, mobilizing behind their policy demands from day one of a new administration. The same sentiment could apply to everyone taking action in this moment.

“We are going to be here for each other,” the Bay Resistance trainers said. “We affirm what we are doing and why it matters. It is too important to give up. It doesn’t matter if it’s not easy, we will do it because we have to.”

Three Tough Laps To Change The Balance Of Power

Strategy and hard work can accomplish two essential objectives: win victories that deliver substantial immediate benefits to all affected by today’s interlocking health, economic and racial crises and do so in ways that shift power our way.




November 2, 2020 Max Elbaum ORGANIZING UPGRADE




https://portside.org/2020-11-02/three-tough-laps-change-balance-power




Partisans of social justice are nearing the end of a very tough lap on the long march to a different world. Even if we succeed in achieving a best-case vote November 3, the next two laps – protecting the electoral victory and then winning substantial changes under a new administration – are likely to be even tougher.

The October 24 installment of “Weekend Reading” – the regular bulletin written by Michael Podhorzer, political director of the AFL-CIO – explains why:

“I fear that when we succeed in our immediate task, electing Joe Biden, we seem all too ready to make the same mistake we made in January 2009 – believing that the worst is now behind us. We will again believe that Democratic politicians can solve our problems if only we “hold them accountable.” The lessons of the early Obama years are seen to be tactical and correctable; this time, we’ll end the filibuster and do big things fast.

“This is delusional.

“Our collective de facto tolerance for racism, capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy excused by the pretense that we have no choice but to abide a Constitution that favors supremacists, capitalists, imperialists and patriarchs makes confidence that “this” will not happen again insupportable.

“There can be no real progress unless we change the balance of power.”

Bullseye.
HOW MUCH CAN THE BALLOT YIELD?

Making our measuring stick shifting power means that beating Trump at the ballot box is our bottom line imperative for November 3. If the anti-Trump majority accomplishes that, it will translate into a measure of harm reduction for millions and expanded breathing room for radical movements. Those are essential. A second Trump term would block any possibility of progress.

But much more than the presidential race will gauge the strength of the forces opposed not just to Trump but to the whole Trumpist agenda. A host of other races will also affect the post-2020 terrain for social movements and the left.

Will Trump lose in a landslide? Can a “blue wave” end GOP control of the Senate and at least five to eight state governments? Will the way-beyond-2016 electoral efforts by progressives succeed in expanding the Squad and electing a large contingent of Squad-like candidates at other levels of government?

Democratic control of the Senate as well as the White House would mean far better prospects for progressive legislation. It would open possibilities for breaking the grip of the now 6-3 right-wing majority on the (illegitimate) Supreme Court.

That’s why McConnell and a large cohort of big GOP donors decided a few weeks ago that they would shift emphasis from Trump’s faltering campaign to preparations to obstruct everything a Biden administration might do. Their strategy was three-pronged: get Amy Barrett on the Supreme Court by any means necessary; reclaim the banner of “cut federal spending” by refusing to pass a much-needed stimulus bill even when Trump wanted one; and pour money into “saving” vulnerable GOP senators while letting their presidential nominee run short on cash.

A shift in control of state governments, meanwhile, would have long-range impact because 2021 is a redistricting year. And a landslide defeat of Trump could spark the kind of recriminations and divisions in the GOP that diminish its appeal and demoralize its base. Only a weakened right offers the left much chance of taking advantage of the class contradictions in its ranks to win significant layers of white workers away from allegiance to right-wing populism.

All home-stretch efforts to achieve these outcomes are more than worthwhile.
A TOUGHER NEXT LAP: STOPPING A COUP

Current polling combine with anecdotal evidence indicates that if all who are eligible and want to vote do vote and have their votes counted, Trump will lose badly. But majority sentiment in this country’s undemocratic electoral system is only a starting point toward people’s power, not that power itself.

In this especially fraught election year, it will be a challenge even to protect what we hope to win at the ballot box. All pretense is gone; everyone from the far left to the New York Times writes that there is no level of lies or hypocrisy too low for Trump’s core team to use in their attempt to win. It’s a raw contest for power that probably will intensify, not end, after November 3.

Racist voter suppression backed by rulings from courts packed with right-wing judges and a crusade to discredit any election Trump doesn’t win have been long underway. Tapping into this country’s deep history of white supremacy, the Trump camp has rooted its campaign in fanning white grievance and what Public Enemy called “Fear of a Black Planet.” They are terrified by demographic change – the steadily growing proportion of people of color in the U.S. – and by the leftward shift of opinion among youth. They believe the 2020 election may be their last chance to entrench a Jim Crow 2.0 system of white minority rule as the anchor for anti-working-class policies across the board.

The Trumpists’ drive toward racist authoritarianism takes full advantage of structural features of the U.S. electoral system that have always favored the enemies of democracy and racial justice. But Trump is now going further, dispensing with the “rules and norms” that meant, within the limits of this unfair system, most votes would be counted and the candidate who lost would accept the outcome.

Those days are gone. We are not yet at the stage when the President can simply declare he won and stay in power. But we can no longer assume that the election will have a fair count and the result, even according to unfair rules, will be accepted.

We are somewhere in between. Exactly where will be tested in this lap of battle.
PROTECT THE RESULTS, CHOOSE DEMOCRACY

A host of social justice and pro-democracy organizations are rising to the challenge.

For months a range of local, state and national organizations and coalitions have been battling on both the legal and political fronts to protect the right to vote, with special attention to making it possible for people to vote safely amid COVID-19. As November 3 has drawn closer, numerous organizations have launched election protection programs and trainings, including The Frontline (initiated by the Working Families Party and The Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice Project), Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), and the Election Protection coalition.

Preparations are also in motion for mass action after November 3 to protect the results in the (likely) event that Trump challenges them and refuses to cede power. Protect the Results, a coalition of more than 100 organizations, already has over 300 post-November 3 actions planned. Choose Democracy, an initiative anchored by organizers with deep experience in nonviolent direct action, has already trained several thousand activists committed to four principles:
We will vote.
We will refuse to accept election results until all the votes are counted.
We will nonviolently take to the streets if a coup is attempted.
If we need to, we will shut down this country to protect the integrity of the democratic process.

Another initiative of particular importance is Labor Action to Protect Democracy which is pressing local and national unions, workers centers and allied labor organizations to commit to labor actions should Trump attempt a coup.

There are good reasons to believe that these all-hands-on-deck efforts will succeed.

They represent the majority and are energized by a rapidly growing progressive and pro-democracy alignment preparing for much more than symbolic protests. And they can exercise the leverage that comes when the ruling elite and broader political class are badly divided. Important ruling class forces are opposed to Trump, and an even larger portion are reluctant to end the tradition of a transfer of executive power that is both peaceful and accepted as legitimate by the whole society. This is a crucial component of their capacity to maintain domestic stability and to project what little that remains of U.S “soft power” across the globe.

Because of this, determined action by millions with majority support that is making the country ungovernable is a combination that can force the institutions controlled by the current powers-that-be to orchestrate Trump’s removal.

And winning a victory like that will buoy support for turning “regime change” into life-on-the-ground change.
IT WILL ONLY GET HARDER

If we can achieve and protect most of our electoral goals, social movements and the left will enter 2021 with considerable initiative. But translating initiative into wins, even on favorable terrain, is going to be a huge challenge. Again, it is a question of power.

The Trumpist right will still hold a lot of it. Beating Trump will throw reaction onto the defensive, but the toxic brew of white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, belief in conspiracy theories, and yen for a strongman leader that constitutes Trumpism will maintain the allegiance of millions. Its ranks will include billionaire donors, GOP elected officials at every level, top-level federal judges, and armed fascist militiamen. Its commitment to block every item on the progressive agenda will remain. Among many, willingness to resort to ever more desperate – that is, violent – methods may well increase.

We will also have to navigate the complexities of an administration led by Joe Biden.

In figuring out how to do that, simply labelling Biden a neoliberal is a poor substitute for the kind of concrete, up-to-date analysis that can serve as a useful guide to action. It ignores shifts in opinion at all levels of the Democratic Party and by Biden himself that have been noted by Bernie Sanders (his [Biden’s] proposals will go a long, long way toward improving life for working families”); Sunrise Movement Executive Director Varshini Prakash (“We’ve seen a pretty huge transformation in Biden’s climate plan…upping his ambition and centering environmental justice”); and most recently harsh Biden critic David Sirota (“Biden brushed off his old deficit hawk buddies, outright rejected GOP talking points… [this] wasn’t some small matter. It was everything.”)

That noted (and a more detailed assessment of the Biden team’s current politics will be forthcoming in a future column), it will take a huge push from the left to win structural change. Biden is still opposed to Medicare for All and to major steps to defund the police, his climate change plan is not yet a Green New Deal, and on foreign policy Biden is still “back to the (militarist) past,” a stance which if unchecked can overwhelm everything else. It also remains to be seen how hard a Biden administration would fight even for its own agenda. And while winning Democratic control of the Senate would be a blow to GOP obstructionism, the political complexion of the new Senate majority would be to the right of the current Democratic contingent.

The left also needs to be realistic about the size of its base relative to our diehard opponents and for-the-moment anti-Trump allies. We have gained lots of ground since 2016 and people under 25 lean more leftward than any age cohort in decades. But it is sobering to look at a recent poll that “offered voters a choice between 4 presidential candidates with equal skills and temperaments.” Though likely skewed a few percentage points by this pollster’s pro-Republican bias, it still must be taken seriously that results showed 36% choosing a Republican who supported policies like Trump’s; 12% supporting a more traditional Republican; 24% preferring a Democrat who supported policies like Senator Bernie Sanders, and 24% choosing a more traditional Democrat.
MAKE TROUBLE AND ORGANIZE

On this kind of terrain, it will require deft strategy and a lot of hard work to accomplish two essential objectives: win victories that deliver substantial immediate benefits to all who are affected by today’s interlocking health, economic and racial crises, especially the most vulnerable; and do so in ways that shift power our way.

Thanks to years of persistent grassroots organizing many of the key tools needed to do that have been put in place. Radical proposals for make-a-big-difference changes are no longer just expressed as abstract visions; they have been shaped into a number of compelling and concrete legislative proposals: the Breathe Act, mandating divestment from discriminatory policing and investing in a new vision of public safety; the THRIVE Agenda, a plan to revive the economy while addressing the interlocking crises of climate change, racial injustice, public health and economic inequity; the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act; the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.

These ambitious measures, along with overall platforms like the Peoples Charter and the Solidarity Agenda have supporters ranging from grassroots activists to leaders of progressive organizations to members of Congress. Campaigns for them not only can lead to immediate tangible gains, they can serve as springboards to expand the base for deep structural change.

Congress will be a key battlefront during this lap of the journey. But the main action will shift to the streets and to day-to-day organizing in workplaces, schools, and communities. Unless dump-Trump electoral energy is carried into one wave after another of direct action and organization-building, the “more favorable terrain for struggle” we have been fighting for will go to waste.

We need to think in terms of continuing and expanding the depth, breadth, and militancy of the uprising to Defend Black Lives, building organizational infrastructure and alignment in the process. There are no shortcuts: it will take time to increase the size and combativeness of the labor movement by orders of magnitude; to reach a level of radical institutional strength in communities of color and immigrant communities that exceeds what existed at the height of First and Second Reconstruction; to draw together the vital electoral efforts of the Working Families Party, Our Revolution, Progressive Democrats of America, Justice Democrats, DSA, scores of state and local power-building groups and the national community organizing networks into a coordinated force that can elect its own as Senators and Governors as well as expand its representation in the House and state legislatures.

A recent article by Bob Master, Assistant to the Vice President for Political and Mobilization Activities in District One of the Communications Workers of America, made a compelling case that this can be a turning point moment toward a new cycle of deep-going positive change. The keys to realizing that potential are defeating Trump, protecting our victory, and going on to organize and make the kind of trouble that shifts the balance of power in our direction.

Google AI Tech Will Be Used For Virtual Border Wall, CBP Contract Shows

Google Cloud will be used in conjunction with Anduril Industries’ surveillance tech on the U.S.-Mexico border. “Their clear strategy is to enjoy the high profit margin of cloud services while avoiding any accountability for the impacts.”




November 2, 2020 Lee Fang, Sam Biddle THE INTERCEPT




https://portside.org/2020-11-02/google-ai-tech-will-be-used-virtual-border-wall-cbp-contract-shows





After years of backlash over controversial government work, Google technology will be used to aid the Trump administration’s efforts to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border, according to documents related to a federal contract.

In August, Customs and Border Protection accepted a proposal to use Google Cloud technology to facilitate the use of artificial intelligence deployed by the CBP Innovation Team, known as INVNT. Among other projects, INVNT is working on technologies for a new “virtual” wall along the southern border that combines surveillance towers and drones, blanketing an area with sensors to detect unauthorized entry into the country.

In 2018, Google faced internal turmoil over a contract with the Pentagon to deploy AI-enhanced drone image recognition solutions; the capability sparked employee concern that Google was becoming embroiled in work that could be used for lethal purposes and other human rights concerns. In response to the controversy, Google ended its involvement with the initiative, known as Project Maven, and established a new set of AI principles to govern future government contracts.


The employees also protested the company’s deceptive claims about the project and attempts to shroud the military work in secrecy. Google’s involvement with Project Maven had been concealed through a third-party contractor known as ECS Federal.

Contracting documents indicate that CBP’s new work with Google is being done through a third-party federal contracting firm, Virginia-based Thundercat Technology. Thundercat is a reseller that bills itself as a premier information technology provider for federal contracts.

The contract was obtained through a FOIA request filed by Tech Inquiry, a new research group that explores technology and corporate power founded by Jack Poulson, a former research scientist at Google who left the company over ethical concerns.

Not only is Google becoming involved in implementing the Trump administration’s border policy, the contract brings the company into the orbit of one of President Donald Trump’s biggest boosters among tech executives.

Documents show that Google’s technology for CBP will be used in conjunction with work done by Anduril Industries, a controversial defense technology startup founded by Palmer Luckey. The brash 28-year-old executive — also the founder of Oculus VR, acquired by Facebook for over $2 billion in 2014 — is an open supporter of and fundraiser for hard-line conservative politics; he has been one of the most vocal critics of Google’s decision to drop its military contract. Anduril operates sentry towers along the U.S.-Mexico border that are used by CBP for surveillance and apprehension of people entering the country, streamlining the process of putting migrants in DHS custody.

CBP’s Autonomous Surveillance Towers program calls for automated surveillance operations “24 hours per day, 365 days per year” to help the agency “identify items of interest, such as people or vehicles.” The program has been touted as a “true force multiplier for CBP, enabling Border Patrol agents to remain focused on their interdiction mission rather than operating surveillance systems.”

It’s unclear how exactly CBP plans to use Google Cloud in conjunction with Anduril or for any of the “mission needs” alluded to in the contract document. Google spokesperson Jane Khodos declined to comment on or discuss the contract. CBP, Anduril, and Thundercat Technology did not return requests for comment.

However, Google does advertise powerful cloud-based image recognition technology through its Vision AI product, which can rapidly detect and categorize people and objects in an image or video file — an obvious boon for a government agency planning to string human-spotting surveillance towers across a vast border region.


According to a “statement of work” document outlining INVNT’s use of Google, “Google Cloud Platform (GCP) will be utilized for doing innovation projects for C1’s INVNT team like next generation IoT, NLP (Natural Language Processing), Language Translation and Andril [sic] image camera and any other future looking project for CBP. The GCP has unique product features which will help to execute on the mission needs.” (CBP confirmed that “Andril” is a misspelling of Anduril.)

The document lists several such “unique product features” offered through Google Cloud, namely the company’s powerful machine-learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. Using Google’s “AI Platform” would allow CBP to leverage the company’s immense computer processing power to train an algorithm on a given set of data so that it can make educated inferences and predictions about similar data in the future.

Google’s Natural Language product uses the company’s machine learning resources “to reveal the structure and meaning of text … [and] extract information about people, places, and events,” according to company marketing materials, a technology that can be paired with Google’s speech-to-text transcription software “to extract insights from audio conversations.”

Although it presents no physical obstacle, Anduril’s “virtual wall” system works by rapidly identifying anyone approaching or attempting to cross the border (or any other perimeter), relaying their exact location to border authorities on the ground, offering a relatively cheap, technocratic, and less politically fraught means of thwarting would-be migrants.


Proponents of a virtual wall have long argued that such a solution would be a cost-effective way to increase border security. The last major effort, known as SBInet, was awarded to Boeing during the George W. Bush administration, and resulted in multibillion-dollar cost overruns and technical failures. In recent years, both leading Democrats and Republicans in Congress have favored a renewed look at technological solutions as an alternative to a physical barrier along the border.

Anduril surveillance offerings consist of its “Ghost” line of autonomous helicopter drones operated in conjunction with Anduril “Sentry Towers,” which bundle cameras, radar antennae, lasers, and other sophisticated sensors atop an 80-foot pole. Surveillance imagery from both the camera-toting drones and sensor towers is ingested into “Lattice,” Anduril’s artificial intelligence software platform, where the system automatically flags suspicious objects in the vicinity, like cars or people.

INVNT’s collaboration with Anduril is described in a 2019 presentation by Chris Pietrzak, deputy director of CBP’s Innovation Team, which listed “Anduril towers” among the technologies being tested by the division that “will enable CBP operators to execute the mission more safely and effectively.”

And a 2018 Wired profile of Anduril noted that one sentry tower test site alone “helped agents catch 55 people and seize 982 pounds of marijuana” in a 10-week span, though “for 39 of those individuals, drugs were not involved, suggesting they were just looking for a better life.” The version of Lattice shown off for Wired’s Steven Levy appeared to already implement some AI-based object recognition similar to what Google provides through the Cloud AI system cited in the CBP contract.


The documents do not spell out how, exactly, Google’s object recognition tech would interact with Anduril’s technology. But Google has excelled in the increasingly competitive artificial intelligence field; creating a computer system from scratch capable of quickly and accurately interpreting complex image data without human intervention requires an immense investment of time, money, and computer power to “train” a given algorithm on vast volumes of instructional data.

“We see these smaller companies who don’t have their own computational resources licensing them from those who do, whether it be Anduril with Google or Palantir with Amazon,” Meredith Whittaker, a former Google AI researcher who previously helped organize employee protests against Project Maven and went on to co-found NYU’s AI Now Institute, told The Intercept.

“This cannot be viewed as a neutral business relationship. Big Tech is providing core infrastructure for racist and harmful border regimes,” Whittaker added. “Without these infrastructures, Palantir and Anduril couldn’t operate as they do now, and thus neither could ICE or CBP. It’s extremely important that we track these enabling relationships, and push back against the large players enabling the rise of fascist technology, whether or not this tech is explicitly branded ‘Google.’”

Anduril is something of an outlier in the American tech sector, as it loudly and proudly courts controversial contracts that other larger, more established companies have shied away from. The company also recruited heavily from Palantir, another tech company with both controversial anti-immigration government contracts and ambitions of being the next Raytheon. Both Palantir and Anduril share a mutual investor in Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist with an overtly nationalist agenda and a cozy relationship with the Trump White House. Thiel has donated over $2 million to the Free Forever PAC, a political action group whose self-professed mission includes, per its website, working to “elect candidates who will fight to secure our border [and] create an America First immigration policy.”

Luckey has repeatedly excoriated Google for abandoning the Pentagon, a decision he has argued was driven by “a fringe inside of their own company” that risks empowering foreign adversaries in the race to adopt superior AI military capabilities. In comments last year, he dismissed any concern that the U.S. government could abuse advanced technology and criticized Google employees who signed a letter protesting the company’s involvement in Project Maven over ethical and moral concerns.

“You have Chinese nationals working in the Google London office signing this letter, of course they don’t mind if the United States has good military technology,” said Luckey, speaking at the University of California, Irvine. “Of course they don’t mind if China has better technology. They’re Chinese.”

As The Intercept previously reported, as Luckey publicly campaigned against Google’s withdrawal from the Project Maven, his company quietly secured a contract for the very same initiative.


Anduril’s advanced line of battlefield drones and surveillance towers — along with its eagerness to take defense contracts now viewed as too toxic to touch by rival firms — has earned it lucrative contracts with the Marine Corps and Air Force, in addition to its Homeland Security work. In a 2019 interview with Bloomberg, Anduril chair Trae Stephens, also a partner at Thiel’s venture capital firm, dismissed the concerns of American engineers who complain. “They said, ‘We didn’t sign up to develop weapons,’” Stephens said, explaining, “That’s literally the opposite of Anduril. We will tell candidates when they walk in the door, ‘You are signing up to build weapons.’”

Palmer Luckey has not only campaigned for more Silicon Valley integration with the military and security state, he has pushed hard to influence the political system. The Anduril founder, records show, has personally donated at least $1.7 million to Republican candidates this cycle. On Sunday, he hosted President Donald Trump at his home in Orange County, Calif., for a high-dollar fundraiser, along with former German ambassador Richard Grenell, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and other Trump campaign luminaries.

Anduril’s lobbyists in Congress also pressed lawmakers to include increased funding for the CBP Autonomous Surveillance Tower program in the DHS budget this year, a request that was approved and signed into law. In July, around the time the program funding was secured, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration deemed Anduril’s virtual wall system a “program of record,” a “technology so essential it will be a dedicated item in the homeland security budget,” reportedly worth “several hundred million dollars.”

The autonomous tower project awarded to Anduril and funded through CBP is reportedly worth $250 million. Records show that $35 million for the project was disbursed in September by the Air and Marine division, which also operates drones.

Anduril’s approach contrasts sharply with Google’s. In 2018, Google tried to quell concerns over how its increasingly powerful AI business could be literally weaponized by publishing a list of “AI Principles” with the imprimatur of CEO Sundar Pichai.

“We recognize that such powerful technology raises equally powerful questions about its use,” wrote Pichai, adding that the new principles “are not theoretical concepts; they are concrete standards that will actively govern our research and product development and will impact our business decisions.” Chief among the new principles were directives to “Be socially beneficial,” “Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias,” and a mandate to “continue to develop and apply strong safety and security practices to avoid unintended results that create risks of harm.”

The principles include a somewhat vague list of “AI applications we will not pursue,” such as “Technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” “weapons,” “surveillance violating internationally accepted norms,” and “technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

It’s difficult to square these commitments to peaceful, nonsurveillance AI humanitarianism with a contract that places Google’s AI power behind both a military surveillance contractor and a government agency internationally condemned for human rights violations. Indeed, in 2019, over 1,000 Google employees signed a petition demanding that the company abstain from providing its cloud services to U.S. immigration and border patrol authorities, arguing that “by any interpretation, CBP and ICE are in grave violation of international human rights law.”

“This is a beautiful lesson in just how insufficient this kind of corporate self-governance really is,” Whittaker told The Intercept. “Yes, they’re subject to these AI principles, but what does subject to a principle mean? What does it mean when you have an ethics review process that’s almost entirely non-transparent to workers, let alone the public? Who’s actually making these decisions? And what does it mean that these principles allow collaboration with an agency currently engaged in human rights abuses, including forced sterilization?”

“This reporting shows that Google is comfortable with Anduril and CBP surveilling migrants through their Cloud AI, despite their AI Principles claims to not causing harm or violating human rights,” said Poulson, the founder of Tech Inquiry.

“Their clear strategy is to enjoy the high profit margin of cloud services while avoiding any accountability for the impacts,” he added.