Author: Kenny Stancil

  • “Utility shutoffs—from water to electricity to broadband internet—leave our most vulnerable communities without essential life-sustaining services and are especially unacceptable during a deadly pandemic,” said the Michigan Democrat.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • The U.S. “has nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, ready to strike first and begin a nuclear war that could result in the deaths of billions of people around the globe,” warned one coalition member.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “Those who have profited the most should help now pay the damages that they’ve already caused.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “If there was ever a teachable moment that we need to invest in public health, it is now.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “Two weeks for Dems to pass redistricting reform before the GOP gerrymanders them out of power for a decade in Congress and at the state level.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “We have no other choice. Either phase out fossil fuels or face forest fires, famines, droughts, and floods.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • Bayer ends U.S. sale of glyphosate herbicides Bayer announced that it will halt the sale of glyphosate-based herbicides to consumers in the U.S. lawn and garden market by 2023. read now…

    This post was originally published on Independent Australia.

  • “It was a failed coup. Call it what it was. It didn’t work! But they sure as hell tried.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “We as a nation have the ability to make sure everyone has their basic needs like food, housing, and healthcare met,” said the Minnesota Democrat.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “As agricultural, large-scale use of this toxic pesticide continues, our farmworkers remain at risk. It’s time for EPA to act and ban glyphosate for all uses.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II speaks in Georgetown, Texas, on July 27, 2021.

    In Texas, activists from the Poor People’s Campaign embarked on a four-day, 27-mile “March for Democracy” on Wednesday to demand that Senate Democrats counteract the GOP’s assault on voting rights and the GOP-led assault on low-wage workers by repealing the filibuster and enacting the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the For the People Act, a $15 federal minimum wage, and protections for undocumented immigrants.

    “Maybe it is a poetic irony that on the… first day of hearings on the violent insurrection of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, we are beginning a march for democracy,” Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, said at a press conference Tuesday. “Ours is not an insurrection, but a moral resurrection.”

    On Wednesday, Barber told KHOU that “the day that the For the People Act is passed is the day everything that the Texas Legislature is doing becomes illegal,” a reference to the ongoing attempt by the state’s Republican lawmakers to pass legislation that would make it even harder to vote.

    After fleeing the state earlier this month in order to deny their Republican colleagues the quorum needed to ram through a sweeping voter suppression bill, Texas Democrats, many of whom traveled to Washington, D.C., implored U.S. Senate Democrats to act immediately to safeguard the franchise from the GOP’s attacks.

    In contrast to the Lone Star State’s Democratic lawmakers who are risking arrest to prevent Texas from becoming the latest jurisdiction to enact voting restrictions this year, Senate Democrats have continued to fail to take meaningful action to protect U.S. democracy.

    In an opinion piece published Tuesday in the Austin American-Statesman, Barber explained that “our moral march to Austin this week is about showing the nation that Black, white, and brown people in Texas are standing together to demand that the Democrats who hold a majority in the U.S. Senate take action to enact the policies they ran on.”

    Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his Republican colleagues “have been quick to point out that the changes they propose are nothing like the Jim Crow-era poll taxes and literacy tests that were used to prevent poor Black and brown people from voting,” wrote Barber. “But they also know that the surgical removal of a few thousand voters in key districts is enough to maintain control of state government and Texas’ congressional delegation to Washington, D.C.”

    “This targeted voter suppression,” Barber noted, “is what I call ‘James Crow, Esquire.’ It is the 21st-century form of voter suppression that the For the People Act was written to prevent.”

    Barber continued:

    When Republicans in North Carolina employed similar tactics just after the Supreme Court gutted the pre-clearance requirements of the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby decision, I led the campaign to challenge that law as president of the North Carolina NAACP. We learned that the question should never be whether proposed changes to election laws would make voting as restrictive as it was in a past era when we all agree voter suppression happened. The question we must ask is why anyone wants laws that make it more difficult for some people to vote.

    An overwhelming majority of Americans want living wages, universal access to healthcare, and common-sense immigration reform. But none of these popular policies are embraced by the corporately funded extremists who have taken over the Republican Party. When Senate Republicans locked arms to block debate on federal voting rights protections, they made clear that they are willing to use the filibuster to subvert the will of the majority of Americans…

    So-called moderate Democrats say they do not want to push forward without Republicans because whatever they pass will simply be overturned if the majority changes in 2022. But capitulation to the Republican voter suppression scheme being carried out in plain sight almost guarantees that Democrats will soon find themselves in the minority. This is why we demand action to protect voting rights and action to raise the minimum wage — which the current administration and Democratic majority ran on.

    During Tuesday night’s press conference, Barber stressed that “what we see happening here is happening all over the country. Texas is like the canary in the mine.”

    Although the deadly coup attempt carried out on January 6 by supporters of then-President Donald Trump failed, Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from him has been “weaponized,” in the words of author and voting rights expert Ari Berman, to fuel a nationwide wave of voter suppression bills.

    Between January and mid-July, right-wing lawmakers in 49 states introduced more than 400 bills that would make it harder for millions of Americans, especially people of color and other Democratic-leaning constituencies, to vote, or would empower election officials to overturn the will of voters.

    Since the beginning of this year, Republican-controlled legislatures — invoking the supposed need to shore up so-called “election integrity” — have enacted a combined total of 30 voter suppression laws in 18 states, according to the latest tally from the Brennan Center for Justice.

    Like Barber, the Brennan Center has argued that the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would increase ballot access nationwide and effectively neutralize the state-level onslaught being waged by the increasingly authoritarian GOP.

    In addition to establishing minimum electoral standards and curbing the corrupting influence of big money in politics, the For the People Act would require states to adopt independent redistricting commissions to combat partisan gerrymandering. But the House-passed bill, which is popular among voters across party lines, remains in peril ahead of next month’s congressional recess.

    President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has so far refused to advocate for repealing the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule that stands in the way of enacting voter protections at the federal level.

    Although Biden criticized Republican state lawmakers for disenfranchising voters during a speech two weeks ago, he did not mention the filibuster — even after the Senate’s GOP minority deployed the anti-democratic tool last month to block debate on the For the People Act.

    Barber and other religious leaders and activists were arrested during a demonstration outside the U.S. Senate building following the GOP’s filibuster of the bill, as Common Dreams reported.

    This week’s March for Democracy comes amid a monthlong “season of nonviolent direct action” organized by the Poor People’s Campaign to pressure the U.S. Senate to end the filibuster and pass legislation that begins to address the crises of worsening inequality and growing right-wing authoritarianism before August 6, the 56th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act.

    If all 50 members of the Senate’s Democratic caucus plus Vice President Kamala Harris were on board, they could, with a simple-majority vote, abolish the filibuster or at the very least reform it by, for example, exempting voting rights bills from the 60-vote rule.

    However, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) have continued to insist — despite mounting evidence of legislative gridlock — that preserving the anti-democratic tool fosters bipartisan cooperation and that eliminating it would cause more dysfunction.

    After he and 38 others were arrested on Monday during a sit-in outside Sinema’s Phoenix office, Barber explained that the refusal of conservative Democrats to support filibuster reform is enabling Senate Republicans to obstruct not only the restoration of the gutted Voting Rights Act and passage of the For the People Act, but a whole host of additional measures that are popular with the electorate.

    Other widely supported policies that have been undermined through a combination of Republican intransigence and Democratic acquiescence, noted Barber, include raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, providing undocumented immigrants with a path to citizenship, and confronting the climate crisis.

    “I’m the granddaughter of undocumented immigrants, a proud daughter of social justice warriors, and the mother of two public school children. I have personally experienced poverty, homelessness, and low wages,” Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, said Tuesday.

    “At this time, when our voting rights are being denied and when economic justice is being denied, we must call out the immoral obstructionism of Congress,” Theoharis continued. “We must demand the full protection of rights and dignity of all 11 million undocumented people.”

    “We march for our children,” she added. “We march for our elders. We march for our families and our partners and our communities. We march so that we can move, as we say in our movement, forward together and not one step back.”

    The March for Democracy, which began in Georgetown, will end on Saturday with a rally at the state Capitol in Austin, where a caravan of 151 cars will mark the 151st anniversary of the passage of the U.S. Constitution’s 15th Amendment that prohibited disenfranchisement on the basis of race or previous condition of servitude.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • There is “a significant number of lives that can be saved if you pursue climate policies that are more aggressive than the business-as-usual scenario.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “At this time, when our voting rights are being denied and when economic justice is being denied, we must call out the immoral obstructionism of Congress,” said Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “The current consolidated food system is nothing more than the result of policy choices that prioritized a large, concentrated industry.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “His crime was telling this truth: 90% of those killed by U.S. drones are bystanders, not the intended targets,” said Edward Snowden. “He should have been given a medal.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “We’ve got to get these shackles off of our democracy,” said Rev. William Barber.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “Repeating the agri-business-as-usual model to solve the food and climate crisis cannot deliver on the holistic and systemic transformation of our food systems we need today.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “The decisions nations make in the next few months will likely determine whether we will or will not ultimately limit global temperature rise at 1.5°C,” said the U.N.’s climate chief.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • One attorney described the blockade as “an outrageous abuse of law enforcement authority serving the interests of the Enbridge corporation against its environmental opponents.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “We have been talking about climate change and it is happening,” said one of the country’s top environmental officials.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • The United States’ attempt “to control the political agenda of Venezuela has had devastating consequences for hundreds of people undergoing treatment.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “Vague statements about supporting voting rights… are meaningless if these entities continue to fund the politicians behind restrictive voter legislation.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • Following the vote, Rep. Debbie Dingell said that “we are one step closer to protecting the health of Americans from these toxic forever chemicals.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • At least 25 people in the central province of Henan have died and roughly 200,000 residents have been evacuated as of Wednesday.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “If 10 prime ministers and three presidents can’t be safe from mercenary spyware, what chance do the rest of us stand?” asked one critic. “Since the hacking industry is incapable of self-control, governments must step up.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “Together,” said the former teacher and union leader, “we’ll… make a more just, dignified, and united Peru.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • A woman talks on her cell phone in front of the headquarters of an international surveillance service

    NSO Group, a private Israeli firm that sells surveillance technology to governments worldwide, insists that its Pegasus spyware is used only to “investigate terrorism and crime.” Leaked data, however, reveals that the company’s hacking tool “has been used to facilitate human rights violations around the world on a massive scale.”

    That’s according to an investigative report published Sunday by the Pegasus Project, a media consortium of more than 80 journalists from 17 news outlets in 10 countries. The collaborative endeavor was coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based media nonprofit, with technical assistance from Amnesty International, which conducted “cutting-edge forensic tests” on smartphones to identify traces of the military-grade spyware.

    The Guardian, one of the newspapers involved in the analysis, reported that “Pegasus is a malware that infects iPhones and Android devices to enable operators of the tool to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls, and secretly activate microphones.” The Washington Post, another partner in the investigation, noted that the tool “can infect phones without a click.”

    A massive data leak turned up a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, according to the Post, “are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of… NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry.”

    More phone numbers were based in Mexico than any other country, with over 15,000 on the list, “including those belonging to politicians, union representatives, journalists, and other government critics,” the Post noted.

    As The Guardian reported: “The phone number of a freelance Mexican reporter, Cecilio Pineda Birto, was found in the list, apparently of interest to a Mexican client in the weeks leading up to his murder, when his killers were able to locate him at a carwash. His phone has never been found so no forensic analysis has been possible to establish whether it was infected.”

    Other nations that either had large shares of numbers on the list or were deemed to be potential government clients of NSO include: France, Hungary, Turkey, Morocco, Togo, Algeria, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Dubai, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen, India, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan.

    While “the presence of a phone number in the data does not reveal whether a device was infected with Pegasus or subject to an attempted hack,” The Guardian noted, the consortium believes that “the data is indicative of the potential targets NSO’s government clients identified in advance of possible surveillance attempts.”

    Amnesty’s Security Lab analyzed a small sample of phones belonging to activists, journalists, and lawyers whose numbers appeared on the leaked list. Of the 67 phones examined, traces of Pegasus spyware were found on 37 devices, including 23 that had been successfully infected and 14 with signs of attempted hacking.

    “NSO claims its spyware is undetectable and only used for legitimate criminal investigations,” Etienne Maynier, a technologist at Amnesty’s Security Lab, said in a statement. “We have now provided irrefutable evidence of this ludicrous falsehood.”

    According to the Post:

    The list does not identify who put the numbers on it, or why, and it is unknown how many of the phones were targeted or surveilled. But forensic analysis of the 37 smartphones shows that many display a tight correlation between time stamps associated with a number on the list and the initiation of surveillance, in some cases as brief as a few seconds.

    The numbers on the list are unattributed, but reporters were able to identify more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents: several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials—including cabinet ministers, diplomats, and military and security officers. The numbers of several heads of state and prime ministers also appeared on the list.

    Among the journalists whose numbers appear on the list, which dates to 2016, are reporters working overseas for several leading news organizations, including a small number from CNN, the Associated Press, Voice of America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Le Monde in France, the Financial Times in London, and Al Jazeera in Qatar.

    The newspaper added that Amnesty found evidence of NSO’s spyware being used by Saudi Arabia and UAE to target the phones of close associates of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi before and after he was brutally murdered by Saudi operatives in 2018.

    “The Pegasus Project lays bare how NSO’s spyware is a weapon of choice for repressive governments seeking to silence journalists, attack activists, and crush dissent, placing countless lives in peril,” Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, said in a statement.

    “These revelations,” Callamard continued, “blow apart any claims by NSO that such attacks are rare and down to rogue use of their technology. While the company claims its spyware is only used for legitimate criminal and terror investigations, it’s clear its technology facilitates systemic abuse. They paint a picture of legitimacy, while profiting from widespread human rights violations.”

    Callamard emphasized that “[NSO’s] actions pose larger questions about the wholesale lack of regulation that has created a wild west of rampant abusive targeting of activists and journalists.”

    “Until this company and the industry as a whole can show it is capable of respecting human rights,” she added, “there must be an immediate moratorium on the export, sale, transfer, and use of surveillance technology.”

    NSO, for its part, issued a statement denying “false claims” in the report, including those related to Khashoggi. Attorneys for the company argued that the Pegasus Project’s investigation was based on “wrong assumptions” and “uncorroborated theories.” The company claimed that it is pursuing a “life-saving mission” to stamp out crime.

    The Guardian noted that while the consortium “found numbers in the data belonging to suspected criminals… the broad array of numbers in the list belonging to people who seemingly have no connection to criminality suggests some NSO clients are breaching their contracts with the company, spying on pro-democracy activists and journalists investigating corruption, as well as political opponents and government critics.”

    According to the Post, “After the investigation began, several reporters in the consortium learned that they or their family members had been successfully attacked with Pegasus spyware.”

    In response, Callamard stressed that “the number of journalists identified as targets vividly illustrates how Pegasus is used as a tool to intimidate critical media. It is about controlling [the] public narrative, resisting scrutiny, and suppressing any dissenting voice.”

    “These revelations must act as a catalyst for change,” said Callamard. “The surveillance industry must no longer be afforded a laissez-faire approach from governments with a vested interest in using this technology to commit human rights violations.”

    The human rights expert demanded that NSO “immediately shut down clients’ systems where there is credible evidence of misuse.” She added that “the Pegasus Project provides this in abundance.”

    NSO stated that it “will continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action based on the results of these investigations.”

    Timothy Summers, a former cyber security engineer at a U.S. intelligence agency and now director of IT at Arizona State University, told the Post that Pegasus “is nasty software.” One could use the technology, said Summers, to “spy on almost the entire world population.”

    The Guardian noted that the Pegasus Project “will be revealing the identities of people whose number appeared on the list in the coming days.”

    Amnesty’s Maynier said that “our hope is the damning evidence published over the next week will lead governments to overhaul a surveillance industry that is out of control.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pegasus spyware sold by private Israeli company NSO Group, “is a weapon of choice for repressive governments seeking to silence journalists, attack activists, and crush dissent,” said Amnesty International’s Agnès Callamard.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

  • “Our kids depend on the people around them being protected, being vaccinated in order to shield them from the virus,” said Dr. Vivek Murthy.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.