30 August 20
Need to Pull a Rabbit From the Hat Today!
We are down to the last two days of the month and we are still far behind where we normally would be and more importantly where we need to be.
Really need a little movement here.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
It's Live on the HomePage Now: Robert Reich | The Soul of Our Country Is Being Fought for in the Streets and Cities Across America Right Now This time it happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rusten Sheskey of the Kenosha Police Department shot an unarmed Black man, Jacob Blake, seven times in the back as his three children watched. He is now paralyzed from the waist down, and doctors say it will take a miracle for him to ever walk again. I won’t pretend to understand what it’s like to be terrorized, brutalized, or murdered for the color of my skin, or to feel unsafe simply by existing. What I do understand is that there are serious, systemic disparities between how I am treated as a white man and how those in the Black community are treated. I am committed to using my privilege and platform to participate actively in upending systems of control, like police and prisons, that have perpetuated white supremacist violence and the oppression of Black people for centuries. That’s why I am asking you to use the below link to make a donation to the Movement for Black Lives — a collective of 150 organizations representing Black people from across the country — to help build a world free of police killings and systemic oppression, in which the full humanity and dignity of Black people is recognized. The Movement for Black Lives supports the local protests at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement, and is mobilizing to create a shared vision and policy agenda to win rights, recognition, and resources for Black people through grassroots organizing and legislative action. Tomorrow, they’re holding a Black National Convention to present the Democratic National Committee with a shared policy agenda, including restoration of the Voting Rights Act, immediate demilitarization of police and an end to private prisons, abolishing the Electoral College, breaking up Big Banks, and guaranteeing universal health care. You can tune in to the convention here: https://m4bl.org/events/the-black-national-convention/ The soul of our country is being fought for in the streets of Kenosha, Louisville, Oakland, and cities across America right now. The stakes could not be higher, and we must all come together to support the movement. So please, use the link below to stand with the Black Lives Matter movement and the protestors literally risking their lives in Kenosha by making a donation to the Movement for Black Lives Fund today. And, if you can, set up a recurring donation to sustain the work. In solidarity, Robert Reich
ALSO SEE: Google Greenlights Ads With Apple Makes a Privacy Change, Facebook and Advertising Companies Cry Foul Apple’s long-standing effort to improve its customers’ privacy is pitting it against an advertising industry that believes Apple has grown too powerful. But with Apple under the antitrust spotlight, its privacy move has also been called a power move by an advertising industry that is scrambling to adjust to the changes, expected to be included in iOS 14, the company’s latest mobile operating system expected to go live next month. On Wednesday, Facebook became the latest organization to speak openly about the changes, telling investors and users that Apple’s move will hurt the social network’s bottom line because it will limit the kind of personalized targeting that makes Facebook’s ads so valuable to advertisers. “This is not a change we want to make, but unfortunately Apple’s updates to iOS14 have forced this decision,” the company said in a blog post. Some in the advertising industry see the move as part privacy, part self-interest on the part of Apple. Apple also offers advertising, and by limiting the amount of data outside marketers collect, Apple’s access to the data becomes more valuable. “I think there’s probably 30 percent truth in that they’re doing it for privacy reasons, and it’s 70 percent that they’re doing it because it’s what’s good for Apple,” said Nick Jordan, founder of Narrative I/O, which helps companies gather data for advertising. “It’s a question for regulators and courts whether they should be able to wield the power they do over this ecosystem,” he said. “They created it, but can they rule it with an iron fist?” In an interview with The Washington Post, Apple Director of Privacy Engineering Erik Neuenschwander said the changes were part of Apple’s privacy road map. When asked whether Apple considers how regulators or competitors might view privacy changes, such as the new policies on advertiser tracking, he said the customer is always Apple’s main consideration. Facebook and Apple have sparred in the past over privacy, with Apple CEO Tim Cook making critical remarks aimed at the social network and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calling out Apple for the high prices it charges for its devices. Most recently, Facebook joined a chorus of app developers in criticizing the 30 percent fees Apple charges for money earned on its App Store. Apple and Facebook are both facing investigations by lawmakers and regulators into whether they have wielded their power in anticompetitive ways. Apple is facing a landmark lawsuit filed by Fortnite owner Epic Games that claims Apple is using its status as an alleged monopolist to overcharge app developers with 30 percent fees on App Store earnings. The latest altercation between Apple and Facebook concerns new pop-up messages expected in iOS 14. Apple says that when customers open apps, they’ll be asked whether they would like to give that specific app permission to track them with something called an “ID for Advertisers,” or IDFA. Apple created the IDFA in 2012 to help app developers earn money on iOS. The unique number, assigned to iPhone customers, allows advertisers to track their movements around websites and apps by following that unique identifier. For years, IDFA was turned on by default on iPhones. Only by going into the phone’s settings could users turn off that feature. The IDFA helped Facebook and other developers learn what apps users downloaded, how frequently they used those apps, their in-app purchases, and the websites they visit on desktop and mobile devices and Apple TV. With the new pop-up messages, customers will be forced to make a choice. It is likely that most consumers will opt out of being tracked. Facebook said in a blog post that it would render its off-platform ad network so ineffective that it may not make sense to offer it to developers at all. Facebook said that in testing it had seen a more than 50 percent drop in revenue as a result of the loss of data from Apple. Over time, Neuenschwander said, Apple has been handing users more and control over how IDFA is used, giving them the ability to turn it off completely when the company launched iOS 10 about four years ago by turning on the “limit ad tracking” switch in the phone’s settings. Neuenschwander wouldn’t say how many Apple customers turned that switch on in the settings. Like Facebook, Google and several other companies, Apple runs an advertising business that relies on personal data it gathers to show people “relevant” advertising. “We collect your personal information,” Apple’s App Store & Privacy guidelines say. “ … We also use information about your account, purchases, and downloads in the Stores to offer advertising to ensure that Search Ads in the App Store and ads in Apple News and Stocks, where available, are relevant to you.” But Apple doesn’t consider this data gathering “tracking,” according to Neuenschwander. That’s because Apple collects the data from its own users on its own apps and other services. Facebook and other advertisers, Apple says, gather data on users even when they’re not using Facebook. By reducing the amount of data Facebook and other advertising companies can gather from IDFA numbers, Apple is limiting their ability to gather data on users as they bounce from app to app, or website to website. “There’s been no discussion, no commercial transaction. They’re saying this is what we decided is right in the name of privacy and this is what we’re going to do,” said Stuart Ingis, a partner at the law firm Venable who represents the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, an association of advertisers. Ingis said Apple is harming the very economy that fueled innovation and growth in app development, which in turn helped Apple sell more phones.
Director of National Intelligence Cancels Verbal Election Security Briefings
Friends and Fans Mourn Black Panther Star Chadwick Boseman, Dead at 43
Leverage Is Everything: The Striking NBA Players Have Inherent Power, but So Do You Working people have the same kind of power. It’s leverage. Many of us walk around carrying it for our entire lives without ever using it. Seeing that power demonstrated is the best way to remind everyone that they can use it, too. We are in the midst of an unprecedented wave of wildcat strikes in major sports leagues. (Withholding labor is a strike; a wildcat strike is when workers strike on their own, without the formal approval of their union and often in violation of their contract. Don’t call it a “boycott.”) We can’t really call them sudden, because they’re a reaction to hundreds of years of racial oppression, but they are happening with stunning speed. Wednesday, the basketball players on the Milwaukee Bucks decided on their own to sit out of their NBA playoff game in protest of the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Players on other teams, inspired, followed their lead, causing the league to hastily “postpone” all of the day’s playoff games, to avoid being forced to cancel them one by one due to player walkouts. Within hours, players in the WNBA and in Major League Soccer and in Major League Baseball and even announcers were stopping work as well. History is being made, just that fast. Here I just want to make a simple point: these NBA players may be rich and famous, but in this case, they are not doing anything that you can’t do too. The power they are exercising here is not athletic power, but labor power. They are members of a union, the National Basketball Players Association, and that union has a contract with the NBA, and that contract prohibits them from striking. Yet they struck. And not only did they get away with it, but it was a spectacular public success. They pulled off a wildcat strike because they have leverage. Because they can. That is the only power that really matters in the workplace. Everything else is imaginary. Think about it: What would happen if the NBA started waving its contract, with the “no strike” clause, and criticizing the players for their work stoppage, and threatening harsh legal retaliation? The NBA would be crushed by a wave of bad PR, first of all. That would be bad for business. And what would be worse for business would be the fact that there would be no business — if the players don’t play, there is no NBA. Period. Being a professional basketball player is certainly a more elite and high-skill profession than what you or I do for a living, but these players are exercising leverage that we all have in common. If we don’t work, there is no business, and there is no money for the boss. The entire history of corporate labor relations in America has been one long effort by employers to obscure, hide, and stifle this fact. Yet it remains the case that we have the power, because we do the work. And bosses will go to great lengths, and make many concessions, to ensure that they’re never forced to do the work themselves. The rules that govern organized labor in America are not fair. The bulk of labor law has been written to favor business, which has the money and financial incentive to spend decades lobbying to make labor laws more and more hostile to workers. The law harshly restricts who is allowed to unionize, and what rights they have, and when they are legally allowed to strike. The Milwaukee Bucks have performed the valuable service of showing us that all of those laws don’t mean jack shit. Leverage is timeless and sits outside the law. It is rooted in the fabric of reality, like physics. Why did the NBA rush to release statements about how it “supports” these unauthorized strikes which very well may end their season? In what sense do the owners of these teams “support” these actions, which may cost them millions of dollars, that they would have warned against right up until the moment they happened? They “support” the players here in the sense that they have no choice but to do so. What would happen if the NBA responded to these unauthorized strikes by locking the players out next season, as would be their right under the contract? Would all of the world’s NBA fans sit calmly and continue tithing money to basketball team owners in order to preserve the sanctity of contracts? No. What would happen is there would be no NBA. And if all of the players got sick of the owners and their contracts and decided to pack up and start their own basketball league that they themselves ran, fans would watch that, because that is where the good basketball would be. The players make money for the owners, not vice versa. This is the key to their leverage. With an understanding of this fact, their options are limitless. The league can holler and yell and cajole and object, but ultimately it will come along. The workers have the power. What is happening in pro sports is inspiring. But I understand that some may also find it dispiriting, because they may think, “I am not a pro athlete. I am not rich or famous. I have a regular job with little power. I cannot exercise leverage in the same way.” Wrong. Though it is easier for the boss to replace you or me at work than it is to replace an NBA player, it is hard for any boss anywhere to replace everyone. To function, businesses require workers. Collective action, therefore, is the real source of your leverage. It is the ability of you and your coworkers to deprive the business of the labor it needs to function. Solidarity is power for everyone. I once went to a union rally for a group of janitors at an airport in Minneapolis. As they marched through the terminal waving signs, they chanted: “Let the bosses clean the toilets! Let the bosses clean the toilets!” They understood leverage. It’s true that NBA players have power because the bosses can’t dunk. But the bosses don’t want to clean the toilets either. You might be surprised what you can win by threatening to make the ownership class give up its most treasured privilege: to be paid without doing real work.
SUNDAY SONG: Johnny Cash | God's Gonna Cut You Down
Protecting African Wildlife: A Defense of Conservation Territories
Such transfers are often criticized as de facto privatization by critics of territorial conservation strategies but I have seen first hand the benefits that professional managers can bring and the damage caused by negligent or under-funded public agencies. The most important question remains: will wildlife be protected and will local people be able to pursue their livelihoods at the same time? W National Park, which spans Benin, Niger, and Burkina Faso, was once a “paper park” that had essentially been abandoned by the conservation community. Yet now it, along with the adjacent Pendjari National Park, represents one of the last hopes for wildlife in western Africa. Nearly 20 years ago, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in a community adjacent to W National Park and was fortunate enough to work closely with the ECOPAS Project, which played a major role in getting the protected area back on its feet from 2001 to 2008. One of its major initiatives was to establish a buffer zone for sustainable resource use by local communities along the boundary of the park. During my two years of service, I worked closely with the farmers and livestock herdsmen in the zone and felt a great deal of optimism that I was seeing a “win-win” for parks and people. But it was not to be, as the European Union-funded project ended and its buffer zone management dissipated or disappeared altogether. Fast forward 18 years and APN is essentially trying to pick up where ECOPAS left off. The park buffer zone has been all but forgotten in many places as agriculture – the most destructive form of land use for biodiversity – has expanded right up to the park boundary. Once hoped-for tourism has failed to materialize as my recent trip to a now dilapidated elephant viewing station revealed. Creating yet another buffer zone would likely lead to the same outcome given that local people and Benin’s economy remain dependent on agriculture and especially cotton, which contributes 40% to the country’s gross domestic product. To the chagrin of conservation critics, the only strategy that seems to have worked for W National Park is old-school enforcement of its boundaries. As someone who cares about and tries to work towards both conservation and rural development goals in Africa, I have been frustrated by critics who remain overly dismissive of the necessary role that protected areas play in the preservation of Africa’s imperiled species. Such territories require some level of security and, yes, surveillance in order to serve their purpose. One tragic example, the Boucle du Baoule National Park in Mali is a vast, intact stretch of woody savanna that is almost entirely devoid of wildlife due to the history of rampant poaching in the area; not by local people but well-armed and organized groups coming from afar. This is not a unique story. When I recently asked a former park director in the Central African Republic how many of his rangers had been killed by poachers, he grew visibly upset and angry that I wished to discuss the matter. The answer was 25 people. They were not killed by locals – who comprised the bulk of the anti-poaching brigade and retained the right to hunt – but heavily armed hunting parties supplying the ivory market in Khartoum, which has served world markets for over a century. The Central African Republic is another story of disappearing wildlife but the country also illustrates the problematic past and present of African conservation. Parks are the vestiges of a violent colonial era in the region and park rangers still behave badly. This does not, however, delegitimize protected areas, but instead reveals the need to remain vigilant about their management and accountability to local people. Conservationists struggle to provide social benefits across sub-Saharan Africa. Organizations such as African Parks Network and the Wildlife Conservation Society should therefore rethink conventional approaches to community engagement as they invest in moribund reserves in Central Africa as a well-justified means to protect biodiversity. In Chad, poaching caused the sizable elephant population in Zakouma National Park to drop by 90 percent during the 2000s but a concerted management effort by APN has led to an astonishing recovery. One gets a visceral sense of the price paid when looking at the portraits in the park’s field headquarters of rangers killed in the line of duty. On the other hand, cattle breeders and others living just outside of Zakouma struggle, as they do outside of W Park, to access the natural resources they need. This is the crux challenge for conservation across sub-Saharan Africa but especially in places like Chad, where the boundaries of once forgotten parks are being revived. Africa Parks’ announcement about W National Park describes the same “win-win” scenario that I had hoped to see in the early 2000s. It even discusses the same activities – notably, beekeeping – that were deployed to support local livelihoods back then. They need to succeed. If that means deploying “fences and fines” so be it, but it will clearly require some fresh thinking about the people living around the park. Why didn’t it work the first time? In 2019, I returned to a village on W Park’s boundary for the first time in 13 years, and people there told me they knew nothing about the buffer zone where, on paper, their homes and fields were located. Local authorities told me the buffer zone was part of the park, not territory they were responsible for. The forgotten W Park buffer zone, with all its legal, territorial, and even moral ambiguities, reflects how not to achieve buy-in from people – the locals – in whose hands “win-win” conservation scenarios ultimately lie. And therein lies the fatal problem that Africa Parks must address if it is to avoid the fate of ECOPAS. Read the origonal story at Mongabay |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.