Arizona Republic Cites Voting Booth’s Steven Rosenfeld and His Extensive Reporting on the Cyber Ninja 2020 ‘Audit’

Steven Rosenfeld’s critical work in the Arizona elections cited by Arizona’s newspaper of record—shedding light on the reality of the GOP Senate in Arizona’s election “audit.”

Cyber Ninjas was never required to deliver definitive report on election results, contract shows

By Robert Anglen / Arizona Republic

Cyber Ninjas never had to deliver a definitive report about its review of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results — it only had to try.

The deal between the Arizona Senate and its contractor used soft language and didn’t list clear-cut expectations, a review of contract documents shows.

There is also little in the paperwork that would hold Cyber Ninjas accountable for producing inaccurate or incomplete results.

The key language requires the Florida-based cybersecurity firm to attempt to do little more than outline facts, according to a March statement of work signed by Senate President Karen Fann and Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan.

“This audit will attempt to validate every area of the voting process,” the contract states. “The final report will attempt to outline all the facts found throughout the investigation and attempt to represent those facts in an unbiased and non-partisan way.”

Read the rest at AZ Central.

The IMI Journal—Pushing for Sane U.S. Diplomacy and Bringing Art Into Environmental Media

Anyone who has lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union—despite the decades of hype that it was on the verge of global dominance, the lies and failures of the 9/11-era wars, the warmongering, and the Cold War hyperbole about Russia and China during the past few years—may perk up and celebrate the arrival of new Globetrotter Writing Fellow James W. Carden. Carden is a former adviser to the U.S. State Department. Previously, he was a contributing writer on foreign affairs at the Nation, and his work has also appeared in the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft, the American Conservative, Asia Times, and more.

Carden’s coverage of world events and analysis are a dose of sanity in a U.S. media environment that is marked by an absence of critical thought, historical context, or grounding in diplomacy—and a superabundance of self-interested business and government narratives and apologies for short-sighted behavior. Read his latest interview with scholar Anatol Lieven on the failure of 20 years of U.S. occupation in Afghanistan, and the political future the country faces.

Additionally, I am also excited to announce the arrival of Rachel Gugelberger as a media fellow to the Independent Media Institute’s Earth | Food | Life project. She has been a mainstay in the contemporary art world for more than two decades, and her interest in the potential of art to shift attitudes around key environmental themes including food justice and nonhuman animal rights will fill a big area of social need—and help IMI continue in its mission to be media pioneers. Look for her first works appearing this fall!

As always, we depend on readers like you to keep us in motion, and make an impact in a world in need of so much change. Please support us now.

And if you aren’t up to date, please catch up with our recent work:

What Next After 20 Years of War in Afghanistan? Anatol Lieven on the U.S. Legacy and the Taliban’s Rise

James W. Carden – Globetrotter

A Climate Disaster Is Unfolding Before Our Eyes—And Politicians Still Refuse to Take Action

Sonali Kolhatkar – Economy for All

Extreme Weather Devastating U.S. Raises Calls to Pass Biden’s Infrastructure Bill

Reynard Loki – Earth | Food | Life

Afghanistan and the Purdue Pharma Case Are Reminders That the U.S. Is a Failed Narco-State, Too

Richard J. Eskow – Economy for All

You’ll Know an Economic and Social Justice Plan Is Serious If It Includes Money for the Arts

April M. Short – Local Peace Economy

Is America Doomed? Or Is This Just a Huge Opportunity for the Progressive Agenda?

Thom Hartmann – Economy for All

Why the Discovery of Natural Gas in Mozambique Has Produced Tragedies, Not Economic Promise

Vijay Prashad – Globetrotter

Taxpayers Are Funding Cruel and Outdated DOJ Training Programs That Kill Animals

Stephen R. Kaufman – Earth | Food | Life

Most Virginia Counties Won’t Offer Sunday Voting This Fall

Steven Rosenfeld – Voting Booth

In Minnesota’s ‘Most Diverse City,’ Schools Are Addressing the Community’s Deep Trauma

Sarah Lahm – Our Schools

Could California End Up With a Trump-Like Governor?

Sonali Kolhatkar – Economy for All

Growing Chorus of Republicans Criticize Arizona Senate’s 2020 Election ‘Audit’

Steven Rosenfeld – Voting Booth

Medicare for All Will Stop Political Bosses from Playing Games with Deadly Diseases

Thom Hartmann – Economy for All

Thanks, from Jan Ritch-Frel and the rest of the IMI team.

Climate Crisis Putting a Billion Children at ‘Extremely High Risk,’ Warns New UN Report

Almost half of the world’s children are seriously threatened by the rapidly deteriorating global climate.

By Reynard Loki

“Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope,” said Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg in 2019. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.” Now the famed young eco-warrior and Nobel Peace Prize nominee might get her wish as she, along with other youth activists, has collaborated with UNICEF—a United Nations agency working in more than 190 countries and territories to provide humanitarian and developmental aid to the world’s most disadvantaged children and adolescents—to launch an alarming new report that has found that a billion children across the world are at “extremely high risk” from the impacts of climate change.

Released ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in November in Glasgow, Scotland, and on the third anniversary of Fridays for Future (FFF), the youth-led global climate strike movement founded by Thunberg, “The Climate Crisis Is a Child Rights Crisis”​​ is the first climate report to combine high-resolution geographic maps detailing global environmental and climate impacts with maps that show regions where children are vulnerable due to an array of stressors, including poverty and lack of access to education, health care or clean water. The report introduces the new Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI), a composite index that ranks nations based on children’s exposure to climate shocks, providing the first comprehensive look at how exactly children are affected by the climate crisis, offering a road map for policymakers seeking to prioritize action based on those who are most at risk. Nick Rees, a policy specialist at UNICEF focusing on climate change and economic analysis and one of the report’s authors, told the Guardian that “[i]t essentially [shows] the likelihood of a child’s ability to survive climate change.”

“For the first time, we have a complete picture of where and how children are vulnerable to climate change, and that picture is almost unimaginably dire. Climate and environmental shocks are undermining the complete spectrum of children’s rights, from access to clean air, food and safe water; to education, housing, freedom from exploitation, and even their right to survive. Virtually no child’s life will be unaffected,” said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF’s executive director. “For three years, children have raised their voices around the world to demand action. UNICEF supports their calls for change with an unarguable message—the climate crisis is a child’s rights crisis.”

In addition to finding that approximately 1 billion children—nearly half the world’s child population—live in countries that are at an “extremely high risk” from climate impacts, the report found that almost every single child on the planet has been exposed to at least one climate or environmental stressor, such as air pollution, flooding, heat waves, tropical storms, flooding or drought. Moreover, the report found that 850 million children—approximately one-third of the world’s child population—are exposed to four or more stressors.

Read the rest at Pressenza.

Reynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, CounterPunch, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.

Photo Credit: The Left/Flickr

Remembering the Great Scientific Crusader Who Showed That No Biological Basis for Race Exists—Richard Lewontin

Lewontin fought a lifelong battle against racism, imperialism and capitalist oppression.

By Prabir Purkayastha

On July 4, Richard Lewontin, the dialectical biologist, Marxist and activist, died at the age of 92, just three days after the death of his wife of more than 70 years, Mary Jane. He was one of the founders of modern biology who brought together three different disciplines—statistics, molecular biology and evolutionary biology—that mark the discipline today. In doing so, he not only battled crude racism masquerading as science, but also helped shed light on what science really is. In this sense, he belongs to the rare group of scientists who are equally at home in the laboratory and while talking about science and ideology at a philosophical level. Lewontin is a popular exponent of what science is, and more pertinently, what it is not.

Lewontin always harked back to what being radical means: going back to fundamentals in deriving a viewpoint. This method is important, as it makes radical inquiry a powerful tool in science, compared to lazier ways of relating positions to certain class viewpoints. What is the relation between genes and race, class, or gender? Does social superiority spring from superior genes, or from biological differences between the sexes? As a Marxist and activist, Lewontin believed that we need to fight at both levels: to expose class, race and gender stereotypes as a reflection of power within society, and also at the level of radical science, meaning from the fundamentals of scientific theory and data.

Richard Lewontin and the population geneticist and mathematical ecologist Richard Levins shared a passion for biology, social activism and Marxism. It is not so well known that Lewontin’s close friend Stephen Jay Gould—the paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and popular science writer—was also a fellow Marxist. All three of them fought a lifelong battle against the racializing of biology and, later, sociobiology, which sought to ‘explain’ every social phenomenon as derived from our genes. Evolutionary biologists E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins—and many others—believed that humans are programmed so that society merely expresses what is already embedded in our genes. Through their eyes, white races are superior because of their genetic superiority; as are the rich. In India, there is also a genetic theory of caste to explain the supposed differences between caste groups. And as long as there are significant differences between groups of people—based on class, race, gender or caste—biological ‘explanations’ for these differences will be offered.

One of Lewontin’s pathbreaking works was to find out how much genetic diversity exists within species. This was at a time when we did not know how many genes humans had. Lewontin’s inspired guess was 20,000, far smaller than what most biologists thought then and remarkably close to what is known today. Most biologists then also believed that races had significant biological differences, which was one of the reasons why they thought that there was a much larger number of genes carrying different traits. Lewontin and geneticist John Hubby used a technique, protein gel electrophoresis, developed by Hubby, to quantify the genetic diversity in fruit flies. At that time, fruit flies were the favorite target for testing genetic theories in the laboratory. This pathbreaking exercise traced evolution at the species level to changes at the molecular level—a foundation for the field of molecular evolution—using statistical methods. The result was startling. Contrary to what most biologists believed, the exercise showed a surprising amount of genetic diversity within a given population and further revealed that evolution led to stable and diverse populations within a species. Later on, Lewontin used this method on human blood groups, to show that the result of stable genetic diversity held true for humans as well. The other result of the human blood group study was that it showed that 85.4 percent of the genetic diversity in humans was found within a population, and only 6.3 percent between ‘races.’ Race was not a biological construct but a social one.

Read the rest at Pressenza.

This article was produced in partnership with Newsclick.

Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.

Photo Credit: Gringer/Wikimedia Commons

The IMI Journal: Standing Up for Democracy Today, and Learning From the Past

What makes the GOP attack on our elections system so dangerous is actually a media problem. The public has little context in which to understand the latest dangerous efforts to undermine our democracy because the corporate media model doesn’t give journalists and election experts the opportunity to explain how states actually count and certify elections.

IMI is so proud to be working with Steven Rosenfeld’s Voting Booth project, a national leader in covering the finer points and the legal issues involved. The work is priceless—the voting and elections community reads and trusts Voting Booth, helping them make better decisions; reporters from all over the country take pointers from the reporting; and the general public is getting the best view possible on what really matters and what’s at stake. The problems are bad, the crisis is real—but at least from a media standpoint, this is exactly the kind of public interest journalism that we need.

Check out Voting Booth’s latest reporting on Arizona, the Trump-era GOP experiment for how to try to crash an election system. Rosenfeld’s recent article on the Supreme Court’s decision about Arizona’s new voting laws is the best, most concise reporting on the consequences of a majority decision on voting rights you’ll find. Hold it up against the New York Times—you come away better informed, and poised to help our democracy. There are seemingly millions of subscribers for diluted journalism on the key democratic issues of our time, and only a fraction of that financial support for the journalists who are the leaders on social issues. It’s time for that to change.

We at IMI are really trying to push the boundaries and keep producing work that can shift the parameters of debate. April M. Short’s work for Local Peace Economy has recently focused on the huge historical lessons from the past about society and human nature. I urge you to sit down with her article that looks at how societies of the past have survived climate change. In it, she interviews the authors of a major study that looks at thousands of years of evidence in Mesopotamia and concluded that the societies that were cooperative and less hierarchical survived—and the ones that weren’t or couldn’t adapt did not. A social dimension to surviving climate change? The message we hear in the media for addressing climate change often comes down to individual choices we make as consumers, and how huge businesses are shifting their production process.

Another one from April Short that I keep turning back to is an interview she did with an expert on the history and culture of warfare, who compared our past to the modernized version of it that sucks up tax dollars more than any other human activity. It turns out that humanity has colossal sample sizes of thousands of years, hundreds of societies that thrived without warfare—these understandings of ancient life are in fact revolutionary when you hold them up against the way we live today. Short’s other articles on pioneering cooperation projects in the U.S. on food, housing and sustainability are inspiring people to join the good social causes and projects around us—I know it because we get the letters from readers who share that it inspired them to act within their communities.

That’s powerful media.

Please check out our other most recent stories below—and if you haven’t already, please join us and support our work!

Thanks from Jan Ritch-Frel and the rest of the IMI team.

After Devastating DACA Ruling, Dreamers Vow to Push for Legalization

Sonali Kolhatkar – Economy for All

Arizona Republicans Are Fanning Trump’s 2020 Big Lie, and Spreading Confusion About How Votes Are Counted

Steven Rosenfeld – Voting Booth

The Republicans Have Unleashed a New Crime Wave on America

Thom Hartmann – Economy for All

The United States Underestimates China’s Economic Challenge at Its Own Peril

Richard D. Wolff – Economy for All

Undercover Investigations Expose Wildlife Killing Contest Brutality

Katie Stennes – Earth | Food | Life

Don’t Let the EAGLE Act Fly Through Congress: Prevent a New Cold War with China

Jodie Evans and RJ Thomsen – Local Peace Economy

20 Years of U.S. Occupation Was Brutal in Afghanistan—And So Will Be the Exit

Sonali Kolhatkar – Economy for All

The GOP’s Truly Morbid Election Strategy

Thom Hartmann – Economy for All

The Myth That Meat Is Essential for Human Health Could Harm Us All

Jennifer Barckley – Earth | Food | Life

The Right Wing Is Pumping Out Critical Race Theory Attacks to Boost Its Propaganda War on Public Education

Jeff Bryant – Our Schools

Samuel Alito’s Assault on the Voting Rights Act Is Plunging the Supreme Court Back to the Segregation Era

The conservative majority’s opinion permits some racial discrimination in voting.

By Steven Rosenfeld

In recent decades, voting rights progress has consisted of expanding access to a ballot and the ways to cast it—such as online registration, voting from home with mailed-out ballots and other options to vote before Election Day. Those innovations have been widely embraced, especially during the 2020 election in response to health concerns during a pandemic. In the general election, 56 million people voted in a different manner than they had in 2016.

But the Supreme Court’s latest major decision on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has imposed new standards that election law scholars say are hostile to the more expansive and convenient voting options that have surfaced in recent years. Even more troubling, the court’s conservative majority has done so in a way that is reminiscent of the arguments put forth by last century’s opponents of equal voting opportunities for racial minorities.

In Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the court eviscerated the strongest remaining section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), Section 2, which held that election laws and voting rules that had a racially discriminatory impact could be blocked. (In 2013, the court, in Shelby v. Holder, neutered the VRA’s sections that allowed federal authorities to block regressive new election laws or voting rules in jurisdictions with histories of discrimination.) Perhaps most alarmingly in Brnovich, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion resurrected a legal strategy embraced by the opponents of last century’s major civil rights reforms.

Brnovich held that some discriminatory impacts of an election law do not alone invalidate that law. That standard, put forth in “guideposts” laid out by Alito, means that suits challenging laws and rules that make voting harder must go beyond showing a discriminatory result. Those challenging a law must prove that its authors intended to discriminate—making it much harder to sue and win. Shifting the burden of proof from the result or effect of a law to its authors’ intent was a tactic of 1970s anti-civil rights litigants.

Read the rest at National Memo.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

The Right Wing Is Pumping Out Critical Race Theory Attacks to Boost Its Propaganda War on Public Education

Right-wing groups are attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion work in public schools because they want to get rid of public education.

By Jeff Bryant

“No one deserves the school I went to,” says Celia Gottlieb.

Gottlieb is currently enrolled in Middlebury College and working as an intern with New York University’s Metro Center, but she is talking about the high school she attended in Highland, New York, a small community in the Lower Hudson River Valley region of the Empire State.

The Highland Central School District would raise few concerns to the casual observer. Its state data report card says the district graduates 89 percent of its students, above the national rate of 86 percent, with a college, career, and civic readiness level of four, the state’s highest rating. But Gottlieb’s negative recollections about her high school years have more to do with what went on inside the building.

“There was not a single day that I didn’t hear a student openly use the n-word,” she told me in a phone call. “Confederate flags were common. Students had Confederate flags on their cars and on their clothes. One kid wore a shirt with a Confederate flag on it nearly every day and was never told to take it off, even though a student who wore a shirt with an LGBTQ message on it was told to take it off.”

Read the rest at LA Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Climate Crises Can Lead to Improved Social Cooperation and Economy

A new study on the effects of climate crises in ancient Mesopotamia found increased cooperation and a more widespread distribution of power.

By April M. Short

The going assumption is that the impacts of climate disasters on institutions and economics will be negative. However, this is not always the case. Climate disasters can actually have the opposite effect, historically, as shown in a recent article about climate-related disasters in ancient Mesopotamia. The study found that climate-related tensions in effect forced greater cooperation and a more widespread distribution of power across social sectors.

The article, “Climate Change and State Evolution,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on April 6 and was authored by Carmine Guerriero from the University of Bologna in Italy and Giacomo Benati from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen in Germany. The authors note in the article’s abstract that prior literature on climate disasters in ancient societies focuses on “collapse archaeology,” and tends to correlate “severe droughts” with “institutional crises.” The article instead used a game theory approach to analyze a stream of papers that have been published in recent years on Bronze Age Mesopotamia that challenge this narrative.

Read the rest at Pressenza.

April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

The IMI Journal: June 2021 Edition: Americans Shell Out for Entertainment Media and Corporate News, But Not Independent Media

I’ve asked two dozen of my colleagues: How much do you pay monthly for all your media subscriptions—and how much of that goes to any of the organizations that are independent, and fighting hard to make the world a better place?

The answers I’ve received show a pattern of monthly subscriptions for most corporate and commercial media: Spotify, $9.99; Netflix, $8.99; Apple TV and Music, $14.95; YouTube, $11.99; Disney+, $7.99; Discovery+, $6.99; Amazon Prime, $12.99.

That totals about $75 per month, plus an average cable/internet bill of $200. It quickly adds up to a number around $3,300 annually in the U.S.

Guess how much my colleagues told me they pay for independent media?

$20 per year, total.

Independent media is necessary to make any kind of social progress—but when it comes to paying for it, our habit as a society is to pay media companies for entertainment instead.

Consider your own patterns, and if you think you might get more out of independent media and everything it can accomplish—whether that’s a better health care system, more sustainable environmental practices, a stronger education system, or a more equal society—than you would with unlimited TV series to binge on, then please join us and support our mission and important work.

Please join us now—we need you in our court.

And if you aren’t up to date, please catch up with our recent work:

To Save Planet, Solve Twin Crises of Climate Change and Species Loss Together, Say UN Scientists

Reynard Loki – Earth | Food | Life

Pro-Trump and Vote-Counting Factions Split Over Arizona 2020 Vote Audit

Steven Rosenfeld – Voting Booth

There Is No Labor Shortage, Only Labor Exploitation

Sonali Kolhatkar – Economy for All

Arizona Senate Challenged by Experienced Election Auditors to Let Them Confirm 2020 Voting Results

Steven Rosenfeld – Voting Booth

Forests Are Crucial to Combating Climate Change—Will Biden Rise to the Challenge?

Reynard Loki – Earth | Food | Life

Is the Rise of QAnon Conspiracies the ‘End Times’ for U.S. Democracy?

Thom Hartmann – Economy for All

How the Tulsa Race Massacre Was a Violent Act of Racist Economic Injustice

Sonali Kolhatkar – Economy for All

Humanity’s #1 Environmental Problem Is Consumption—Climate Change Is Just One of the Byproducts

Reynard Loki – Earth | Food | Life

Does the U.S. Really Need Another Oil Pipeline?

Sonali Kolhatkar – Economy for All

Thanks from Jan Ritch-Frel and the rest of the IMI team—please join us.

Voting Booth: Reporting on the Ground From Arizona—Audit Controversies and Election Integrity

Voting Booth’s coverage of the Arizona state Senate’s examination of 2020 election ballots from Maricopa County, the state’s largest county, has noted many previously undisclosed and important developments. In mid-May, after visiting Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix where the audit was taking place and having backstage and floor access, Voting Booth noted why the hand count of 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County was imprecise at key junctures, which could lead to discrepancies with the state-certified results where Joe Biden won.

The report’s prime takeaway was that the hand count was not compiling or comparing subtotals of the hand count with the building blocks of the official results, which is what an audit would do. By late May, Voting Booth reported how experienced auditors, including a respected Arizona Republican Party election observer, had obtained 2020 election data and issued their assessment of what happened in Arizona’s 2020 election. They found 60,000 ballots where most of the votes were cast for Republicans—but not for Donald Trump. In short, suburban Phoenix voters rejected him—an understandable explanation, in contrast to the many Trump-pedaled conspiracy theories.

As June began, those same independent auditors issued a challenge to the Arizona Senate’s pro-Trump lead contractors—underscoring that an independent team of experienced election auditors could do what the state Senate’s contractors had yet to do: trace the vote count from individual ballots through the process to the compiled election results. By mid-June, as the hand recount was nearing its completion, two camps were emerging backstage: one limiting the Senate’s investigations to those by fervent Trump supporters, and another seeking an actual audit of ballots and vote counts.

Voting Booth’s next report will focus on where the exercise in Phoenix’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum goes from here. It is not yet clear if pro-Trump partisans, who have minimal prior election auditing experience, will short-circuit a wider inquiry that not only evaluates the presidential election vote in Maricopa County, but also double-checks the hand recount.