Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

Border Lands, David Bradley (Chippewa)







http://nitanahkohe.tumblr.com/post/50630974097

[American Dream]

Here is a bare-bones description of my own feminist vision: this is a vision of the world that is pro-sex and -woman, a world where women and men are free to live creative lives, in security and with bodily health and integrity, where they are free to choose whom they love, and whom they set up house with, and whether they want to have or not have children; a world where pleasure rather than just duty and drudgery determine our choices, where free and imaginative exploration of the mind is a fundamental right; a vision in which economic stability, ecological sustainability, racial equality, and the redistribution of wealth form the material basis of people’s well-being. Finally, my vision is one in which democratic and socialist practices and institutions provide the conditions for public participation and decision making for people regardless of economic and social location. In strategic terms, this vision entails putting in place antiracist feminist and democratic principles of participation and relationality, and it means working on many fronts, in many different kinds of collectivities in order to organize against repressive systems of rule. It also means being attentive to small as well as large struggles and processes that lead to radical change—not just working (or waiting) for a revolution. Thus everyday feminist, antiracist, anticapitalist practices are as important as larger, organized political movements.

– Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 3-4

[American Dream]

A.V.A.T.A.R.
 (Anglos 
Valiantly 
Aiding 
Tragic 
Awe-inspiring
 Races) is 
a 
fast‐paced 
media 
mashup 
that 
highlights 
the overplayed 
racial 
tropes 
of 
Hollywood 
cinema 
using James 
Cameron’s 
multimillion‐dollar 
epic 
Avatar as 
its visual 
anchor. 
The 
hilarious 
visual 
juxtapositions 
and accompanying 
soundtrack
 of 
baffling 
one‐liners 
spliced together 
from
 seventeen
 films 
are 
both 
a 
humorous 
jab 
at racism in our supposedly liberal popular 
culture,
as 
well as 
a 
media
 literacy 
tool 
for 
deconstructing how whiteness and Other-ness is 
portrayed 
in 
mainstream 
films 
about humanitarian crises.

[American Dream]

“Within settler colonialism, it is exploitation of land that yields supreme value. In order for settlers to usurp the land and extract its value, Indigenous peoples must be destroyed, removed, and made into ghosts. Extracting value from the land also often requires systems of slavery and other forms of labor exploitation. These simultaneous processes of taking over the land (by killing and erasing the peoples with previous relationships to that land) and importing forced labor (to work the land as chattel slaves to yield high profit margins for the landowners) produced the wealth upon which the U.S. nation’s world power is founded. Profit is obtained by making property out of the land, as well as out of the body of the slave. The triad relationship among the industrious settler, the erased/invisibilized Native, and the ownable and murderable slave is evident in the ways in which the United States continues to exploit Indigenous, black, and other peoples deemed “illegal” (or otherwise threatening and usurping) immigrants, which is why we describe settler colonialism as a persistent structure.”

– “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy.” Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill

[American Dream]

http://wkallpa.tumblr.com/post/49866877796

[American Dream]

“If you are reading this in the United States or Canada, whose land are you on, dear reader? What are the specific names of the Native nation(s) who have historical claim to the territory on which you currently read this article? What are their histories before European invasion? What are their historical and present acts of resistance to colonial occupation? If you are like most people in the United States and Canada, you cannot answer these questions. And this disturbs me.”

Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee), “Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies”

[American Dream]

“I hear people say it’s gonna take seven generations just to fix this—and I say please don’t say that! I say, please say that the most important thing to do is to start the healing process, not how long it’s gonna take, but to start it today right this second. Let’s say we’re gonna heal, we’re gonna work at healing—it’s gonna be our road, not a destination…We need to heal our minds; the words that come out of our mouth—to our children, to our wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, aunties and relatives—they’re gonna be kind considerate words that are encouraging. We need to heal our bodies; we’re the only ones that will take care of this body. And we can do that—heal ourselves. If you’ve been struck, or raped, or whatever happened to you, you’ll find healing for that.”

– Gerry Saahiilthit Oleman (Stl’atl’imx Nation), Victim Services Coordinator for Provincial Residential School Project

[American Dream]

I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us, then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation.

— Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” Sister Outsider, p. 123

[American Dream]

“[…] Accordingly, we are fed a steady diet of reproaches by liberal and misanthropic environmentalists alike about how “we” as a species are responsible for the breakdown of the environment. One does not have to go to enclaves of mystics and gurus in San Francisco to find this species-centered, asocial view of ecological problems and their sources.

New York City will do just as well. I shall not easily forget an “environmental” presentation staged by the New York Museum of Natural History in the seventies in which the public was exposed to a long series of exhibits, each depicting examples of pollution and ecological disruption. The exhibit which closed the presentation carried a startling sign, “The Most Dangerous Animal on Earth,” and it consisted simply of a huge mirror which reflected back the human viewer who stood before it. I clearly recall a black child standing before the mirror while a white school teacher tried to explain the message which this arrogant exhibit tried to convey.

There were no exhibits of corporate boards of directors planning to deforest a mountainside or government officials acting in collusion with them. The exhibit primarily conveyed one, basically misanthropic, message: people as such, not a rapacious society and its wealthy beneficiaries, are responsible for environmental dislocations – the poor no less than the personally wealthy, people of color no less than privileged whites, women no less than men, the oppressed no less than the oppressor.

A mythical human “species” had replaced classes; individuals had replaced hierarchies; personal tastes (many of which are shaped by a predatory media) had replaced social relationships; and the disempowered who live meager, isolated lives had replaced giant corporations, self-serving bureaucracies, and the violent paraphernalia of the State.”

– Murray Bookchin, Society & Ecology

[American Dream]

The Invention of the White Race

by JEFFREY B. PERRY

Theodore W. Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race, republished by Verso Books in a New Expanded Edition, presents a full-scale challenge to what Allen refers to as “The Great White Assumption” – “the unquestioning, indeed unthinking acceptance of the ‘white’ identity of European-Americans of all classes as a natural attribute rather than a social construct.” Its thesis on the origin and nature of the “white race” contains the root of a new and radical approach to United States history, one that challenges master narratives taught in the media and in schools, colleges, and universities. With its equalitarian motif and emphasis on class struggle it speaks to people today who strive for change worldwide.

Allen’s original 700-pages magnum opus, already recognized as a “classic” by scholars such as Audrey Smedley, Wilson J. Moses, Nell Painter, and Gerald Horne, included extensive notes and appendices based on his twenty-plus years of primary source research. The November 2012 Verso edition adds new front and back matter, expanded indexes, and internal study guides for use by individuals, classes, and study groups. Invention is a major contribution to our historical understanding, it is meant to stand the test of time, and it can be expected to grow in importance in the 21st century.

“When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.”

That arresting statement, printed on the back cover of the first (1994) volume, reflected the fact that, after poring through 885 county-years of Virginia’s colonial records, Allen found “no instance of the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status” prior to its appearance in a 1691 law. As he explained, “Others living in the colony at that time were English; they had been English when they left England, and naturally they and their Virginia-born children were English, they were not ‘white.’” “White identity had to be carefully taught, and it would be only after the passage of some six crucial decades” that the word “would appear as a synonym for European-American.”

Allen was not merely speaking of word usage, however. His probing research led him to conclude – based on the commonality of experience and demonstrated solidarity between African-American and European-American laboring people, the lack of a substantial intermediate buffer social control stratum, and the “indeterminate” status of African-Americans – that the “white race” was not, and could not have been, functioning in early Virginia.

It is in the context of such findings that he offers his major thesis — the “white race” was invented as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the later, civil war stage of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-77). To this he adds two important corollaries: 1) the ruling elite, in its own class interest, deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges to define and maintain the “white race” and 2) the consequences were not only ruinous to the interests of African-Americans, they were also “disastrous” for European-American workers, whose class interests differed fundamentally from those of the ruling elite.

In Volume I Allen offers a critical examination of the two main lines of historiography on the slavery and racism debate: the psycho-cultural approach, which he strongly criticizes; and the socio-economic approach, which he seeks to free from certain apparent weaknesses. He then proceeds to develop a definition of racial oppression in terms of social control, a definition not based on “phenotype,” or classification by complexion. In the process, he offers compelling analogies between the oppression of the Irish in Ireland (under Anglo-Norman rule and under “Protestant Ascendancy”) and white supremacist oppression of African Americans and Indians.

Allen emphasizes that maximizing profit and maintaining social control are two priority tasks of the ruling class. He describes how racial oppression is one form of ruling class response to the problem of social control and national oppression is another. The difference centers on whether the key component of the intermediate social control stratum are members of the oppressor group (racial oppression) or the oppressed group (national oppression).

Continues at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/21/ ... hite-race/

[American Dream]

http://www.justseeds.org/fernando_marti ... stina.html

Fernando Martí

Fernando Martí
Palestina


Palestine: slingshot, olive, key. Symbols of self-determination over a 1918 map of Palestine, showing Palestinian and Jewish villages of the time. Keys, hopes and aspirations for a right of return to the homeland, a memory of what grandmothers held to after the Nakba, symbols of destroyed homes and villages. Olives, aspect of a land-based culture, of history and economic sustenance, feared and destroyed by the settlers. The slingshot, a symbol of resistance and struggle, and of youthful uprising against apparently invincible forces. I realize that all those symbols have a certain nostalgia to them. Like this website that sells old-school made-by-hand prints, today’s struggles may be communicated through text messages and media posts, but when the lights are turned out, we return to faded paper maps, rusted family keys, makeshift slingshots, and the ancient olive trees that still give life…

[American Dream]

Tales in a Kabul Restaurant

May 22, 2013

By Kathy Kelly

Since 2009, Voices for Creative Nonviolence has maintained a grim record we call the “The Afghan Atrocities Update” which gives the dates, locations, numbers and names of Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces. Even with details culled from news reports, these data can't help but merge into one large statistic, something about terrible pain that's worth caring about but that is happening very far away.

It’s one thing to chronicle sparse details about these U.S. led NATO attacks. It’s quite another to sit across from Afghan men as they try, having broken down in tears, to regain sufficient composure to finish telling us their stories. Last night, at a restaurant in Kabul, I and two friends from the Afghan Peace Volunteers met with five Pashtun men from Afghanistan’s northern and eastern provinces. The men had agreed to tell us about their experiences living in areas affected by regular drone attacks, aerial bombings and night raids. Each of them noted that they also fear Taliban threats and attacks. “What can we do,” they asked, “when both sides are targeting us?”

The First Responder's tale

Jamaludeen, an emergency medical responder from Jalalabad, is a large man, with a serious yet kindly demeanor. He began our conversation by saying that he simply doesn’t understand how one human being can inflict so much harm on another. Last winter, NATO forces fired on his cousin, Rafiqullah, age 30, who was studying to be a pediatrics specialist.

"A suicide bomber had apparently blown himself up near the airport. My cousin and two other men were riding in a car on a road leading to the airport. It was 6:15 AM. When they'd realized that NATO helicopters and tanks were firing missiles, they had left their car and huddled on the roadside, but they were easily seen. A missile exploded near them, seriously wounding Rafiqullah and another passenger, while killing their driver, Hayatullah."

Hayatullah, our friend told us, was an older man, about 45 years old, who left behind a wife, two boys and one daughter.

Although badly wounded, Rafiqullah and his fellow passenger could still speak. A U.S. tank arrived and they began pleading with the NATO soldiers to take them to the hospital. “I am a doctor,” said Rafiqullah's fellow passenger, a medical student named Siraj Ahmad. “Please save me!” But the soldiers handcuffed the two wounded young men and awaited a decision about what to do next. Rafiqullah died there, by the side of the road. Still handcuffed, Siraj Ahmad was taken, not to a hospital, but to the airport, perhaps to await evacuation. That was where he died. He was aged 35 and had four daughters. Rafiqullah, aged 30, leaves three small girls behind.

And Jamaludeen knows that those girls, in one sense are lucky. Four years ago, he tried to bring first aid as an early responder to a wedding party attacked by NATO forces. Only he couldn’t, because there were no survivors. 54 people were killed, all of them (except for the bridegroom) women and children. “It was like hell,” said Dr. Jamaludeen. “I saw little shoes, covered with blood, along with pieces of clothing and musical instruments. It was very, very terrible to me. The NATO soldiers knew these people were not a threat.”

The Manual Laborer's Tale

Kocji, who makes a living doing manual laborer, is from a village of 400 families. His story took place three weeks ago. It started with a telephoned warning that Taliban forces had entered the Surkh Rod district of Jalalabad, which is where his village is located. That day, at about 10:00 p.m., NATO forces entered his village en masse. Some soldiers landed on rooftops and slid expertly to the ground on rope ladders. When they entered homes, they would lock women and children in one room while they beat the men, shouting questions as the women and children screamed to be released. On this raid, no one was killed, and no one was taken away. It turned out that NATO troops had acted on a false report and discovered their error quickly. False reports are a constant risk. - In any village some families will feud with each other, and NATO troops can be brought into those feuds, unwittingly and very easily, and sometimes with deadly consequences. Kocji objects to NATO forces ordering attacks without first asking more questions and trying to find out whether or not the report is valid. He’d been warned of a threat from one direction, but the threats actually come from all sides.

The Student's Table

Rizwad, a student from the Pech district of the Kunar province, spoke next.

Twenty-five days ago, between 3 and 4 a.m., twelve children were collecting firewood in the mountains not far from his village. The children were between 7 and 8 years old. Rizwad actually saw the fighter plane flying overhead towards the mountains. When it reached them, it fired on the twelve children, leaving no survivors. Rizwad’s 8 year old cousin, Nasrullah, a schoolboy in the third grade, was among the dead that morning.

The twelve children belonged to eight families from the same village. When the villagers found the bloodied and dismembered bodies of their children, they gathered together to demand from the provincial government some reason as to why NATO forces had killed them. “It was a mistake,” they were told.

"It is impossible for the people to talk with the U.S. military,” says Rizwad. “Our own government tries to calm us down by saying they will look into the matter."

The Farmer's Table

Riazullah from Chapria Marnu spoke next. Fifteen days previously, three famers in Riazullah's area had been working to irrigate their wheat field. It was early afternoon, about 3:30 p.m. One of the men was only eighteen - he had been married for five months. The other two farmers were in their mid-forties. Their names were Shams Ulrahman, Khadeem and Miragah, and Miragah’s two little daughters were with them.

Eleven NATO tanks arrived. One tank fired missiles which killed the three men and the two little girls. “What can we do?” asked Riazullah. “We are caught between the Taliban and the internationals. Our local government does not help us.”

The Story of US/NATO Occupation

The world doesn't seem to ask many questions about Afghan civilians whose lives are cut short by NATO or Taliban forces. Genuinely concerned U.S. friends say they can't really make sense of our list - news stories merge into one large abstraction, into statistics, into "collateral damage," in a way that comparable (if much smaller and less frequent) attacks on U.S. civilians do not. People here in Afghanistan naturally don’t see themselves as a statistic; they wonder why the NATO soldiers treat civilians as battlefield foes at the slightest hint of opposition or danger; why the U.S. soldiers and drones kill unarmed suspects on anonymous tips when people around the world know suspects deserve safety and a trial, innocent until proven guilty.

“All of us keep asking why the internationals kill us,” said Jamaludeen. “One reason seems to be that they don’t differentiate between people. The soldiers fear any bearded Afghan who wears a turban and traditional clothes. But why would they kill children? It seems they have a mission. They are told to go and get the Taliban. When they go out in their planes and their tanks and their helicopters, they need to be killing, and then they can report that they have completed their mission.”

These are the stories being told here. NATO and its constituent nations may have other accounts to give of themselves, but they aren’t telling them very convincingly, or well. The stories told by bomb blasts or by shouting home-invading soldiers drown out other competing sentiments and seem to represent all that the U.S./NATO occupiers ever came here to say. We who live in countries that support NATO, that tolerate this occupation, bear responsibility to hear the tales told by Afghans who are trapped by our war of choice. These tales are part of our history now, and this history isn’t popular in Afghanistan. It doesn’t play well when the U.S. and NATO forces state that we came here because of terrorism, because of a toll in lost civilian lives already exceeded in Afghanistan during just the first three months of a decade-long war – that we came in pious concern over precious stories that should not be cut short.


From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/tales-in ... athy-kelly

[American Dream]

http://ordoesitexplode.wordpress.com/20 ... -power-is/

morning thoughts on being a “have not” and what power is.

we are dealing with evil.

the society in which we live is a wicked one- let there be no doubt. in a socety built on the creation of classes of “have nots”being exploited, drained, and killed by a wealthy 1% of the population, there can only be suffering. in capitalism there is only room for this kind of order- because monopoly means that there is a singular power controlling industries and profitting. there can never be a comprimise between the rulers of this world and the workers. there can only be a total shift, in which the workers and those neglected and shut out of formal “wage slavery” (aka a 9 to 5) take back their power and run the society for themselves. the oppressed must use their power to destory hierarchy and the ideas that it necessitates.

but what is “power”? and where is it? how do they have it and we dont?

the capitalist/ 1%/ rulers of this world have material power. money means power and is protected by force. the systems of government seek to care only for the wealthy while holding up the illusion of working for us all. but anyone looking closely enough will see the true nature of our “representatives”. their true faces- mostly white, owners of industry. police protect these representatives and the laws that they create. and most of the oppressed population believes these laws because we belive in “fairness”, “democracy” and the like- even though it is never in play. Where is there democracy when millions of Africans were stolen for labor, killed, raped, and tortured in the creation of this land? Where is there democracy when the native population of the Americas was wiped out to make space for the colonial European power and forced onto small pockets of the lands their ancestors thrived and dreamt on for generations? Where is there democracy when this imperial land starves other nations and forces them into slave-like labor for capitalist gain? Where is there democracy when the prison system of this country houses a majority black and brown population while bodies of armed men, given the “right” to protect us, murder us for sport? Where is there democracy when the majority of this country is dying unnecessary because of lack of access to basic health care, healthy food, and work?

there is none. there is only a dreamed illusion that supports this “democracy” and guns that defend it. “democracy” in this reality is a dangerous lie.

in creating a class system- it is important to destroy the self confidence and self fullfillment of those who will make up the lower classes. it happens all the time in this world. folks are starved, told their bodies are ugly and unworthy, given food that is dangerous to eat and wears down the body (simultaneiously destorying the spirit)- folks are given scraps of jobs (and told to be greatful because everyone else is unemployed or jailed), and given guilt- the oppressed are blamed for their condition. “you are poor/ unsuccessful, because you aren’t working hard enough, because you aren’t playing the game, because you are . . . “

all the while, the media dictates what the picture of success is- shifting every so often to include a smaller amount of tokens. (faces of oppressed populations that will help maintain the illusion of fairness- that everyone can succeed) the oppressed are being sold a pipe dream, because now to fill the void of what they/ we ,suppossedly, don’t have (“beauty”, “wealth”, “health”, etc. . .), the oppressed are told to buy their healing (get surgery, buy more clothes, purchase the shiny/ updated versions of that indigenous healing that the colonizers demeaned and destroyed) or to numb it through addiction- to food, to drugs (“legal” and “illegal”), to violence, to escapism via television or videogames, to sleep, to sex, to domination (esp in the case of working men and men of color, the society teaches you to take your power back through controlling what you can- your interactions , your children and partners, your friends)

all of this creating unhealthy dependancies and ideas of these things.

the aim/ goal in all of this is still the takng of power.

the oppressed are having their power stripped by being told that it doesn’t lie inside themselves.

the oppressed are starved. but not powerless.

chanting down this Babylon means looking inside ourselves for what can be healing- and leaning on one another when we feel low or destructive (self and otherwise). the methods of healing and growing our own gardens are being pronounced as “new”, “trendy”, or otherwise “a thing of privilege” are ancient and ours. we, the oppressed, created them. we knew how to hold earth and breathe life before it was called “organic”. we knew the multiple beauties in our bodies before we were called fat and we had ways of harvesting food that would produce health and longevity. we created- in free time and healed through that.

part of the “power” that has been stripped from us ain’t really gone. its just been hid behind distraction.

”i believe i have inside of me everything that i need to live a bountiful life. with all the love inside of me i will stand as tall as the tallest tree.” – celie, “the color purple”

part of that power is in self love and “actualization” and community. and it is hard to cultivate because we are surrounded by conditions that are of opposite intentions but we must seek it. we must use our lives to build community strong enough to sustain us and we must talk about the lies being fed and how to undo them through truth and establishing centers of power for ourselves where everyone is growing and knowledge isn’t specialized and held by a “boss”. we must all be workers that build together and share in the bounty of our work together. and we have to tell one another that we are beautiful- especially when we feel low because that is how we gain power. we gain it by living for ourselves and our community. we gain it by healing and living for our healing. we gain it by questioning our thoughts and our actions. we gain it by seeking life outside of these parameters given.

[American Dream]

http://www.justseeds.org/bec_young/15outsiders.html

Bec Young

The Outsiders

I am a human being in an era of robots, so don't judge my worth or my right to a full life solely on productivity at work.

I am not a machine, I need to spend my time doing what I love, & creating revolutions of the mind & heart.

First published in 1963, the book The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Workers' Notebook by James Boggs breaks down the state of labor in this country in ways that are still so relevant today. The fourth chapter, entitled The Outsiders, explains that due to automation, there will simply not be enough jobs. Rather than create more meaningless jobs what we actually need is to re-imagine the idea of work:

"... the new generation, the outsiders, the workless people, now have to turn their thoughts away from trying to outwit the machines and instead toward the organization and reorganization of society and of human relations inside society. The revolution which is within these people will have to be a revolution of their minds and hearts, directed not toward increasing production but toward the management and distribution of things and toward the control of relations among people, tasks which up to now have been left to chance or in the hands of an elite."

The image is based on a press photo of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Judith Jamison. Reportedly, Baryshnikov said "You people are crazy. I do what I love to do, and you pay me to do it." Jamison had an incredible career inspiring others: “Learn the craft of knowing how to open your heart and to turn on your creativity.
There’s a light inside of you.”

[Hammer of Los]

...

God bless ya man.

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