Share a link, article, film recommendation, or anything else!

More on recent massacre in Peruvian Amazon

rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/ben-powless/20...

www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009906210530

Goddammit Detroit…..

Interesting commentary on Venezualan revolutionary process. Could generate good discussion on relationship between the state and movements…..

www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticlePrint/21779

the U.S. is at it again! promoting democracy all over the globe!!! Check out this article with some good photos of the situation in Honduras. I for one salute the people of Honduras for taking to the streets in the face of such brute force.
www.soaw.org/presente/index.php?option=...

:)


www.blogtalkradio.com/Ethics-Talk/2009/...

Sexuality in Socialist Cuba…

upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1...

Along with our little chat about Burger King’s advertising last week:

www.rimag.com/article/ca6667235.html

Fuck Carl’s Jr. And Hardee’s.

The Coup in Honduras is becoming more and more of a nightmare.Check out telesurtv.org in these recent days for info. Even if you don’t understand Spanish, the images speak a thousand words.

Tijerina Heirs Ask Obama To Restore Land Grants

By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer
Settled into a chair on her patio, Rosita Tijerina shows none of the fist-pumping militancy that caused her famous father, Reies, to be described by some as “a creature of the darkness” and the most hated man in New Mexico.
Her younger brother, Noé, on the other hand, has inherited all of his father’s oratorical fire.
“We’re hungry for justice,” he says, arms waving. “Evil will only triumph while good men stand by and do nothing.”
We’re under a patio umbrella in an older Albuquerque neighborhood because Rosita and Noé are banding together with longtime community activist Andres Valdez to bring the land grant fight of Reies Lopez Tijerina back to life.
A Texas native who was a traveling preacher, Tijerina landed in northern New Mexico in the 1960s and became the face of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a collective of Hispanic land grant heirs he helped to organize with the aim of taking back property they claimed under the treaty that ended the Mexican-American War.
In 1966, Tijerina led the group in an armed occupation of Echo Amphitheater in the Carson National Forest, land that was historically part of the San Joaquin del Rio de Chama Land Grant. A year later, Tijerina and others tried to make a citizens arrest and free members being held at the Rio Arriba County Courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, an event that turned into an armed occupation — culminating in the shooting of a State Police officer and a jailer — and became known as the “courthouse raid.”
More than 40 years later, the Tijerina children are taking a different tack. They have sent President Barack Obama a certified letter asking, in a sentence, for title to millions of acres of national forest and Bureau of Land Management land in the Southwest.
“We are requesting our land be returned back to us, the thousands of displaced land grant heirs that have been forced out of our homes, our towns and out of our livelihoods.”
Rosita and Noé Tijerina make it sound simple: They meet with Obama, he sees things their way, and directs the Interior and Agriculture Departments to identify which parts of the forests and BLM reserves were historically land grants and give that land to the collective heirs.
They envision an arrangement similar to that of the Indian pueblos — land grant communities with their own police forces, governments and industries.
The land grants were lands awarded by the Spanish and Mexican governments to individuals and groups as they agreed to move into the New World. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo recognized the property as belonging to the ancestors of the original settlers, people the Tijerinas prefer to call “Indo-Hispanos.” But, over time, most of the land grant acres became folded into federal holdings, or purchased or swindled into private hands.
There were hundreds of land grants, comprising millions of acres, and they cover much of New Mexico.
Land grant activists are understandably unhappy about losing their land, although it’s also reasonable to ask whether it was ever really theirs. Native Americans called this place home long before the “settlers” arrived, and they can make a good case that the land wasn’t Spain’s or Mexico’s to give.
Too bad about all this ancient history, you’re thinking. What about me? I rather like scrambling to the top of Cabezon and strolling on the Aspen Vista Trail and fishing in the Santa Barbara and watching birds at Bosque del Apache. I think of all this public land as mine.
Relax, the organizers say. Grazing, hiking, fishing — it would all be allowed under the land grant nations.
“Hand in hand in brotherhood,” Noé says.
“We would not do to them what they did to us,” Rosita adds.
And what about the folks who’ve bought former land grant land and built their houses and ranches there? They would stay put, the organizers say. But the federal government would be expected to compensate the land grant heirs for their property.
You seem pretty matter-of-fact about all this, I tell Valdez and the Tijerinas. But talking about a takeover of a good portion of the state will scare the daylights out of people.
“Of course, it will scare people,” Valdez says. “But there will be diplomacy and education.”
Tijerina did several years in prison for the amphitheater takeover and the courthouse raid. He had a conversion of sorts behind bars and emerged with a different view of the struggle. Tijerina, who is 82 now and lives in El Paso with his third wife, still believes in the land grant cause, Rosita says, but “he wanted brotherhood, peace among the races.”
Rosita was 18 during the courthouse raid, and she acted as a shield and decoy and remembers bullets flying. Noé was 9 and watched it on TV, worried that he was losing his father and his sister to the cause.
Although the organizers don’t rule out some kind of protest if Obama ignores the new Alianza (they’re silent on the details), the elderly Tijerina won’t have to watch his children engaged in armed conflict on TV.
“We’re hungry for justice,” Noé says. “But militant activity has gotten us nowhere.”
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com.

There’s an article in today’s Morning Sun (7/16) about the MP School Board seeking an alternative to closing Oasis. I’ll save a copy should anyone like to read it. (I can’t be held responsible for the quality of the article, though.)

www.counterpunch.org/scahill05152009.html

Whoooooops

Oh and Helen Keller was a part of the IWW

www.iww.org/culture/articles/hkeller1.s...

Awesome!

The Long Haul by Myles Horton. Autobiography of an educator who opens a free school in rural Tennessee. Lots of pertinent stuff. Seriously…read it once, twice, and again. I’m actually going to recommend we do a chapter of this a week for book club in the fall. There’s like, a relevant insight PER PAGE. Hell, if you have a CMU email account, recall it from me. I want this to make the ROUNDS! This book is making me see a lot of stuff in a new light!

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Freire. Changed how I look at…basically everything, but mostly my education. Again, very pertinent.

Getting Off by Robert Jensen. Great anti-porn writer, great anti-porn book.

“American Skinheads” (Documentary) www.documentarytube.com/social-document... People make the mistake of assuming all skinheads are “psychotic” or “evil.” In reality, they’re often poor, rural whites with few options…exactly the people we’ve talked about reaching out to. Suggest we watch it as a group and discuss its implications.

For anyone (like me) who likes learning foreign languages:

www.seelrc.org:8080/grammar/mainframe.jsp?nLanguageID=5

www.ielanguages.com

This websites provide extensive tutorials on:

Bosnian/Croation/Serbian, Czech, Gerogian, Macedonian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovene, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faorese, Ukranian, Finnish, Turkish, Indonesian.

Um, so go learn something.

www.democracynow.org/2009/8/7/honduras

Democracy Now! lands Lanny Davis to get his side (and the Honduran business community) on why the coup was justified.

Lanny Davis is a slimeball but you probably already know this…

My good friend Raul recently sent our crew (buncha crazy ass xican@ militants!) a fun article and his response. It is WELL WORTH the time to read both the article and his response if you have any interest in Capitalism, sexuality, and race ALL AT THE SAME TIME. (mmmm, exciting!)

here is the text of what he sent us:

“Yo my friend sent me this article talking about the development of queer identity within capitalism. Scandalous! Check it out. I read it… here’s the link and my reponse

platypus1917.home.comcast.net/~platypus...


“Capitalism has created the conditions that allow some men and women to organize a personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction to their own sex. It has made possible the formation of urban communities of lesbians and gay men, and more recently, of a politics based on sexual identity.”

This article claims that queer IDENTITY and COMMUNITY has developed as a result of capitalism. El autor dice que NO siempre hemos existido as jot@s. He claims that “gay men and lesbians are a product of history, and have come into existence in a specific historical era.” His argument sounds dangerous and problematic. Queer people have existed since the beginning of time foo!

But if he is saying that queerness as an IDENTITY has not always existed, that rather has emerged as a label, as a category, as a community, as a visible political force more recently, then this is true. Today, we (todas las jotitas y jotitos) assert our queerness and sometimes make it the center of our existence, without realizing that doing so is a defense/survival mechanism reacting to colonization and systems of oppression (brutal heterosexism). Heterosexism is for sure colonial cuz many indigenous tribes—although it varied in time and space—highly regarded queerness and 2-spirit people in their communities; they lived AMONG the community WITH their families WITH their “queer identity” interwoven WITHIN the extended family and community. As the author indicates, although his examples are of White settler Amerika, the development of capitalism emphasized self and individuality. Family interdependence for survival (i.e. farming or small family businesses) was no longer widespread and the introduction of wage labor would eventually bring family economic self-sufficiency to near extinction… this he claims is what facilitated the dawn of the Gay Age (my term…jajajaja), because we can live a life outside the family, which in turn allows a queer identity and community to develop. Hmmmm… muy interasnte.

This author is for sure privileged as a white male and probably middle class. His article focuses on the effects on White Amerika and doesn’t go beyond to analyze, much less criticize racial or white supremacist consequences on queer communities of color. So how does this relate to us as indigenous, working-class people? I think it depends on our lives. Have we felt unsafe, brutalized or terrorized cuz of our own identity within our community? Have we escaped our families to find safety in new communities that are more queer-friendly? In many respects we are living in the margins and in the center at the same time… we are living amidst homophobic families/communities that were historically colonized and brainwashed to view “sexuality” in a different way. However, through evil capitalism we find the ability to survive OUTSIDE our family and communities, and we are able to create our own communities and live in our own multiple queer spirits ELSEWHERE. Are our lives really just a mere response to colonization and capitalism? Is it that we are finding coping/surviving mechanisms within THEIR FOREIGN structures, but WITHOUT challenging them and working towards their destruction? Are we getting too comfortble in our artificially-created queer spaces without doing the real work with our families and communities? And therefore, never ending that cycle of taboo and queer violence, but in fact ensuring the preservation of these isolated gay communities… cuz the social needs for those spaces will presumably always be there? What are we creating and how are we living “autonomous”? Are we? What do we do? Is that even possible? How? Do we stay or go back home? And what does that mean and how does that look like to stay or go back home? Ironies and contradictions plague my thoughts…

The author ends with a socialist vision of society where worker/community-controlled institutions are the reality. But to me, as long as the State and institutions exist, and centralized, vertical power structures, queer liberation, much less HUMAN/EARTH liberation won’t ever be our reality…

****Que piensas?*****"

I love this…I wonder if we could put it in the next publication? Maybe we could read the parent article and his response for next week’s book club?

I would be down!

Afro-colombian communities struggle for self-determination

polinizaciones.blogspot.com/2009/08/sto...

Apparently the police don’t like it when the gays kiss. We probably shouldn’t tell them the other stuff we do then…

www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/16/gay-marriage-fight-kiss-i_n_260535.html

vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=54162036

The video is just cops being cops but the last quarter is interesting. Shows a non prof approaching police stations and requesting complaint forms to test the level of corruption.

I thought this was pretty cool:

www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/queens/2009/08/23/2009-08-23_rapper_schools_record_label_qns_ma_makes_warner_music_foot_bill_for_phd.html

“Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!”
—Otto Von Bismarck, upon hearing of the split in the First International

Andrej Grubacic, ‘The Red and the Black’:
www.againstthegrain.org/program/215/id/...

Are there still murmurs about getting him to MP?

More on coup in Honduras. It’s still hard for many of us to believe that this type of shit is happening again. It’s even more painful to know that no one seems to give a shit.

upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/2...

Someone needs to ask him about Skype. Eh-hem.

Talking about sustainability without talking about workers?

www.grist.org/article/2009-09-02-time-w...

A breath of fresh air comes from, of course, anywhere but the U.S. in terms of asking the real, fundamental questions about what’s going on with the Right in the United States….

www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/09/09/index.ph...

Dear angelo,
Soaring health care costs. Foreclosures on the rise. An uncertain future. And now, a so-called “jobless recovery.”

How did this happen? For years, we tried trickle-down economics. And it was a miserable failure.

That’s why hundreds of state leaders are in Washington DC TODAY, fighting for the Employee Free Choice Act – so workers can fix our economy from the bottom up.

When more folks can negotiate for better wages, health care, and working conditions by joining a union, things get better for all of us. That’s what this bill is all about.

Will you back up local leaders on Capitol Hill today?

Our Day of Action JUST started – we need your help!

Do your part to fight greedy CEOs and corporate lobbyists who are trying to kill the Employee Free Choice Act.

CALL TOLL-FREE
1-888-318-1664

Tell your Senators to Support the Employee Free Choice Act.

Over 300 state leaders who support the Employee Free Choice Act are on-the-ground today, meeting with their members of Congress in support of the Employee Free Choice Act, including JwJ leaders from North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maine, Missouri, California, Indiana and Virginia. Will you back up their on-the-ground efforts by making quick calls to your senators, right now? It takes about 1 minute per call and makes a huge difference!

1. Call Toll Free 1-888-318-1664 2. Ask to be connected to your Senator’s office. 3. Tell the staff member who answers the city and state you’re calling from, and that you strongly urge your Senator to vote for the Employee Free Choice Act. 4. Most calls end right there, but if you like you might mention: * The Employee Free Choice Act is a critical piece of our economic recovery. * If we really want to restore our middle class, workers must be able to bargain, not borrow their way to a better life. * By making it easier for workers to form unions, the Employee Free Choice Act will level the playing field and help ensure that the economy works for everyone again. * The Employee Free Choice Act would put real money into the hands of working families without costing the government a dime.

We need your help to win. Many of the same lobbyists and front groups who are spending $1.5 million a day to defeat health care reform are also spending millions to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act, engaging in the same kind of smear campaigns that are being used to try to kill health care reform.

We’re fighting back by sending people to lobby in DC. We need to back them up by OVERWHELMING the Senate switchboard today.

Please call your Senators now: 1-888-318-1664

Thank you for making our Day of Action an undeniable force to pass the Employee Free Choice Act!

In Solidarity,

Jobs with Justice

Switchboards are shut down for the EFCA line but….

Carl Levin (Cosponsor of the bill)
(202) 224-6221

Debbie Stabenow (Cosponsor of the bill)
(202) 224-4822

And our fearless leader, Dave Camp, can be reached through email easily or you can try and hunt him down through one of his offices at camp.house.gov/Contact