Bears Ears: Leave it as it is

It was the first national monument to grow out of the thinking, study, support, and political power of Native American nations.

[On May 6, 1903, not a hundred feet from where I was standing at the canyon’s edge, Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech that environmentalists—a word yet to be invented—would come to deem as important as Churchill’s “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat” or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It was a perfect match of subject and stage. In the open air on the canyon’s ledge, the president declaimed on the miracle of nature he was trying to save. The five words the speech is most remembered for would become synonymous with the Grand Canyon, and become a touchstone for protecting other wild landscapes.

“Leave it as it is,” Roosevelt told the crowd. “You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American, if he can travel at all, should see….”]

REGINA LOPEZ-WHITESKUNK WAS A COUNCILWOMAN OF THE UTE MOUNTAIN UTE DURING THE CAMPAIGN TO ESTABLISH BEARS EARS NATIONAL MONUMENT. “WE KNEW WE WERE SPEAKING FOR NATIVE AMERICANS, BUT WHAT WE DIDN’T ANTICIPATE WAS BECOMING LEADERS FOR THE PEOPLE OF UTAH BEYOND THE TRIBES.” | PHOTO BY JUSTIN CLIFTON

Land Grab: Trump’s Campaign Against Bears Ears National Monument | Sierra

We Will Not Leave our Village

[In late 2008, a five-minute video clip titled ” Gaon Chodab Nahin” (literally, “We Shall Not Leave our Village”) came into circulation among activists and grassroots NGOs in the forest highlands of eastern India. To those who watched and passed on the video throughout the eastern Indian states of Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Orissa, it summed up the plight of adivasi or “tribal” populations in the region as they battled an emerging state-corporate nexus whose plans for rapid industrialization in India relied on greater access to forest and mineral resources.]

Prof. Uday Chandra’s paper Primitive Accumulation and “Primitive” Subjects in Postcolonial India: Tracing the Myriad Real and Virtual Lives of Mediatized Indigeneity Activism

Assistant Professor, Government, Georgetown University, Qatar 

Generic Signifiers of Why Some Lives Still Don’t Matter That Much | King Leopold’s Soliloquy

[Mark Twain wrote a satire about Leopold called “King Leopold’s Soliloquy; A Defense of His Congo Rule”, where he mocked the King’s defense of his reign of terror, largely through Leopold’s own words. It’s an easy read at 49 pages and Mark Twain is a popular author in American public schools. But like most political authors, we will often read some of their least political writings or read them without learning why the author wrote them in the first place. Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example, serves to reinforce American anti-socialist propaganda about how egalitarian societies are doomed to turn into their dystopian opposites. But Orwell was an anti-capitalist revolutionary of a different kind—a supporter of working class democracy from below—and that is never pointed out. We can read about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” isn’t on the reading list. This isn’t by accident. Reading lists are created by boards of education in order to prepare students to follow orders and endure boredom. From the point of view of the Department of Education, Africans have no history.]

http://www.walkingbutterfly.com/2010/12/22/when-you-kill-ten-million-africans-you-arent-called-hitler/

Reservation Blues | Sex Trafficking for Drugs

[POPLAR, Montana, May 17 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Life on the remote Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana has all the ingredients for sex trafficking – poverty, isolation, joblessness and violence, topped with an epidemic of crystal meth addiction.

Drug users are selling their babies, daughters and sisters for the potent stimulant that is ravaging Native American communities such as the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes living on the desolate plains of Fort Peck, say community leaders, experts and federal authorities.

“We’re in crisis mode,” said Tribal Chairman Floyd Azure. “We have mothers giving their children away for sexual favors for drugs. We have teenagers and young girls giving away sexual favors for drugs.”

No numbers record specific rates of local sex trafficking, which can often be buried in crimes of sexual assault, abuse, prostitution, abandonment or kidnapping. But it is a crime, poorly documented and fuelled by drug abuse, plaguing Indian reservations across the United States.

The rate of meth use among American Indians is the highest of any ethnicity in the country and more than twice as high as any other group, according to the National Congress of American Indians.

The number of drug cases on Indian lands nationwide rose seven-fold from 2009 to 2014, and crime rates on some reservations are five times higher than national averages, according to a federal Drug Enforcement Administration report…..

A harrowing number of victims are trafficked by their own family members.

“Traffickers are not just scary men who drive around in Cadillacs in their leather trench coats,” said Healey.

“A trafficker can be a parent or guardian. A trafficker can be an aunt or an uncle or it can be a boyfriend or another friend.”

The often close relationships between abuser and abused present a web of problems such as forcing victims to leave home for their protection, experts said.

Victims may fear the community and authorities won’t believe them and will instead defend the trafficker, said an Indian Health Service social worker who did not want to be identified.

“Nobody wants to go after a family member,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation…..]

Read the full story | Thompson Reuters Foundation Group

Tribal elder Tommy Christian lives on Montana’s Fort Peck Indian Reservation which is looking for ways to combat issues of drug abuse and sex trafficking, Poplar, Montana, April 28, 2016 | THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION/Ellen Wulfhorst

 

Because Memory is a Tricky Little Thing | Large Companies with Nazi Roots

The Slave Ship: An Operative Architecture Responsible for the Atlantic Crossing

A concentration on a micro-argument in the context of a greater argument some subjects of which include German citizens during WWII, non-black South African citizens during Apartheid, American citizens during slavery or their encounters with native Americans, soldiers carrying out illegal orders, Israeli citizens about the Palestinians, Japanese citizens during WWII, and the list goes on seemingly forever. Here it is:

The argument of these articles in the broader context of the research exposed on this platform is simple: although architecture and design (and through them, architects and designers) cannot be held responsible for the founding logic of the genocide that constitutes the slave trade, the latter could simply have never existed without their active contribution and, as such, architecture is fundamentally responsible for the operativity of slavery. (THE FUNAMBULIST)

La Marie-Séraphine (1770) / Excerpt from Bertrand Guillet, La Marie-Séraphine: Navire négrier, Nantes: Editions MeMo, 2009

[… Here, more than ever, we need to forget any dissociation between the various scales of design: the plantation cabin is architecture, of course (see Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg (eds), Cabin, Quarter, Plantation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) but more broadly, any materialized form of whatever size or nature implementing the organization of bodies in space is also architecture. This includes the slave ship and its inherent tension between the fundamental cruelty of its design and the economization of life that its function requires vis-a-vis its “human cargo.”

What the example of slave ship allows, because of the world in itself it constitutes, is a representation of the holistic dimension of the weaponization of its architecture. In other words, every component of the slave ship is designed to contribute to the organization of bodies in a spatial configuration optimizing its function, as the illustrations (above and below) of the French slave ship La Marie-Séraphine (1769-1776), show well. This includes the bodies themselves: the sailors’ bodies, in their choreographed accomplishment of navigating this “vast machine” (see Rediker, 2007), the daily ‘care’ of the hundreds of bodies living under the deck, as well as the individualized or collective deadly suppression of potential forms of revolt. In The Slave Ship: A Human History (Penguin, 2007), Marcus Rediker describes the frequent deaths of these bodies during the triangular crossings, which we can interpret through a logic that shares some similarities with slavery itself: not considering bodies individually but rather, through their muscular operativity as a whole by the ship’s captain and owners. Nevertheless, the sailors’ bodies are not the only one engaged in the holistic optimization of the slave ship through its design. The imprisoned African bodies themselves, through the deliberate overpopulation of their space (see past article), were involuntarily acting as as much walls for each other — the illustrations presented here was drawn by the ship’s officer, not an abolitionist and, as such, is very likely to have minimized the amount of bodies present — in particular when these bodies were handcuffed by two, as Rediker describes in his book.]

http://thefunambulist.net/2016/01/08/the-slave-ship-an-operative-architecture-responsible-for-the-abysmal-atlantic-crossing/

What is this Notorious Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)?

The TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Partnership Agreement) TISA, (Trade in Services Agreement) and TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement) are highly controversial and top secret deals that would affect the lives of citizens worldwide, yet the general public have no right to decide whether we want them- or even know the details of the draft legislation.

TTIP, in particular, is of major concern. As ANONYMOUS have reported, the deal allegedly threatens to allow corporations to sue governments who do not comply with their wishes, compromise online privacy, make fracking a standard procedure across 28 countries, privatize European health systems, force GMO food on unwilling citizens, strip us of our civil liberties, and ensure that corporations have control over the European Parliament.

Julian Assange called TTIP “The most important thing happening in Europe right now,” which is why Wikileaks is raising a 100,000 euro reward for any information relating to the deal. The site says of TTIP:

“It remains secret almost in its entirety, closely guarded by the negotiators, and only big corporations are given special access to its terms. The TTIP covers half of global GDP and is one of the largest agreements of its kind in history. The TTIP aims to create a global economic bloc outside of the WTO framework, as part of a geopolitical economic strategy against the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.”

Considering the impact all three of these trade deals will allegedly have on democracy, human rights, food safety and the environment, public awareness should be widespread. (ANONYMOUS)

Some more information on the subject:

Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) | OFSE

Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) | OFFICE OF THE US TRADE REPRESENTATIVE

What is the TTIP? | USECONOMY

Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership | WIKIPEDIA

What is TTIP, and How Does it Affect Us? | GUARDIAN

The TTIP of the Spear | ECONOMIST

 

 

 

 

 

The Clock, and the Attempt to Tame the Body of its Unprofitable Tendency to Tire: Time as Moral Issue

IF time is money, then sleep is theft. Today’s cult of busyness regards sleep as a defect that threatens to render people competitively unfit. In a recent article for the Guardian, Lucy Rock wrote about CEOs’ “competitive sleep deprivation,” with top executives sleeping for a mere three to four hours, mimicking Margaret Thatcher’s four-hour sleep cycle when she was in office…. Such enthusiasm for sleeplessness seems to make an executive virtue out of a capitalistic necessity. But it has deep epistemological roots.

Read the full article | Eman Shahata for THE NEW INQUIRY

Day of Reckoning | Created by Cindyfaye

Freedom: A Different Opinion on Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter to His Daughter

[Mark Zuckerberg used 2,234 words to describe the things he values most in the world. None of those words was “freedom.”

Every problem that Zuckerberg says he cares about has been solved by political-economic freedom: the liberation of individuals from coercion by one another and by government. If that freedom existed in the impoverished world then the impoverished world would quickly become prosperous.

What will not make the impoverished world prosperous–or free–is for billionaires to dole out huge sums of conspicuous charity to unfree people while doing absolutely nothing to fight for their freedom.

If you are Mark Zuckerberg and have $45 billion, it is easy to live a lavish lifestyle with only 1% of it.

What would be hard–and admirable–would be for Zuckerberg to stand up in a meaningful way for freedom, in any area or every area, particularly for the billions who lack it most.

Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg, in the face of the recent massacre of Parisians by jihadists bent on enslaving the world to Islamic law, condemned jihadism as a threat to freedom and civilization.

Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg, in the face of an ongoing summit in Paris to outlaw the use of the vast majority of affordable, reliable energy, condemned the environmentalist leaders who oppose energy from fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric sources as a threat to freedom and prosperity.

Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg, in the face of his fellow billionaires condescendingly giving the impoverished world handouts instead of support for freedom movements, created an initiative to promote political-economic freedom around the world.

If Mark Zuckerberg did any of those things he would make a huge, positive difference in the world. But those things would be hard. And he doesn’t do them.

Neither does Bill Gates. Neither does Warren Buffett.

]  Alex Epstein for FORBES | 2 December 2015

Alex Epstein is founder of the Center for Industrial Progress and author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Click hereto contact him about media inquiries, speaking engagements, or anything else.

Europe is Kaput | Long live Europe! | Monday 16 November 2015

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek and former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange discuss Europe’s future. With the recent economic crisis in Greece, unprecedented challenges to centralised European policy, and the lack of consensus on the ongoing refugee crisis, many would agree that Europe faces its greatest ever predicament. Slavoj Žižek, regarded as ‘the most dangerous philosopher in the West’ (The New Republic), and Yanis Varoufakis, self-described ‘erratic Marxist’ and economic ‘rock-star’ (Business Insider and other publications), met in Croatia in 2013. They have never appeared together on the public stage – until now. Take your seat to hear them discuss the urgent task of building a different and more democratic Europe. The conversation explores the contradictions of late capitalism and some of the solutions that might just save the European project. It is moderated by Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat.