this is what a cluster fuck looks like

Things I like that may or may not appear on this blog: leftist politics, speculative fiction, creative non-fiction, social theory, nature, DIY stuff, furniture, information, futurism, technology, news, activism, art, poetry, anthropology, gender stuff, queer stuff, Marxism, hip hop, world music, protest culture, humanism, empathy, compassion, love, neurology, philosophy. My strictly political blog project is http://thepeoplesrecord.com (also Facebook.com/ThePeoplesRecord and @thepeoplesrec on Twitter).

[sagansense]

[thepeoplesrecord]

Petition: Would you serve 25 days in jail for Bradley Manning?

Manning’s maximum sentence is 136 years and the next petition benchmark is set at 2,000 signatures, so if you sign you’re symbolically volunteering up to 25 days of your life.

Source

[thepeoplesrecord]

Who exactly is recovering in this ‘recovery’? Fair-wage jobs are eliminated in mass and SOME additional very low-wage jobs are created instead. Leaving many still unemployed, and many others fighting desperately for the limited low-wage positions that ARE available.

Source

[thepeoplesrecord]

Imperialist Feminism: A Historic Review with Deepa Kumar August 2, 2013

The West has often used the liberation of brown women as an excuse for empire. This talk reviews a few examples and offers some analysis. It begins with the Afghan war but goes back to 19th century colonial narratives in regard to Muslim women.

Source

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Manila, Philippines: March to protest President Aquino’s State of the Nation Address (SONA), July 22, 2013.

"We were very impressed with the level of organization of the different sectors that participated in yesterday’s State of the Nation Address. Urban poor, students, women, LGBT, teachers, peasants and the masses in general attended the march. There was police repression and several people suffered injuries including the leader of a national peasant organization. Our members of Union del Barrio were honored to be part of this march.’

Photos and report by Ron Gochez

[thepeoplesrecord]

BDS victory at TIAA-CREF

Jonathan Cunningham provides the backdrop to a new step forward for the boycott, divestment and sanctions struggle—this one against the Israeli company SodaStream. July 22, 2013

THE BOYCOTT, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that has been protesting the Israeli occupation of Palestine took another step forward this month when the giant retirement fund giant TIAA-CREF announced it was divesting $9 million from SodaStream, an Israeli company that makes its carbonation machines in the occupied West Bank.

TIAA-CREF has been facing pressure from a new arm of the movement: We Divest, a campaign launched by Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) in 2010. Days after the SodaStream divestment was announced, We Divest organized a national day of action on July 16 to up the pressure on TIAA-CREF to divest from other companies that profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The first step in the campaign at TIAA-CREF came last February when over 200 shareholders filed a resolution asking the fund to divest from companies that “contribute to or enable" human rights violations—in particular, those ongoing in Palestine. TIAA-CREF refused to put the proposal to a proxy vote among shareholders—and won approval for this move from the Securities and Exchange Commission. In response, activists all over the U.S. held demonstrations, protests and actions in front of TIAA-CREF offices.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE CAMPAIGN against TIAA-CREF is part of a larger solidarity effort for Palestine. In 2005, a coalition of more than 170 Palestinian organizations called for international supporters to initiate boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns—to boycott Israeli products and companies, divest from businesses that profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and demand government sanctions for Israel’s violations of international law.

The goal of the BDS campaign is to support the Palestinian struggle to secure an end to the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, to stop the system of institutionalized racial discrimination against Palestinians in Israel, and to recognize the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. The model for BDS is the international divestment campaign against apartheid South Africa which helped the Black freedom struggle finally topple the racist regime.

In recent years, BDS activism has become very effective in highlighting the crimes of the Israeli system—and the complicity of other governments, especially the U.S., that support it. The movement has been gaining momentum rapidly. The world-renowned physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking joined the academic boycott of Israel earlier this year, and this year alone, universities stretching from Oslo in Norway, Sydney in Australia, Sheffield in Britain, York in Canada, and Berkeley in California, among many others, have taken steps toward divestment.

This is the backdrop to the actions at TIAA-CREF. Jewish Voice for Peace started the We Divest campaign to pressure the fund—whose full name is the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund—in 2010. TIAA-CREF was chosen after it was pressured in 2009 to divest from Africa-Israel Investments, whose construction projects were viewed by activists to be in violation of human rights and international law. The following year, the We Divest campaign moved from being led by JVP to being structured as a coalition, with a representative of participating organizations serving on a National Coordinating Committee.

In February 2011, 20 shareholders filed a resolution asking TIAA-CREF to “engage" with companies doing business with occupying forces. This resolution might seem weakly worded, but it inspired the administrators to take drastic measures. Their first response was to disallow a vote by shareholders on the proposal and to request SEC approval for this action.

After the resulting outrage among activists and the promise of protests at its doorstep, TIAA-CREF moved its annual shareholder meeting from New York City to Charlotte, N.C. Despite the change of venue, however, dozens of activists still showed up outside the shareholder meeting to demand divestment from Israeli apartheid.

This year’s proposal is much more direct than the one submitted in 2011. It demands that TIAA-CREF “end investments in companies that, in the trustees’ judgment, substantially contribute to or enable egregious violations of human rights, including companies whose business supports Israel’s occupation."

This resolution had 10 times as many shareholders backing it. The unequivocal wording produced stronger opposition from pro-Zionist forces. TIAA-CREF has been threatened with a lawsuit by Shurat HaDin, the Israel Law Center (ILC), if it allows the resolution to come to a vote. ILC is a Tel Aviv-based nonprofit that focuses on issues related to the Palestinian struggle for justice. Its work includes blocking other BDS work around the globe, as well as legal efforts to keep Gaza’s southern border closed.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE CAMPAIGN to pressure TIAA-CREF has generated two distinct victories. In July 2012, TIAA-CREF removed all Caterpillar stock—worth more than $72 million—from its “Social Choice" fund. And now this year, TIAA-CREF divested more than $9 million from SodaStream.

Andrew Dalack of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network explained why SodaStream has become a central focus of the BDS campaign:

SodaStream insists in its marketing materials that they are “Building Bridges, Not Walls," but the truth is that it profits from a system of illegal occupation and settlements, based on walls and checkpoints that control, humiliate, and criminalize millions of people. It appears TIAA-CREF was able to see through the empty slogans and identify SodaStream as a company that in no way could be passed off as “for the greater good." We commend them for that.

This victory reinforces the obvious—if TIAA-CREF sees the problem with an investment in SodaStream, it should acknowledge the problem with investment in other companies that profit from Israel’s occupation and allow shareholders to vote on the resolution to divest from apartheid.

Activists around the U.S. gathered in protest of TIAA-CREF’s blatantly undemocratic decision to block a shareholder vote. The day of action was July 16, the date of the shareholder meeting when the resolution would have been voted on. Actions took place in at least 12 cities, including Charlotte, N.C., (where the meeting was held), Denver, Chicago and New York City.

In Denver, an action called by the Colorado BDS Coalition (CBC) took place in front of the TIAA CREF building at 17th and Broadway. CBC chose TIAA-CREF as its primary target in April of this year, following a conference of solidarity activists. CBC is made up of several organizations and individuals, including the International Socialist Organization, Students for Justice in Palestine, Friends of Sabeel, and Front Range Jewish Voice for Peace.

In New York City, the BDS group Adalah turned out several dozen activists who performed mime, songs and creative divestment chants outside the Midtown headquarters of the pension giant. Known for transforming public protests into cultural events, Adalah-NY once again used street theater and music as a means to attract attention from the rush-hour crowds heading toward Grand Central Station a few blocks away.

The crowd favorite was a hearty rendition—complete with dance moves—of the group’s call for TIAA-CREF to divest, sung to the tune of the ’70s hit “YMCA." Lyrics and video of the demonstration/performance will be posted to the Adalah-NY website.

Source

Hey, look what my brother (involved in the BDS organizing in Denver) wrote for SocialistWorker. 

[loqui-deactivated20160106]

Day 12- Tell your life story in 6 words

dreamer: you are your own alarm

[robert-cunningham-blog]

study them, your life hangs uncertain

[cocothinkshefancy-deactivated20]

Singing the Lesbian Blues in 1920s Harlem

When Gertrude “Ma” Rainey—known as “The Mother of Blues”—sang, “It’s true I wear a collar and a tie, … Talk to the gals just like any old man,” in 1928′s “Prove It on Me,” she was flirting with scandal, challenging the listener to catch her in a lesbian affair. It might not seem like a big deal to us now, but back then, pursuing same-sex relations could get you thrown in jail.

“It was under the cover of night, because they could be prosecuted for same-sex activity.”

The good news for women-loving chanteuses like Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Gladys Bentley is that blues music in the 1920s was so far under the radar of mainstream America, female blues singers could get away with occasionally expressing their unconventional desires. That said, they all felt obligated to produce song after song about loving and losing men.

“I don’t want to overplay the significance of the three songs that Ma Rainey wrote and recorded that had some references to lesbianism and homosexuality,” says Robert Philipson, who directed the 2011 documentary, “T’Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: Queer Blues Divas of the 1920s.” “That’s a handful out of hundreds and hundreds of blues songs that were recorded. The fact that there were any was remarkable, given the times. You certainly never saw it in any other part of American culture.”

A writer and lecturer with a Ph.D. in comparative literature, Philipson got intrigued by hints such as these when he was starting out as a filmmaker and preparing for a course on the early 20th century African American art and literature explosion known as the Harlem Renaissance. “I kept running into these tidbits about this person being gay or that person being bisexual,” he says.

These clues intrigued Philipson, who saw the potential for a documentary—and in 2008, he finished his first film, “Take the Gay Train,” which traces the threads of gay sensibility running through the Harlem Renaissance. Often, though, the desire to prove that black Americans, less than half a century out of slavery, could be as artistic and literate as their white counterparts went hand-in-hand with adopting the “proper Christian values” of middle-class Edwardians.

The blues community, however, had no such concerns about respectability, and that’s where Philipson found the most references homosexuality. Which is why, three years after “Gay Train,” he followed up with another documentary, this time focusing exclusively on female blues singers with lesbian proclivities.

As it turns out, the blues world was the perfect realm for people who were thought of as “sexual deviants” to inhabit, as it thrived far outside the scope of the dominant white American culture in the early 20th century. In Jazz Age speakeasies, dive bars, and private parties, blue singers had the freedom to explore alternative sexuality, and on a rare occasion, they even expressed it in song.

“In lyrics, they talk about ‘bulldaggers,’ which is they called butch lesbians at that time, or ‘BD women,’ ‘BD’ being short for bulldaggers,” Philipson says. “There were references to being ‘in the life,’ which was understood to mean same-sex activity.”

In 1930’s “The Boy in the Boat,” Ma Rainey’s protégé, Bessie Smith sang, “When you see two women walking hand in hand, just look ‘em over and try to understand: They’ll go to those parties—have the lights down low—only those parties where women can go.” A married woman who kept a female lover on the road with her, Smith is known to have exploded at a girlfriend, “I got twelve women on this show, and I can have one every night if I want it.”

With short cropped hair and a tuxedo, the lesser-known Gladys Bentley commandeered the crowd at Harlem’s Clam House in the 1920s, singing cabaret, tickling the piano keys, and flirting shamelessly with the women in the audience. The only one of these women to openly exploit her lesbian identity, she was known for taking popular songs and giving them lewd lyrics; and she asked the audience to help her improvise naughty lines.

“Harlem’s 133rd Street was called ‘Jungle Alley,’ because there were so many nightclubs on it,” Philipson says, explaining that Harlem had the only Roaring Twenties blues clubs in the country that drew white “tourists” curious about “race music.” “The Clam House was famous because it had Bentley, reveling in her image as a ‘bulldagger.’ Because of her, it became a place where black lesbians and gay men would go to hang out. White sightseers from downtown would check out her show as well.”

Read more: Singing the Lesbian Blues in 1920’s Harlem

[redplebeian-deactivated20150604]

Tim Wise is a kind of a scumbag

[frank-e-sleep-no-more]

this should really read

Tim Wise speaks over people of color, repeating what Black folks have been saying and doing for ever, while also bashing PoC who call him on the shit, in order to make money off speaking to white people about racism and also helps to dismantle public schools in Black neighborhoods.

[blackeatblack]

[blackeatblack]

For those of you that missed it, this is the Imagine A Future documentary that aired on BET and Centric which focuses on one young woman’s journey as she learns to love her blackness. The mini documentary features interview clips from black women from all walks of life, as they discuss the process of achieving self-love as black women.

(with a couple cameos from yours truly)

[strugglingtobeheard]

imma check this later

[robert-cunningham-blog]

reblogging to watch later

[satanic-capitalist]

[sinidentidades-blog]

satanic-capitalist:

Bank of America Wants This Family Homeless — You Wouldn’t Believe the Dirty Tricks They’ve Used

Bank of America is doing everything it can to kick this family out of its home. Here’s why you could be next.

July 8, 2013  |  

Warning:  While completely horrifying, the story of how the Mata family had its lives turned upside down is not harrowing just because of what happened to them — but also for how it represents the quiet story of so many other Americans, as well.

Gisele Mata, her husband and three children have lived in the same home in Whittier, Calif., for 10 years. They fell victim to the Great Recession in late 2009, when she and her husband were both laid off within six months of one another; Gisele had been at her retail job for 23 years before the dismissal. Determined to stay current on their home loan, both she and her husband cashed in their 401K plans.

What follows is a story of how seemingly illegal, but very common, bank machinations affect ordinary homeowners — who, after bad luck or an accident of timing, turn to their bank for help, only to get caught up in a nightmare. There’s a tremendous amount of shame put upon homeowners, who are unaware of the institutional forces working against them, and who think they somehow deserve this treatment. And there’s a risk that others will fall prey to the same scheme.

Within a year or so of floating between temporary jobs and a home-based business, none of which earned the same wages as before the layoffs, the money had run out for the Matas. They could no longer afford the mortgage payment. So Gisele contacted Bank of America in January of 2012, seeking a loan modification.

Eighteen months later, she has applied and reapplied six different times for modifications, without success. And many of the tactics she has had to deal with match perfectly with what bombshell Bank of America whistle-blowers [3] have revealed was standard practice inside the loan modification unit. “They claimed I didn’t send in paperwork after I did, then they claimed I didn’t send in the right paperwork, and then they claimed I had a tax lien on the house which didn’t exist,” said Mata, 43.

I’ve heard lots and lots of these stories over the years, but making up a tax lien out of whole cloth is actually a delaying tactic I’d never heard before. Mata had to go through the city of Whittier to prove to Bank of America that the claimed tax lien was imaginary.

Part of the problem for Mata was that changes in her family’s income situation would habitually kick them back to the beginning of the loan modification process. Her husband found permanent work inspecting aircraft equipment (making an entry-level wage of $12 an hour) and over time received a couple of raises and promotions, and each time, Gisele had to inform the bank of the change in income, which would prompt Bank of America to restart her application, delaying the final decision even further. This also happened when one of her daughters entered the workforce as a massage therapist. “And we’d have to send in new forms, new financial documents, the whole thing,” Gisele told Salon. The Mata family still couldn’t secure a modification, despite three incomes.

Every time Gisele would reapply for a loan, she would get a new single point of contact (SPOC). She would receive letters from different people inside the bank with contradictory information, some from an old SPOC saying she was denied a modification (without explanation), others from a new SPOC saying that her paperwork was in the underwriting process. This matches what Bank of America whistle-blowers have stated, that customer service representatives would facilitate delay by claiming that applications were “under review,” when they weren’t.

I’ll jump in here to add that practically all of this conduct occurred after Bank of America signed a supposedly important settlement with state and federal law enforcement officials over just this type of misconduct. The $25 billion National Mortgage Settlement was inked in February 2012. But based on Gisele Mata’s story, you would never know that anything changed at the bank over the years, despite the new mortgage servicing standards that were part of the settlement agreement.

In fact, Gisele’s recent experience shows things getting worse. She was told this April that she had to get current on her loan within 15 days. When she reapplied for a modification, the bank told her it had no information on her application. Nevertheless, a new single point of contact said he would get the information to underwriting. Then she heard from a completely new representative at the bank, who told her she had to resend the information to him. It was her third reapplication and third “single point of contact” within 30 days.

Gisele had enough. She began to seek out information about what others were going through, and eventually hooked up with the activist group Occupy Our Homes. “I had no clue this was happening to so many people. I watch MSNBC, they’re not talking about this, they’re saying everything’s getting better,” Gisele told Salon.

Through Occupy Our Homes, Gisele attended the May 20 protest [4] outside the Justice Department, demanding prosecutions of bank executives for their conduct. She was arrested with dozens of others for attempting to storm the building. “Extreme actions were taken against me and my family, so I had to take extreme actions right back,” Gisele argued. “And this was extreme for me, I’m a Girl Scout troop leader!”

Gisele did not give her name to the arresting officer, calling herself “Brian Moynihan #4.” Brian Moynihan is the CEO of Bank of America. While being patted down, the arresting officer whispered to her, “Good for you, Bank of America took two of my homes.” A second officer told Gisele about losing his home to Bank of America when he went on disability.

Gisele Mata’s mortgage situation remains in flux. Two weeks ago, a brand-new single point of contact told her that, “because of special circumstances” (no doubt her activism) the bank was willing to offer an in-house loan. However, the terms were pretty onerous. All owed payments and fees would be capitalized into the principal of the loan, over a term of 40 years. “So this $240,000 house would take me 50 years total to pay off,” Gisele said. Furthermore, Gisele was told she would have to waive her rights to any incentives through the Federal Housing Administration, where she got the loan in the first place. Gisele was unwilling to waive any rights, so she told the bank she would reapply, based on another promotion her husband received. “They said that’s fine,” Gisele said, “but that foreclosure could be pending because I was no longer in negotiation.”

There is no reason why a family who can afford some level of payment should have to wait two years to get a loan modification, which would ultimately make sense for the owner of the loan over a foreclosure sale that would bring back less money. The warped financial incentives of the mortgage servicers, in this case Bank of America, have turned this simple process into a horror show for millions of families like Gisele Mata’s. And Bank of America and its colleagues have stooped to illegal activities to make their profits, without any sanction.

The experience has turned Gisele into a full-fledged activist, who believes that giving voice to the realities of dealing with the banks will create greater awareness and help others. She led an action at her local Bank of America branch in Whittier on Wednesday. Gisele and other activists brought fake gift cards, in a nod to whistle-blowers’ claims [3] that bank employees were given gift cards as bonuses to push people into foreclosure. Said Gisele, “We took the gift cards to the branch to try to bribe the bank manager into working with me on my loan.”

[sinidentidades-blog]

There was a time when Filipin@s and Xican@s stood together. Filipin@s were also forced to work fields for almost nothing right alongside Xican@s. That was until the United Farm Workers of America (UFWA) came about after the merging of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee [AWOC] led by Filipino organizer Larry Itliong (pictured above) and the National Farm Workers Association [NFWA] led by César Chávez (pictured above). Together, they organized a force of Filipin@s and Xican@s loud enough to make Washington D.C. hear them. They were not the only ones who took notice of the UFWA. During César Chávez’s 25 day fast to promote nonviolent action, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram showing his support for Chávez and the efforts of the UFWA (pictured above).

[commune-or-nothing]

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has now been offered asylum in three American countries: Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. He has applied for asylum in six additional countries, according to WikiLeaks. And his chances for reaching a safe haven are growing further because of US interference in the process, according to Michael Bochenek, director of law and policy at Amnesty International.

"Interfering with the right to seek asylum is a serious problem in international law," Bochenek told The Guardian.

"It is further evidence that he has a well-founded fear of persecution. This will be relevant to any state when considering an application. International law says that somebody who fears persecution should not be returned to that country."

Meanwhile, Spain provided the first formal acknowledgement that the diversion of the air force jet of Bolivian president Evo Morales was linked to the US hunt for Snowden. Spanish foreign minister José Manuel Garcia-Margallo: “They told us that the information was clear, that he was inside."

Garcia-Margallo however did not reveal who “they" were or if he’d been contacted by the US. A Spanish diplomat vehicle did however turn up at the Vienna airport the night Morales arrived.

Ecuadorean foreign minister Ricardo Patino said the Spanish ambassador, who arrived in the vehicle, told Morales that his country would allow the presidential jet into Spanish airspace if it could be inspected. Morales rejected the offer.

Bochenek said further that the US hunt was turning the Snowden story into a global saga.

In PR terms, opinion here and elsewhere in Latin America has shifted precisely because of the appearance of interference with other governments’ decision-making processes.

Bochenek further clarified that Snowden could be granted asylum without setting foot in the country granting him asylum — that’s a convention that can be ignored.

"It’s true that a lot of states have that as a rule in their own domestic requirements, but it is not required by international law."

And placing Snowden on an Interpol “red flag" list is an advisory only.

A possible route for Snowden from Moscow to Venezuela would be through Havana, and although the Cubans have not yet formally declared they would grant him transit, they have expressed sympathy for his situation and accused the US of trampling on the sovereignty of other nations.

[celestedoodles]

kirk and her crew — an AU where all of the main character Enterprise crew members are women

[robert-cunningham-blog]

I dig that Uhura. 

[vancough]

‘Hey Arnold’ and ‘Rugrats’ characters as imagined in their 20s by Celeste Pille.

[love-like-a-ghost]

omg.

[loki-stole-my-cookies]

PUBERTY DID THEM JUSTICE, DAMN.

[brichibi]

This is awesome.

[lolripbyebye]

DAMN. ARNOLD CLEANED UP.

[hatingeverything]

Sid and Susie especially Sid

[scenicroutes]

w o w or like

reblog them from her tumblr instead of reposting them and attributing credit to her personal facebook page???

god fucking dammit

[celestedoodles]

PLEASE DO NOT REBLOG THIS FROM ME.

I’m reblogging it to say a couple things. I’m not crazy about someone reposting art of mine that’s already been posted here by me, but I understand they saw the Huffington Post article and wanted to make a tumblr post about it and they did credit me, but that’s the bigger issue here. Instead of linking back to my tumblr (which huffington post linked to) they linked it to my personal facebook page. I was really baffled when I started getting a ton of friend requests from people I don’t know, especially since I keep my facebook circle really small—family and close friends. Again, please don’t reblog this but if you see it on your dash and if it’s not too much of a bother, could you request the person add a link to my tumblr and delete the link to my facebook? Thanks.

[mxdp-deactivated20180829]

John Light as Oberon and Matthew Tennyson as Puck, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe. Directed by Dominic Dromgoole.

[robert-cunningham-blog]

MY GOD this is adorable. 

[thepeoplesrecord]

These are a few of my favorite “Critics of Capitalism" photoquotes that we have on our Facebook photostream.

I think it’s important to regularly have conversations about capitalism and to contextualize our political problems within the economic-system our political problems exist in, and to really consider the popular criticisms of that economic system.

If criticism of capitalism is something that has been on the periphery of your political education, I can’t stress how important it is to bring it to the center and how helpful Marxism is for theorizing strategy for targeting one of the largest sources of oppression plaguing humanity. 

If you want to learn more, I would search Youtube for Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Cornel West, Richard Wolff and Slavoj Zizek videos (alongside the word ‘capitalism’) or read SocialistWorker.org (or a number of similar organizational socialist papers) or browse the video and audio talks at wearemany.org that answer a number of political questions.

-Robert