Raising Cain...

A Voice from the Gulf: "Stop calling me resilient!"

The people who live on the Gulf of Mexico are no doubt taking a huge hit from the BP oil disaster, but this film aired on Al Jazeera English pulls the lens back to a wider view of the oil industry in the Gulf over time.

I was especially moved by the stories of folks at the end of the piece who speak very clearly about the toll this industry has taken on their lives and communities. One woman in particular calls out the use of the term "resilient" to describe the historical battering of coastal citizens.

I am really grateful to this woman. I think she's absolutely right that it's a way of denying the actual suffering so that the industry can keep on doing what it's doing, or so the rest of us can sleep at night as we go along with continued use of fossil fuels without protest. It's a term often applied in other situations -- the ability of kids to heal from horrific abuse, of the mountains of Appalachia to recover from the assaults of surface mining, or of Indigenous people of the world surviving genocidal colonial occupations of their homelands.

"Stop calling me resilient!" she said. "I'm not resilient!"

I hear you, Sister.

Naomi Klein consulted on this film. Please check out her great article, Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world, at OpEd News.

t r u t h o u t | "The Price That We Pay" - Undocumented Immigrants and Taxation

Yana Kunichoff launched the first of a 3-part series on immigration yesterday at Truthout. This article illustrates a problem I have with all the knee-jerk responses being legislated in Arizona, Tennessee and other states: immigration, immigrant rights and how this all relates to fundamental human rights and persistent structural racism in the United States is very complex. As a national collective we need a lot of discussion and de-mythifying, a lot of open-minded and open-hearted listening as we undertake serious, compassionate and just immigration reform.

Kunichoff's first article takes a look at some of the not-so-obvious truths that make immigration issues so complex:

Rita, a 47-year-old Hispanic woman, may in fact be the blueprint for a growing number of Mexican-American immigrant lifestyles: Rita is an undocumented immigrant, and a taxpayer.

According to her 2009 tax return, the divorced mother of three, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of prosecution, made $18,295.68 of which $1,170.41 was withheld for Social Security tax and $273.73 for Medicare - benefits that Rita is unlikely to ever see.

Read the whole article here.

#Arizona syndrome: 'We have met the enemy and it is us'

Arizona has stirred controversy with its new law giving local law enforcement officers authority to question people they suspect of not being in the U.S. legally. David L. Altheide, a professor who splits his time between Tempe and Olympia, offers observations about Arizona's approach.

via blog.altoarizona.com

Texas textbooks and the truth about the Confederacy - Texas - Salon.com

By all means, let schoolchildren in Texas read Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address. But there should be more material from the Confederate side of the conflict than that. For generations, apologists for the Confederacy have claimed that secession was really about the tariff, or states’ rights, or something else -- anything other than preserving the right of some human beings to own, buy and sell other human beings.

That being the case, the education of schoolchildren in my state should include a reading of the Cornerstone Speech made by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, on March 21, 1861. With remarkable candor, Stephens pointed out that whereas the United States was founded on the idea, enshrined in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal," the new Confederacy was founded on the opposite conception: 

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically ... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

via www.salon.com

Cathie's notes: Awesome article, worth a close read.