radiofree.asia

Category: Social Justice

  • The Global Cry for Change

    Change is in the air, it’s been hovering for some time, but thanks to Covid-19 festering social issues and inequalities have been highlighted, intensifying the need for a new approach. Talk of environmental action and reimagining how we live and work fills the airwaves; catchphrases abound, spilling from the lips of duplicitous politicians who claim they want to ‘build back better’, create a ‘new normal’, and invest in a ‘green recovery’.

    Repeated often enough, and the men and women in suits are nothing if not repetitive, such slogans become totally devoid of meaning. The word becomes the thing to which it refers, without ‘the thing’ – ‘peace’, ‘brotherhood’, ‘equality’ – ever being realized, or any meaningful action undertaken to bring it about.

    A cluster of interconnected crises confronts humanity, the most urgent of which is the environmental emergency. The natural world with its sublime beauty and intricate systems, has been vandalized, mutilated, poisoned. Hunger and malnourishment soil the lives of almost a billion people, billions more are economically insecure. Societies are fractured, divided, some more some less; there’s armed conflict, modern-day slavery, displacement of persons; anxiety, stress and depression are everywhere. It’s a mess, but it’s a mess from which a small number of very rich and politically powerful people benefit enormously. A tiny coterie of humanity, complacent and greedy, who are quite happy with the current order and do not want things to change, certainly not in any radical substantive way.

    But billions of people throughout the world are desperate for change, for freedom, social justice, greater democracy and environmental action. And in the last forty years or so virtually every country in the world has witnessed expressions of popular outrage (including the more repressive states) as a global protest movement, unprecedented in scale, has emerged.

    Social change has forever been slow in coming; fought for by the masses and resisted, often violently, by those in power. There is nothing unusual there, what is new is the weight and scale of the calls for change, the range of issues, interconnected, but diverse, and the urgency of the crises. The internet, social media and mass communication means the world is connected like never before. It’s easier to organize happenings, news is accessible almost everywhere all the time, speeding everything up.

    Underlying this universal wave of discontent is a collective awakening, a unifying attitude of strength in the face of political arrogance, corporate exploitation and social division: Enough is enough; hear us and respond, seem to be the mantras of the masses. Fear of reprisals has lost its restraining hold (as seen in the recent protests in; e.g., Belarus, Russia and Myanmar) in light of the power of unified creative actions brought together under the banner of love.

    ‘People power’ is the label commonly applied to this uncoordinated diverse movement by the mass media – and they love a label. A reductive, somewhat divisive term; the explosion in political, social and environmental engagement is not rooted in opposition, though this certainly exists, but flows from a growing sense of social and environmental responsibility and an evolving unity; a recognition that we are all responsible for one another and the planet.

    Responsibility is a key component of a democratic society, as is participation, and, of course, the two are closely linked. Society is not separate from those who live, work and study within its boundaries; we are society, collectively we create the atmosphere, and we allow and perpetuate the structures and dominant modes of living through our actions and attitudes. Consciousness sits behind behavior, attitudes, values, and consciousness (at least as far as we know it) is its content. Such content is predominantly the accumulated ideas and beliefs that have been poured into the mind from birth; conditioned content then is the fabric of our consciousness. We are, for example, conditioned into competition from childhood, and believing it to be natural and beneficial, we live within its divisive pattern and pass it on to others, our peers and children, say; we thereby add to the collective conditioning which shapes society.

    Changes in consciousness and therefore behavior come about quite naturally when conditioning is absent; remove conformity and fear from a classroom, for example, and see children relax, play and freely express themselves.

    We are all responsible, not just for ourselves but for others, family, friends, our community, nation, region, world; the more we act, the more the ripples of responsibility expand. Recognition and awareness of this inherent responsibility leads quite naturally to participation and action, as the many and varied protest movements and community groups demonstrate.

    Expressions of social and environmental responsibility reflect and strengthen an evolving realization that humanity is one, that we are all essentially the same: Individuals with particular qualities and gifts sharing a common nature and universal constitution, the beauty and depth of which we sense but do not understand; its quality is love, that much we do know; and it is love in action that needs to permeate any ‘new normal’.

    The post The Global Cry for Change first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Global Cry for Change

    Change is in the air, it’s been hovering for some time, but thanks to Covid-19 festering social issues and inequalities have been highlighted, intensifying the need for a new approach. Talk of environmental action and reimagining how we live and work fills the airwaves; catchphrases abound, spilling from the lips of duplicitous politicians who claim they want to ‘build back better’, create a ‘new normal’, and invest in a ‘green recovery’.

    Repeated often enough, and the men and women in suits are nothing if not repetitive, such slogans become totally devoid of meaning. The word becomes the thing to which it refers, without ‘the thing’ – ‘peace’, ‘brotherhood’, ‘equality’ – ever being realized, or any meaningful action undertaken to bring it about.

    A cluster of interconnected crises confronts humanity, the most urgent of which is the environmental emergency. The natural world with its sublime beauty and intricate systems, has been vandalized, mutilated, poisoned. Hunger and malnourishment soil the lives of almost a billion people, billions more are economically insecure. Societies are fractured, divided, some more some less; there’s armed conflict, modern-day slavery, displacement of persons; anxiety, stress and depression are everywhere. It’s a mess, but it’s a mess from which a small number of very rich and politically powerful people benefit enormously. A tiny coterie of humanity, complacent and greedy, who are quite happy with the current order and do not want things to change, certainly not in any radical substantive way.

    But billions of people throughout the world are desperate for change, for freedom, social justice, greater democracy and environmental action. And in the last forty years or so virtually every country in the world has witnessed expressions of popular outrage (including the more repressive states) as a global protest movement, unprecedented in scale, has emerged.

    Social change has forever been slow in coming; fought for by the masses and resisted, often violently, by those in power. There is nothing unusual there, what is new is the weight and scale of the calls for change, the range of issues, interconnected, but diverse, and the urgency of the crises. The internet, social media and mass communication means the world is connected like never before. It’s easier to organize happenings, news is accessible almost everywhere all the time, speeding everything up.

    Underlying this universal wave of discontent is a collective awakening, a unifying attitude of strength in the face of political arrogance, corporate exploitation and social division: Enough is enough; hear us and respond, seem to be the mantras of the masses. Fear of reprisals has lost its restraining hold (as seen in the recent protests in; e.g., Belarus, Russia and Myanmar) in light of the power of unified creative actions brought together under the banner of love.

    ‘People power’ is the label commonly applied to this uncoordinated diverse movement by the mass media – and they love a label. A reductive, somewhat divisive term; the explosion in political, social and environmental engagement is not rooted in opposition, though this certainly exists, but flows from a growing sense of social and environmental responsibility and an evolving unity; a recognition that we are all responsible for one another and the planet.

    Responsibility is a key component of a democratic society, as is participation, and, of course, the two are closely linked. Society is not separate from those who live, work and study within its boundaries; we are society, collectively we create the atmosphere, and we allow and perpetuate the structures and dominant modes of living through our actions and attitudes. Consciousness sits behind behavior, attitudes, values, and consciousness (at least as far as we know it) is its content. Such content is predominantly the accumulated ideas and beliefs that have been poured into the mind from birth; conditioned content then is the fabric of our consciousness. We are, for example, conditioned into competition from childhood, and believing it to be natural and beneficial, we live within its divisive pattern and pass it on to others, our peers and children, say; we thereby add to the collective conditioning which shapes society.

    Changes in consciousness and therefore behavior come about quite naturally when conditioning is absent; remove conformity and fear from a classroom, for example, and see children relax, play and freely express themselves.

    We are all responsible, not just for ourselves but for others, family, friends, our community, nation, region, world; the more we act, the more the ripples of responsibility expand. Recognition and awareness of this inherent responsibility leads quite naturally to participation and action, as the many and varied protest movements and community groups demonstrate.

    Expressions of social and environmental responsibility reflect and strengthen an evolving realization that humanity is one, that we are all essentially the same: Individuals with particular qualities and gifts sharing a common nature and universal constitution, the beauty and depth of which we sense but do not understand; its quality is love, that much we do know; and it is love in action that needs to permeate any ‘new normal’.

    Graham Peebles is an independent writer and charity worker. He set up The Create Trust in 2005 and has run education projects in India, Sri Lanka, Palestine and Ethiopia where he lived for two years working with street children, under 18 commercial sex workers, and conducting teacher training programmes. He lives and works in London. Read other articles by Graham, or visit Graham’s website.

    This article was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2021 at 10:37pm and is filed under Activism, Civil Unrest, COVID-19, Environment, Media, Neoliberalism, Opinion, Peace, Propaganda, Social Justice, Social Movements.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • President Biden Plans To Upend Trump’s “Remain In Mexico” Immigration Policy

    Via America’s Lawyer: Biden’s administration inherits from his predecessor a years-long immigration catastrophe. Mike Papantonio is joined by President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association Allen Orr to explain the steps Biden has already taken toward reshaping a defunct asylum system and promoting legal immigration along the southern border. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software […]

    The post President Biden Plans To Upend Trump’s “Remain In Mexico” Immigration Policy appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.

  • Biden’s EPA Nominee Must Act on Forests to Be an Environmental Justice Champion

    Michael Regan speaks during his nomination hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to be Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C., on February 3, 2021.

    The confirmation process for President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the current secretary of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality (NC DEQ) Michael Regan, has begun. While many environmental groups have enthusiastically supported his appointment, his leadership on environmental justice in his home state has produced mixed results.

    Regan has headed the NC DEQ since 2017. On the bright side, Regan played a lead role in the development of the state’s Clean Energy Plan pursuant to Gov. Roy Cooper’s executive order on climate change. This work led to the state rejecting biomass energy as a false solution to climate change.

    The plan states, “Currently, the wood pellet industry does not contribute to NC’s energy generation portfolio and does not advance NC’s clean energy economy. The wood pellets harvested from NC increase the state’s carbon output during logging, processing and transportation and are burned for fuel elsewhere, mostly Europe.”

    Regan also created the Environmental Justice and Equity Board. In Regan’s own words, “[T]ogether we will protect our natural resources, our economic interests, and our communities so that ALL North Carolinians will have clean air and clean water for today, tomorrow and future generations to come.”

    Unfortunately, these statements were not backed by sufficient agency action. Despite the strong local community and statewide opposition, as well as his own message relating to the Environmental Justice and Equity Board, wood pellet biomass facilities that were proposed during his tenure were fully permitted or allowed to expand production. These decisions have created irreversible climate, forest and human health impacts, all of which disproportionately affect low-income rural communities of color.

    If he truly cared about frontline (or as he calls them, fence line) communities, he would have addressed the wood pellet industry and logging in North Carolina. Had Regan’s actions as the top environmental regulator in North Carolina matched his words, there would have been a more favorable outcome for the communities and forests of the state, where my organization, Dogwood Alliance, is based. Time and time again, he deferred taking bold action, noting the lack of power he had as a state regulator to effectively address these issues. Now, on the cusp of becoming the head of the EPA, that all changes.

    There are four pathways that Regan should aggressively follow in order to achieve a positive environmental impact for all communities:

    1. Regulate biogenic carbon emissions and reject biomass as a path to reducing carbon emissions.
    2. Direct states to comply with their responsibility under the Civil Rights Act and consider the disproportionate impacts that issuing permits for wood pellet/biomass facilities would have on communities designated for environmental justice (defined as those communities that are most impacted by environmental harms and risks with a disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards and increased vulnerability to these hazards).
    3. Improve the EPA’s annual greenhouse gas reporting by disclosing forest carbon emissions from forestry in accordance with the latest science and methodology.
    4. Strengthen Clean Water Act regulations, which contain massive loopholes for industrial forestry.

    Under Regan’s leadership, the wood pellet industry has rapidly expanded in North Carolina, and the state is now the largest exporter of wood pellets in the world. Nearly 80,000 acres of forest had to be cut down in 2017 to meet the needs of pellet processing plants in North Carolina, according to an estimate by Dogwood Alliance. The forest products industry, including wood pellet production, is the third-largest carbon emitter in North Carolina, barely behind electricity and transportation. And every single wood pellet facility built in the state was sited in environmental justice-designated communities, increasing air pollution risks to local residents.

    The U.S. is the world’s largest wood producing and consuming nation, with rural low-income communities of color in the Black Belt region of the coastal plain of the U.S. South disproportionately bearing the negative impacts of this. The rate of forest cover loss from “forest management” (aka industrial logging) in this region was estimated to be “four times as high as that of South American rainforests” between 2012 and 2013, according to a paper by the United Nations Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals. This same region consistently exhibits high poverty, unemployment and other indicators of socioeconomic distress.

    Unregulated “forest management” via large-scale clear-cutting and the conversion of natural forests into plantations have left forests and surrounding communities in a degraded state. According to a paper submitted to the World Forestry Congress, as of 2003, 67 percent of the nation’s industrial tree plantations can be found in the South, with the highest concentrations in the coastal plain and Black Belt region. The loss of tens of millions of acres of natural forest cover to “replanted” or “regenerated” plantations planted with seedlings that have been genetically manipulated to grow faster for commercial extraction has been well-documented.

    Over decades, the loss of natural forests to pine plantations has brought some of the South’s most diverse ecosystems to the brink of collapse. Plantations are essentially dead zones in terms of carbon sinks and biodiversity, releasing carbon for up to 13 years after harvest. The establishment of plantations has degraded the natural ability of forests to filter water, purify and cool the air and provide natural flood control. In the coastal plain Black Belt region, approximately 28 percent (or more than 1 in every 4 acres) of “forests” are industrial tree plantations, compared to 8 percent nationally.

    These same communities are in high-risk flood zones, having suffered disproportionate impacts from the recent extreme flooding linked to climate change. Only approximately 10 percent of the forestland in the region is in public ownership, compared to 33 percent nationwide. Of the 90 percent in private ownership, less than 1 percent is owned by people of color. The lack of public ownership combined with the extent of industrial forestry disproportionately restricts access to outdoor recreation and its associated community and economic development benefits.

    So now, as Secretary Regan undergoes the confirmation process, we must remind him that actions speak louder than words. If he is confirmed, let’s hope he will take action and stand up to industrial polluters who continue destroying our forests and polluting our communities.

    This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The New Environmentalism Must Demand Systemic Change

    A climate strike on the Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C., September 20, 2019.

    Fifty years ago, my young daughter and I were on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the first Earth Day. A group of us were then launching the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Since then, the NRDC and other U.S. environmental groups have racked up more victories and accomplishments than one can count.

    But here’s the deeply troubling rub: As our environmental organizations have grown stronger, more sophisticated and more global in reach, the environment has continued to slide downhill. And not just slightly downhill.

    Climate change is coming at us very hard. Worldwide, we are losing biodiversity, forests, fisheries and agricultural soils at frightening rates. Fresh water shortages multiply. Toxics accumulate in ecosystems, and in us. Here in the U.S., half of the freshwater bodies still do not meet the “fishable and swimmable” goal set for 1983 in the 1972 Clean Water Act. And about half of Americans live with unhealthy levels of air pollutants at least part of each year. Between 1982 and 2012, we lost an area roughly the size of Oklahoma to urban and industrial sprawl, much of it spreading into prime agricultural land. Thirty percent of U.S. plant species and 18 percent of animal species are now threatened with extinction.

    An annual country-by-country environmental performance review by Yale and Columbia universities for the World Economic Forum (reflecting results, not level of effort) ranks the U.S. in 2020 as 24th overall. No other advanced economy looks worse. We ranked 25th in environmental health, 23rd in drinking water, 67th in biodiversity protection, 62nd in wetland loss, 122nd in fisheries management and 15th on climate change. We are at the bottom among advanced countries in our ecological footprint per capita, too.

    So, something is terribly wrong. And it’s something that more of the same cannot fix. We’ve now had decades of more of the same, but find ourselves awash in the very planetary conditions we set out 50 years ago to prevent. Hard-working environmentalists truly believed during that momentous stretch that the current system could be made to work, and we were wrong.

    What we overlooked for decades is how deeply the most important environmental problems and the climate emergency are rooted in our current political economy’s defining features. Baked in are:

    • an unquestioning society-wide commitment to endless economic growth, routinely measured by the misleading gauge of GDP (gross domestic product);
    • powerful corporate interests determined to generate profit and to grow, while avoiding the large social and environmental costs of doing so;
    • markets that ignore these external costs unless corrected by governments, which won’t as long as they are themselves obeisant to corporate interests and the growth imperative;
    • rampant consumerism spurred endlessly by sophisticated advertising;
    • social injustice and economic insecurity vast and deep enough to delay action and fuel false claims that safeguards would cost jobs and ruin the economy;
    • excessively materialistic, individualistic and anthropocentric cultural values;
    • economic activity now so huge in scale that its impacts alter the planet’s fundamental biophysical operations.

    This complex is the citadel of power we are up against. It is what has been destroying the environment and climate, and, with history as our guide, it will continue to do so unless we change the system — the fundamental task of a new environmentalism.

    The starting point is again asking the basic question: What is an environmental issue? Climate change and water pollution, of course. But what if the right answer is that environmental issues include the things that determine environmental outcomes? Then, surely, creeping plutocracy and corporatocracy — the ascendancy of money power and corporate power over people power — are environmental issues. And so are chartering and empowering artificial persons to do almost anything in the name of profit and growth; the fetish of GDP growth as the ultimate public good and the main aim of government; runaway consumerism; and vast social insecurity, with half of U.S. families scrambling from paycheck to paycheck.

    The new environmentalism should debunk consumerism and commercialism, reject “growthmania” and profit-centered economics, redefine what it is that society should be striving to grow, challenge corporate dominance as well as today’s main corporation form and its goals, broaden control and the ownership of productive assets, and push against the anthropocentric values that currently dominate U.S. culture.

    New environmentalists must also join with social progressives and others to address the crisis of low incomes and economic insecurity now unraveling the U.S.’s social fabric. We should make common cause with those seeking to make politics respond to the common good and strengthen democracy. We need to reverse the vicious concentration of political access and influence to wealthy constituencies and large businesses.

    New environmentalists need to champion public financing of elections, new anti-corruption ethical restrictions on legislatures, the right to vote, tougher regulation of lobbying and the revolving door, nonpartisan congressional redistricting, and other political reform. We must join in campaigns like National Popular Vote to work around the Electoral College and Move to Amend to forge a new Constitution that recognizes that corporations are not people and money is not speech.

    Above all, the new environmental politics must be broadly inclusive, embracing the concerns of workers and working families, people of color, frontline communities, family farmers, religious organizations, the women’s movement, and other communities with complementary interests and a shared fate.

    In a nutshell, the new environmentalism should be seeking to build a new system that routinely produces good results for people and the planet, rather than making those results almost impossible to achieve.

    The Biden administration is making many good climate moves in its early days, including reversing some of the damaging policies of the Trump era. The danger is that its well-intentioned, positive steps forward will, like previous environmental efforts, still not give us enough velocity to escape the gravitational pull of status quo politics and popular fear of change.

    To give us that needed velocity, system change can best be approached through a series of interacting, mutually reinforcing transitions. Eight such transformations — some aborning, some farther off, and all difficult but none impossible — would alter the current system’s key motivational structures.

    • The market transition. The market becomes a secondary force in economic life, ceding dominance to cooperation and planning. Tight regulations keep prices honest and wages fair.
    • The corporate transition. Profit becomes a minor motivation for businesses. Producing social and environmental well-being comes first. Economic democracy is the goal and takes many forms: worker ownership, co-ops, community and public ownership, credit unions, public-private and for-profit, not-for-profit hybrids.
    • The growth transition. GDP — think “grossly distorted picture” — is recognized as a poor guide, ignored in favor of measuring progress toward democratically determined priorities and well-being.
    • Transition in investment and finance. Investment for high financial returns is largely replaced by investment for high social and environmental returns. Public and community banking predominates over private. Main Street trumps Wall Street.
    • The social transition. Powerful social justice measures — a job guarantee, tax fairness, fully adequate minimum wage and unemployment compensation, strong unions, good child care — ensure fundamental fairness and genuine equal opportunity, defeating social deprivation and gross economic inequality.
    • The lifestyle and culture transition. Vain attempts to satisfy non-material needs with material possessions give way to new lifestyles based on the recognition that other people are our main source of happiness. Nature is seen as a communion of subjects in which we are integral.
    • The communities transition. Runaway enterprise and throwaway communities are replaced by vital local communities that prize vigorous democracy and human solidarity. Joy in diversity supplants racial and religious discrimination and intolerance.
    • The democracy transition. Creeping corporatocracy and plutocracy are rolled back as political reforms bring true popular sovereignty and empowerment of marginalized groups.

    These essential transitions provide the truest escape from the currently failing system. And they are neither far-fetched nor necessarily far off. We already know enough about the policy and other changes needed to propel us in these directions. Innovative models along many of the lines sketched here are already proliferating: sustainable communities, solidarity economy initiatives, new regional and organic food systems, locally owned and managed renewable energy, community development and finance institutions, sharing and barter networks, local currencies, campaigns to “take back your time” and “move your money” (out of Wall Street) have all been taking hold around the country.

    We are also seeing the spread of innovative business models that prioritize community and environment over profit and growth — whether social and public enterprises, for-benefit business, worker-owned and other cooperatives, local credit unions or public banking. Consider, too, the interlinked campaigns for fair wages, worker rights, Earth-friendly and community-oriented lifestyles, racial justice and pro-family policies.

    Fifty years after that first Earth Day, we are running out of time and excuses. With examples aplenty of how things can and must be different, we must all be new environmentalists now.

    This article is excerpted from an essay in The New Systems Reader: Alternatives to a Failed Economy.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Dreams Outside the Hopes of the Neuronormal

    The legacy of a society is, well, how it treats its young, old, frail, infirm, sick, poor and those hobbled by structural and environmental injustice.

    Some in urban planning circles also allude to how safe a community is based on the popsicle test – can a child or two walking from home to a store, get a popsicle without having to cross high speed roads or highways, without having to walk along long stretches of ugly dangerous buildings, and who can find a multitude of stores that sell good food and desserts like Popsicles. How easy it is for the child to walk there? Are the homes-apartments-duplexes-offices looking out toward the sidewalks? Are there porches out front where people linger and lounge? Are there trees for shade? Are there mail boxes? Are there stores and eateries on the ground floor of a stretch of businesses with apartments and housing one and two floors above? Are there people bicycling? Are the stores and businesses set toward the streets and their parking lots pushed to the back of the establishments? Are there scalable hardware stores with windows and many doorways? Are there neighborhood groups that patrol the neighborhoods? Are there mixed neighborhoods with lower economic mixed in with middle class? What are the officers of the peace doing? Are they walking and bicycling their beats, where they live? Are they battened down in huge bulletproof SUV’s with three computers, five assault weapons, and the A/C blaring?

    The children, walk or bicycle from their home, and within a few minutes, they get to a place of business, without running through or dodging a gauntlet of racing trucks and autos. Are there elderly and families and business owners and customers there, doing their thing, on a scalable level?

    We know that in capitalism, in this free (sic) market society, with the bottom dollar and the bottom line of more and more profits without work or building something as the drivers, we the people – those two children walking to get a fudge bar or organic apple – are not the drivers of the society, the communities, the neighborhoods.

    Life in Capitalism is designed for speed, rot, decay, throwaway buildings and throwaway humanity. We have those massive systems of oppression run by real estate, insurance, finance, banks, building and paving, all those entities guarded by the US Chamber of Commerce whose job is to maximize the profits (gouging’s) of the large and medium-sized businesses that have run rough shod over us, the “regular people.”

    Now, those old industries are being retrofitted for the next level of exploitation and enslavement vis-à-vis the economies of scale vaunted by the monopolies, the investor class and billionaires. And that scaling up is facilitated by the masters of logarithms and Artificial Intelligence and digital dictators.

    Mom and pops – that is, the small family-owned businesses and the mini-chains of this or that service or consumer item – they are now on the cutting block in an amped up destruction of people’s lives, on a scale that would make a steroid using wrestler look like Mother Teresa on bread and water. Any chance of having a small business community have a say in how their communities and neighborhoods and census tracks are developed alongside with how their neighboring communities connect to this urban and rural planning, all of that inclusive and participatory democracy and governance are  dwindling ten-fold yearly.

    Who makes the decisions? Who puts the brakes on suburban sprawl and rampant car-centric cities? Ahh, the masters of money and masters of stocks and the AI and Digital Dictators will have more and more say in the design (or miss-design) of both the built environment as well as the financial environments. Add to that educational environments, the healthcare environments, the food system environments, the housing environments. We the people do not have control!

    Examples by Design

    I’m putting in this opening above to help segue into the reality of my work now – one of many hats, but now, it’s social work and case management for adults living with developmental and intellectual disabilities. And some who have had traumatic brain injuries.

    If the reader doesn’t have a bead on what the ID/DD community is, well, look it up. In a Western culture with more and more pre-newborns gestating into a slurry of forever chemicals, cortisol loads, heavy metals, stress hormones from mother, and a combination of all of this as a synergetic roulette wheel, coupled with DNA markers from mother and father, well, you can image that young boys and girls with disabilities like Autism Spectrum Disorder or mental retardation or any number of other aspects of life dealt from a genetic and poison deck of cards will be a huge burden on families, medical services, schools, society in general.

    Go back to the Popsicle analogy, but this time look at how our cultures deal with the less fortunate – a child born is innocent, no matter what sort of spirituality or religiosity you hold or do not hold. Cases in point for me after more than two decades working with poisoned souls – the children of the storms: fetal alcohol-affected or drug-addicted or hugely malnourished inside the womb – we are barbaric in terms of how we “deal” with the afflicted or the people born into a life of one or multiple deficits.

    Here, a composite – Drew was born to a mother who “experienced” drug and alcohol addiction. He was 5 pounds and four ounces at birth. He tested positive for cocaine and opiates at birth. He was in a nursery until moved to foster care in 10 days. His birth mother had several children “taken away or removed from her” because of her addictions.

    He was adopted by an old woman, who loved him but died of cancer when Drew was 7. Neighbors reported to the child protective agencies in California that Drew was being neglected and the dying mother was not caring for him properly.

    This is a common story in my line of work – multiple foster home placements per individual, lots of behavior issues arising by first year of school, from aggression, to defiance, to tantrums. Quickly he was put under a special education label – independent education plan. His ADHD, Tourette’s Syndrome, and anxiety, depression, aggression, isolating behavior, and poor stick-to-it-ness, all of that and more channeled him into special classes and into the special education network. Hearing voices and magical thinking and fantastical thoughts and paranoia, well, Drew is sort of a ward of the state. His foster/adoptive parents are his financial guardians, and he has county case workers and state ones lined up, along with nonprofit case workers.

    I work with a nonprofit, again, as a case worker-employment specialist. My job is to get people like Drew jobs, but that process is holistic, systematic and definitely tied to the whole suite of getting young and not so old people ready to face competitive employment, integrated, no longer stuck in some sheltered workshop.

    Those “sheltered workshops” included Goodwill clothing tagging rooms where all workers were those living with developmental disabilities; or even roaming crews of cleaners of office buildings who are all labeled ID-DD. That is a type of cloistering, sheltering from mainstream society.

    My nonprofit, of course, is a middleman of sorts, replacing the services states, counties and cities should be providing by taking over the contracts to do the work of providing developmental disabilities safety nets.

    Nutshells are the Only Teachable Moments

    So, getting someone a job at a hotel to do towel folding or room cleaning, or helping someone land a job as a custodian at a school, and for those with more skills and with more confidence, a place in retail sales, that’s part of my work. Sure, in Portland I worked with lawyers who have cerebral palsy, and true, that type of person deserves an equal shot at being a lawyer or working at the level somewhere. These advocates have their hearts in the right place, to be sure, and no Five F’s for them – filth, factory, food, foliage, fur – because they have graduate degrees.

    The reality is, though, someone with a lack of reading skills, with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and all the attending issues tied to the autism in that individual, well, working a cash register is tough (impossible for most), and doing public customer service at any level is tough. Behind the scenes jobs are the norm, and, unfortunately, the filth, food, foliage, fur and factory are the only choices sometimes. Life on the Central Oregon Coast where people retire or vacation, and where a fishing industry thrives, well, those job opportunities dwindle big time.

    Aspirational:  all people deserve home, health, education, food, work, public transportation choices. Aspirational: sure, we need communities designed for that Popsicle test. Most of my clients, of course, do not drive, or can’t. Most clients have issues with navigating the absurd on-line employment applications. Many clients need me there in the actual job interview.

    Many clients need a coach on the job, sometimes for life. Many clients work minimum wage for 20 hours a week to keep a bit of the SSI (social security insurance coming in). We are such a penury and usury society that my clients, even at minimum wage, get a dollar taken away from every two dollars made. This is how the system kills hope, advancement — the state gobbles up shekels after their first $85 is earned.

    All the studies and anecdotal evidence show that a job for a person with a developmental disability or a physical disability, or even a psychological disability like schizophrenia, THRIVE with employment for obvious reasons: a sense of belonging, team work, doing something as a member of society, extra money, socialization, using the brain. But here we are again, failing the other Popsicle test – we penalize and penalize and penalize until people are stripped bare.

    A few clients have to take urine tests for many jobs, and if they come back positive for cannabis, well, some outfits disqualify the person automatically from a minimum wage job. Even if that person has a medical marijuana card, in a state where pot is legal (it is in OR). Imagine that, all those politicians, those weak-spine things in DC and around state Capitols, and this is what they have legislated and this is how weak they are when it comes to day to day, people to people life-and-death decisions.

    Study after study, and again, a million anectodical stories show THC and CBD actually pull patients off prescriptions and actually keep anxiety at bay and amp up focus.

    The law enforcers and the bureaucracies and the policymakers are Neanderthals, really (no attack on those people, Neanderthals, but it’s a term of describing how behind the times and backward they are).

    My job is to do workarounds, to do magic, and while mom and pop’s along the coast are shuttering daily, the small hotels are now owned by investment groups, and managed by the big daddies of hotel and motel management corporations. Having workarounds with national organizations, sometimes multinationals, well, those conversations never happen, let alone an email gets returned. They are not of, for and by the community. They are in business for the investors and profits.

    The chances of having an offspring with one or a number of chronic illnesses or who might end up on the spectrum or might have brain anomalies because of gestational issues, or who are genetically programmed to come out a “certain way,” well, those odds increase monthly.

    Yet the systems of oppression and the cops and the legal systems, they still incarcerate, batter and murder people with autism. People in mental health crises are tased and murdered by pigs. The systems of oppression are buttressed by the prejudices of Holly-dirt and the bullies of the world. It can be an overt Trump making fun of a disabled reporter at a press conference when he was first running in 2016, or it could be a Biden who pushed the crime bill, putting untold numbers of people with mental, emotional and situational abuse in chambers of hell – prison.

    The spectrum of people who still do not understand why I work in “that field,” under all the pressures of emotionally traumatized and psychologically depleted people and their families, well, they might think of themselves as the beautiful people, the anti-Trumpistas, the LGBTQ folk, the African-American-in-the-VP-office loving folk, but again, they fail the Popsicle test.

    Dream hoarders and Not in My Backyard vacillators, and all sorts of other liberal/neoliberal types, they are no friends of the Popsicle Test of a Sustainable, Fair, Resilient Community. They love their first and second homes. They covet a Stock Market hovering around 31,000 points. They love the Netflix mental diabetes junk they consume, and they have no idea why Biden is as bad as Bush or Trump.

    And then I have to convince people to shed their prejudices against people that are not appearing “like themselves.” We do not use terms like “neuronormal” to contrast my clients with the mainstream, but in the end, what is normal in a society that shifts baselines almost weekly?

    With the new normal full of paranoia, unapproved vaccines, and misleading diseased minds like Fauci and Gates leading the charge for a global forced vaccination program, one can image how paranoid my clients are who live in group homes or in small one-room apartments. TV and few friends ramify their fears. Lockdown is a locking up of the mind!

    Some clients do not even want to meet me face to face on a beach with masks on. They are paranoid because of the mass polluting media. One disability on top of another and another. Welcome to America.

    What is a disability? I suppose Helen Keller might figure in here:

    When she was sixteen, in 1896, she was catapulted to national fame, writes Keith Rosenthal for the International Socialist Review. By 1904, when she graduated from Radcliffe College, she was internationally famous. She joined the Socialist Party of America a few years later and began advocating for revolutionary change. “She noticed the close relationship between disability and poverty, and blamed capitalism and poor industrial conditions for both,” writes Sascha Cohen for Time.

    But even though she had strong politics and a national voice, nobody took her opinions seriously. “Newspaper editors would use her disability as a means to dismiss her politics and to dissuade people from taking her seriously,” writes Rosenthal. “Her radicalism, conservative writers would aver, was a product of the political ‘mistakes [which] spring out of the manifest limitations of her development.’”

    Despite this, she was a leading light of the American socialist movement, Rosenthal writes. Among many other causes, she championed pacifism and the U.S. staying out of World War I. Source: Smithsonian Magazine

    keller.jpg

    Eventually, in dog-eat-dog, kill your competition capitalism, we all become each other’s competitor, enemy. A few billion dollars here and there for hundreds of millions of struggling people is birdseed, yet the systems of oppression and suppression, along with the mass murdering media, cull agency, gumption, and the ability of people to stand up to the oppressors and the authorities and multiple graduate degree certificate holders.

    What do the people I serve and the so-called “normal majority” have in common? There are variations on a Dystopian theme, whether it’s Blade Runner or Minority Report or Brave New World or 1984. Almost everyone in this country is confused, shattered, see-hear-speak no evil tied to their specific coalitions and ways of thinking. My amazing clients are enmeshed in fear and the outside world, thanks to the conflation of SARS-CoV2 to a body-eating zombie virus, eating them alive and culling them all eventually. No more hide and seek — it’s all duck and cover and mask and hide and isolate.

    What that gives me as a worker are many people who deserve integrated employment but who are hobbled and shackled to the gestalt of a warped society. Do they have other ways of thinking and seeing and hearing? Of course. Do they have their own methods of surviving paranoia, depression, anxiety, hypervigilance, magical thinking, shattered executive functions, functional or complete illiteracy?

    Of course. Of course. But again, the Popsicle test fails each time. Imagine, a job, 4 pm to 8 pm, in a town 15 miles from where they live. Can you see the public transportation system beautiful and timely and regular? Nope. Can you see all these taxi and shuttle services for free getting people to work and from work who can’t-won’t-never will drive? Where is that dreamland in Capitalism?

    Yet every minute and every second of a 24-hour news cycle or 24 hours of a million channels broadcasting thousands of novellas, soap operas or series and movies, all are occupied with the stories and travails of the rich and famous, the idiotic heroes or pig crime dramas or Marvel Comic Book drivel. Rarely do Americans see what they live out personally, or view what they struggle with daily, or get to watch people like themselves in this battle to get the oppressors and Eichmann’s to bend to their/our will and begin to apply the tenants of the Popsicle Theory.

    Otto Zehm

    I can end with story after story of humanity hog-tied or knee-butted to death by the cops. Add to that demographic people living with psychological-intellectual-developmental disabilities.

    You do not have to surf the internet long to find a few cases of autistic men and women or boys and girls getting pepper sprayed and handcuffed and body slammed by the pigs.

    There is that case of Otto Zehm, and then Alien Boy which I wrote about here at DV. “Watching Brian Lindstrom’s Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse, I am reminded of my forty plus years in and around cops, with mentally distressed clients, as a social worker with homeless and re-entry and veteran clients, and as a teacher in many alternative high school programs, community college, prisons, with military students, and with adults living with developmental disabilities.”

    I think that most of us instinctively avoid people with mental illness.

    I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa’s dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between “us” and “them” to arrive at a “we.”
    —Brian Lindstrom, documentarian

    Zehm was 32 years old when the Spokane cops killed him by putting him on the ground and forcing a cop’s weight onto his back while Otto’s diaphragm collapsed. He was a custodian, and back in 2006, the Spokesman Review deemed him as a mentally disabled custodian.

    He went into a mini-mart for soda. It took almost a decade to find the pig guilty of murder. And this is how the DA and cops think of “mentally disabled custodians” —

    Zehm either “attacked” the officers or at least refused to comply with their commands. Police Chief Jim Nicks said Tuesday that Zehm “immediately engaged” the first officer.

    “Whether he lunged or turned quickly on him, whatever the case may be, the officer clearly felt there was a risk there,” Nicks said. “The suspect had a large two-liter bottle of pop. The officer had to take all those things into consideration as far as what level of threat this might be.

    “But the bottom line is they had a duty and an obligation to detain and control him.” — Spokesman Review

    I’ve been down this road many times over the years. My first police encounter as a newspaper reporter was in Ajo, Arizona. A very long time ago. Pima County Sheriff responds to a mother’s call about her Vietnam War veteran son having a mental crisis out front in the desert front yard. Fenced in. He needed some meds. The cops show up. And, while the veteran was on his mother’s property, which essentially was being paid for through the vet’s job and benefits, the deputy pulled his gun on the other side of the property line. He tells the 38 year old to drop the small knife.

    A knife brandished by a shirtless and barefoot fellow in his OWN front yard.

    Justified-six-shots-to-the-torso homicide. I was 19, and back then, I had  this gig as a newspaper reporter, the so-called “sexy” cop beat, and, while I pushed my editors to allow some of my secondary interviews into the piece (interviews I did from a USC criminal justice reforming professor, another from a police chief in Akron) well, those were cut from the published article. Those two sources discussed how police are ripe for this sort of homicide, and how the system is rigged to defend civilian killing cops. That was 43 years ago.

    I spent time with the vet’s mother and his ex-wife, and in reality, this guy was pretty cool, a great rock hound, three years at the university in hard rock geology, but his PTSD was way too much. PTSD wasn’t even the terminology back then in 1976.

    I think of Otto Zehm all the time now. I knew of him and said hello to him a few times while I lived and taught in Spokane. He cleaned at the Community Building where I did a lot of gigs as a poet and teacher. I had my radio show in that building, and I ran into Otto a lot.

    There is no way in hell Otto could have done harm to a cop.

    The irony is that in 2006 I wasn’t working yet directly in the field of developmental disabilities. Sure, I had students who had psychological disabilities, and some students with accommodations. Many students who came back from the killing mountains of the Middle East.

    I ended up working with adults with developmental disabilities in Portland and the three-county area 8 years later.

    Now I am back at it, and, I think about some of my very verbal and far-thinking men and women with autism disorders. I think of their defiance and their questioning and their inability “to get” that cops or pigs or sheriff deputies just are itching for a bruising. They expect instant compliance. That is compliance from a disabled person, or from a three star black general or a Mexican American female attorney.

    You can read about the extrajudicial killings this country’s allows. And that, again, is the Popsicle Test failure Number 999,999.

    All those promises for reform. With the Portland Police Bureau. Seattle PD. Spokane PD. A thousand other PD’s blemished overtly with police brutality, police coverups, police maleficence.

    No Popsicles for the People. Including the Developmentally Disabled.

    Amid coronavirus, parents want ice cream vendors to return - Los Angeles Times

    The post Dreams Outside the Hopes of the Neuronormal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • PETA Presses Merriam-Webster to Drop Speciesist Definitions

    This morning, PETA sent a letter to Merriam-Webster requesting that the dictionary remove harmful definitions of pig (“a dirty, gluttonous, or repulsive person”), snake (“a worthless or treacherous fellow”), and dog (“a worthless or contemptible person”), pointing out that lending credence to such inaccurate descriptions fuels speciesism, a human-supremacist attitude that slights, insults, and denigrates animals.

    “Words matter, and Merriam-Webster is in a position to relegate outdated language to the dustbin of history and help usher in a more respectful view of other species,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA encourages everyone to reject mischaracterizations of animals and reflect upon their talents, communication abilities, social skills, and more. Saying, ‘as loyal as a goose,’ ‘as protective of their young as a pigeon,’ ‘as flexible as an octopus,’ and ‘as clever as a mouse,’ would be more apt and accurate.”

    PETA’s motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way.” For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

    PETA’s letter to Merriam-Webster Editor-at-Large Peter Sokolowski follows.

    January 26, 2021

    Peter Sokolowski 

    Editor-at-Large

    Merriam-Webster

    Dear Mr. Sokolowski,

    I’m writing on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and our more than 6.5 million members and supporters worldwide with an important request: We would like you to remove from your dictionary all animal-related slurs whose purpose is to debase human beings. Eliminating such language will help move us closer to a more respectful and empathetic world. This is perhaps a more pressing area of concern than most people realize. Please allow me to explain.

    PETA has always urged people to stop using language that is meant to hurt others’ feelings and denigrate those who happen not to be human, in much the same way that we now understand how wrong it is to attribute undesirable traits, like miserliness or laziness, to certain nationalities or ethnicities. It was once acceptable for Carl Linnaeus, the “father of taxonomy,” to correlate skin color with disposition (listing Americans as “choleric,” Europeans as “sanguine,” Asians as “melancholic,” and Africans as “phlegmatic”). Looking back at this, we are rightly appalled. And assigning a negative meaning to an objective, neutral word for an animal, e.g., “pig” (“a dirty, gluttonous, or repulsive person”), “snake” (“a worthless or treacherous fellow”), or “dog” (“a worthless or contemptible person”), among others, is also unacceptable.

    Calling humans various animal names is meant to sting, yet pigs, for instance, are intelligent, lead complex social lives, and show empathy for other pigs in distress. They have rescued drowning humans and alerted their guardians to fires. Snakes are clever, have family relationships, and prefer to associate with their relatives rather than with strangers. If taken many miles away, they can find their way back home even if it takes two years. Dogs have personalities as varied and distinct as those of the humans who care for them. A dog living in a human home has been shown to understand, on average, some 400 words of human language simply from paying close attention. Yet humans don’t even try to understand their language.

    As you know, language matters and is essential to reflecting our ever-evolving culture. Perpetuating the idea that animals are sly, dirty, heartless, and so on is improper and inaccurate, desensitizes the public, and paves the way for the normalization of cruelty to and violence against animals. I look forward to hearing that Merriam-Webster will remove these harmful definitions and thereby encourage people to recognize that attributing ill character to these thinking, feeling animals who experience joy, suffering, love, and grief, just as we do, is unacceptable. Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.

    Very truly yours,

    Ingrid E. Newkirk

    President

    The post PETA Presses Merriam-Webster to Drop Speciesist Definitions appeared first on PETA.

    This post was originally published on Blog – PETA.

  • PETA Presses Dictionary.com to Drop Speciesist Definitions

    This morning, PETA sent a letter to Dictionary.com requesting that the dictionary remove harmful definitions of weasel (“a cunning, sneaky person”), snake (“a treacherous person; an insidious enemy”), and rat (“a scoundrel”), pointing out that lending credence to such inaccurate descriptions fuels speciesism, a human-supremacist attitude that slights, insults, and denigrates animals.

    “Words matter, and Dictionary.com is in a position to relegate outdated language to the dustbin of history and help usher in a more respectful view of other species,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA encourages everyone to reject mischaracterizations of animals and reflect upon their talents, communication abilities, social skills, and more. Saying, ‘as loyal as a goose,’ ‘as protective of their young as a pigeon,’ ‘as flexible as an octopus,’ and ‘as clever as a mouse,’ would be more apt and accurate.”

    PETA’s motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way.” For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

    PETA’s letter to Dictionary.com CEO Jennifer Steeves-Kiss follows.

    January 26, 2021

    Jennifer Steeves-Kiss

    CEO

    Dictionary.com

    Dear Ms. Steeves-Kiss,

    I’m writing on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and our more than 6.5 million members and supporters worldwide with an important request: We would like you to remove from Dictionary.com all animal-related slurs whose purpose is to debase human beings. Eliminating such language will help move us closer to a more respectful and empathetic world. This is perhaps a more pressing area of concern than most people realize. Please allow me to explain.

    PETA has always urged people to stop using language that is meant to hurt others’ feelings and denigrate those who happen not to be human, in much the same way that we now understand how wrong it is to attribute undesirable traits, like miserliness or laziness, to certain nationalities or ethnicities. It was once acceptable for Carl Linnaeus, the “father of taxonomy,” to correlate skin color with disposition (listing Americans as “choleric,” Europeans as “sanguine,” Asians as “melancholic,” and Africans as “phlegmatic”). Looking back at this, we are rightly appalled. And assigning a negative meaning to an objective, neutral word for an animal, e.g., “weasel” (“a cunning, sneaky person”), “snake” (“a treacherous person; an insidious enemy”), or “rat” (“a scoundrel”), among others, is also unacceptable.

    Calling humans various animal names is meant to sting, yet pigs, for instance, are intelligent, lead complex social lives, and show empathy for other pigs in distress. They have rescued drowning humans and alerted their guardians to fires. Snakes are clever, have family relationships, and prefer to associate with their relatives rather than with strangers. If taken many miles away, they can find their way back home even if it takes two years. Dogs have personalities as varied and distinct as those of the humans who care for them. A dog living in a human home has been shown to understand, on average, some 400 words of human language simply from paying close attention. Yet humans don’t even try to understand their language.

    As you know, language matters and is essential to reflecting our ever-evolving culture. Perpetuating the idea that animals are sly, dirty, heartless, and so on is improper and inaccurate, desensitizes the public, and paves the way for the normalization of cruelty to and violence against animals. I look forward to hearing that Dictionary.com will remove these harmful definitions and thereby encourage people to recognize that attributing ill character to these thinking, feeling animals who experience joy, suffering, love, and grief, just as we do, is unacceptable. Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.

    Very truly yours,

    Ingrid E. Newkirk

    President

    The post PETA Presses Dictionary.com to Drop Speciesist Definitions appeared first on PETA.

    This post was originally published on Blog – PETA.

  • PETA Presses The American Heritage Dictionary to Drop Speciesist Definitions

    This morning, PETA sent a letter to The American Heritage Dictionary requesting that the dictionary remove harmful definitions of pig (“a person regarded as being piglike, greedy, or disgusting”), snake (“a treacherous person”), and dog (“a person regarded as unattractive or uninteresting”), pointing out that lending credence to such inaccurate descriptions fuels speciesism, a human-supremacist attitude that slights, insults, and denigrates animals.

    “Words matter, and The American Heritage Dictionary is in a position to relegate outdated language to the dustbin of history and help usher in a more respectful view of other species,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA encourages everyone to reject mischaracterizations of animals and reflect upon their talents, communication abilities, social skills, and more. Saying, ‘as loyal as a goose,’ ‘as protective of their young as a pigeon,’ ‘as flexible as an octopus,’ and ‘as clever as a mouse,’ would be more apt and accurate.”

    PETA’s motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way.” For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

    PETA’s letter to The American Heritage Dictionary President John J. Lynch Jr. follows.

    January 26, 2021

    John J. Lynch Jr.

    President, CEO, Director

    Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

    Dear Mr. Lynch,

    I’m writing on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and our more than 6.5 million members and supporters worldwide with an important request: We would like you to remove from The American Heritage Dictionary all animal-related slurs whose purpose is to debase human beings. Eliminating such language will help move us closer to a more respectful and empathetic world. This is perhaps a more pressing area of concern than most people realize. Please allow me to explain.

    PETA has always urged people to stop using language that is meant to hurt others’ feelings and denigrate those who happen not to be human, in much the same way that we now understand how wrong it is to attribute undesirable traits, like miserliness or laziness, to certain nationalities or ethnicities. It was once acceptable for Carl Linnaeus, the “father of taxonomy,” to correlate skin color with disposition (listing Americans as “choleric,” Europeans as “sanguine,” Asians as “melancholic,” and Africans as “phlegmatic”). Looking back at this, we are rightly appalled. And assigning a negative meaning to an objective, neutral word for an animal, e.g., “pig” (“a person regarded as being piglike, greedy, or disgusting”), “snake” (“a treacherous person”), or “dog” (“a person regarded as unattractive or uninteresting”), among others, is also unacceptable.

    Calling humans various animal names is meant to sting, yet pigs, for instance, are intelligent, lead complex social lives, and show empathy for other pigs in distress. They have rescued drowning humans and alerted their guardians to fires. Snakes are clever, have family relationships, and prefer to associate with their relatives rather than with strangers. If taken many miles away, they can find their way back home even if it takes two years. Dogs have personalities as varied and distinct as those of the humans who care for them. A dog living in a human home has been shown to understand, on average, some 400 words of human language simply from paying close attention. Yet humans don’t even try to understand their language.

    As you know, language matters and is essential to reflecting our ever-evolving culture. Perpetuating the idea that animals are sly, dirty, heartless, and so on is improper and inaccurate, desensitizes the public, and paves the way for the normalization of cruelty to and violence against animals. I look forward to hearing that The American Heritage Dictionary will remove these harmful definitions and thereby encourage people to recognize that attributing ill character to these thinking, feeling animals who experience joy, suffering, love, and grief, just as we do, is unacceptable. Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.

    Very truly yours,

    Ingrid E. Newkirk

    President

    The post PETA Presses The American Heritage Dictionary to Drop Speciesist Definitions appeared first on PETA.

    This post was originally published on Blog – PETA.

  • Shilo Kino: Your mana diminishes every time you switch on the news

    COMMENT: By Shilo Kino

    What were you doing during the foreshore and seabed hīkoi in 2004?

    I wish I could say I was at the protest, gripping the hem of Nana’s dress while she raised her fist in the air, marching for sovereignty, echoing the cries of our tīpuna who were fighting for the very same thing on the very same whenua all those years ago.

    But this wasn’t the reality for me and for so many other urban Māori who grew up disconnected from our culture. I was living in Avondale, Auckland and watched the protest unfold on the news. Mum was still at work and I was eating noodles, my homework spread out on the dinner table.

    Sir Pita Sharples leads the 2004 hikoi protesting against the foreshore and seabed legislation. Image: Newsroom/Getty Images

    A sea of black and white flags flying in the air came on the TV. I remember a wave of emotion coming over me from seeing the crowds of brown faces who looked like me, who looked like my mum, my Nana.

    I wish I could say it was a feeling of pride but it wasn’t. I felt whakamā – a word every Māori knows because it is an emotion that has been forced upon us to feel inherently bad for who we are.

    The news coverage of the foreshore and seabed told me Māori were greedy, wanted special privileges, were angry over nothing and were trying to ban the public from beaches. It didn’t speak of Māori relationship to the land, the history of land confiscation, the fight for sovereignty or the issues that have come from colonisation and dispossession.

    It was a narrative carefully formulated by the media for the intended target audience which was, you guessed it: Pākehā.

    Misframing a story just one example
    Weaponising activism through misframing a story is just one example. We were also sold a narrative that Māori are the criminals, the baby killers, the gang members, the underachievers, the prisoners, the drug and alcohol addicts.

    What do you think this does to a person when you are constantly fed a false narrative of your identity? Your mana diminishes every time you switch on the news, open the newspaper, turn on the radio. Even worse, what happens when you are a child?

    The media didn’t care how this narrative would impact me or the thousands of other Māori growing up in urban cities, unsure of who we were, no grandparents alive to teach us our identity, busy parents trying to push us into mainstream because that’s what they were told would be “best” for us and so we were forced to learn about who we are through the eyes of the media. And it wasn’t pretty.

    Many years have passed since the foreshore and seabed hīkoi, yet in the year 2021 the same racism exists today, instigated by the same institutions that continue to push this same, tired narrative.

    Joe Bloggs calls up a radio station well known to be racist to Māori and says “they’re (Māori) victims of their own genetic background. They are genetically predisposed to crime, alcohol, and underperformance educationally” – and the radio host who used to be the Mayor of Auckland doubles down and says something equally, if not more, racist.

    This incident is not shocking to Māori, because we have heard this our whole lives. The question we should be asking ourselves is: How have we allowed the media to get away with this for so long? The continual, blatant attacks against Māori from this particular station have been among the biggest contributors to racism in this country.

    Dame Whina Cooper photo
    A group of students hold the iconic photo of Dame Whina Cooper taken by Micheal Tubberty at the 1975 land march, the previous big hikoi. Image: Newsroom/Getty Images

    There are many examples of racism from this network but I’m not about to dive into its racist history, because I’m tired. We. Are. Tired. Google the radio hosts, look at their Twitter feeds, turn on talkback at any time of the day and the same, racist rhetoric will be there.

    Network needs to stop hiding
    John Banks deserves criticism but the network needs to stop hiding behind the facade of this being an individual problem. There are many John Banks who come in different forms, some working in the media who get to say whatever they want under the guise of “free speech”. Even the Christchurch terrorist attacks, where a white supremacist murdered 51 people could only keep these people quiet for one week before the station went back to regular, racist programming.

    So what happens now? I can predict what will happen because this is the same vicious, ugly cycle. The racist outburst goes viral, there is some outrage. Advertisers pull out, there’s a loss of revenue, the network apologises. The person is fired. Then it happens again the next day, the next week, the next month. It seems it is much more convenient to take out the individual rather than address the racist and colonial system that exists within our media and institutions.

    It’s good to see the outpouring of support from Pākehā but we need more than empathy. We need action. You get to feel outraged for a day and then go home and forget about it and not think about it again. Māori can’t switch it off. We experience racism in our workplaces, in everyday life and we have to turn on the media and see it there too.

    How many more racist outbursts do you need to hear before something is done? How many more articles do you need to read before there is change?

    This isn’t a matter of opinion. This is about human rights.

    Shilo Kino is a reporter and the author of her new book The Pōrangi Boy, released last month with Huia publishers. She writes about social issues, justice and identity. This article was first published by Newsroom and is republished on Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.
    Twitter: @shilokino

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Shilo Kino: Your mana diminishes every time you switch on the news

    COMMENT: By Shilo Kino

    What were you doing during the foreshore and seabed hīkoi in 2004?

    I wish I could say I was at the protest, gripping the hem of Nana’s dress while she raised her fist in the air, marching for sovereignty, echoing the cries of our tīpuna who were fighting for the very same thing on the very same whenua all those years ago.

    But this wasn’t the reality for me and for so many other urban Māori who grew up disconnected from our culture. I was living in Avondale, Auckland and watched the protest unfold on the news. Mum was still at work and I was eating noodles, my homework spread out on the dinner table.

    Sir Pita Sharples
    Sir Pita Sharples leads the 2004 hikoi protesting against the foreshore and seabed legislation. Image: Newsroom/Getty Images

    A sea of black and white flags flying in the air came on the TV. I remember a wave of emotion coming over me from seeing the crowds of brown faces who looked like me, who looked like my mum, my Nana.

    I wish I could say it was a feeling of pride but it wasn’t. I felt whakamā – a word every Māori knows because it is an emotion that has been forced upon us to feel inherently bad for who we are.

    The news coverage of the foreshore and seabed told me Māori were greedy, wanted special privileges, were angry over nothing and were trying to ban the public from beaches. It didn’t speak of Māori relationship to the land, the history of land confiscation, the fight for sovereignty or the issues that have come from colonisation and dispossession.

    It was a narrative carefully formulated by the media for the intended target audience which was, you guessed it: Pākehā.

    Misframing a story just one example
    Weaponising activism through misframing a story is just one example. We were also sold a narrative that Māori are the criminals, the baby killers, the gang members, the underachievers, the prisoners, the drug and alcohol addicts.

    What do you think this does to a person when you are constantly fed a false narrative of your identity? Your mana diminishes every time you switch on the news, open the newspaper, turn on the radio. Even worse, what happens when you are a child?

    The media didn’t care how this narrative would impact me or the thousands of other Māori growing up in urban cities, unsure of who we were, no grandparents alive to teach us our identity, busy parents trying to push us into mainstream because that’s what they were told would be “best” for us and so we were forced to learn about who we are through the eyes of the media. And it wasn’t pretty.

    Many years have passed since the foreshore and seabed hīkoi, yet in the year 2021 the same racism exists today, instigated by the same institutions that continue to push this same, tired narrative.

    Joe Bloggs calls up a radio station well known to be racist to Māori and says “they’re (Māori) victims of their own genetic background. They are genetically predisposed to crime, alcohol, and underperformance educationally” – and the radio host who used to be the Mayor of Auckland doubles down and says something equally, if not more, racist.

    This incident is not shocking to Māori, because we have heard this our whole lives. The question we should be asking ourselves is: How have we allowed the media to get away with this for so long? The continual, blatant attacks against Māori from this particular station have been among the biggest contributors to racism in this country.

    Dame Whina Cooper photo
    A group of students hold the iconic photo of Dame Whina Cooper taken by Micheal Tubberty at the 1975 land march, the previous big hikoi. Image: Newsroom/Getty Images

    There are many examples of racism from this network but I’m not about to dive into its racist history, because I’m tired. We. Are. Tired. Google the radio hosts, look at their Twitter feeds, turn on talkback at any time of the day and the same, racist rhetoric will be there.

    Network needs to stop hiding
    John Banks deserves criticism but the network needs to stop hiding behind the facade of this being an individual problem. There are many John Banks who come in different forms, some working in the media who get to say whatever they want under the guise of “free speech”. Even the Christchurch terrorist attacks, where a white supremacist murdered 51 people could only keep these people quiet for one week before the station went back to regular, racist programming.

    So what happens now? I can predict what will happen because this is the same vicious, ugly cycle. The racist outburst goes viral, there is some outrage. Advertisers pull out, there’s a loss of revenue, the network apologises. The person is fired. Then it happens again the next day, the next week, the next month. It seems it is much more convenient to take out the individual rather than address the racist and colonial system that exists within our media and institutions.

    It’s good to see the outpouring of support from Pākehā but we need more than empathy. We need action. You get to feel outraged for a day and then go home and forget about it and not think about it again. Māori can’t switch it off. We experience racism in our workplaces, in everyday life and we have to turn on the media and see it there too.

    How many more racist outbursts do you need to hear before something is done? How many more articles do you need to read before there is change?

    This isn’t a matter of opinion. This is about human rights.

    Shilo Kino is a reporter and the author of her new book The Pōrangi Boy, released last month with Huia publishers. She writes about social issues, justice and identity. This article was first published by Newsroom and is republished on Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.
    Twitter: @shilokino

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Jill Biden To Help Reunite Migrant Families That Trump Separated

    First Lady Jill Biden will be joining the team and providing insight into how best to reunite the families that Donald Trump ordered to be separated at the southern border. This is a sharp contrast to our previous First Lady, Melania Trump, who tried to make a fashion statement with her trip to the border. […]

    The post Jill Biden To Help Reunite Migrant Families That Trump Separated appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.

    This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.

  • We are the 1% – the wealth of many Australians puts them in an elite club wrecking the planet

    ANALYSIS: By Alex Baumann, Western Sydney University and Samuel Alexander, University of Melbourne

    Among the many hard truths exposed by covid-19 is the huge disparity between the world’s rich and poor. As economies went into freefall, the world’s billionaires increased their already huge fortunes by 27.5 percent.

    And as many ordinary people lost their jobs and fell into poverty, The Guardian reported “the 1 percent are coping” by taking private jets to their luxury retreats.

    Such perverse affluence further fuelled criticism of the so-called 1 percent, which has long been the standard rhetoric of the political Left.

    In 2011, Occupy Wall Street protesters called out growing economic inequality by proclaiming: “We are the 99 percent!”. And an Oxfam report in September last year lamented how the richest 1 percent of the world’s population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the poorest half of humanity.

    But you might be surprised to find this 1 percent doesn’t just comprise the super-rich. It may include you, or people you know. And this fact has big implications for social justice and planetary survival.

    People crossing the street in Sydney
    Many everyday Australians have a net worth that puts them in the world’s richest 1 percent. Image: The Conversation/Shutterstock

    Look in the mirror
    When you hear references to the 1 percent, you might think of billionaires such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or Tesla founder Elon Musk. However, as of October last year there were 2189 billionaires worldwide — a minuscule proportion of the 7.8 billion people on Earth.

    So obviously, you don’t have to be a billionaire to join this global elite.

    So how rich do you have to be? Well, Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report in October last year showed an individual net worth of US$1 million (A$1,295,825) – combined income, investments and personal assets — will make you among the world’s 1 percent richest people.

    The latest official data shows Australia’s richest 20 percent of households have an average net worth of A$3.2 million. The average Australian household has a net worth of A$1,022,200, putting them just outside the world’s richest 1 percent.

    Aerial view of suburban Australian homes
    The net worth of many Australians puts them in the global elite. Image: The Conversation/Shutterstock

    If you’ve just done the sums and fall outside the 1 percent, don’t feel too sorry for yourself. A net wealth of US$109,430 (A$147,038) puts you among the world’s richest 10 percent. Most Australians fit into this category; half of us have a net worth of A$558,900 or more.

    What does all this mean for the planet?
    It’s true the per capita emissions of the super-rich are likely to be far greater than others in the top 1 percent. But this doesn’t negate the uncomfortable fact Australians are among a fraction of the global population monopolising global wealth. This group causes the vast bulk of the world’s climate damage.

    A 2020 Oxfam report shows the world’s richest 10 percent produce a staggering 52 percent of total carbon emissions. Consistent with this, a 2020 University of Leeds study found richer households around the world tend to spend their extra money on energy-intensive products, such as package holidays and car fuel. The UN’s 2020 Emission Gap Report further confirmed this, finding the top 10 percent use around 75 percent of all aviation energy and 45 percent of all land transport energy.

    It’s clear that wealth, and its consequent energy privilege, is neither socially just nor ecologically sustainable.

    Man with one shiny shoe and one scruffy shoe
    Global wealth disparity is not just or sustainable. Image: The Conversation/Shutterstock

    A potential solution
    Much attention and headlines are devoted to the unethical wealth of billionaires. And while the criticism is justified, it distracts from a broader wealth problem — including our own.

    We should note here, one can have an income that’s large compared to the global average, and still experience significant economic hardship. For instance in Australia, the housing costs of more than one million households exceed 30 percent of total income – the commonly used benchmark for housing affordability.

    Here lies a central challenge. Even if we wanted to reduce our wealth, the enormous cost of keeping a roof over our head prevents us from doing so. Servicing a mortgage or paying rent is one of our biggest financial obligations, and a key driver in the pursuit of wealth.

    But as we’ve shown above, as personal wealth grows, so too does environmental devastation. The rule even applies to the lowest paid, who are working just to pay the rent. The industries they rely on, such as retail, tourism and hospitality, are themselves associated with environmental damage.

    Existing economic and social structures mean stepping off this wealth-creating treadmill is almost impossible. However as we’ve written before, people can be liberated from their reliance on economic growth when land – the very foundation of our security – is not commodified.

    For social justice and ecological survival, we must urgently experiment with new land and housing strategies, to make possible a lifestyle of reduced wealth and consumption and increased self-sufficiency.

    This might include urban commons, such as the R-Urban project in Paris, where several hundred people co-manage land that includes a small farm for collective use, a recycling plant and cooperative eco-housing.

    The R-Urban project in Paris
    The R-Urban project in Paris, which includes a small farm. Image: The Conversation/Flickr

    Under a new land strategy, other ways of conserving resources could be deployed. One such example, developed by Australian academic Ted Trainer, involves cutting our earnings sharply – with paid work for only two days in a week. For the rest of the working week, we would tend to community food gardens, network and share many things we currently consume individually.

    Such a way of living could help us re-evaluate the amount of wealth we need to live well.

    The social and ecological challenges the world faces cannot be exaggerated. New thinking and creativity is needed. And the first step in this journey is taking an honest look at whether our own wealth and consumption habits are contributing to the problem.
    The Conversation

    Dr Alex Baumann is a casual academic, School of Social Sciences & Psychology, Western Sydney University and Samuel Alexander, Research fellow, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • ‘Walk the talk’ human rights warning from Fiji NGO over UN chair

    Fiji’s UN ambassador Nazhat Shameem … “Fiji now faces global scrutiny on … human rights obligations.” Image: Wikipedia

    Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    Fiji’s NGO Coalition on Human Rights has called for stronger accountability and commitment to human rights at home in response to the country taking the world stage as the head of a UN body.

    The UN Human Rights Council (UNHCR) elected Fiji’s ambassador Nazhat Shameem as its 2021 president on Friday.

    “As the president of the UNHCR, Fiji now faces global scrutiny on our human rights obligations,” said the NGOCHR chair Nalini Singh in a statement.

    “This is a welcome opportunity for Fiji to reflect on our progress and the existing human rights concerns that need to be addressed.”

    It was encouraging to witness a small Pacific island nation like Fiji taking the lead at a global forum and representing key regional human rights issues, she said.

    “It is also a critical time for the Pacific and Fiji, as we see the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic exacerbating human rights issues in the region.

    Fiji ‘must act over justice’
    “With Fiji’s new appointment, our government must act to ensure that human rights and the principles of equality and justice are upheld across all sectors,” said Singh.

    A recent concern has been cases of alleged police brutality that have been raised by the NGOCHR.

    The NGOCHR has reaffirmed that there must be “no rollback of human rights” under the guise of response measures and continues to raise concerns on the arrests of Fiji citizens during the nation-wide curfew.

    “We are at the world stage taking a strong stance on human rights but we must walk the talk here at home and set the example,” said Singh.

    Fiji’s selection as the President of the UNHCR is a step forward in the right direction and we must keep this momentum to foster a culture that promotes and protects human rights, justice and democracy.

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    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘Walk the talk’ human rights warning from Fiji NGO over UN chair

    Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    Fiji’s NGO Coalition on Human Rights has called for stronger accountability and commitment to human rights at home in response to the country taking the world stage as the head of a UN body.

    The UN Human Rights Council (UNHCR) elected Fiji’s ambassador Nazhat Shameem Khan as its 2021 president on Friday.

    “As the president of the UNHCR, Fiji now faces global scrutiny on our human rights obligations,” said the NGOCHR chair Nalini Singh in a statement.

    “This is a welcome opportunity for Fiji to reflect on our progress and the existing human rights concerns that need to be addressed.”

    It was encouraging to witness a small Pacific island nation like Fiji taking the lead at a global forum and representing key regional human rights issues, she said.

    “It is also a critical time for the Pacific and Fiji, as we see the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic exacerbating human rights issues in the region.

    Fiji ‘must act over justice’
    “With Fiji’s new appointment, our government must act to ensure that human rights and the principles of equality and justice are upheld across all sectors,” said Singh.

    A recent concern has been cases of alleged police brutality that have been raised by the NGOCHR.

    The NGOCHR has reaffirmed that there must be “no rollback of human rights” under the guise of response measures and continues to raise concerns on the arrests of Fiji citizens during the nation-wide curfew.

    “We are at the world stage taking a strong stance on human rights but we must walk the talk here at home and set the example,” said Singh.

    Fiji’s selection as the President of the UNHCR is a step forward in the right direction and we must keep this momentum to foster a culture that promotes and protects human rights, justice and democracy.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • K Road Chronicles – looking at NZ’s homelessness from the inside

    K Road Chronicles video produced by Stuff with NZ On Air.

    By RNZ’s The Weekend with Karyn Hay

    The K Road Chronicles is a New Zealand webseries that delves into what it is like to be homeless on the streets of inner city Auckland.

    Now in its second season, the show is hosted by Six – who knows the experience of homelessness firsthand, having lived on the streets for six years.

    Six, an AUT journalism graduate and founder of the K Road Chronicle newspaper for homeless people, joins Karyn in the studio to discuss making the series.

    By Jessie Chiang, RNZ News reporter

    Living on the fringes
    FLASHBACK TO 2017 REPORT: Homeless people and those living on the fringes in central Auckland have their own newspaper for the first time.

    K Road Chronicle tells the stories of the Karangahape Road community.

    The Chronicle’s editor, Six, said the monthly newspaper was about giving the homeless a voice and breaking down any prejudices the public may have about them.

    “It educates the wider audience on who these people are and what they’re stories are and what’s significant to them,” she said.

    Six, the editor of the K Road Chronicle, pictured on Karangahape Road. Image: Jessie Chiang/RNZ

    “Even though it focuses mainly on K Road and stories from the street, it’s about everybody who uses the street whether they live there or work there.”

    So far 1000 copies have been printed and are being given free to those sleeping rough to sell.

    Six said just the other day she gave a few copies to someone on the street to sell and it was rewarding to see the difference it made.

    “He sat up and he was excited to be giving out these newspapers and I think it gave him a purpose,” she said.

    “I caught up with him a few hours later and I said, ‘how’s it going?’ and he said, ‘I made 20 bucks’ and that’s great because he could be sitting there all there and make five or 10 dollars.”

    K Road Chronicle
    The paper was started with initial funding from the K Road Business Association. Image: Jessie Chiang/RNZ

    Rob, who usually asks for money on K Road, has also been selling the Chronicle.

    He said it was great to be able to offer people something that represented him as well as putting money in his pocket.

    “They give me koha and before they read it, they ask me what it’s all about so I explain it to them,” he said.

    “I say it’s all about the community and [it’s] ideas and thoughts.”

    The newspaper was started with initial funding from the K Road Business Association.

    “This publication really identifies the community and speaks to the community enhancement aspect of what we do,” said manager Michael Richardson. “It really speaks to what happens here at Karangahape Road.

    Richardson said he was in talks with other organisations which were keen to donate funds to the newspaper.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • K Road Chronicles – looking at NZ’s homelessness from the inside

    K Road Chronicles video produced by Stuff with NZ On Air.

    By RNZ’s The Weekend with Karyn Hay

    The K Road Chronicles is a New Zealand webseries that delves into what it is like to be homeless on the streets of inner city Auckland.

    Now in its second season, the show is hosted by Six – who knows the experience of homelessness firsthand, having lived on the streets for six years.

    Six, an AUT journalism graduate and founder of the K Road Chronicle newspaper for homeless people, joins Karyn in the studio to discuss making the series.

    By Jessie Chiang, RNZ News reporter

    Living on the fringes
    FLASHBACK TO 2017 REPORT: Homeless people and those living on the fringes in central Auckland have their own newspaper for the first time.

    K Road Chronicle tells the stories of the Karangahape Road community.

    The Chronicle’s editor, Six, said the monthly newspaper was about giving the homeless a voice and breaking down any prejudices the public may have about them.

    “It educates the wider audience on who these people are and what they’re stories are and what’s significant to them,” she said.

    Six, editor of the K Road Chronicle
    Six, the editor of the K Road Chronicle, pictured on Karangahape Road. Image: Jessie Chiang/RNZ

    “Even though it focuses mainly on K Road and stories from the street, it’s about everybody who uses the street whether they live there or work there.”

    So far 1000 copies have been printed and are being given free to those sleeping rough to sell.

    Six said just the other day she gave a few copies to someone on the street to sell and it was rewarding to see the difference it made.

    “He sat up and he was excited to be giving out these newspapers and I think it gave him a purpose,” she said.

    “I caught up with him a few hours later and I said, ‘how’s it going?’ and he said, ‘I made 20 bucks’ and that’s great because he could be sitting there all there and make five or 10 dollars.”

    K Road Chronicle
    The paper was started with initial funding from the K Road Business Association. Image: Jessie Chiang/RNZ

    Rob, who usually asks for money on K Road, has also been selling the Chronicle.

    He said it was great to be able to offer people something that represented him as well as putting money in his pocket.

    “They give me koha and before they read it, they ask me what it’s all about so I explain it to them,” he said.

    “I say it’s all about the community and [it’s] ideas and thoughts.”

    The newspaper was started with initial funding from the K Road Business Association.

    “This publication really identifies the community and speaks to the community enhancement aspect of what we do,” said manager Michael Richardson. “It really speaks to what happens here at Karangahape Road.

    Richardson said he was in talks with other organisations which were keen to donate funds to the newspaper.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Social Issues and Homeownership for All

    Image source

    Homeownership is the traditional cornerstone of the American Dream. Yet for millions of people across the nation, who may have poor credit scores and earn less than a living wage, the possibility of homeownership has long been out of reach, even before the COVID pandemic. Today, with COVID serving as yet another barrier to homeownership in the U.S., especially among minority populations, the situation has become dire.

    In fact, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reports that “an estimated 10 million adults are in a household that is not caught up in its mortgage payment.” Those vulnerable homeowners are at a high risk of losing their housing via bank foreclosure unless policies are enacted to protect them.

    In light of this sobering fact, we must ask ourselves whether the goal of homeownership is even possible under the threat of a global pandemic and subsequent economic insecurity. Is it time to reassess the general view in society that homeownership is the pinnacle of success? To answer those and similar questions, we need to take a look at the various legal, economic, generational, and political perspectives that surround homeownership in the 21st century.

    Social Justice, Public Health, and Housing

    Over the years, the federal government has implemented various policies and programs designed to facilitate homeownership for all. One notable example is the American Dream Downpayment Initiative, signed by then-President George W. Bush in 2003. The initiative framed the topic of homeownership in a social justice context, and for his part, President Bush reportedly believed that homeownership could help reduce racial inequality across the country.

    And various data supports the idea that housing insecurity is indeed a social justice issue. Among U.S. homeowners, minority populations are underrepresented. According to The White House archives, 74.3% of non-Hispanic whites own their own home, compared to 48% of African-Americans. These numbers are indicative of a larger, systemic problem wherein racial minorities are disproportionately devalued and oppressed.

    Housing inequality is just one of the long-standing systemic health and social inequities that are affecting modern society and negatively impacting public health. Minority populations are even at an increased risk of contracting COVID-19, in part due to practices in the realm of homeownership, including redlining and gentrification. In gentrified urban neighborhoods, people of color are frequently displaced, resulting in increased housing segregation and perpetuating the cycle of inequality.

    The Importance of Good Credit

    While gentrification isn’t necessarily indicative of bad intentions, the practice of redlining is much less innocuous. In New York City and numerous metro areas across the country, the effects of redlining lasted for decades, persisting to this day. Redlining refers to racist housing laws of the 20th century, wherein neighborhoods with large minority populations were labeled “red.” In those red-designated areas, it was much more difficult to obtain a mortgage loan, and property values were frequently undermined.

    Researchers have determined that redlining also negatively impacts homeownership rates and credit scores among residents of those “undesirable” neighborhoods. In regards to securing and maintaining equity, an individual’s credit score is of fundamental importance. A low credit score typically equates to higher interest rates or even the flat-out denial of a mortgage loan request.

    Situations such as foreclosure only serve to compound the issue of housing inequality and can significantly reduce an individual’s credit score. And make no mistake: repairing one’s credit following a foreclosure is typically an uphill battle for which there is no quick fix.

    Costs Related to Home Ownership

    To save on housing costs, even with less-than-perfect credit, many prospective homeowners seek creative solutions. Millennials, in particular, may opt to upgrade their existing home to better align with their personal ideals or choose to invest in a fixer-upper that’s priced to sell. But DIY housing repairs often come with their own set of challenges, including those related to personal safety.

    Older properties are especially problematic, as they were likely constructed with materials that today are considered harmful. For instance, asbestos was a common construction material in the past, used in various forms between the 1940s and 1970s. Asbestos exposure poses a significant health risk and has been linked to an aggressive form of cancer known as mesothelioma.

    Homeowners looking to renovate an older property may want to have the property checked for asbestos, mold, and other harmful substances before starting on the project. New York State homeowners may discover asbestos in various building materials and products, ranging from textured paint and vinyl floor tiles to insulation and roofing materials. Asbestos should only be removed by a licensed abatement contractor.

    Key Takeaways

    The question of fair and equitable homeownership is one of the most significant social justice issues of the 21st century. As we continue to adapt to a world forever changed by a pandemic, we must work to better understand the various nuances of homeownership. Further, we must promote economic policies that are designed to protect the millions of American homeowners who are under financial strain.

    Beau Peters is a freelance writer based out of Portland, OR. He has a particular interest in covering workers’ rights, social justice, and workplace issues and solutions. Read other articles by Beau.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2021 at 10:02am and is filed under Gentrification, Health/Medical, Homeownership, Housing/Homelessness, Social Justice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Great Divider: Covid-19 reflects global racism, not equality

    ANALYSIS: By Ramzy Baroud

    The notion that the covid-19 pandemic was “the great equalizer’ should be dead and buried by now. If anything, the lethal disease is another terrible reminder of the deep divisions and inequalities in our societies.

    That said, the treatment of the disease should not be a repeat of the same shameful scenario.

    For an entire year, wealthy celebrities and government officials have been reminding us that “we are in this together”, that “we are on the same boat”, with the likes of US singer, Madonna, speaking from her mansion while submerged in a “milky bath sprinkled with rose petals,” telling us that the pandemic has proved to be the “great equalizer”.

    “Like I used to say at the end of ‘Human Nature’ every night, we are all in the same boat,” she said. “And if the ship goes down, we’re all going down together,” CNN reported at the time.

    Such statements, like that of Madonna, and Ellen DeGeneres as well, have generated much media attention not just because they are both famous people with a massive social media following but also because of the obvious hypocrisy in their empty rhetoric.

    In truth, however, they were only repeating the standard procedure followed by governments, celebrities and wealthy “influencers” worldwide.

    But are we, really, “all in this together”? With unemployment rates skyrocketing across the globe, hundreds of millions scraping by to feed their children, multitudes of nameless and hapless families chugging along without access to proper healthcare, subsisting on hope and a prayer so that they may survive the scourges of poverty – let alone the pandemic – one cannot, with a clear conscience, make such outrageous claims.

    Not only are we not “on the same boat” but, certainly, we have never been. According to World Bank data, nearly half of the world lives on less than US$5.5 a day. This dismal statistic is part of a remarkable trajectory of inequality that has afflicted humanity for a long time.

    The plight of many of the world’s poor is compounded in the case of war refugees, the double victims of state terrorism and violence and the unwillingness of those with the resources to step forward and pay back some of their largely undeserved wealth.

    The boat metaphor is particularly interesting in the case of refugees; millions of them have desperately tried to escape the infernos of war and poverty in rickety boats and dinghies, hoping to get across from their stricken regions to safer places.

    Sadly familiar sight
    This sight has sadly grown familiar in recent years not only throughout the Mediterranean Sea but also in other bodies of water around the world, especially in Burma, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have tried to escape their ongoing genocide. Thousands of them have drowned in the Bay of Bengal.

    The covid-19 pandemic has accentuated and, in fact, accelerated the sharp inequalities that exist in every society individually, and the world at large. According to a June 2020 study conducted in the United States by the Brookings Institute, the number of deaths as a result of the disease reflects a clear racial logic.

    Many indicators included in the study leave no doubt that racism is a central factor in the life cycle of covid.

    For example, among those aged between 45 and 54 years, “Black and Hispanic/Latino death rates are at least six times higher than for whites”. Although whites make up 62 percent of the US population of that specific age group, only 22 percent of the total deaths were white.

    Black and Latino communities were the most devastated.

    According to this and other studies, the main assumption behind the discrepancy of infection and death rates resulting from covid among various racial groups in the US is poverty which is, itself, an expression of racial inequality. The poor have no, or limited, access to proper healthcare. For the rich, this factor is of little relevance.

    Moreover, poor communities tend to work in low-paying jobs in the service sector, where social distancing is nearly impossible. With little government support to help them survive the lockdowns, they do everything within their power to provide for their children, only to be infected by the virus or, worse, die.

    Iniquity expected to continue
    This iniquity is expected to continue even in the way that the vaccines are made available. While several Western nations have either launched or scheduled their vaccination campaigns, the poorest nations on earth are expected to wait for a long time before life-saving vaccines are made available.

    In 67 poor or developing countries located mostly in Africa and the Southern hemisphere, only one out of ten individuals will likely receive the vaccine by the end of 2020, the Fortune Magazine website reported.

    The disturbing report cited a study conducted by a humanitarian and rights coalition, the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA), which includes Oxfam and Amnesty International.

    If there is such a thing as a strategy at this point, it is the deplorable “hoarding” of the vaccine by rich nations.

    Dr Mohga Kamal-Yanni of the PVA put this realisation into perspective when she said that “rich countries have enough doses to vaccinate everyone nearly three times over, while poor countries don’t even have enough to reach health workers and people at risk”.

    So much for the numerous conferences touting the need for a “global response” to the disease.

    But it does not have to be this way.

    While it is likely that class, race and gender inequalities will continue to ravage human societies after the pandemic, as they did before, it is also possible for governments to use this collective tragedy as an opportunity to bridge the inequality gap, even if just a little, as a starting point to imagine a more equitable future for all of us.

    Poor, dark-skinned people should not be made to die when their lives can be saved by a simple vaccine, which is available in abundance.

    Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr Baroud is a non-resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). This article is republished with permission. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • 10 Infamous quotes reminding us that we can all create positive change – even solo!

    By Elizabeth Arif-Fear

    Have you ever felt passionate about a cause but felt that niggling self-doubt inside?

    Perhaps you’ve been told that you’ll be “wasting your time”, that you “can’t ever make a real difference”?

    Maybe you’re simply part of a small team and think you can’t create any real impact?

    Well, we say: forget that! It’s time to say “no” to the naysayers and remind ourselves of the power that each and every one of us has to make a difference.

    Now of course, people = power. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t make a difference on our own/in small groups and even grow. After all, we all have to start somewhere right?

    Well, yes! There’s lots of people that would and do very much agree!

    Take a look at our top 10 favourite quotes by politicians, activists and leaders alike showing that we can all make a difference!

    Great stuff! Now, are you feeling inspired? Well, why not put that idea you’ve kept in the back of your mind into action?

    Here’s how!

    Take action

    Whatever your passion, you’ll need a plan. But don’t worry, we’ve got a template right here for you to guide you along the way!

    Here are a few key pointers using the GAMMA method of campaigning developed by the Radicalisation Awareness Network.

    Here’s what you’ll need to think about and plan:

    – G = Goal: What’s your end aim? What do you want to achieve?

    – A = Audience: Who are you reaching out to? Who will you need to engage?

    – M= Message: What is your message? What are you trying to do/say?

    – M = Messenger: How will you get the message out there? Online? Offline? Or both?

    – A = Action: What will your call to action be? What will you be asking people to do?

    Do some research and evaluation before, during and after your campaign.

    Think about:

    – Stage 1: What inspires you? Why are you doing this?

    – Stage 2: What is already going well? What are people responding to?

    – Stage 3: What is needed / left to do? Where / what are the gaps?

    – Stage 4: What do you need to realise this? What else is there that needs to be done?

    With this plan, you’ll have the means to really pin down your goal, power up your passion and campaign for hopefully some impactful change.

    Remember: the power is your hands!

    Happy campaigning!

    This post was originally published on Voice of Salam.

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    This post was originally published on Human Rights Consortium.