#Or are we too quick to judge their lack of agency when we ourselves have almost none under capitalism | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

freelanews-blog · 5 years

Text

“Mama, There Are No Armed Robbers Here” By ‘Tope Oriola

I attended the birthday party of the matriarch of a Nigerian friend’s family in Edmonton a few weeks ago. It was mama’s 82nd birthday. Her children and grandchildren decided to give her a truly memorable birthday party. The invitation card was tastefully done and regular reminders meticulously delivered. There was the ubiquitous “Adults only” warning on the card. That was a not-so-subtle warning to Nigerians in diaspora who liked to turn social gatherings to babysitting opportunities. In a part of the world where children were treated as expensive acquisitions, there were rarely extended family members to help take of children or neighbours to whom such colossal responsibility might be entrusted. Therefore, people would take young children to such gatherings or pay others to babysit. Mama was on vacation from Nigeria, where she lived. Mama’s children flew in from Europe and the US. They spoke eloquently about her hard work. She became sole breadwinner after her husband’s death. She was a teacher but her salary was insufficient. Mama grew several crops on her farm during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970). She processed some of the crops for sale to raise additional cash. You would expect the children’s education to suffer under such circumstances. It did not. Mama was a disciplinarian and insisted on high academic performance. Her children did not disappoint. They all went to school and became successful in various professions. Mama was that lion roaring in the jungle to protect its own. We all enjoyed mama’s timeless dance. Her moves made you want to board a time machine to have an idea how people lived and partied in those days. Mama gave a fine speech. It was a story of survival, courage and fearlessness in the face of danger. It was an emotional moment with grown women and men moved to tears. She ended her speech with the prayer “as you go back home, armed robbers will not attack you on the road”. The prayer caused lots of smiles, chuckles and respectful laughter in the largely hybridized Nigerian-Canadian audience. It was funny and entertaining to our Canadian sensibilities. Robberies happen in Canada but they are relatively few and armed robberies are rare. The master of ceremonies said what was on our lips “mama, there are no armed robbers here”. We finally had permission to laugh really hard. This example reflects how society shapes the kinds of prayers we offer. People may not realize it but how we organize ourselves or fail to has an overriding influence on the content of our prayers. Prayer requests are byproducts of human social organization (or lack of). Consider that the most materialistic person in biblical times could not have prayed for a Range Rover. There is no better place to feel the pulse of a developing society than church services. Pentecostal church services put on vivid display Nigeria’s internal logic. Prayers and testimonies, in particular, speak to broader socio-political, economic and cultural issues. I enjoy going to church in Nigeria. Churches are thermometers for measuring the country’s struggles, triumphs and the state of the human condition. Church services are now major security events in Nigeria. Police and private security are deployed to block streets leading to major churches. Abuja has become notorious for that as the fear of Boko Haram is the beginning of cleverness. Cars are parked with impunity right in the middle of the road. No warning signs are provided to drivers to warn them that a road has been blocked. God help you if you take Uber on a Sunday morning in Abuja. But don’t get angry; it is all worth the effort once you get to church, pass through security (screening is now routine) and find a comfortable seat. Testimony time is always a treat. On my first Sunday service last summer in Abuja, one woman testified that her house was infested with cockroaches. She said she did not understand where they came from and had to engage in prayers. Apparently, the cockroaches left. I wondered if madam had heard of fumigation. I wanted to say to her “madam: gather the family together to clean your house and allow no food leftovers on the floor”. Another person testified about her son’s university admission outside Nigeria. Sending children to study overseas is no longer just a quest for knowledge. It is now a status symbol among middle class Nigerians. The more children you have studying overseas, the greater the prestige. It does not matter that some of the children struggle academically having attended expensive but mediocre private schools. Another testifier spoke about her son’s National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) posting. She said “He is where I want him to be”. She seemed to suggest that she succeeded in influencing the posting but gave all glory to God for allowing it to work out. Shebi, God works through people. The young man’s agency appeared stifled in parental preference. We will never know if his choices aligned with his parents’. Nigeria’s precarious security situation received honorary mention. One church member said he was implicated wrongly in a kidnapping case. Six of the victims died in the hands of the kidnappers. He spent seven years and one month behind bars for a crime he knew nothing about and was released by a judge a week before his testimony. He said his mother and sister died in a road accident two years into his incarceration while on their way to visit him. At that point, some church members appeared frustrated by his testimony as if to suggest “brother, go for deliverance” (after all, we were in a church famous for deliverance). I considered the implications of the man’s experience for detention of suspects before trial, length of adjudication, evidence collection by the police and compensation for those unjustly detained. The man had no such analytical luxury: He was simply grateful to have his freedom. One woman narrated how several shops got burnt in a massive fire but hers was miraculously spared. It was an impressive miracle when you consider the condition of the fire service, which apparently showed up after the damage was done. We all covered the testimonies with the blood of Jesus and shouted seven hallelujahs. Tithe and offering time was a fine technological affair even in one of the most conservative churches. POS machines were moved around by ushers in uniform. The church had gone corporate given that this was a church where jewelry of any kind was banned and women were not allowed to wear trousers. There’s a way to dance in a conservative church. The talking drums (gangan) and other musical instruments may tempt you but don’t be too quick to dance. Simply allow the music to marinate in your body: Stand up, begin with your waist and slowly follow the rhythm. Don’t be vulgar otherwise brethren would assume you have backslidden. The Pastor mounted the pulpit and at the end of his message announced the matter of a missing 13-year old child of a member. There were prayers for the Holy Ghost to “arrest” the girl. Given the lack of comprehensive database for missing persons and ineffective policing, God must intervene in this matter as well. The kidnapping case was quickly forgotten as the new church building project was announced to cap a nice afternoon. The template was shown on large screens. There were prayers against witches and wizards and other evil forces but my favourite was a truly remarkable prayer point at the end of the service. It was “Fire of God fall upon me and deliver me from those who hate me either rightly or wrongly”. I resisted the temptation to unpack and analyze the prayer point. This social analysis thing will not put me into trouble. We all held our heads in our palms and prayed hard. Who does not want their enemies dealt with? I was making plans about my next visit when the pastor announced the date for dry fasting. Ha! Dry fasting ke? I knew when next not to show up. I went to a church at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel the following Sunday. Half a dozen sisters lined up to welcome people to church. Could that be a deliberate strategy? They were all of a certain age bracket, height and complexion. The guest worship leader was Steve Crown, who had his entourage and did his best to remain humble in an increasingly celebrity-worship culture. It was a different yet equally enjoyable kind of service with qualitatively different prayers. Just like there were no armed robbers in Canada, there were no witches and wizards pursuing the rich and those trying to hobnob with the rich in Abuja. Read the full article

#mama #noarmedrobbers

0 notes

gwlarson2002 · 4 years

Text

We are The People. We are the wealth creators. We are sick of exploitation and ruination of our lives. Capitalism has done this to us and we are not going to return to that life. That life is now over. The billionaires had their chance to rule the world. They did. And look at it -- burning, over-heating, acidified oceans and ecosystems collapsing. They were so selfish and greedy, they broke OUR HOME so that they could get richer. Richer. Richer. We are The People, and we are done with billionaire bullshit. If we cannot earn our living, we will TAKE our living.

H/T Arm the Poor You Fucking Coward

Handmaid's Hammer:

This is a little off topic but I've had some thoughts that I'd like to share with you all regarding our current situation. ❤️🌺✊

I don't know who needs to hear this, but if the billionaire/landlord class would just back off for 5 fucking minutes, they'd be able to keep their shit and we would stop coming for their fucking blood. So hear me out:

"The people" are already conditioned to work for their living, even though we don't technically have to because we have the technology to automate 50, maybe 80% of the bullshit jobs that we go plunk away at.

But "the people" will do it. We've been trained since birth to do it.

When we meet each other, our second question is almost always "What do you do?" and we mean "What's your job?" and we INSTANTLY judge/evaluate/value or devalue the person based on their answer.

We've been conditioned to look at our job/career as our self-definition.

Our job takes up a full 1/3rd of our lives, usually more. And we don't complain about that. We assume that we're trading our time for the resources that we need to survive and thrive. And so it should be: members of any community should be working together to achieve the goals of survival, safety, harmony, etc. Cooperating and community building is one of humanity's defining characteristics.

The PROBLEM IS that we've been given starvation rations, in terms of wages, for so long, it's impossible to even survive anymore. So we look around and wonder what the fuck the point was.

Why did we give you our labor for the promise of prosperity, when all the while you were robbing us blind?

For decades, we've been under-bidding each other for jobs because there are no more unions ...unless you happen to get lucky and work a trade in a blue state.

For decades, we've been willingly surrendering our tax money to banks, billionaires, hedge funds, and oil companies. We've been told that the "job creators" are necessary to support, as if THEY somehow created the wealth. A quick look around at the crying mega-corps and their lackluster month of low profits will demonstrate my point: how many are asking for loans, bail outs, and socializing of their debt?

It's somehow ok to ask the tax payers to bail out the same industries that hoodwinked and lied to them, whose shady practices lead to the economic collapse in 2008. And we were expected to fork over YET MORE MONEY to folks who should have more than enough because we were told the lie of "too big to fail."

WE'RE SOMEHOW OK with the idea of tying decent healthcare to one's place of employment. We're somehow SO ok with this, we'd rather work against "socialized healthcare" because we "like our provider".... when, in reality, our bosses have been negotiating down our quality of healthcare for years, paying as little as humanly possible and pushing shams like "health insurance savings accounts" that let them almost fully shirk their responsibility to their workers. And yes, they DO have a responsibility to their workers under this scenario: healthcare is used as a lure for workers to entice them to work harder, for longer hours, for less money. If you're going to provide healthcare for your workers, you have a responsibility to them to get the best care they can possibly have. I don't see employers doing this whatsoever. I see employers changing plans every single year, only allowing enrollment after a certain time at the job and only during a certain time of the year...??? and I see people trapped in jobs they hate, working for bosses they despise, saying nothing about the abuse they must endure because of their HEALTH INSURANCE.

This is not an accidental arrangement. Not at all.

By tying healthcare to employment, capitalists have closed the noose around the necks of the American working class. By union busting and right-to-work laws, they slit the throat of the worker and demoralize any attempts to obtain better circumstances. Almost every professional workplace I have encountered has made clear, during the interview, that they were a "non-union shop" and didn't see that ever changing. The pharmaceutical company I interviewed with was especially clear on this point.

We are expected to stay 9 hours a day, rather than 8, because our lunch counts against our time. We are expected to punch clocks, even in professional environments, as if we were children who could not manage our own time. We are belittled and demeaned by bosses who look down their noses at "Millenials" or anyone more highly educated than they are--which is most of us, because on average, the Boomer generation didn't exactly focus on scholastic achievement the way we're forced to if we ever expect to get a decent job.

It's not like we can work at a factory and retire with a pension anymore. Nope. We're expected to volunteer, publish scientific papers in undergrad (even though we're not taught how until graduate school), we need a straight 4.0 to get any of the ever diminishing scholarships available... and we're expected to dig ourselves into debt for the privilege of going to college. I went to a state school in Ohio, Bowling Green University, and I'm 80k in debt for a bachelor's. All federal loans, no private. When I took these loans, they were forgiveable under a federal program for teachers. That program is now gone. I will die in debt.

We are expected to work with sub-standard equipment, old systems, and infrastructure that's crumbling because it's just too inconvenient or expensive to bother with. The last regulatory agency I worked for had us working on a mainframe that was built the year I was born: 1980. They wanted DEA records kept in this system and it was 2014.

I see employers performing what I call "salary purges": pushing out the more experienced workers, the more expensive workers, by giving them impossible hours, changing their roles against their will, or just firing them altogether. Then, they either establish the job as a "perma-temp", where they cycle through cheap HB1 visa workers and abuse the fact that they'll never unionize because they won't be there long enough to try... or the employer just hires someone fresh out of college, lacking the wisdom to realize how badly they're being treated.

In summary, I see a toxic atmosphere surrounding the concept of work and career, in this country. We are sickly obsessed, as a society. We allow and sanction mental torture because we've been taught that everyone must EARN their right to exist. Everything has a price. There's no free lunch. You must pay. Pay. Pay. For everything, you must pay. So you must earn. Earn. Earn. If you cannot earn, we call you a leech, a loser, a faker, you deserve poverty, and we'll make you beg for the crumbs that you need to survive. If you cannot earn, capitalism has no use for you and you should die.

That is the system we live under. That is the system that BOTH parties work to maintain. It's never been red vs. blue, it's always been The Rich vs. all of the rest of us. Their tactics of divide and conquer are the oldest tricks in the book, that's why we should work to spread class consciousness and solidarity with workers everywhere. We have more in common with each other, despite any of our differences, than we do with the ultra wealthy.

If the billionaire class would LET us earn our living, we would. We've been conditioned to do that. We would do it. The problem is they're NOT LETTING US live. They're trying to force us to be machines and they're killing us in the process. They're forcing us to live in abject poverty while they hoard their wealth in off-shore accounts, safe from taxation. Safe from being made to share.

And we're so brainwashed, huge swaths of us would stand up and defend the "right" of the billionaire class to be as rich as they want. Who are we to "take" their money?

The billionaires had their chance to rule the world. They did. And look at it -- burning, over-heating, acidified oceans and ecosystems collapsing. They were so selfish and greedy, they broke OUR HOME so that they could get richer. Richer. Richer.

We are The People, and we are done with billionaire bullshit. If we cannot earn our living, we will TAKE our living.

#Solidarity #Left #EatTheRich #MulchTheRich #NeverTrustTheRich #BillionairesShouldntExist #EveryBillionaireIsAPolicyFailure #SocialismForThePeopleNow #YouFuckersHadYourTurn

0 notes

tortuga-aak · 7 years

Text

Intelligence veterans blast Tom Cotton as pro-torture, 'partisan,' and 'wholly unfit' to lead the CIA

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

President Donald Trump is weighing a national security shakeup that could involve replacing CIA Director Mike Pompeo with Arkansas Sen.Tom Cotton.

Several CIA veterans reacted with alarm to the news on Thursday, characterizing Cotton as too partisan and inexperienced to lead the agency and expressing concern over his views on torture.

"It is bothersome that, so far as one can tell, he knows absolutely nothing about the intelligence community," one former CIA official said.

Several CIA veterans reacted with alarm on Thursday to news that Republican Sen. Tom Cotton could replace Mike Pompeo as head of the intelligence agency within the next two months.

It is unclear whether Cotton, a combat veteran and Senate freshman, would accept the position if nominated by President Donald Trump. Cotton's spokesman said on Thursday that his "focus is on serving Arkansans in the Senate.”

But Trump's chief of staff John Kelly is reportedly spearheading a national security shake-up that would involve installing Pompeo as secretary of state and Cotton as CIA director. Rex Tillerson, whose leadership of the State Department has been criticized by both career department employees and the president, would be ousted.

"This is an awful appointment," said Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the CIA, of Cotton's potential nomination. "Sen.Cotton is a highly ideological individual who is not well-suited to lead an agency part of whose core mission is objective analysis."

Pillar pointed to a letter Cotton wrote to top Iranian leaders in March 2015 warning them against striking a nuclear deal with then-President Barack Obama. The letter was signed by 47 Senate Republicans and infuriated the White House, which viewed it as an inappropriate congressional intervention in sensitive diplomatic negotiations.

"We will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei," the letter read.

"It's hard to imagine someone who would do something like that, something so contrary to accepted foreign policy procedure, providing objective leadership on issues related to Iran," Pillar said.

Former CIA analyst Ned Price, who served as a National Security Council spokesman under Obama, shared concerns over the future of the US's relationship with Iran if placed in the hands of Pompeo at the State Department and Cotton at the CIA.

"I certainly think Cotton will continue much of what Pompeo started," Price said, referring to a common perception of Pompeo's CIA leadership as partisan and motivated, at least in part, by loyalty to Trump.

"And with these two at the helm of these institutions, it's much more likely that we'll find ourselves moving towards regime change with Iran," Price added. "The Iran deal is toast — that's a given — but the march to war will become much more viable. It's something they've coordinated on even in their current posts, and it surely will pick up if this comes to pass."

As the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin noted in a lengthy profile of Cotton published earlier this month, undermining and the Iran nuclear deal in an attempt to wholly dismantle it has been a touchstone of Cotton's young Senate career. (He was elected in 2015.)

"I told the President in July that he shouldn't certify that Iran was complying with the agreement,” Cotton told Toobin. "Putting aside the issue of technical compliance or noncompliance, it's clear that the agreement is not in our national interest."

Lack of experience working in intelligence

Beyond Cotton's position on the Iran deal, however, some CIA veterans are nervous about his lack of experience working with the intelligence community.

"He seems bright enough," said former CIA counsel Bob Deitz. "He went to my favorite law school. But it is bothersome that, so far as one can tell, he knows absolutely nothing about the intelligence community. The CIA is not an easy agency to lead because of its varied missions. Of course he may be a quick learner. I hope that is true."

While serving in the Army in 2006, Cotton wrote a letter to three New York Times reporters who broke a story about a classified program run by the CIA and the Treasury Department that tracked the financing of terror networks. He told the reporters that they should be in jail for publishing the details of the program.

"Having graduated from Harvard Law and practiced with a federal appellate judge and two Washington law firms before becoming an infantry officer, I am well-versed in the espionage laws relevant to this story and others — laws you have plainly violated," Cotton wrote. "By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars."

As The Daily Beast's Spencer Ackerman noted, Cotton was "plainly wrong about the law."

"Leaking classified material is criminal; publishing it is not," Ackerman wrote.

Former congressional intelligence staffer Mieke Eoyang, now the vice president for the national security program at the think tank Third Way, said on Twitter that one upside to Cotton running the CIA is that he would be forced to suppress his partisan outbursts.

"He'd stop organizing counterproductive Senate letters. He'd have to shut up about his successes. He'd have to take the hit for any intelligence failures," Eoyang said. She added that "classified information restrictions limit what he can say/do."

Controversial views on torture

Others, like longtime CIA intelligence officer Glenn Carle, are concerned about Cotton's views on torture. Cotton told CNN last November that "waterboarding isn't torture," arguing that "Donald Trump is a pretty tough guy and he's ready to make those tough calls" when it comes to the use of controversial and extreme interrogation methods.

In 2015, Cotton said that "the only problem with Guantánamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now."

"We should be sending more terrorists there," Cotton said in reference to the infamous detention facility. "As far as I'm concerned, every last one of them can rot in hell. But as long as they can't do that, they can rot in Guantánamo Bay."

Carle, who wrote a book about his involvement in the interrogation of a man believed in the early 2000's to be a top Al-Qaeda member, said that Cotton is "wholly unfit" to be CIA director.

"It will be difficult" for the CIA's career employees "to work under someone who is a zealot and thinks that torture is not torture," Carle said. "Cotton is an ideologue and a partisan, and his views are not only out of the mainstream — they challenge tenets of our core American values."

NOW WATCH: Relive the historic moment Obama won the 2008 election

from Feedburner http://ift.tt/2AiPY6X

#Feedburner

0 notes