#SAVING POOR STUDENTS SINCE 2008

[phantomchick]

Shout out to Library Genesis for once again saving my life a week before a deadline

[woman-loving]

Islam, heteronormativity, and lesbian lives in Indonesia

Selections from Heteronormativity, Passionate Aesthetics and Symbolic Subversion in Asia by Saskia Wieringa, 2015.

These passages discuss some general social developments related to sexuality and gender in Indonesia, and then describe stories from different (mostly lesbian) narrators. They also touch on the creation of a religious school for waria (trans women), and include two trans men narrators, one of whom talks about his struggle to get sex reassignment surgery in the 70s. I also included a story from a divorced woman whose sexuality was questioned when her husband complained that she couldn’t sexually please him. Accusations of lesbianism can be directed toward any woman as a method for managing her sexuality/gender and prodding her into compliance with expectations of sexual availability.

In spite of protests by religious right-wing leaders, Islam does not have a single source of its so-called 'Islamic tradition'. There are many different interpretations and, apart from the Quran, many sources are contested. Even the Quran has abundant interpretations. Feminist Muslim writers, such as Fatima Mernissi (1985), Riffat Hassan (1987), and Musdah Mulia (2004 and 2012), locate their interpretations in the primary source of Islam--the Quran. According to those readings, sexuality is seen in an affirmative, positive light, being generally described as a sign of God's mercy and generosity toward humanity, characterised by such valued qualities as tranquillity, love, and beauty. The California-based Muslim scholar Amina Wadud (1999) describes the jalal (masculine) and jamal (feminine) attributes of Allah as a manifestation of sacred unity. She maintains that Allah's jamal qualities are associated with beauty that, although originally evaluated as being at the same level as Allah's masculine qualities that are associated with majesty, have en subsumed in the 14 centuries since the Quran was revealed.

The Quran gives rise to multiple interpretations. Verse 30:21 is one of my favorites:

“And among Allah's signs is this. That Allah created for you spouses from among yourselves, that you may dwell in tranquillity whit them, and Allah has put love and mercy between your [hearts]: verily in that there are signs for those who reflect.”[2]

The verse is commonly used in marriage celebrations, and I also used it in my same-sex marriage ritual. It mentions the gender-neutral term 'spouse,' which leaves room for the interpretation that same-sex partners are included.

Indonesian waria (transwomen) derive hope from such texts. In 2008, Maryani, a well-respected waria, opened a pesantren (traditional Islamic religious school) for waria, named Al-Fatah, at her house in Yogyakarta. After her death in March 2014, it was temporarily closed, but fortunately soon reopened in nearby Kotagede. A sexual-rights activist, Shinta Ratri, opened her house to waria santri (santri are strict believers, linked to religious schools) so they could continue to receive religious education. At the official opening, Muslim scholar Abdul Muhaimin of the Faithful People Brotherhood Forum reminded the audience that, as everyone was made by God: "Everyone has the right to observe their religion in their own way...", and added: "I hoped the students here are strong, as they must face stigma in society."[3]

Prior to her death (after she had made the haj),[4] Maryani herself, a deeply-religious person, said: "Here we teach our friends to worship God. People who worship are seeking paradise, this is not limited to our sex or our clothing..."[5] So far, hers is the only waria pesantren in Indonesia, perhaps even globally, and may be due to the fact that Maryani was an exceptionally strong person who spoke at many human-rights meetings. In October 2010, I also interviewed her and was struck by her warm personality, courage, and clear views.

In spite of those progressive readings of the Quran, women's sexuality is interpreted in light of their servility to men in practice, and has been linked to men's honour rather than women's pleasure. Although marriage is not viewed as too sacred to be broken in Indonesia, it is regarded as a religious obligation by all. An unmarried woman over the age of 20 is considered to be a perawan tua ('old virgin'), and is confronted by a continuous barrage of questions as to when she will marry.

Muslim (and Christian) conservative leaders consider homosexuality to be a sin. Women in same-sex relations find themselves in a difficult corner, as exclusion from their religion is a heavy burden. Some simply pray at home, privately hoping that their God will forgive them and trusting in the compassion taught by their holy books. However, outside their private space, religious teachers and society at large denounce their lives as sinful and accuse them of having no religion.

Recent Indonesia legislation strengthens the conservative, heteronormative interpretations of Islam. Apart from the 2008 anti-pornography law (discussed below), a new health law was adopted that further tightened conservative Islam's grip on women's reproductive rights and marginalised non-heteronormative women. That 2009 health bill replaced the law of 1992, which had no chapter on reproductive health. The new law states that a healthy, reproductive, and sexual life may only be enjoyed with a 'lawful partner' and only without 'violating religious values'--which means that all of our narrators would be banned from enjoying healthy, sexual, and reproductive lives.[6]

Conservative statements are also made by women themselves; for example, members of the hard-line Islamic group Hizbut Tahrir, who not only want to restrict reproductive services (such as family planning) to lawfully-wedded heterosexual couples but also see population control as a 'weapon of the West' to weaken the country.[7] They propose to save Indonesia by the imposition of sharia laws. Hard-line Islamic interpretations are widely propagated and creep into the legal system, thus strengthening heteronormativity and further expelling non-normative others.

Yet strong feminist voices are also heard in Indonesia's Muslim circles. Even in a relation to one of the most controversial issues in Islam--homosexuality--a positive, feminist interpretation is possible. Indonesia's prominent feminist Muslim scholar, Siti Musdah Mulia, explains that homosexuality is a natural phenomenon as it was created by Allah, and thus allowed by Islam. The prohibition, however, is the work of fallible interpretations by religion scholars.[8] In her 2011 paper on sexual rights, Mulia bases herself on certain Indonesian traditions that honour transgender people, referring to bissu in south Sulawesi, and warok[9] in the reog dance form in Ponorogo. In those cases, transgender is linked to sacred powers and fertility. She stresses that the story of Lot, always cited as evidence of Quranic condemnation of homosexuality, is actually concerned with sexual violence--the people of Sodom were not the only ones faced with God's wrath, as the people of Gomorrah were also severely chastised even though there is no indication that they engaged in same-sex behaviour. Nor is there any hint of same-sex behaviour in relationship to Lot's poor wife, who was transformed into a pillar of salt. Mulia advances a humanistic interpretation of the Quran that stresses the principles of justice, equity, human dignity, love, and compassion (2011: 7). Her conclusion is that not Islam itself but rather its heterosexist and patriarchal interpretation leads to discrimination.

After the political liberalisation (Reformasi) of 1998, conservative religious groups (which had been banned at the height of the repressive New-Order regime) increased their influence. The dakwah ('spreading of Islam') movement, which grew from small Islamist usroh (cell, family) groups and aimed to turn Indonesia into a Muslim state, gathered momentum.[10] Islamist parties, such as the Partai Kesejahteraan Sosial (PKS), or Social Justice Party, gained wide popularity, although that was not translated into a large number of seats in the national parliament (Hefner 2012; Katjasungkana 2012). In the early Reformasi years, official discourse on women was based on women's rights, taking the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action as its guide, but recent discourse on an Islamic-family model--the so-called keluarga sakinah ('the happy family')--has become dominant in government circles (Wieringa 2015, forthcoming). The growing Islamist emphasis on a heteronormative family model, coupled with homophobia, is spreading in society. During KAN's [Kartini Asia Network for Gender and Women's Studies in Asia] September 2006 TOT [Training of Trainers] course in Jakarta, the following conversation was recorded:

“Farida: Religious teachers go on and on about homosexuality. They keep shouting that it is a very grave sin and that people will go straight to hell. My daughter is in the fifth form of primary school. She has a best friend and the two were inseparable. But the teachers managed to set them apart, as they were considered to be too close. The mother of my daughter's friend came to me crying; she was warned that she had to be careful with her child, or else she might get a daughter who was different. And now the new school regulations stress that a woman must wear the jilbab [headscarf].[11] This has put a lot of stress on tomboyish girls. They cannot wear the clothes they are comfortable with any more. Zeinab: When we were taught fiqih [Islamic law], we never discussed homosexuality. When we studied the issue of zinah [adultery], one of our group asked: "But how about a woman committing zinah with another woman, or a man with another man?" Our teacher just shook is head and muttered that that was not a good thing. The only story we learnt was about the prophet Luth [Lot]. But when we went to study the hadith [Islamic oral law], we found the prophet had a very close friend, Abu Harairah, who never married, while all men were always showing off their wives. There were some indications that he might have had a male lover. Yet the prophet is not known to have warned him. So, while the mainstream interpretation of Islam is that they condemn homosexuality, there are also other traditions that seem to be more tolerant, even from the life of the prophet himself.”

The above fragment shows how fundamentalist practices creep into every nook and cranny of Indonesian people's lives--the growing suspicion toward tomboys, forcible separation of close school friends, and enforcement of Muslim dress codes. But we also see a counter-protest arising. At the TOT training course, the women activists realised that patriarchal interpretations of religion had severely undermined women's space, and started looking for alternative interpretations, such as the story of the prophet's unmarried friend.

However, for many of our narrators, religion is a troubling issue. Putri, for instance, does not even want to discuss the rights of gays and lesbians in Indonesia; she thinks the future looks gloomy, with religious fundamentalism on the rise, and her dream of equal rights is buried by the increasing militancy of religious fanatics. [...]

Women-loving women

Religion is a sensitive aspect of the lives of our women-loving-women narrators, who are from world religions that, although propagating love and compassion in their distinct ways, interpret same-sex love negatively. In some cases, our narrators are able to look beyond the patriarchal interpretations of their religions, which preach hatred for what are emotions of great beauty and satisfaction to them, while others are devastated by guilt and shame. [...]

Indonesian male-identified Lee wonders why "people cannot see us as God's creatures?" but fears that Islam will never accept homosexuality. He knows the story of the prophet Lot, and how the city of Sodom was destroyed by God as a warning so others would not commit the sin of sodomy. Lee was raised as a good Muslim, and tries to follow what he has been taught are God's orders. For some time, he wore a man's outfit for praying.[16] At that time, he thought that religious duties--if conducted sincerely--were more important than his appearance but, after listening to some religious preachers, he felt that it was not right to wear men's clothing: "Sometimes I think it is not right, lying to myself, pretending to be someone else. We cannot lie to God, right? Even if I try to hide it, definitely God knows." So, after attending religious classes, he decided to wear the woman's outfit--the mukena--when praying at home.

Lia grew up in a strict Muslim family. When she pronounced herself to be a lesbian, it came as a shock to her relatives, who invoked the power of religion to cure her. When her mother went on the haj, she brought 'Zamzam water' from Mecca. The miraculous healing powers of the liquid from Mecca's Zamzam well were supposed to bring Lia back to the normal path. Dutifully, Lia drank from it and jokingly exclaimed: "Ah, my God, only now I realise how handsome Delon is!"[17] Yet she found succor in her religion when she went through a crisis in her relationship with Santi:

"When Santi hated me very much and avoided me, I prayed: "God, if it is true that you give me a guiding light, please give me a sign. But if it is a sin...please help me..." Was my relationship with Santi blessed or not? If it wasn't, surely God would have blocked the way, and if it way, would God broaden my path? As, after praying so hard, Santi and I became closer, God must have endorsed it. Does God listen to my prayer, or does God test me?"

So, even though she got together again with Santi after that fervent bout of praying, uncertainty gnaws at Lia, who realises that mainstream Islamic preachers prohibit homosexuality. Ideally, she feels that a person's religion must support people, but Islam does not do that because she is made to feel like a sinner. But, she says, the basic principle that Islam teaches is to love others. As long as she does that, Lia sees nothing wrong in herself as one of God's creatures. She realises that, particularly in the interpretation of the hadith (Islamic oral tradition), all manner of distortions have entered Islamic values, and wonders what was originally taught about homosexuality in Islam. She is aware that many Quranic texts about the status of women were manipulated in order to marginalise them, and avidly follows debates on feminist interpretations that stress that the real message of the Quran does not preach women's subordination.

Lia knows that there are lesbians in the pesantren who carry out religious obligations, such as praying and doing good deeds. If someone has been a lesbian for so long that it feels like natural character, and has been praying and fasting for many years, they cannot change into a heterosexual, she decided.

Religious values are also deeply inculcated in Sandy, who is tortured by guilt and shame about her lesbian desires. Although masculine in appearance and behaviour, she wears the mukena while praying both at home and at the mushola (small mosque) that she frequents. Since she was 23, when her mother died, she realised that what she did with her lover, Mira, was a sin and started reading religious books to discover what they said about people like her. She accepted the traditional interpretation of the story of Lot and the destruction of Sodom. When she was 25 years old, Mira left her to marry a man. Sandy was broken hearted and considered suicide. In that period of great distress, she realised that God prohibits suicide and just wanted her to give up her sinful life. She struggled hard against her desires for women and the masculinity in her:

"If I walk with women, I feel like a man; that I have to protect them. I feel that I am stronger than other women. But I also feel that I am a woman, I am sure that I am a woman, that is why I feel that I am different from others. I accept my own condition as an illness, not as my destiny. ... Yes, an illness, because we follow our lust. It we try to contain our lust, as religion teaches us, we would never be like this. So I try to stay close to God. I do my prayers, and a lot of zikir.[18] I even try to do tahajjud.[19]"

Sandy believes in the hereafter and does not want to spoil her chances of eternal bliss by engaging in something so clearly disproved of by religion, although she has not found any clear prohibitions against lesbianism in either the Quran or hadith.

Bhima, who considers himself to be a secular person, was brought up in a Muslim family. His identity card states that he is a Muslim, which got him into serious trouble when he went for his first sex-change operation at the end of the 1970s. He went through the necessary tests but the doctors hesitated when they looked at his ID, fearing the wrath of conservative clerics. Bhima was desperate:

"Listen, I have come this far! I have saved up for this, sold my car, relatives have contributed, how can you do this to me? Tell me what other religion I should take up and I will immediately get my identity card changed. I have never even been inside a mosque. I don't care about any institutionalised religion!"

The doctors did not heed his plea, instead advising him to get a letter of recommendation from a noted Muslim scholar. Undaunted, Bhima made an appointment with a progressive female psychologist who had been trained in Egypt and often gave liberal advice on Muslim issues on the radio. He managed to persuade her to write a letter of introduction to the well-known Muslim scholar Professor Hamka. Letter in hand, Bhima presented himself at the gate of Hamka's house, and was let in by the great scholar himself. Bhima pleaded his case, upon which Hamka opened the Quran and pointed to a passage that read "when you are ill, you must make all attempts to heal yourself":

"Are you ill?" Hamka asked. Bhima nodded vehemently. "Fine, so then tell them that the Quran advises to heal your illness." "It is better, sir," Bhima suggested, "that you write that down for them."

With that letter, Bhima had no problem to be accepted for the first operation, in which his breasts were removed.

Widows [...] In Eliana's case religion played an important role in her marriage--and subsequent divorce. While still at school, she had joined an usroh group (created to teach students about religious and social issues in the days of the Suharto dictatorship). Proper sexual behaviour played an important role in their teachings. According to usroh, a wife must be sexually subservient to her husband and accept all his wishes, even if they involve him taking a second wife. Eliana felt close to her spiritual leader and tried to sexually behave as a good Muslim wife would. She forced herself to give in to all her husband's sexual wishes, including blow jobs and watching pornography with him. Yet the leader blamed Eliana for not doing enough to please her husband, saying that is why he needed a second wife. Her teacher even asked if she was a lesbian, because she could not satisfy her husband. As both her spiritual leader and husband agreed that it was not nice for a man to have an intellectually-superior woman, she played down her intelligence. Eventually she divorced her husband.

Internalised lesbophobia and conservative-religious (in this case, Muslim) norms prevented Jenar for enjoying the short lesbian relationship that she had between her two marriages. It is interesting how she phrases the conversation, starting on the topic by emphasising how much she distrusted men after her divorce (because her husband did not financially provide for their family). The relationship with her woman lover was not long underway, and had not advanced beyond kissing, but she immediately felt that, according to religion, what she did was laknat (cursed). Anyway, she added, she was a 'normal,' heterosexual woman and did not feel much aroused when they were touching. A middle-aged, male friend added to her feeling of discomfort by emphasising that she would be cursed by God if it would continue. He then took her to a dukun (shaman), where she was bathed with flowers at midnight in order to cure her. That was apparently successful, for she gave the relationship up. However, even though she had stressed that she was 'normal' and did not respond sexually to her lover's advances, she ended the conversation by saying that she felt lesbianism was a 'contagious disease'. That remark stresses her own internalised homophobia but also emphasises her helplessness and lack of agency--contagion is something that cannot be avoided. It also hints at the strength of the pull she felt for a contagion that apparently could not be easily ignored. The important role of the dukun indicates that she follows the syncretist stream of Islam, mixed with elements of the pre-Islamic Javanese religion--Kejawen. [...]

Women in same-sex relationships [...]

As in India, the human-women's-lesbian-rights discourse is gaining momentum in Indonesia. It could only develop after 1998, when the country's dictator was finally forced to resign and a new climate of political openness was created. The new sexual-rights organisations not only opened a public space to discuss women's and sexual rights but also impacted on the behaviour of individuals within their organisations (as discussed in more detail in chapter 9). Before Lee joined a lesbian-rights group, he had decided to undergo sex-reassignment therapy (SRT) to physically become a man as much as possible. Activists warned him of the operations' health risks and asked whether he really needed such a change in order to live with his spouse. Lee feels secure within the group, and is happy to find like-minded people with whom he can share many of his concerns. Lee actively sought them out after reading a newspaper article about a gay male activist: he tracked him down at his workplace and obtained the address of the lesbian group. Lee is less afraid of what will happen when their neighborhood find out that Lee's body is female--as he says: "I have done nothing wrong, I haven't disturbed anyone, I have never asked anyone for food." However, Lee is worried about the media, where gay men and lesbian women are often represented as the sources of disease and disaster.

Lia had no idea what a lesbian was when she first fell in love with a woman. There were many tomboys like her playing in the school's softball team, and she once spotted a female couple in another school's softball team. Her relationship with Santi developed without, as Lia says, any guidance of previous information. Only at college in Yogyakarta did she start reading about homosexuality on the internet. Through the Suara Srikandi portal (one of the first lesbian groups in Jakarta), she came to know of other Indonesian lesbians. Another website that she frequently visited was the Indonesian Lesbian Forum, and one of her lecturers introduced her to the gay and lesbian movement in her city. In 2004, she publicly came out at a press conference. She first joined the KPI, which has an interest group of sexual minorities, but found the attitude of her feminist friends to be unsupportive and decided to join a lesbian-only group. The women activists only wanted to discuss the public role of women and domestic violence, and told her that lesbianism was a disease and a sin.

Lia wants to broaden the lesbian movement. She feels the movement is good in theory but lacking in practice--particularly in creating alliances with other suppressed groups, such as farmers and labourers. In focusing only on lesbians, not on discrimination and marginalisation itself, she asserts that it has become too exclusive. By socialising with other movements, she argues, they will better understand lesbian issues, and, in turn, that will help the lesbian movement. It is true, she concedes, that lesbians are stigmatised by all groups in society but, since 1998 (the fall of General Suharto), the country has seen a process of democratisation. "We must take up that opportunity and not be scared of stigma," she exhorts her friends in the lesbian movement. Lia herself joined a small, radical political party, the PRD,[33] and faced stigma ("we have a lesbian comrade; that's a sin, isn't it?"), but feels that she has ultimately been welcomed. Now, her major problem is to find the finances to conduct her activism. At the time of the interview, she had lost her job and could not find the means to print handouts for her PRD comrades.

Lia is a brave forerunner. At the time of the interview, her lesbian friends were too scared to follow in her footsteps and told her that she was only dreaming. However, her heterosexual friends (in the labour movement) said that they were bored with her, and found her insistence of a connection between the struggle for sexual and labour rights to be too pushy.

Lia dreams of equal rights for lesbians. First, she would like to see a gay-marriage law implemented in Indonesia, which would ensure that the property rights of surviving spouses are protected in case one passes away. She also would like to set up a shelter for lesbians, as she knows many young lesbians who have been thrown out of their family homes and are in need of support.

Sandy is rather hesitant about the rights she would like to see introduced to Indonesian society. Most of all, she wants to be accepted as a normal human being, where no one says bad things about or harasses lesbians like her. What women do in the privacy of their bedrooms is one thing. Women should have the right to have sex, for it comes straight from the heart--it is pure love. But, in public, their behavior should be impeccable: no kissing, no hugging, no holding of hands. However, Sandy thinks that marriage rights for lesbians will not happen in Indonesia, and are only possible in Christian countries. But, minimally, she hopes to lead a life without discrimination or violence:

"If they see us as normal, they won't bother us. We are human, but if we act provocatively then it is ok for them to even hang us ... [I just hope they] won't harass us, or humiliate us. That is all I ask, that if we are being humiliated there is a law to prevent it. That a person like me is protected. To be laughed at is okay, but it is too much if they throw stones at us and if we are not allowed to work."

Sex workers want the right to work without being harassed, and women in same-sex relationships want to be treated like 'normal' human beings and enjoy socio-sexual rights, such as health benefits or the right to buy joint property. Yet the state does not provide those rights and does not protect its citizens in equal measure. As a major agent of heteronormativity, it restricts its benefits and protection to those within its margins. Couples with social stigma and conservative-religious interpretations, some of our narrators have reached deep levels of depression.

[health-is-in-you]

From Enough 14.

Social rebel, counterfeiter, bandit, modern Robin Hood – the list of titles with which our anarchist comrade Lucio Urtubia was honoured is long. His life, which sounds like an adventure novel, is a mirror of the revolutionary movements in Europe in the second half of the 20th century. Lucio Urtuba passed away today (18 July, 2020). Rest In Power Lucio!

Lucio Urtubia was born in 1931 in a small village in Navarre and grew up in poor conditions. When he was called up for military service, he deserted to France shortly afterwards, where he worked as a bricklayer from then on. He came into contact with anarchist groups and met his political foster father: the legendary Sabaté, who organized the armed resistance against the Franco dictatorship from France. Forging documents, hiding underground fighters and illegal fundraising activities play a major role in his life from then on. Numerous resistance organisations, which have a base of operations in France or are looking for a place to retreat, benefit from his skills: Black Panthers, Tupamaros, European guerrillas. Lucio’s solidarity is with every act of revolt aimed at a more just social order.

In 1962, he proposed to Che Guevara, then head of the National Bank of Cuba, to flood the world market with counterfeit dollar bills in order to destabilize the US economy. The proposal meets little approval on the Cuban side, but the idea remains alive in Lucio. In 1980 he succeeds in his greatest coup: by printing traveller’s cheques from Citibank with a value of several million dollars he brings the then most powerful bank in the world on its knees.

But the list of his activities is not completed. Lucio is also a master of conspiracy, however, who manages to spend only a few months in prison in his not exactly law-abiding life. He breaks the silence at the age of well over 70. There is a book and also a movie (Watch here) about Lucio Urtubia.

Lucio, The Good Bandit: Reflections of an Anarchist Marie Trigona, Toward Freedom (05/06/2008)

Outspoken and charismatic, Lucio speaks like a true anarchist. When asked what it means to be an anarchist, Lucio refutes the misperception of the terrorist, “The anarchist is a person who is good at heart, responsible.” Yet he makes no apologies for the need to destroy the current social order, “it’s good to destroy certain things, because you build things to replace them.”

Lucio has old friends in the Southern Cone. Funds from the forgery operatives helped hundreds from revolutionary organizations exile and finance clandestine actions against the bloody dictatorships which disappeared ten thousands of activists, students and workers during the 1970’s throughout Latin America. In Uruguay, funds from falsified Citibank travelers’ checks funded the guerilla group Tupamaros, in the US the Black Panthers and other revolutionary groups throughout Europe.

During his recent visit to South America, Lucio stayed at the worker run BAUEN Hotel in Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires. He was astounded by the accomplishments of the workers without bosses. At the BAUEN hotel, workers are putting into practice workers autogestíon or self-management. Self-management has been a mainstay of anarchist thought since the birth of capitalism. Rather than authority – obey relationship between capitalists and workers, self-management implies that workers put into practice an egalitarian system in which people collectively decide, produce and control their own destinies for the benefit of the community. But for such a system to work, participants have to be hard working and responsible, one of the most important attributes a man or woman should have according to Lucio. “The anarchist movement was built by workers. Without work we can’t talk about self-management, to put self-management into practice we need to know how to do things, to work. It’s easy to be bohemian.”

Lucio explains that his anarchism is based in his poor childhood in fascist Spain. “My anarchist origins are rooted in my experience growing up in a poor family. My father was leftist, had gone to jail because he wanted the automony of the Basque country. For me that’s not revolution, I’m not nationalist. With nationalism humanity has committed a lot of mistakes. When my father got out of jail he became a socialist. We suffered a lot. I went to look for bread and the baker wouldn’t give it to me, because we didn’t have money. For me poverty enriched me, I didn’t have to make any effort to lose respect for the establishment, the Church, private property and the State.”

In Spain, fascism persevered 30 years after the end of World War II. Hundreds were placed in jail for resisting the Franco dictatorship. Anthropologists have estimated that from the onset of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 to Franco’s death in November 1975, Franco’s Nationalists killed between 75,000 and 150,000 supporters of the Republic.

Lucio exiled to France where he discovered anarchism. He had deserted the nationalist army and escaped to France. Paris in the 1960’s was a bourgeoning city for anarchist intellectuals, organizers and guerillas in exile. It was there that Lucio met members from the anarcho-syndicalist trade union, Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT). He was anxious to participate.

During his early years in France, Lucio met Francisco Sabate, the legendary anarchist and guerilla extraordinaire. At this time Sabate, otherwise known by his nickname “El Quico” was the most sought after anarchist by the Franco regime. French police were also looking for Sabate, who led resistance against Franquismo. “When I met Quico, I was participating in the Juventud Libertarias. They asked me if I could help Sabate, me an ignorant, I didn’t know who he was.” Sabate used Lucio’s house as a hide out. The young Lucio, listened to Sabate’s tales of direct action and absorbed whatever wisdom he had to offer, like methods for sniffing out infiltrators. “I met guerillas that put me on the road to direct action and expropriations. Sabate taught me to lose respect for private property.”

It was then that Lucio began participating in bank robberies. “There are no bigger crooks than the banks,” says Lucio in the defense of expropriation. “[This was the] only means the anarchist had, without funding from industry or government representatives to fund them. The money was sent to those suffering from Franco’s regime.” Student organizations and worker organizations received the funds to carry out grass roots organizing. In other cases the money was used for the guerilla actions against Franco’s regime, such as campaigns for the release of political prisoners in the nationalist jails.

To save the lives of exiles, Lucio thought of a master plan to falsify passports so Spanish nationals could travel. “Passports for a refugee means being able to escape the country and lead safe lives elsewhere,” he explains. Not only in Europe but in the US and South America, dissidents used false ID’s to lead their lives and direct actions.

In 1977, Lucio’s group began forging checks as a direct form to finance resistance. Lucio was essentially the “boss” of the operation-he made, distributed and cashed the checks. The checks were harder to falsify than counterfeit bills. Lucio thought they should target the largest banking institution in the world, National City Bank. The distribution of the checks went to different subversive groups who used the funds to finance solidarity actions. Lucio explains that “no one got rich” from the checks. Most of the funds went to the cause. All over Europe, these checks with the same code number were cashed at the same time.

Lucio’s master plan cost City Bank tens of millions of dollars in forged travelers’ checks. But many say a much larger sum was expropriated. City Bank was at the mercy of the forger, who had cost so much that the bank had to suspend travelers checks, ruining the holiday for thousands of tourists. At the time, people did not use check cards or credit cards. Lucio was arrested in 1980 and found with a suitcase full of the forged checks. In the meantime during Lucio’s arrest, Citibank continued to receive false travelers’ checks.

Citbank became worried. Representatives from the bank agreed to negotiate. Lucio would be released if he handed over the printing plates for the forged checks. The exchange was made, and Lucio became a legend for his mastermind plan. Although his life as a forger ended at 50-years-of-age, his life as an anarchist continued.

Lucio had always worked as a bricklayer. “What’s helped me the most is my work, Anarchists were always workers.” Lucio-bricklayer, anarchist, forger and expropriator has left a legacy like his predecessors. “People like Loise Michel, Sabate, Durruti, all the expropriators taught me how to expropriate, but not for personal gain, but how to use those riches for change.” At 76-years-of-age he does not apologize for his actions. “I’ve expropriated, which according to the Christian religion is a sin. For me expropriations are necessary. As the revolutionaries say, robbing and expropriation is a revolutionary act as long as one doesn’t benefit from it.”

[qqueenofhades]

Question for you. When you have time. And if you want. I know things are busy for you. What do you mean by end stage capitalism? Thanks.

Aha. I am sorry that this has been sitting in my inbox for a while, since I’ve been busy and doing stressful things and not sure how to answer this in a way that wouldn’t immediately turn into a pages-long rant. Nothing to do with you, of course, but just because I have 800 things to say on this topic, none of them complimentary, which I’ll try to condense down briefly. Ish.

In sum, end-stage capitalism is at the root of everything that’s wrong with the world today, more or less. It’s the state of being that exists when the economic system of capitalism, i.e. the exchange of money for goods and services, has become so runaway, so unregulated, so elevated to the level of unchallengeable dogma in the Western world (especially after the Cold War and decades of hysteria about the “scourge of communism”) and so embedded on every level of the social and political fabric that it is no longer sustainable but also can’t be destroyed without taking everything else down. Nobody wants to be the actual generation that lives through the fall of capitalism, because it’s going to be cataclysmic on every level, but also… we can’t go on like this. So that’s a fun paradox. The current world order is so drastically, unimaginably, ridiculously and wildly unequal, privileging the tiny elite of the ultra-rich over the rest of the planet, because of hypercapitalism. This really got going in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan, still generally worshiped as a political hero on both the left and right sides of the American political establishment (even liberals tiptoe around criticizing Saint Ronnie), set into motion a program of slashing business and environment regulations, reducing or eliminating taxes on the super wealthy, and introducing the concept of “trickle-down” or “supply-side” economics. In short, the principle holds that if you make it as easy as possible for rich people to become EVEN MORE RICH, and remove all irksome regulations or restrictions on the Church of the Free Market, they will benevolently redistribute this largess to the little people. To say the very least, this….does not happen. Ever.

Since the 1980s, in short, we have had thirty years of unrestricted, runaway capitalism that eventually propelled us into the financial crisis of 2008, after multiple smaller crises, where the full extent of this philosophy became apparent…. and nobody really did anything about it. You can google statistics about how the price of everything has skyrocketed since about the 1970s, when you could put yourself through college on one part-time job, graduate with no student debt, and be assured of a job for the next 30 years, and how baby boomers (who are responsible for wrecking the economy) insist that millennials are “just lazy” or “killing [insert x industry]”. This is because we have NO GODDAMN MONEY, graduate thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt (if we can even afford college in the first place), are lucky if we find a job that pays us more than $10 an hour, and often have to string together several part-time and frangible jobs that offer absolutely nothing in the way of security, benefits, or long-term saving potential. This is why millennials at large don’t have kids, buy houses, or have any savings (or any of the traditional “adult” milestones). We just don’t have the money for it.

Even more, capitalism has taken over our mindsets to the point where it is, as I said, at the root of everything that’s wrong with the world. Climate change? Won’t be fixed because the ruling classes are making money from the current system, and if you really want to give yourself an aneurysm, google the profiteers who can’t wait for the environment/society to collapse because they’ll make MORE money off it. This is known as “disaster capitalism” and is what the US has done to other countries for decades. (I also recommend The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.) This obviously directly contributes to the War on Terror, the current global instability, the reason Dick Cheney, Halliburton, Blackwater, and other private-security contractors made a mint from blowing up Iraq and paying themselves to rebuild it, and then the resultant rise of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other extremist reactionary groups. The bombing produces (often brown and Muslim) refugees and immigrants, Western countries won’t take them in, right-wing politicians make hay out of Threats To Our Way of Life ™, and the circle goes on. Gun control? Can’t happen because a) American white supremacy is too deeply tied to its paranoid right to have as many guns as it wants and to destroy the Other at any time, and b) the NRA pays senators by the gigabucks to make sure it doesn’t. (And we all know what an absolute goddamn CLUSTERFUCK the topic of big money and American politics is in the first place. It’s just… a nightmare in every direction.)

Meanwhile, end-stage capitalism has also systematically assigned value to society and to individuals depending entirely on their prospects for monetization. Someone who can’t work, or who doesn’t work the “right” job, is thus assigned less value as a human (see all the right-wing screaming about people who “don’t deserve” to have any kind of social and financial assistance or subsidized food and medicine if they won’t “help themselves”). This is how we get to situations where we have the ads that I kept seeing in London the other month: apps where you could share your leftover food, or rent out your own car, or collectively rent an apartment, or whatever else. Because apparently if you live in London in 2019, there is no expectation that you will be able to have your own food, car, or apartment. You have to crowdsource it. (See also: people having to beg strangers on the internet for money for food or medical bills, and strangers on the internet doing more to help that person than the whole system and/or the person’s employment or living situation.) There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism as an economic theory. Exchanging money for goods and services is understandable and it works. But when it has run out of control to this degree, when the people who suffer the most under it fiercely defend it (see the working-class white people absolutely convinced that the reason for their problems is Those Damn Job Stealing Immigrants), when it only works for the interests of a few uber-privileged few and is actively killing everyone else… yeah.

Let’s put it this way. You will likely have heard of the two fatal crashes of Boeing 737 Max airplanes in recent months: the Lion Air crash in October 2018 and the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March 2019. Together, they killed 346 people. After these crashes, it turned out that the same malfunctioning system was responsible for both, and that Boeing had known of the problem before the Max went on the market. But because they needed to make (even more) money and compete with their rivals, Airbus, they had sent the planes ahead anyway, with unclear and confusing instruction to pilots about how to deal with it, and generally not acknowledging the problem and insisting (as they still do) that the plane was safe, even though it’s been grounded worldwide since March. There are also concerns that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is too deep in Boeing’s pocket to provide an impartial ruling (and America was the last country to ground the plane), and other countries’ aviation safety bodies have announced that they aren’t just going to take the FAA’s word for it whenever they decide that the Max is safe. This almost never happens, since usually international regulatory bodies, especially in aviation, will accept each other’s standards. But because of Boeing’s need for Even More Money, they put a plane on the market and into commercial passenger service that they knew had problems, and the FAA essentially let them do that and isn’t entirely trusted to ensure that they won’t do it again. Because…. value for the shareholders. Or something. This is the extreme example of what I mean when I say that end-stage capitalism is actively killing people.

It is also doing so on longer-term and more pernicious everyday levels. See above where people can’t afford their basic expenses even on several jobs, see the insulin price-gouging in the US (and the big pharma efforts in general to make drugs and healthcare as expensive as possible), see the way any kind of welfare or social assistance is framed as “lazy” or “bad” or “socialist,” see the way that people are basically only allowed to survive if they can pay for it, and the way that circle is becoming smaller and smaller. The American public is also fed enduring folk “wisdom” about “money doesn’t buy happiness,” the belief that poverty serves to build character or as an example of virtue, or so on, to make them feel proud of being poor/deprived/that they’re doing a good thing by actively supporting this system that is responsible for their own suffering. And yet for example, the Nordic countries (while obviously having other problems of their own) maintain the Scandinavian welfare model, which pays for college and healthcare, provides for individual stipends/basic income, allows generous leave for parenthood, emphasises a unionised workplace, and otherwise prescribes a mix of capitalism, social democracy, and social mobility. All the Nordic countries rank highly for human development, overall happiness, and other measurements of social success. But especially in America, any suggestion of “socialism” is treated like heresy, and unions are a dirty word. That is changing, but…slowly.

In short: the economic overlords have never done anything to give power, money, or anything at all to the working class without being repeatedly and explicitly forced, they have no good will or desire to treat the poor like humans (see: Amazon) or anything at all that doesn’t increase their already incomprehensible profit margins. The pursuit of more money that cannot possibly be spent in one human lifetime, that is accumulated, used to make laws for itself, and never paid in taxes to fund improvements or services for everyone else, lies at the root of pretty much every problem you can name in the world right now, is deeply, deeply evil, and I do not use that word lightly.

[drlissahawthorne]

A New Vision

Who: Clarissa Hawthorne

When:  Summer 2008 - Summer 2012

Where: nowhere specific 

What: Clarissa’s journey from the end of the Beijing games through the end of her career as an Olympic archer four years later in London.

Warnings: Abuse

Word Count: 1855

Notes: This is part 2 of 3. Part 1.

After gold in Beijing, Clarissa was riding a high. A high that she never wanted to end, but a high that couldn’t possibly last. Unfortunately, her eyes were going to get worse. And they were going to get worse, fast. She did her best to focus on college, to take everything one day at a time. Except sometimes one day turned into three or four days where her eyes just didn’t work. Where she couldn’t read her textbooks, where almost everything had to be read to her. Where she was lucky if she could even open her eyes without feeling like her head was going to explode.

Her roommate was her saving grace.

Jill was the kind of girl who would do anything for a laugh, but especially to make Clarissa laugh. She often considered the archer to be too stiff, too unwilling to be a young adult. Sure, she figured this had to do with how Clarissa was raised, how she’d been treated on the world stage, but it was something that could change. And it was something that Jill was going to make sure happened. Jill, in a lot of ways, just wanted to see Clarissa succeed in life. No matter what that might mean she’d have to do. Whether it was dragging Clarissa out to clubs to party or helping her adjust to life, Jill did it. When it came to Clarissa’s notes, classwork, and the like, Jill painstakingly recorded everything she could and read aloud what she couldn’t for when Clarissa’s eyes weren’t working. It was something Clarissa was beyond thankful for, and often tried to pay the other back, but was generally turned down at every turn. They were friends, that's what they did.

They worked together well and agreed to move into an off campus apartment their sophomore year. It gave them the liberty to live out in the city itself and pay way less than they had been on campus. It also gave them a headstart on helping Clarissa figure out bus routes without entirely relying on her sight to do so. Not that her eyesight was to that point, but it was good practice and a good deal of fun. They often tried to see if they could start at opposite ends of town and figure out the quickest bus route to a central point the fastest. Typically speaking, the central point was somewhere important, their apartment, the grocery store, their favorite restaurant. To most people it probably seemed weird, the way the pair worked, but they were just being themselves.

During that time Clarissa played hockey, helped support the rugby team, and continued to practice archery. Though, it became increasingly more obvious that things like hockey and archery, at least the act of participating in them, were going to come to an end. Sooner, rather than later. The prospect wasn’t new to Clarissa, but it also wasn’t something she was looking forward to. Or even really saw herself being able to accept. Jill tried, a number of times, to get Clarissa to start the process early. To start transitioning to a life where sports weren’t going to be as big a part of them as they were, but didn’t succeed in the slightest. If anything, the few times Jill pushed her to do such, Clarissa withdrew into herself. The denial was strong and, admittedly, Jill really couldn’t blame her.

Clarissa had a number of relationships during that time. Very few of them were good for her. In fact, many of them were very negative. People not wanting to deal with the way her eyesight could be a problem. The way she sometimes needed a little extra help on dates. How movie dates, or any dates that involved a lot of eye power in general, were fun but draining in a way that left her not really wanting to do much else. Or how her eyesight could get in the way of her even being able to go on a date. How things had to be planned out while still being open to canceling or extreme changes to accommodate her. Many of the relationships ended on very poor terms, Clarissa getting angry and breaking things off, or her partner getting frustrated over not wanting to deal with everything. Her sight was failing her, and it seemed like no one really wanted to put up with that. Not that this was something that surprised Clarissa, of course. It was the kind of thing that made her already strange reputation even worse. That just added to the way people avoided interacting with her if they could help it.

In the fall of 2010, Clarissa met Elias Westwood. He was a charismatic and charming guy, who genuinely seemed to want to know Clarissa for who she was. He was interested in her archery, her love of hockey, the things that made Clarissa, herself. Elias was a couple years older than her and she’d met him at a function on campus. They bonded over a love of video games and good music. He was a grad student and the way he looked at her made her feel special. Made her forget about the way her eyes ached and the looming reality that her time as an Olympic archer was coming to an end. He picked at her insecurities and promised to never hurt her the way other people had.

And he didn’t. He did so much worse.

The first clue that he was going to be nothing but bad news was also the first thing Clarissa chose to ignore. Hard to see red flags for what they are while wearing rose colored glasses. Whether Clarissa wanted to admit it at the time or not, Elias drove a wedge between Clarissa and Jill. The other girl warned Clarissa that he really wasn’t as great a guy as he seemed. That he was playing her like a fiddle. Clarissa refused to listen. Refused to see reason. He made her feel special and she hated the idea of there possibly being something wrong with that. Even as Elias slowly started to show his true colors. He started getting clingy, at first. Little things. Wanting to know when she’d be out of a class, where she was headed to after. Who she was spending time with. It wasn’t all the time, just every once in a while. He said he was worried about her getting hurt. She believed him.

However, his actions slowly amped up more and more. Getting accusatory whenever she gave him an answer. Swearing she was lying to him. He never went so far as to say she was cheating on him but he got close. Close enough that it started to strain her other relationships. Friendships she’d worked hard to cultivate despite distance. Friendships she’d made at college and wanted to explore for what they were, purely platonic and supportive relationships. Everytime Clarissa managed to talk him down from whatever imagined ledge he was on, Elias was amazing for a couple weeks. Apologized for freaking out, made up excuse after excuse that were less and less believable. And then he stopped even doing that. He started arguing with her over everything. The little details. Things that really shouldn’t have made any real difference. Then, once he got his way, he never mentioned it again, leaving Clarissa to wonder just what was happening. Even still, she refused to see it as the emotional abuse that it was. Refused to admit to anyone that there were days when she expected him to stop yelling and start using his fists. No one needed to know that.

The summer after Clarissa graduated with her bachelor’s degree, she found herself diving headfirst into work. She had a job that she loved and that she would be able to work around both her own disability and getting her doctorate in occupational therapy, as well as training for the 2012 Olympic games. This also kept her from seeing Elias as often, which, on some days felt like a life saver, while on others felt a bit like a death sentence. Even still, she found herself in love with everything she was doing and once the fall rolled around again, she was barely seeing Elias at all. He was constantly texting and calling her, but with everything going on, she didn’t have as much time for him. Something he’d, at one point, said he understood as it’d been something very similar, at times, with him getting his master’s.

In December of 2011, Elias’ temper rose to new heights. He became extremely possessive of her. Even managed to stop her from going into work a few times, making her lie to her boss as to the why. Until he was making her choose between their relationship and her work. The work that would establish a future for her after the summer of 2012. The work that had become her passion. And in a rather explosive fight, Clarissa chose her job.

A few days later, Jill took Clarissa to adopt her first cat, Haruhi.

With her focus back on her future instead of poor relationship choices, Clarissa started to prepare herself to announce her departure from Olympic archery after the London games. It was still massively terrifying, knowing that the one thing she’d been extremely good at her entire life was coming to an end even before she hit her mid twenties. But she had a new future and a new plan. 

It was her final interview of the 2012 Olympic games. She’d won gold but barely, something she hated to admit. Despite her sight having not only stabilized but improved quite a bit, a strange occurrence that no one could explain but that Clarissa was thankful for, in the year prior to the games, she had still struggled. A struggle that paid off, sure, but one she wished hadn’t existed.

“Future plans?” The interviewer was kind, already knowing that there were rumours floating around the Olympic Village about the young archer’s future in the sport.

“Finishing college and starting a proper career as an occupational therapist. As for archery, unfortunately, my time is up. I’ve been struggling with loss of sight since I was fifteen. The truth is, I’m surprised my eyesight was good enough to both qualify and compete in the games this year. I’m forever thankful for it, for the chances I’ve had to compete, to meet people, to stand on the world’s stage and show what I’m capable of. But, all good things must come to an end and, as sad as it is, this is the end of the road.” Clarissa did her best to smile through it, to let the look of pity on everyone’s faces not touch her. To roll off her back. Even as they stabbed to her very core.

And like that, Clarissa’s life as an archer had come to a close. She was ending on a high note, even if a bitter sweet one. Olympic gold in a town she’d once called home, for the country that still held her heart.

[blackkudos]

Oscar Stanton De Priest

Oscar Stanton De Priest (March 9, 1871 – May 12, 1951) was an American politician and civil rights advocate from Chicago. A member of the Illinois Republican Party he was the first African American to be elected to Congress in the 20th century. During his three terms, he was the only African American serving in Congress. He served as a U.S. Representative from Illinois' 1st congressional district from 1929 to 1935. De Priest was also the first African-American U.S. Representative from outside the southern states and the first since the exit of North Carolina representative George Henry White from Congress in 1901.

Born in Alabama to freedmen parents, De Priest was raised in Dayton, Ohio. He studied business and made a fortune in Chicago as a contractor, and in real estate and the stock market before the Crash. A successful local politician, he was elected to the Chicago City Council in 1914, the first African American to hold that office.

In Congress in the early 1930s, he spoke out against racial discrimination, including at speaking events in the South; tried to integrate the House public restaurant; gained passage of an amendment to desegregate the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the work programs under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal; and introduced anti-lynching legislation to the House (it was not passed because of the Solid South Democratic opposition). In 1934, De Priest was defeated by Arthur W. Mitchell, the first African American to be elected as a Democrat to Congress. De Priest returned to Chicago and his successful business ventures, eventually returning to politics, when he was again elected Chicago alderman in the 1940s.

Early life

De Priest was born in 1871 in Florence, Alabama, to freedmen, former slaves of mixed race. He had a brother named Robert. His mother, Martha Karsner, worked part-time as a laundress, and his father Neander was a teamster, associated with the "Exodus" movement. After the Civil War, thousands of blacks left continued oppression by whites in the South by moving to other states that offered promises of freedom and greater economic opportunities, such as Kansas. Others moved later in the century.

In 1878, the year after Reconstruction had ended and federal troops been withdrawn from the region, the De Priests left Alabama for Dayton, Ohio. Violence had increased in Alabama as whites had tried to restore white supremacy: the elder De Priest had to save his friend, former U.S. Representative James T. Rapier, from a lynch mob, and a black man was killed on their doorstep. The boy Oscar attended local schools in Dayton.

Career

Business

De Priest went to Salina, Kansas, to study bookkeeping at the Salina Normal School, established also for the training of teachers. In 1889 he moved to Chicago, Illinois, which had been booming as an industrial city. He worked first as an apprentice plasterer, house painter, and decorator. He became a successful contractor and real estate broker. He built a fortune in the stock market and in real estate by helping black families move into formerly all-white neighborhoods, often ones formerly occupied by ethnic white immigrants and their descendants. There was population succession in many neighborhoods under the pressure of new migrants.

Politics

From 1904 to 1908, De Priest was a member of the board of commissioners of Cook County, Illinois.

De Priest was elected in 1914 to the Chicago City Council, serving from 1915 to 1917 as alderman from the 2nd Ward, on the South Side. He was Chicago's first black alderman. In 1917 De Priest was indicted for alleged graft and resigned from the City Council. He hired nationally known Clarence Darrow as his defense attorney and was acquitted. He was succeeded in office by Louis B. Anderson.

In 1919, De Priest ran unsuccessfully for alderman as a member of the People's Movement Club, a political organization he founded. In a few years, De Priest's black political organization became the most powerful of many in Chicago, and he became the top black politician under Chicago Republican mayor William Hale Thompson.

In 1928, when Republican congressman Martin B. Madden died, Mayor Thompson selected De Priest to replace him on the ballot. He was the first African American elected to Congress outside the South and the first to be elected in the 20th century. He represented the 1st Congressional District of Illinois (which included The Loop and part of the South Side of Chicago) as a Republican. During the 1930 election, De Priest was challenged in the primary by noted African-American spokesperson, orator, and Republican Roscoe Conkling Simmons. De Priest defeated Simmon's primary challenge and won the general election afterward. During De Priest's three consecutive terms (1929–1935), he was the only black representative in Congress. He introduced several anti-discrimination bills during these years of the Great Depression.

DePriest's 1933 amendment barring discrimination in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a program of the New Deal to employ people across the country in building infrastructure, was passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His anti-lynching bill failed due to opposition by the white conservative Democrats of the Solid South, although it would not have made lynching a federal crime. (Previous anti-lynching bills had also failed to pass the Senate, which was dominated by the South since its disenfranchisement of blacks at the turn of the century.) A third proposal, a bill to permit a transfer of jurisdiction if a defendant believed he or she could not get a fair trial because of race or religion, was passed by a later Congress.

Civil rights activists criticized De Priest for opposing federal aid to the poor. Nevertheless, they applauded him for making public speeches in the South despite death threats. They also praised De Priest for telling an Alabama senator he was not big enough to prevent him from dining in the private Senate restaurant. (Some Congressmen ate in the Senate restaurant to avoid De Priest, who usually ate in the Members Dining Room designated for Congressmen.) The public areas of the House and Senate restaurants were segregated. The House accepted that De Priest sometimes brought black staff or visitors to the Members Dining Room, but objected when he entertained mixed groups there.

De Priest defended the right of students of Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., to eat in the public section of the House restaurant and not be restricted to a section in the basement near the kitchen, used mostly by black employees and visitors. He took this issue of discrimination against the students (and other black visitors) to a special bipartisan House committee. In a three-month-long heated debate, the Republican political minority argued that the restaurant's discriminatory practice violated 14th Amendment rights to equal access. The Democratic majority skirted the issue by claiming that the restaurant was a private facility and not open to the public. The House restaurant remained segregated through much of the 1940s and maybe as late as 1952.

In 1929, De Priest made national news when First Lady Lou Hoover invited his wife, Jessie De Priest, to a traditional tea for congressional wives at the White House.

De Priest appointed Benjamin O. Davis Jr. to the United States Military Academy at a time when the only African-American line officer in the Army was Davis's father.

By the early 1930s, De Priest's popularity waned because he continued to oppose higher taxes on the rich and fought Depression-era federal relief programs under President Roosevelt. De Priest was defeated in 1934 by Democrat Arthur W. Mitchell, who was also African American. After returning to his businesses and political life in Chicago, De Priest was elected again to the Chicago City Council in 1943 as alderman of the 3rd Ward, serving until 1947. He died in Chicago at 80 and is buried in Graceland Cemetery.

Personal life

Oscar married the former Jessie L. Williams (c. 1873 – March 31, 1961). They had two sons together: Laurence W. (c. 1900 – July 28, 1916), who died at the age of 16 and Oscar Stanton De Priest, Jr. (May 24, 1906 – November 8, 1983) A great-grandson of Oscar De Priest, Jr., Philip R. DePriest, became the administrator of his estate after his grandmother's death in 1992. This included his great-grandfather's Oscar Stanton De Priest House, now a National Historic Landmark, which still held his locked political office. This had not been touched since about 1951. This great-grandson has been working to restore the office and house, and assessing the political archives—"a veritable treasure trove."

Legacy and honors

The Oscar Stanton De Priest House in Chicago, at 45th and King Drive, has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and city landmark.

See also

List of African American firsts

List of African-American United States Representatives

Oscar Stanton De Priest House

Jessie De Priest

References

Bibliography

Day, S. Davis. "Herbert Hoover and Racial Politics: The De Priest Incident". Journal of Negro History 65 (Winter 1980): 6-17

Nordhaus-Bike, Anne. "Oscar DePriest lived Pisces's call to service, unity." Gazette, March 7, 2008.

Olasky, Martin. "History turned right side up". WORLD magazine. 13 February 2010. p. 22.

Rudwick, Elliott M. "Oscar De Priest and the Jim Crow Restaurant in the U.S. House of Representatives". Journal of Negro Education 35 (Winter 1966): 77–82.

External links

United States Congress. "Oscar Stanton De Priest (id: D000263)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.

Search for National Historic Landmark: Oscar De Priest House, National Park Service

“DE PRIEST, Oscar Stanton”, History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives

Shelley Stokes-Hammond, Biographical sketch: "Pathbreakers: Oscar Stanton DePriest and Jessie L. Williams DePriest", The White House Historical Association

"The DePriest Family Legacy", Video Interview/YouTube, White House Historical Association

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Born to prevent war, UN at 75 faces deeply polarized world (AP) Born out of World War II’s devastation to save succeeding generations from the scourge of conflict, the United Nations officially marks its 75th anniversary Monday at an inflection point in history, navigating a polarized world as it faces a pandemic, regional conflicts, a shrinking economy and growing inequality. Criticized for spewing out billions of words and achieving scant results on its primary mission of ensuring global peace, the U.N. nonetheless remains the one place that its 193 member nations can meet to talk. And as frustrating as its lack of progress often is, especially when it comes to preventing and ending crises, there is also strong support for its power to bring not only nations but people of all ages from all walks of life, ethnicities and religions together to discuss critical issues. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, looking back on the U.N.’s history in an AP interview in June, said its biggest accomplishment so far is the long period during which the most powerful nations didn’t go to war and nuclear conflict was avoided. Its biggest failing, he said: its inability to prevent medium and small conflicts.

Global trade rebounding (WSJ) Global trade is rebounding much more quickly this year than it did after the 2008 financial crisis, lifting parts of the world economy and defying predictions the pandemic could send globalization into permanent retreat. When the new coronavirus hit earlier this year, international trade in goods suffered the biggest year-over-year drop since the Great Depression. Economists warned of rising protectionism, and some companies said they would reassess overseas supply chains that were vulnerable to unexpected shocks. Trade remains below pre-pandemic levels. Still, it has snapped back robustly—and had recovered about half of this year’s historic loss by June, according to calculations by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank.

Dwindling ranks, declining public support plague police (Washington Post) Police forces are suffering from diminishing ranks, slumping morale and declining public support as the nation nears the end of a long, fraught summer defined by protests against policing tactics and racial injustice. Agency leaders and experts say the months of demonstrations have left officers strained and departments struggling to both recruit officers and keep the ones they have. The Portland Police Bureau in Oregon lost 49 officers to retirement in August, more than during all of 2019. The Atlanta Police Department, which became the focus of protests after a police shooting this summer, said about 140 officers have resigned so far this year, up from 80 during the same period last year. “Our workforce in general is pretty emotionally and physically fatigued,” said William H. “Skip” Holbrook, the police chief in Columbia, S.C. Weary officers were further shaken by the Sept. 12 ambush shooting of two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies as they sat in a police car. One is still hospitalized while the other has been released. Combined with the surge in nationwide demonstrations and calls to defund their departments, police in the United States say they feel under siege. Public opinion on policing has shifted. In a survey this summer, the Pew Research Center found that while most Americans still believe police do an excellent or a good job protecting people from crime, the percentage of people who think they use the right amount of force, treat racial groups equally and hold officers accountable for misconduct all fell by double-digit points since 2016.

Trump Expected to Name a Replacement for Ginsburg in the Coming Days (Foreign Policy) U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday while undergoing treatment for cancer, leading to an outpouring of grief but instantly opening a new battleground in an already intense political fight between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden less than two months before the country’s presidential election. As Foreign Policy’s Michael Hirsh wrote, Ginsburg’s “replacement could crucially tilt the court” toward either its conservative or liberal wing. With fewer than 50 days until the election, the timing of Ginsburg’s death leaves little time to complete the often long and cumbersome nomination process. There are also questions over how Senate Republicans will handle the situation. Republicans controversially blocked former President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, Merrick Garland, arguing that a president shouldn’t have the power to appoint a new Supreme Court justice in an election year. Leading Republicans have already backtracked on the logic they used to block Garland, signaling that they will facilitate the nomination process once Trump selects a replacement. But with a small 53-47 majority in the 100-member Senate, Democrats would only need four Republicans to vote against Trump’s pick to push the appointment until after the election.

How California Became Ground Zero for Climate Disasters (NYT) California is one of America’s marvels. By moving vast quantities of water and suppressing wildfires for decades, the state has transformed its arid and mountainous landscape into the richest, most populous and bounteous place in the nation. But now, those same feats have given California a new and unwelcome category of superlatives. This year is the state’s worst wildfire season on record. That follows its hottest August on record; a punishing drought that lasted from 2011 to last year; and one of its worst flood emergencies on record three years ago, when heavy rains caused the state’s highest dam to nearly fail, forcing more than 180,000 people to flee. The same manufactured landscapes that have enabled California’s tremendous growth, building the state into a $3 trillion economy that is home to one in 10 Americans, have also left it more exposed to climate shocks, experts say. And those shocks will only get worse. “There’s sort of this sense that we can bend the world to our will,” said Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist in San Francisco for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Climate change is exposing the vulnerabilities in the systems that we’ve engineered.”

Tropical Storm Beta makes landfall on Texas coast (AP) Tropical Storm Beta made landfall on the upper Texas coast late Monday night. The storm made landfall about 5 miles (8 kilometers) north of Port O’Connor, Texas, with maximum winds of 45 mph (72 kph), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. Its winds weakened as it made its way to shore over several days. Beta was the ninth named storm that made landfall in the continental U.S. this year. That tied a record set in 1916, according to Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach. The biggest unknown from Beta was how much rainfall it could produce in areas that have already seen their share of damaging weather during a busy hurricane season.

Cuba’s Economy Was Hurting. The Pandemic Brought a Food Crisis. (NYT) It was a lucky day for the unemployed tourism guide in Havana. The line to get into the government-run supermarket, which can mean a wait of eight or 10 hours, was short, just two hours long. And better yet, the guide, Rainer Companioni Sánchez, scored toothpaste—a rare find—and splurged $3 on canned meat. Cuba, a police state with a strong public health care system, was able to quickly control the coronavirus, even as the pandemic threw wealthier nations into crisis. But its economy, already hurting from crippling U.S. sanctions and mismanagement, was particularly vulnerable to the economic devastation that followed. As nations closed airports and locked down borders to combat the spread of the virus, tourist travel to Cuba plummeted and the island lost an important source of hard currency, plunging it into one of the worst food shortages in nearly 25 years. What food is available is often found only in government-run stores that are stocked with imports and charge in dollars. The strategy, also used in the 1990s, during the economic depression known as the “special period,” is used by the government to gather hard currency from Cubans who have savings or get money from friends or relatives abroad. Even in these stores, goods are scarce and prices can be exorbitant: That day, Mr. Companioni couldn’t find chicken or cooking oil, but there was 17-pound ham going for $230 and a seven-pound block of manchego cheese with a $149 price tag.

Madrid asks for Spanish army's help in battling coronavirus surge (Reuters) Madrid’s regional government chief requested the army’s help on Monday in fighting the coronavirus surge in the Spanish capital where local authorities ordered a partial lockdown of some poorer districts, prompting protests. At the height of the first wave of the pandemic in March-April, Spain deployed thousands of troops to help civilian authorities contain the outbreak. A recent spike in infections, peaking at over 10,000 per day, took cumulative cases above 670,000 as of Monday, the highest in Western Europe, while the number of deaths from the COVID-19 respiratory disease in Spain stood at 30,663. Meanwhile, residents in the southern district of Vallecas, one of the areas where a partial lockdown took effect on Monday, were upset but resigned to the curbs as police stopped cars getting in and out of the neighbourhood.

Indian couple run street-side classes for poor students (AP) On a quiet road in India’s capital, tucked away on a wide, red-bricked sidewalk, kids set adrift by the country’s COVID-19 lockdown are being tutored. The children, ages 4 to 14, carry book bags more than 2 kilometers (a mile) from their thatched-roof huts on the banks of the Yamuna River to this impromptu, roadside classroom. There, they receive free lessons in math, science, English and physical education, taught by a former Indian diplomat and his wife. It all began when Veena Gupta’s maid, who lives on bank of the river, complained that with schools shut, children in her impoverished community were running amok and wasting time. Veena, a singer and grandmother of three, and her husband, Virendra Gupta, decided to go out to the street and teach the kids so they are not left behind when school reopens. “They don’t have access to internet, their schools are shut and they don’t have any means to learn,” said Veena, who bought books, pencils, notebooks and other teaching materials, and set up the small, open-air classroom under the shade of a leafy banyan tree. India’s stringent lockdown to curb the spread of COVID-19 shut schools across the country in late March. Most remain closed. The street-side classes have grown as dozens of children showed keen interest. Now the Guptas—with help from their driver, Heera—teach three different groups three times a week, morning and evening. After class, the children are treated to homemade lemonade and cookies prepared by Veena.

Salarymen (Bloomberg) Japanese companies like to recruit employees fresh out of school and then keep them for the rest of their lives. In 2018, 70 percent of open jobs went to new grads. About one out of every four workers in Japan has been at their job more than 20 years, a figure that in the States is only around one in 10. This means that companies cutting back on hiring in 2021 will be devastating for the careers of an entire graduating class, and possibly for the rest of their lives: the jobs-per-applicant ratio is lower than ever amid 122,000 fewer openings. When this same thing happened in the late 1990s, the effects were felt decades later: among that era’s college grads, 35 percent of men and 9.6 percent of women are yet to find full-time employment. This is prompting a push for more job mobility in the country.

Alone among nations, US moves to restore UN Iran sanctions (AP) The United States slapped additional sanctions on Iran on Monday after the Trump administration’s disputed unilateral weekend declaration that all United Nations penalties eased under the 2015 nuclear deal had been restored. The announcement came in defiance of nearly all U.N. members, including U.S. allies in Europe, who have rejected U..S. legal standing to impose the international sanctions. It set the stage for an ugly showdown at the annual U.N. General Assembly this week and also came as President Donald Trump seeks to portray himself as a champion for Middle East stability ahead of November’s presidential election. The sanctions include freezes on any assets those targeted may have in U.S. jurisdictions, bar Americans from doing business with them and, perhaps most importantly, open up foreign governments. companies and individuals to U.S. penalties if they engage in transactions with them.

Opposition growing in the Ivory Coast (Foreign Policy) The political crisis in the Ivory Coast is escalating as opposition leaders have called for the public to engage in acts of civil disobedience to block President Alassane Ouattara’s bid for a third term. Critics of Ouattara, who was first elected president in 2010, argue that his candidacy violates the two-term limit set in the country’s constitution. His supporters, however, contend that Ouattara’s term count was reset because the constitution was ratified in 2016, after he took office. Protests against Ouattara have gripped the country since last month, leaving more than 12 people dead and raising concerns that next month’s presidential election could plunge the country into another deadly civil war.

[justsomeantifas]

its 11:59 its still technically tonight so

this is gonna be my reference point to questions abt venezuela, at least regarding things pre- May 19 2019. Its a bit scattered and it may get edited down along the road, but yeah.

short version that draws some similar conclusions: https://www.salon.com/2019/05/17/the-plot-to-kill-venezuela_partner/

one difference in scales that’s important to keep in mind: the lifespan of people is 2-7 decades. the lifespan of colonialism lasts centuries. the lifespan of media memory is a couple years, tops.

Most western narratives of venezuela start meaningfully at chavez, which is a mistake. The focus point in history around which the country flowed was the Caracazo. You probably already know about this, but a massive uprising took place in the heart of Caracas, against decades of dictatorship both formal and informal, after severe instability in the global oil market. The people were hungry, the riots were fiery, and the bullets bled. knows the death toll even now, but its estimated well into the thousands.  This happened pre-chavez, and started a cascade of events which brought him into limelight that you can read about here. not gonna go into more venezuelan history, but i talk a bit more here

chavez was democratically elected, multiple times.

   in 2002, after his first democratic election, he was kidnapped by US-backed troops and replaced by someone who threw out the 1999 constitution, which was as legitimate as any other made in venezuela’s colonial and violently capitalist history, seeing as it was the first (aka only, so far) of 26 constitutions actually approved by popular referendum. He was reinstated largely due to massive protests in support of him. Maduro however doesn’t really have as much of the charisma and support of chavez, which is creating problems - as well as exacerbating problems created by the economic crises ramping up just around chavez’s death. In 2015, there were elections to the National Assembly, which ended up with the Opposition winning a majority of the seats (which does show that there’s some degree of fairness in the elections, at least verifiably up til that point, yet that isnt rly accounted for when western media describes it as “undemocratic” - many of whom don’t apply the same scrutiny to their own country: such as this UN Human Rights councilor who also happens to be the crown prince of british-iraq, currently residing in the noted democracy of the Kingdom of Jordan, which has no vested interest or control over any particular export of Venezuela.).        

This turnout showed most of all that maduro had alienated as many as 2 million of his supporters, who didnt end up voting (though many also voted against him - trying to act on their feeling that whatever they want, its “not this”). This decreasing support also accelerates whats known as “Everyday Sabotage” - people not trusting in the government, and look out for their own interests contra everyone else. This is a danger inherent to tying “Socialism” to a primarily state project.       

However 1999 Constitution was never meant as an eternal document & it created mechanisms to call for new popular constitutional referendums to be held. That’s what the “Constituent Assembly” is about, which is what a lot of the western world is describing as him singlehandedly rewriting it (while also being “vague about its contents”), or “created by him”. Elections to the constituent assembly were boycotted by opposition, so that it would be government controlled & look like a sham in the eyes of the broader world. That being said, the assembly was called both as a reaction to losing election but also in response to intensifying crises - it was put forth (i don’t see any reason to believe in bad faith) as a way to come together and figure out how to address the needs that were driving people to protest - to address the desire for “not this”, but bc of the uncertainty, it was easily twistable by reactionaries by putting all emphasis on the former. Also timing corresponds with increasing fears of maduro straying from the path of chavez, the image of scrapping one of his strongest plays for smth unknown is risky - tho if there are other meaningful options given the situation im not sure. And the body’s got at least as much constitutional legitimacy as Guaido  (Chapter III)  

The 1999 constitution also enabled a recall election to be called against maduro in 2016, bc it was written with particular attention to holding public officials accountable - similar noble commitments helped to end the presidency of Rousseff & bring in Bolsonaro (who was also one of the people spurring on the investigations and whipping up a social base).

     (speaking of guaido & bolsonaro)

on Guaido:

part of student group in 2007 protesting against non-renewal of coup-assisting network, who the CFR (one of the major think tanks of the cold war still playing a big role in foreign policy today) considered “most important network”   

close friend of Leopoldo Lopez, the aforementioned coup plotter.

politician since 2010, won a couple small elections

Unknown to majority of general population until 2019, most venezuelans surveyed didnt know him   

Plan Pais       

plans to privatize state owned industry & allow investment from foreign oil companies       

center-right neoliberal draped in platitudes of “stability”, “revitalization”, “security”, and “rescue” - a message seemingly deliberately targeted to become more and more resonant with increased sanctions.

/on Guaido

governing is about the expression of power. I wanna live in a world where that power isn’t expressed, but as long as the exploitation of the global working class continues unabated, id prefer some of that power be put towards helping the poor.     

there is no such thing as a static state of affairs, there’s no “goldilocks zone” out in the political universe where we tweak things finely until we find whats best for everyone, only different rates of change in different dimensions. what we need to do is figure out how we can push that state of affairs in a direction so that everyday people have the power to take control of their lives. re

re: “constitutionality” - if the supreme court calls it constitutional then its constitutional. period. There’s no such thing as a supreme court as an “independent branch” of government, but there are different degrees of integration into the rest of it.       

The Supreme Tribunal of Venezuela has 32 members, (a bit more than a dozen put in by the national assembly, while the PSUV held it), and the opposition holds abt 3 away from a supermajority. Each member of the court holds their spot for 12 years. If that’s “The Most Corrupt In The World” according to Transparency International, i wonder what world the 9-person lifetime-appointed US Supreme Court (2 of which appointed by trump, and save for pulling a Weekend At Ginsbergs, likely 3) is on. In fact, one of the tactics that the more radical circles of democrat voters are putting forward is to pack the Supreme Court. Because thats how shit actually gets done, or at the least how shit is prevented from being committed w the stamp of legality. FDR learned that lesson too, in trying to pass what is today known as “The New Deal”

My comparisons to trump are for specific end: these actions are exerted on levers of liberal democracy, and every single liberal democracy is susceptible to them in some ways.

whats a “dictator”? if hes unelected, the millions of people who participated in the elections dont seem to think so. if maduro is a dictator, then what is donald trump? the majority of ppl didnt vote for him yet hes still governing. macron’s popularity has at several points been less than 1/3, and the yellow vest protestors have been violently attacked - why is he not “a violent dictator with only the support of the military”? These terms are not neutral.

“their elections are highly flawed” So What? show me a country whose elections arent.   

“opposition jailed” - ok but coup plotters don’t get off easy in any liberal democracy. If someone - say Bernie Sanders - said “enough is enough” and succeeded in overthrowing the current government with the help of a foreign government…. you think they’d let him go free? what if ten years later he was getting his supporters all riled up to do it again? how long you think he’d be in jail for (assuming he can survive well into his 100’s)? You think more than 13 years? Think he’d get house arrest? Some US states lock you up for posessing weed up to 10. If you stay long enough around this blog, youll find plenty of other examples of much more cruel and unusual punishments. Look at Chelsea Manning, look at Oscar Riviera…   look at the US protestors saying Guaido is illegitimate

 what we have to keep in mind most of all, is to show that the contradictions being exploited are inherent to Liberalism. Contradictions are just expressed most freely at the margins - the interstices

poor economic decisions happen everywhere - 2008/2009 still affecting the entire world there’s violence thats “natural”, and violence thats “intolerable”. The dividing line is whether we have anything to gain by changing things.

sanctions:    started under obama, originally targeted specific individuals, used as precedent for more generalized. They’re indirect - they have a “squeezing effect”, takes already-existing problems & just makes them markedly worse. also doesn’t necessarily correlate with emigration, bc it takes a lot of money to start a new life somewhere else, and sanctions disproportionately affect the poor.   

war wouldnt likely look like (many) US boots on the ground - we’ve got plenty of other places to be. It’d look like guns being smuggled to counter-protestors. It’d look like sending resources to neighboring countries like Colombia or Brazil who would then use their troops. Colombias ruling party is right wing populists - much of current president’s campaign was run on fearmongering abt venezuelan socialism - they’re raring to go. It’d look like drones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracas_drone_attack. Also means there likely won’t be a sudden trigger, its a gradually escalating stressful gradually-more-warlike situation.  

If war does break out - where would the refugees go?  In reality the majority would go to Colombia, but if anything significant breaks out there will be a stream of those looking to find shelter in the US, which has advertised itself as a beacon of hope - what would happen to them? some may get taken in as a gesture of showmanship, but nowhere close to the majority.   

speaking of the US - imagine if trump and bolton manage to actually plot a winning coup. Do you think that that wont be his main bullwark against ppl like Bernie? you think the media and rest of the democratic party wont jump on that narrative and “begrudgingly” support a fascist because the alternative might mean supporting single payer and not-having-good-for-ratings-climate-apocalypse?

another term thrown around without regard is “once vibrant” - for whom?

most articles ive seen just take this as an axiom, and dont find any cognitive dissonance when also saying chavez reduced poverty hugely.

 The answer to that rhetorical question: Citgo is venezuelan, before chavez none of the wealth went back to venezuela - thats what “vibrancy” means.  

     many similarities with BP (the-artist-formerly-known-as-the-anglo-iranian-oil-company)

in age of climate change & vocal ppl about phasing out oil, the more one’s livelihood is connected to oil, the more unstable ones country will be - either that, or the more instability ones country will cause.

“Oil exports fell by $2,200 per capita from 2012 to 2016, of which $1,500 was due to the decline in oil prices.”  

The drop in price that affected the venezuelan economy so much in 2014 was largely by US shale fracking

in 1970’s Chile, copper was the main product of Chile - allende nationalized the mines, and in return wall street dropped the

(also worth noting that venezuela’s got non-insignificant untapped shale basins)      

At least venezuela used the oil money to fund social programs instead of like, pad the pockets of Raytheon.

also oil price wars in africa highly correlated w oil (whose annual production doesn’t even combined total venezuelas)

a couple ppl have raised concerns abt my strong stance on equivocal dismissal - if there’s a difference, if there’s some way of reading your statement that says “X country that the State Dept wants to invade is an anomoly in the otherwise free world”, then that’s acting to push the discourse towards normalization & invasion. It’s not “whataboutism”, just basic consistency.   

now more than ever, narratives are affected by people. They may not be ones we had a hand in forging, but the way that we propagate them actually does have measurable effects on the larger-scale political outcomes. Always look for the base assumptions, as well as the direction   

sure denounce Chavez. sure denounce Maduro. denounce Kim, Xi, Castro, anyone. But if there’s no equally or proportionally loud denunciations of the horrors perpetrated by allies - the “assumed”, “natural” violence, then you’re acting to reinforce the narrative of exceptionalism.   

Just make sure after you take a breath, you denounce Saudi Arabia & Yemen, Israel for Palestine, the conditions which brought Argentinian/Brazillian, Brazilian coup, the US for Puerto Rico, the conditions which have murdered dozens of journalists in Mexico per year…  

what people want most of all is stability. “A debate over whether it is mismanagement and corruption by the Maduro government or the sanctions that are the author of the crisis is largely irrelevant. The point is that a combination of the reliance on oil revenues and the sanctions policy has crushed the policy space for any stability in the country.”

government’s errors and tensions   

fixed exchange rate -> black market      

took 5 years to address changing relation between dollar & BsF, all the room between those two curves left a huge room for intensifying crises, though since it also corresponds with the death of chavez, it sorta makes sense.   

antidemocratic actions and remarks by maduro  

scattered responses filled w half-solutions   

diversification needed, but how do you diversify an economy filled with rampant poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy… 

(nominally begrudging) support for mineral extraction 12.4% of territory opened to extraction - “Special Economic Zone” as a method of managing decay       

this is also what much of the reality of “economic diversification” looks like

not enough socialism. (even fox agrees!) Venezuela shows the limits of Social Democracy in countries living outside of the Imperial Core - esp the dangers if you’re in the crosshairs already bc of oil         

started out as populism, gradually grew as confronted more.            shows shaping influence on political organs from actions of foreign actors - if you’ve survived a coup before, you’re gonna become paranoid about any more of them - especially when the coup plotters say “hey lets do more coups”       

also shows the weakness of only having a small number of charasmatic faces representing the movement - if one dies and theres no clear and popular replacement, then you’ll lose ppl who were largely brought in by the charisma, weakening your political project, and creating cracks for reactionary forces to take advantage of - especially in times of transition.       

bourgeoisie still control a majority of the economy.            Capitalist businesses are internally unaccountable, and in this age of intensified global trade, one can punish countries for straying from the pack by moving business & focus away. If you’re looking for dictatorships, look at the thousands of private companies run as dictatorships daily       

capital flight is a real effect, precisely because socialism is fundamentally and irreconcilably against the self-interest of the bourgeoisie. not necessarily against the interest of the humans-who-are-also-bourgeois, but of the impersonal self-sustaining force of capital.           

Have you ever pulled something out of an electrical socket, and seen a quick spark? The reason that occurs is bc of what’s called an induction current, which is a fancy physics word for flowing electricity not liking to suddenly change its flow. If you accidentally touch that spark, you might feel it, but youll live to tell the tale. But if you only take the plug out halfway & touch it, that’s a different story.  Capital flows similarly.

   my country (lithuania) has been facing sky-high emigration since the collapse of the USSR (with an added boost after 08-09), we have also consistently had one of the highest suicide rates in the world (#7), a minimum wage of about 3 Euros an hour (after a recent increase), as well as one of the highest prison populations in Europe (discounting Russia & Belarus… which like….)   

when are we gonna be invaded? when will the US media talk about our pain?  

oh wait, they did. We cried all pretty for the TV cameras, then they got a bozo nobody really knew of to denounce the government, who they called dictatorial (though it was far from ideal, massive bureaucracies dont tend to mix well with single-person-decision-making). And to be fair, the fact that the government was unpopular wasnt entirely undeserved. But what was promised to us was the idea of “Freedom”, “Free Enterprise”; to “Get Rid of Corruption” and institute “Real” Democracy". They said we’d be integrated into the glorious capitalist west, and we understood that to mean that we’d be in the position of a Germany, or at least an Austria or smth. But they never meant to integrate us into the imperial Core, we have always been seen as part of the Periphery - the “assumed” violence that “naturally” happens.    

Then we got to where we our today. Some of the stuffs more available, but expensive. Most of the bureaucracy’s still around, it just helps fewer people. We stand as an example of what to expect, in one of the best case scenarios, you would join our emigrees now making up a significant percentage of underpaid house-servants aka maids across the EU.  

if we want the people of Venezuela to be healthy, safe, and fulfilled, then:

speak out and pointing to the effects of US sanctions is incredibly important. They’ve already killed 40,000 people in the last year, and 300,000 more are in extreme danger (and millions more in long-term risk).

what does it mean when you simultaneously sanction trade with a place but also demand they let you give them humanitarian aid?

if there is to be action taken by the international community, then the US has forfeited its right to speak. They threw it away once in 2002, and obama rhetorically picked it up and dusted it off so that trump could throw it in a bigger dumpster, thats also on fire. However we also still live in a world deeply shaped by US Hegemony, so the opinions of its close trade partners & closest-knit media buds should be seen as influenced as such. Doesn’t mean that theyre wrong on everything too, but they still feel the magnetic pull of the US economy and ecosystem (as well as their own potentially imperial interests) and the effect of that force cannot be discounted.

transitioning our economies away from oil & away from globalized neoliberalism which only values peripheral states by their exports - dissolves tensions of how to produce in unproductive terrain   

socialize medicine in the US, so that drug companies run by dictatorships can’t control their lives & ours. healthcare is especially reliant on imports, sanctions affect especially strongly.  

normalize the ideas of Socialism, without taking the easy way out of “oh no dont think of Venezuela, think of sweden or denmark”. None of them are Socialist, but to avoid the complexities of Venezuela is to imagine that US attempts at socialism wouldn’t involve significant capital flight. If we don’t consider that, if we don’t have solid actionable plans to deal with that, while also facing the inherent complexity of changing material conditions, then we’re gonna waste whatever shot we get.   

redirect conversation normally centered around government towards support of the tens of thousands of small business co-operatives, where people live their daily lives in a democratic manner.

on The Communes:

    “delegating responsibility throughout all members, and bringing important decisions to the whole to work through and find the best possible solution… They create “collective criteria” together; agreements stipulating whether individuals have power over certain decisions or whether it is up to the whole group. However, he assures that these “are not rigid, they can change at any moment.” The cooperative I lived with in Venezuela had regular organizational meetings where they informally came to agreement and were even able to come back to re-evaluate decisions that didn´t seem to be satisfactory for the whole group in this same way. Decisions and decision making, in this way, are viewed as a process not contained by meetings and discussions in board rooms, but are always being analyzed and made better by the process of putting them into action, and not only by thinking them out and writing them down.”

- the “Self Government of the Producers” - aka what it looks like for cooks to govern.   

they have communal councils as well - neighborhood councils in the same vein that so many (rightfully) find inspiring in Kurdistan . They preexisted chavez, but they were able to proliferate and be given legal recognition through him. I understand that legal recognition can act to ‘name’ a body & pin it to smth that doesn’t match its requisite variety - how dynamic it is, but imo as its currently legislated it recognizes a good amount of the autonomy that they had already been excersizing. - liable to change                                government recognition of co-ops has drawbacks too, and correlates negatively with that coop’s success           

           "A good example of this intention is the de-emphasis that cooperatives in Venezuela put on advertising or “marketing” products, and instead push to find more people to become part of the cooperative, and choose the services or products they provide based on community decisions about what is needed. A cooperative I worked in […] was originally a family owned and operated theater group that traveled around the country performing theater pieces that highlighted social and environmental issues. When they joined the […] cooperative, the larger co-op did an analysis and decided they wanted a natural fruit juice concentrate producer and gave the group a loan to acquire capital and start producing. They have been doing this for only a couple of years now but have already paid back the loan to the larger cooperative and are bringing extra money in to support themselves, better their services, and supply extra funds to the larger cooperative for community projects such as the recently [2012] built community health center…                  

The cooperative services I experienced and learned about in Venezuela were health, dental, food, and a separate example of trash services. A dental cooperative […] provides quality dental services (I know because I used them) almost every day for affordable prices. You don´t have to be a member of the cooperative, and you don´t have to make an appointment. It takes only a couple of hours, and emergency situations are treated with urgency. The health center, built with funds provided by all the associated cooperatives[…], works the same way. Anyone can go there, the services are subsidized by the cooperative so they are affordable, the clinic and workspaces are clean and well taken care of, and the quality of the service is great. Worker-members of the cooperative receive health care at the facility without charge except for the massage and acupuncture services that they also provide at a really low price.

           […] food services are priced to provide more access to food for the community in which it exists. The original and persistent intention is to make the best situation for people on all ends of the process. The producers are part of the cooperative and are part of the group that decides the prices that growers get, as well as the prices that the food is sold for. This means that both farmers and workers at the market decide what to charge a person, which ultimately affects how much money the growers receive, as well as if the food is affordable for the people who need to eat who live in the city. In a normal capitalist market system these parties are separated and put up against each other, raising prices for consumers and lowering them for small producers, excluding those people from getting enough money to afford all the necessities that are typically only provided at a high price.

           One communal council, a parallel governing organization of community members linked to investment funds from the national government, in the city of Merida, Venezuela organized themselves to get funds to buy a trash collection truck. The truck at the time was used for a specific waste removal project that removed waste from their community regularly but was not a traditional collection service. However, they did have plans to expand the project to start their own collection service, and this would be provided by the commal council, an anti-capitalist organization which does not require people to pay for the service. Although this is not a “co-operative” as some hardliner co-operative enthusiasts might point out, it is a horizontal anti-capitalist organization widening access of necessary services to the larger community run by community members; following cooperative values of equity, inclusion, and solidarity I believe this to be an example of cooperative economics and action. It appears to me that economic inclusion is much more likely to widen only when those who are being excluded are included in the process of organizing the services and are in control of the economy.“

until the communes, workers cooperatives, and the like are strong enough to rule themselves, having Maduro in power is the only option given to us which doesn’t trigger the control of reactionaries. People make their own history, but not in situations of their choosing - the exact outcome isn’t predetermined, but there’s only a limited number of poles - gravitational attractors - towards which that trajectory is heading at any particular time.   

if maduro acts to squash the power of the communes, then thats a different situation. but until that point, we outside of the country must work to center any discussion on these bodies - they are the heart of the country and of whatever social revolution has occurred/is further possible. They are filled with lessons for us to learn from, and show how rich and dynamic the organized populace can be if they are allowed to control their communities. (ex of dealing with gang violence from @ 22:50)       

This is all said with recognition that many chavistas have acted against communes, the bureaucratic machine acts to co-opt much of their energy, its linguistically obscured the concept of "ownership” with that of “control”, and that the state has changed its messages over time. But the heart of the communes is what’s a priority, and they have acted against the government overstepping its bounds & mis-identifying them. But whats important is that there’s a feedback process in the gvt to actually allow them to assert their autonomy. Liberals will do their utmost to close those channels.

   If Guaido and the Popular Will take control of power, be assured that whatever gains made in organizing the everyday people of Venezuela will be at the top of the chopping block. How effective that suppression turns out to be is undetermined - it might turn out to strengthen the communes, but that outcome would be damage control, not something to try and bullseye.

Effective Propaganda knows that its more effective to control what’s left out than control what’s put in. Keep that in mind, and study trajectories and forces.

other links:

https://next.podbay.fm/podcast/1363342644/e/1551711604

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Voc08vh9cJY

https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/21/a-cowboy-in-caracas/

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/the-tragedy-of-venezuela/

https://www.multpl.com/venezuela-gdp

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/fivethirtyeights-venezuela-problem

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-venezeulas-middle-class-is-taking-to-the-streets/

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/bjkmq8/fiery-protest-leader-leopoldo-lopez-faces-13-year-sentence-in-venezuela

https://potent.media/minimum-sentencing-for-marijuana-possession

https://www.thoughtco.com/core-and-periphery-1435410

https://popularresistance.org/building-the-commune-radical-democracy-in-venezuela/

http://www.antiwar.com/regions/regions.php?c=Venezuela

[medea10]

My Review of Kiss x Sis

/headdesk

Okay, I guess 2019 was the year I catch up on incestish titles. After watching more recent animes involving the main boy-toy eye-banging their step-sisters like in Domestic Girlfriend and Eromanga Sensei, I thought I should go back a decade and check out a slightly-known anime known only as Kiss x Sis.

…Of course I didn’t go at this voluntarily! I have more sense than that! I just put it in the randomizer with a bunch of other animes that are unlicensed or in license limbo. Who the fuck knew this one pile of dirty underwear was going to be the one that I would watch after finishing a cute story like Fushigi Yugi?!

I hate my life sometimes!

Actually, I was semi-curious about this title back when the television anime series came out in 2010…if not horribly disgusted at the concept. But because I had other things to watch at the time like Hetalia, Durarara, and Kimi ni Todoke…you know I had better things to watch! So here we are!

Keita Suminoe is a third-year middle school student on the verge of entering high school. He has a life that the boys at his school envy.

He gets to go home to two horny step-sisters, Ako and Riko!

So basically, Keita lost his mother at a young age and his father remarries soon after. That mother has two daughters, Ako and Riko. Basically a non-fucking-a-teacher version of Domestic Girlfriend! And it is clear that these two sisters WANT THE D from their younger step-brother!!! Very clear when in the first episode alone, these two girls flashed him their boobies, stole his dirty underwear to sniff, and broke into his heavily locked-up bedroom to sleep with him and play grab-dick!

WHAT AM I WATCHING?! And this is clearly something made in the early 2010s with this shit! At least .feel productions went on to do better…God I hope so!

So we watch the weekly shenanigans of Keita trying to study in order to get into a high school, while his horny step sisters do every erotic thing you could possibly think of to get their brother’s attention. Just put the bullet in my head now, please!

BETWEEN THE SUB AND THE NEVER TO BE DUB: So as of this date, no one has picked up this anime here in the states. Neither the television series nor the OVA! Which is shocking to me! You mean to tell me that Media Blasters wasn’t stupid enough to pick up this? That’s the same company that licensed a bunch of obscure yaoi and hentai titles and you’d think something like this would have gotten a full release (no pun intended). So in short, this series is unavailable on any streaming site, DVD release, or any of that shit! So yar-dee-har-har, pirate time!

The cast, I’m only familiar with one well-known name and the rest of the cast I’ve only heard in a few roles from animes I hardly remember watching. I can’t really claim that this is the anime that gave Ayana Taketatsu several incest-ish roles in the future, but you can’t argue with the results. Because Taketatsu ended up playing a girl interested in her sibling at least three other times after playing Ako. As you can tell, I am still clearly not over watching Oreimo. With that said, here’s what you might recognize these folks from.

*Keita is played by Ken Takeuchi (known for Lithuania on Hetalia and Yusuke on Green Green)

*Ako is played by Ayana Taketatsu (known for Sugu on SAO, Kirino on Oreimo, Azusa on K-ON!, Koneko on High School DxD, Hotaru on Dagashi Kashi, Yuzu on Citrus, and Erica on Berserk 2016)

*Riko is played by Yuiko Tatsumi (known for Mio/Midori on Little Busters)

I FEEL SORRY FOR…: Yeah, here’s a nice category where I feel sorry for a single character in this show that really shouldn’t have so many horrible things happen to her. Yeah, I said ‘her’. I feel sorry for Keita too (to an extent), but Miharu’s got it worse!

Miharu has just been in the wrong place at the wrong time whenever she’s around Keita. Oh sure, this anime gives us the usual schtik of her falling over and everyone sees her underwear or something else incredibly embarrassing where other classmates can see. But nothing could prepare me for episode 5 where we see this woman fondled, stuck in small spaces with that same fondler, and to cap this off, watch Miharu hold in her pee until she literally burst. Yeah, they animated this girl peeing on Keita. Add insult to injury, that wasn’t the last time we saw this girl pee on or in front of Keita. It happens again! And again!

And he even dreams about being pee’d on! In fact, every time Miharu hears Keita’s name and sees him, she wants to pee! God, this poor girl!

Amazingly, THIS still doesn’t trump Gakuto deficating during class in Prison School. But the pee-pee scenes were still pretty messed up.

SHIPPING: Oh God…where do I even begin with this tripe?! As it turns out, Keita actually had feelings for both of his older step-sisters when he was much younger. He even prayed for one day marrying both of them. But got slapped in the face by reality as Japan does not allow polygamy of that caliber!

You wouldn’t have thought that with the way he is now as he’s embarrassed and hates being fondled by his older step-sisters, but here we are. And as for Ako and Riko, they find every other boy gross, perverted, and disgusting. They like their pure little step-brother. And before you go off on the age-demographic, Ako and Riko are only one year older than Keita. So age shouldn’t really be an issue here. It’s everything else that’s hella illegal!

Oh and their parents just laugh it off and find it cute that the girls love their little brother this way. Some parents!

But it’s not just the two sisters after Keita! Keita has an underclassman named Yuuzuki who has a thing for him. Because this series isn’t complete without a Lolita flashing her panties! And then there’s Miharu…

Oh God, this poor girl. She ends up with the short end of the stick whenever Keita is around her (especially the pee scenes). I know because some of these interactions, both Keita and Miharu have felt some sort of uncomfortable yet sexual thrill with one another. I just have a feeling Keita’s going to end up with one or both of his sisters despite all this.

At least that’s all for Keita’s sordid affairs…

Episode 7 happens!

FUCK! WHY THE TEACHER?! WHY DID SHE “MAGIC-MIKE” HERSELF ON KEITA’S GYM CLOTHES!

I apologize for most of the things I ever said about Domestic Girlfriend. At least Natsuo was at legal age (in Japan). This kid is a middle schooler being pursued by two classmates, his two step-sisters, and a teacher from the high school. IT ISN’T EVEN HIS TEACHER (yet)! This lady is Ako and Riko’s teacher! I say NO to Keita getting with the teacher!

ENDING TO TV SERIES: So the main focus of the series (besides a middle school boy being lusted after by his two step-sisters, a loli, and a teacher) mostly has to do with Keita trying to study so he can enter the same high school as Ako and Riko. Yeah, Keita is usually studying whenever we get a break from loli-twincest-bait. I shouldn’t say that, because the girls still made study sessions extra sexual.

Yeah, if you have a sister writing words and phrases in provocative parts of her body, you’re gonna remember!

So Keita studied for the entrance exam and took the test. However the day of the results was anything but pleasant. Bad luck followed Keita everywhere he went. And when he went to the result board, his number wasn’t on there and so he will not attend the same high school as his sisters, his friends, and one horny teacher. And I gotta say, that’s a fucking blessing. Keita barely gets any peace at home with his sisters constantly trying to get in his undershorts. Add to that, their teacher now has pervy fantasies involving Keita along with her samurai fetish. Not going to that school is probably the best thing to happen to the boy. But that’s just my opinion. Of course he’s going to try for the school again next year.

But Keita finally got some good news! Miharu’s dog somehow got some mail from Keita and it was an acceptance package due to Keita being on the waiting list. So Keita gets to go to school with Ako and Riko. And Miharu didn’t pee on him when Keita hugged her…but the trail of pee she left as she ran off speaks otherwise. God, this fucking show!

Okay, time for graduation from middle school to high school. And as is tradition, girls ask for a button off a boy’s uniform as a memento. In Keita’s case, too many unnamed girls beat the main girls to it. So Ako and Riko decided to have a little fun by playing a different game to gain something from Keita. And then Yuuzuki and Miharu ended up in this game as well! Yuuzuki flashed her snatch to Keita and Miharu was alone in the shed with Keita for a few minutes. Surprisingly, Miharu didn’t pee all over Keita this time (although they slipped and they wound up in an awkward position).

So after that dirtiness, the family celebrated Keita’s graduation. And that night, Ako and Riko decided to give him a friendly visit while Keita slumbers. Now believe it or not, I was shocked that this scene didn’t end up with a premature ejaculation gone wrong, but we get a touching scene instead. Keita was speaking while sleeping where he’s fighting off a horde of crazy girls to save a button for his sisters. Aw, he loves his sisters. Aw, I’m fighting back my urge to puke!

The ending credits show us Keita entering high school and watch all the shenanigans of him with his harem of girls. One can only imagine what his high school years are going to be like. But since this series ended in 2010, that tale ends here. Now I haven’t picked up the manga publication and have no intention of doing that (this adaptation is enough for me). Seeing as the manga is still in serialization, maybe they’ll get into Keita’s high school life and quite possibly who he chooses to be with. Now does the OVA give us a glimpse of Keita in high school with Ako, Riko, Miharu, and the pervy teacher lady? Let’s take a look!

OVA: So the OVA series began in 2008, two years before the television series came to air. And it didn’t finish things until 2015. So basically, people waited a full year for each episode to come out. Normally I’d be pissed if I had to wait a full year for a continuation to a story. But for fuck’s sake, it’s Kiss x Sis, I want to fuck my little step-brother please! Nothing hard to remember there!

And because these are OVA’s, I expect this to be a lot more lewd compared to the television series. Meaning, expect to see nipples and ejaculation scenes! When viewing, yeah it’s a lot nastier than the television series, but no actual nipples. Every show is different with nipples showing, I guess! Also, they somehow toned down scenes where Keita is peed on. I didn’t think this was a sentence I ever needed to write, but here we are! One thing I noticed is that the first half of the OVA set mostly featured Keita and his sisters. All the other characters really didn’t show up until the 6th episode. What’s more, after episode 5, they show Keita in high school with his sisters. So I guess we do get to see Keita in high school here. But let’s not give this show the benefit of the doubt. It’s still full of panty shots, piss shots, kissing, heavy petting, erotic scenes, and 95% more boners from Keita. I will say that Keita seems more willing to go along with whatever sexual act his sisters put him through than in the television series.

The final episode wasn’t really a conclusion and we don’t really know who Keita’s going to end up with. So I guess it’s up to our imagination if he ends up with his step-sister, his other step-sister, the underaged Lolita, Boobs McGee, or a horny teacher with a samurai fetish. Instead, we get an episode of getting drunk off some tapioca wine, ball sucking that leads to tit and clit sucking, a very weird scene where Keita puts 10 bandaids on his sister’s box, and other disgusting acts of debachary.

Before you ask, no I disliked this anime. Just…no!

I do admire their creativity when the sisters are sexually curious. I mean we were all at that age where we get sexually curious. I’m not into the incest storylines. If that’s your thing, fine with me, I don’t and can’t judge anyone on that!

Thankfully, no one has licensed this anime. That should be a clear sign that you avoid Kiss x Sis like the plague!

Thank God that’s over! What’s my next anime that’s unlicensed/license limbo?

To Heart.

This shit wasn’t an incest show, was it? No?! Okay, I’ll take it!

[shibashouse]

Self-study of English (2) ーHow the Internet Has Changed Learning Styles

* writing in red: learning tools or styles which emerged in the Internet era

Before the Internet prevailed, self-study of foreign languages was monotonous sometimes and often took discipline. I still remember I was given lots of penmanship assignments, such as writing every new word 10 times each in my notebook, which I thought time-wasting sometimes.

When my eldest daughter entered junior high school, there was at least one computer at average families in Japan. My husband and I used an e-learning app for TOEIC Test on our (old Windows XP) PC from 2003 to 2006. Preparing for the TOEIC test with a computer was extreme fun compared with my Eiken preparation in the 20th century:  the computer app responded to me right after I answered the questions, which was as if I were playing a computer game. 

Faster Internet Has Made the World Smaller

In 2007, I upgraded my laptop to Windows Vista and gave my old one to my eldest daughter. I kept on learning English using a computer; I started reading out my blog entries in English, recording my reading and attached the audio clips when posting them. At that time, there were just a few online English schools for practicing conversation, and I failed to activate Skype in my Windows Vista laptop. Learning English for me then was solving vocab drills on the Internet, zapping International radio shows ( actually, I subscribed to BBC radio, which cost 1450 yen per month ), and occasionally writing blog entries in English. Until 2008, I was an introverted housewife being devoted to learning English in front of my PC. I preferred learning English alone with my PC to hanging out with PTA staff members at my children’s elementary school; it was all because of saving money.

Since 2009, I went to work again. At first, I worked for a company cafeteria, which is about 10 minutes from home by bike. Unfortunately, I left there just for 5 months; I was too poor at cooking. Next year, I started teaching English at a franchised cram school. About half of the students there were 9th graders (the 3rd year in junior high school ), so teachers needed to handle them really carefully, especially one month before their first high school entrance exams. Personally, the times teaching English and preparing lessons at the cram school were my treasure, because I could study English deeply and check how precisely I understand grammar and word usage at the same time. 

In the days I worked as a cram school teacher, my son studied at a cram school to prepare for his high school entrance exams. I attended parents' day meetings there and listened to the school owner’s lectures a couple of times. Luckily I hadn’t preached by the school owner about my son’s studying attitude, but he didn’t agree with my English-learning style making the most of the Internet; he wanted me to study traditionally, using printed materials.

In my 2nd year as a cram school teacher, I got my first smartphone, which was Android 2.1. I have bought less printed drill books since I got a smartphone; I prefer digital ones, especially English vocab books. Digital drill books (actually apps) have audio clips recorded by professional narrators, which are really effective for practicing pronunciation. Moreover, they told me whether my answers were right or wrong by the sound, took my study log and sometimes praised me with cute gimmicks.

I had to leave the cram school in March 2012 because of the management tactics change, in other words, the board preferred younger teachers. (I learned that later by the cram school’s website) Moreover, my mother wanted me not to work as a cram school teacher anymore, so I needed to look for a daytime job to relieve her. I promised to work during the day, but I had to wait for more than a year to teach English again. I went to a few factories as a temporary worker on weekdays and proctored the TOEIC test several times a year on Sunday then.

Eligible Skills for English Teachers in the Internet Era

In June 2013, I found my teaching license would expire in March 2014 unless I attended the intensive training to renew it. Signing up for the teaching license renewal training doesn’t take much time for teachers as long as they’re at work, but I needed one more step to apply for the training. I wrote the registration form for a temporary or part-time teacher bank and submitted it to the education ministry, and waited for the grant. I joined the 5-day intensive training in Hitachi City in August 2013, and two weeks after the training, I got an offer as a substitute teacher for 7 months at the longest. My workplace then was a public high school in the countryside, and just a few students liked English. Colleagues in the English department advised me to entertain students during lessons rather than teach the language, which was really helpful during my lessons and gave me a new perspective.

“Enjoy reading high school English textbooks as materials for myself, and entertain students with trivia about English words, phrases, or topics presented in the textbooks”

I memorized the word “hibernate” in a textbook for 11th graders (2nd year in high school), and the most difficult word for me in the textbooks I had taught with was “ventriloquism”, which I still need to google.

I taught English totally for 1 year and 7 months there and truly enjoyed giving lessons and learning English for myself at the same time, but I had been worrying about one thing:  my TOEIC test score has not so much improved. I often heard a rumor that those who teach English should hold the 1st grade on the Eiken test or AT LEAST 900 on the TOEIC test (holding both is preferable), and I had neither of them. Ironically, company workers who hold both Eiken 1st grade and the full mark ( 990) on TOEIC test without the national teaching license are more welcomed as (private) English teachers or coaches than (licensed) schoolteachers without Eiken 1st grade or higher TOEIC test scores, because Japanese has been taught English as an entrance exam subject, which means English skills are gauged by test scores. Since I failed Eiken 1st grade twice so far and have never reached 900 on the TOEIC written test, I thought I was not eligible for teaching English in early 2015. Actually, I got only 815 in January 2015 and had come to want to see another world.

I think it’s natural that higher test score holders are respected more than schoolteachers who haven’t taken the Eiken test and TOEIC test since test scores are objective to everyone. Nowadays is not only the Internet era but also the AI era, young English learners can practice English 100 times more efficiently than in the pre-Internet era thanks to the Internet and digital gadgets. That means some highly advanced students can be over their English teachers in test scores, in other words, English teachers at schools with average test scores might be discounted easily even though they are nationally licensed.

I Stopped Teaching English to Enjoy Using It

In March 2015, I accepted a transfer to teach computing instead of English. Being a computer teacher, I don’t have to worry about rumors or criticisms of my English test scores anymore. I simply enjoy learning English, that means at the same time I’ve become a lazy learner compared to the past :) Zapping articles about the newest smartphones or computer software is really fun, although the words there are not listed in vocab books.  Reading breaking news in English is also useful for me to enhance critical thinking since news articles reported in Japanese often seem biased or partly exaggerated to conceal the truth.

[stusbunker]

Known: Hell and Other Delusions

A Supernatural Dark Fan-fiction

Featuring: Dean Winchester x Demon!Reader, Dean Winchester x Female OC

Series Masterlist

A/N: With respect to my readers’ devotion to the show and its story lines, I have included dates relevant to air dates for reference points. I try not to repeat information you already know, but please ask if something doesn’t make sense! xoxo Stu

Warnings: Torture, captivity, demons, smells, pain, blood, bile, possession, hinted potential sexual assault, Slow Burn. Each chapter will have its own warnings, because I am generous like that.

Earth Date: August 16, 2008

Location: Hell, Alastair’s Quarters

“Does it have to smell all the time?” Dean growled as he sucked in a deep breath of the slightly less offensive office air.

“Well, it’s Hell, you see. If we made it aromatic, that would be poor marketing. Wouldn’t you agree Mr. Winchester?” Alastair didn’t look up from his notes, until the last syllable, brows lifted and face unimpressed.

“Your point? Over-promising and under-delivering would be worth it.” Dean muttered, mindlessly playing with the trinkets on one of Alastair’s clinically organized shelves. The Higher Demon sighed and tossed Dean across the room with a flick of his wrist.

“Don’t touch things that aren’t yours, Dean. Didn’t your parents teach you any manners?” Alastair stood and approached the paralyzed soul of his new apprentice. “Oops, I mean that petulant rage-o-holic father and that charcoaled corpse of a mother teach you any manners?”

Dean grunted against the strain of the demon’s strength, his voice stuck in his throat. Alastair glared back, allowing his true eyes to glow with power until Dean stopped struggling.

“You have patients waiting, Dean. Why don’t you scurry along to your post,” Alastair straightened the young man’s collar before patting him on the back, “Wipe that snarl off your face while you’re at it.”

Now that you knew it was him, the soul you had envied and empathized with over years of torture, you couldn’t help but take in his appearance in complex detail. The way his eyes shifted in the harsh light, gold giving way to moss covered teak. His teeth were impossibly straight, though you rarely saw them as Dean stood impassive above you. Light brown hair unchanging from the moment of his death. It was a solid year before you used his name, casually greeting him as he entered. His shoulders hunched, but his face bordered on endearment when he spun to face you.

The softness in his lips and the lines around his eyes were too sacred for this refuse pile. He was easier on the eyes than Alastair, though it hurt to look at Dean like that, even with his faux sincerity, it fluttered long forgotten feelings within you. He didn’t reply but cleared his throat and continued to sort through his tools. There was a crack that broke open in the back recesses of your logic that day, and something like a permeating gas sank through.

You weren’t the only victim who felt the grips of Dean’s rack, never the only one to feel his wrath. You couldn’t keep count of the other souls that filled the expanses of the chain webs, nor the dozens waiting in line for the first-class treatment that Alastair’s minions were renowned for. There was no point, with communication restricted and connection only giving the guards more things to use against you. You began to feel transparent once more, another one of the huddling masses from your former pit. Even among the most vindictive of captors, you were one of many that were carted to their dens, day in and day out.

Until that moment each day when Dean locked eyes on you and you felt all that delicious concentration for as long as you could stand him. Dean had learned over his years behind the blade, observed your tells and triggers, and used them to his every advantage. The choking moans and strangled cries each giving him more ammunition for his arsenal. You fed on the shadows in his eyes, the way they moved and lingered with every whimper that passed your lips.

Dean had started to crave the job as you longed for him to hurt you, to see the glint of his teeth as he grinned at your misery. The warping of your form was imperceptible to his untrained eye, but Alastair sensed its progress from his observation platform. He was nearly as pleased with his student as he was with himself.

Earth Date: September 2, 2008

Location: Bonaventure Cemetery (Outside Savannah, GA)

Chloe Collins cursed her choice in jobs as the clinging, swampy air soaked through her top while she filled the grave. Although the salt-and-burn was ordinary enough, the drive across country had left her restless rather than exhausted. She packed up her supplies in near silence and quickly wheeled onto the Interstate, with no discernible destination.

The weight of the humidity dampened her hair while leaving a sheen to her naturally tanned skin, she tried to ignore the less than subtle once over from the motel desk clerk. As if she could be anymore physically uncomfortable in that moment. She took the old metal key ring and gave him a toothless smile. The shower pressure did little to relieve the tension from her scarred shoulders, but CC used every drop of lukewarm water to wash away the sweat and filth of the last hunt.

Adabelle, GA

Ruby dragged her bag from the backseat of the Impala, sighing at the cliché décor of the patriotic motel. Loyalty to something as fleeting as political structures seemed a waste of initiative, if not all together disappointing to the demon encased in the trim brunette brain-dead woman. She followed the surly hunter she had latched onto into their shared room, curious to see what he possibly had planned for them in this corner of the Bible Belt.

Unfortunately for her, research involving the surrounding haunted sites was Sam Winchester’s primary agenda. Ruby dragged her feet, grabbing food and drinks while casually messing with the local teenagers loitering at the superstore. She smirked at the gawking boys complimenting her ‘cool contacts’ before stumbling out of the way. When she pulled into the motel’s parking lot a voice caught her attention.

“Hey Winchesters, you’re a little late for the case,” a curvy woman called across the parking lot at the Impala, Ruby noticed how the female hunter recoiled at the sight of her crawling out of the driver’s seat. “Oh, sorry, I thought you were somebody else.”

Ruby calculated the risk of confirming the woman’s assumption before she smiled politely. “It’s no problem, the car is kind of a giveaway there’s a Winchester within earshot.” Ruby shifted the bags into one hand, offering to shake hers. “I’m Ruby, Sam’s inside if you want to set him straight.”

“CC, thanks. What about Tweedle Dean?” Damn the innate skepticism, Ruby thought, but her face fell enough to cause the stranger real concern.

“I think you should talk to Sam about that,” Ruby nodded toward the grimy red door.

Earth Date: September 18, 2008

Location: Hell, Pit 2A

It was a cold day in Hell, which was not as uncommon as the phrase would have mortals believe. The biting chill snaked up the chains causing them to moan and freeze beneath the deadly forming icicles. And unlike your living experience, numbness and shock never saved your body from the burn of subzero temperatures. The imaginary needles struck every nerve against the unsuccessful shivering caused by the day’s environmental torture. Dean sat beside your restraining table as you were dragged in for your session.

His eyes rolled over your puckered flesh and frigid lips deciding how to proceed with such a canvas. You felt more exposed than you had in front of him, even more than on the days you were bare naked. His look broke you open, a freshly burst vein of emotion. It felt as if he was listening to your inner most secrets and finding them comically childish. You inhaled against the protest of your ice-lined lungs, ignoring the grubby paws of the demons locking you in place.

Dean circled the end housing your feet, cautious and calculating. He dragged his calloused palm over the crook of your ankle and the plane of your shin, instinctively you shied from the contact. Your toes clenched, and your legs fought against the restraints. As his hand slid over your knee, your mind began to spiral. Dean hadn’t slid into that sort of depravity, even after years yielding the position. You don’t think granting him that pleasure would bring you the sort of twisted satisfaction your periled screams had.

You didn’t notice the screams that broke off in the distance. Nor did you see the reflection of the implement in his free hand. All you could focus on was the weight of his hand on your thigh and the heat of his gaze. You pleaded against the muzzle, the leather and metal stifling your cries. Then the door exploded behind Dean in a shower of blinding light which flooded through the door way, inside out, from a dazzling human-shaped figure. The brass knuckles fell from Dean’s right hand as he gaped at the intruder. As soon as you saw it, your face grew hot, the layers of skin and hair melting away in the heavenly presence. Before you lost your vision, you caught the being’s shining arms grab for Dean.

In the darkness before your remaining brain deteriorated, the truth of what happened came to you on the wind. A victorious overture resonating the liberation of your captive captor. There were tunnels and passages, hidden doors among the rows of barracks which lead through the massive and complex layers of Hell. And while the security around the gates in Wyoming had been tripled and constantly tested since the mass break out that cost them countless souls and certain high-profile demons. Even the ways of Crossroad Demons were limited and utilized by those only deigned fit for teleportation privileges. In short, there was no way it should have happened. No being of darkness knew of the portal or the subsequent means that were taken to secure the extraction. And yet, the Angel Castiel entered the unfathomable depths of the abyss and raised Dean Winchester from perdition.

You awoke to the demanding voices of angry demons all around you. Your eyes had regenerated, which were soon followed by your tongue and lips. As soon as sounds could be formed you howled at your audience, the sheer terror from what you had witnessed, and the uncertainty of Dean’s fate culminating in a wail. The words came eventually, after a swift slap from a childlike demon you had never seen before. The combined rage from the loss of their Righteous Man rumbled the walls, and just as you had recovered, you were atomized once more.

The next morning the shift settled in your essence. You were no longer all soul, somehow a sliver of grey had wedged itself into your being; cracking you wide open.

Earth Date: November 2, 2008

Location: Hell, Alastair’s Quarters

The news was growing concerning, Heaven sinking to their level for an upper hand in a war they hadn’t earned. Hell’s agenda was clear, concise. Those winged light beams were painting targets on their own kind while leaving humanity to rot. Alastair read the messages that littered his inbox, rolling his eyes at the mess. He needed a release, he needed to feel the unparalleled bliss of flailing a soul within an inch of existence. He stood and walked out of the once-meticulous space. He wandered the halls between the various chambers of anguish, listening to the screams, waiting for the perfect call. He had lost his most promising protege, but there would be others. There already were many vying for the favor of the Master of Torture, but none had the passion Alastair expected.

He had a new crop of souls coming up from the lower levels due in any day. Yet, not enough had been turned since the momentum had nearly halted with the incident. It was then, when Alastair worried about the progress and purpose of his students that he heard her. She was like a phoenix, rising from the ashes. Her cruel retorts caused her guard to muzzle her before getting to her appointment. She giggled at the demon’s irritation, humming to herself beneath the strip of tanned hide. All was not lost.

It was a cancer, but like any transformation, the need for change only accelerated the process. Before long the lumps of logic, longing and empathy dwindled until they became cumbersome. The grey matter that had been pierced through you, had enveloped your remaining light. Alastair had taken it upon himself to continue with your daily sessions, stoking the fire of damnation that the loss of Dean and vision of a Heavenly Host had kindled within your soul-psyche.  He hadn’t loss any steps during Dean’s tenure.

Alastair carved into you like a miner drove through ore, searching, prying and chipping away at any and all valuables. He hummed when your eyes buzzed in your sockets, the onyx slowly flooding the Scleral tissue. His nasally voice recited all the changes you had undergone, and the awestruck anticipation of what your end results would be. Horns or a tail? Perhaps both. His list of your possible outcomes was as detailed as a spoiled child’s demands to a department store Santa.

Alastair was your gift wrapper and receiver, all in one.

But, like so many people in your human life, he left before he could see the scars, he had left upon you. Before you had blossomed into his reviled creation, Alastair returned to Earth in search of Dean and a girl who could hear Angels. The War for the Seals had escalated, and he was needed in the frays of battle. You took it extremely personally, futilely clinging to the scraps of humanity that remained in tiny pockets of your soul. Telling yourself that he would come back to finish his and Dean’s work. That if you remained microscopically human; your demonization would not complete. That they would be back to finish their job.

That you were not alone.

It was during one of your internal rants while hanging by your ankles below one of the chattering mechanical spiders that you realized Alastair’s last crescendo to your symphony. The feeling of loss and regret you had been wearing since the angel had melted your face was a wound akin to heartbreak. Love. They had given you your greatest torture to date: an unusable devotion to the once more mortal hunter Dean Winchester.

There were (and continue to be) innumerable ways to torture the human soul, emotionally, spiritually, physically. But that knowledge wouldn’t remedy this transgression, couldn’t right or lessen its burden. This unfulfilled longing was the purest form of torture. This blasphemy, this raw human ache was more than your warped being could endure. The frustration, of it stewing alongside the deepening darkness within you, shot through your very existence, burning, churning and scrambling you into something new. Something broken, yet focused. In time, you became fully demonic, raw and unfettered, but not without purpose.

tags: @dontshootmespence @because-imma-lady-assface @mrswhozeewhatsis @smi727 @sassykayla255 @dxr-supernatural-fanfic @supernaturalboi @dumbthotticus @eve05glee @veroinnumera @spn-dean-and-sam-winchester @forgettingthoughts @shokushuhime-stuff @fanfictionrecommendations-com @soullesscollection-world @igotdressedthroughthemess @thoughtslikeaminefield

Next Chapter: Hunters

[reverseswing]

FROM RAGS TO RECOGNITION : SWaCH LEADS THE TRANSFORMATION

Garbage. A word that’s more abhorred than adored for quite obvious reasons. While all of us, in one way or the other, contribute in creating garbage on a daily basis, we are averse of its presence around us – whether at home, neighbourhood or streets. We want to get rid of the filth every day so that we don’t have to bear the stench from the piled up waste.

While every city administration employs staff and officials who collect garbage on daily basis and take it to the landfills, the role and efforts of the rag pickers are always ignored and overlooked. They are perhaps one of the most marginalised sections of the society and therefore never talked about. Forget dignity, they find themselves being treated like ‘garbage’, even when they willingly dirty their hands by scouring through the filth that’s not even generated by them. If not for livelihood, would anyone spend a better part of his / her day, every day, amidst nightmarish working conditions?

A new era dawns in Pune (India)

Circa 1993. The waste pickers of Pune in Maharashtra, one of the largest states in India, scripted their exit out of the rubbish heaps and landfills to transform their lives forever. They unionized themselves to define legitimate workspace for themselves in municipal solid waste management that improved their working conditions. Thus was formed the Kagad Kach Patra Kashtkari Panchayat (KKPKP), a movement that spearheaded the battle of waste pickers, waste buyers and waste collectors to be recognised as workers.

What KKPKP said was very simple. Waste pickers need to be treated with dignity and given their due status in the society because they recovered materials for recycling, reduced municipal solid waste handling costs, generated employment downstream, and contributed to public health and environment. They occupy an important place in the waste management and recycling value chain and contribute substantially to the manufacturing economy.

Surprised!! Take a breather, rethink over what’s aforesaid, and you can’t help but agree that rag pickers indeed need to be taken much more seriously than they have been since time immemorial.

Well, this argument was well understood by Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), which in the year 2008, entered into an MOU with an offshoot of KKPKP christened Solid Waste Collection Handling - SWaCH.

SWaCH. A Higher Level of Self-Reliance.

A wholly worker-owned cooperative of waste pickers, waste buyers and waste collectors, SWaCH is conceived as an autonomous social enterprise. SWaCH Seva Sahakari Sanstha Maryadit, as it is formally known, provides front-end waste management services to Pune city with support from PMC.

Throwing light on the birth of SWaCH, Aparna Sasurla, Director of SWaCH says, “The organisation works on a well-defined model which was tested for two years (2005-2007) before being presented to PMC for support, approval and recognition. It was only after the success of this pilot project which established the workability and the potential of SWaCH beyond doubt, that PMC gave its nod to be integrated into the mainstream solid waste management system (SWM) of the city of Pune.”

Acceptance by PMC was like winning a long battle for SWaCH. In the crucial early years, the Corporation played a positive and enabling role in promoting SWaCH. It acknowledged that SWaCH model was indeed a cost-saving, sustainable and environmentally beneficial system which added value to the already existing but faltering solid waste management system of the Corporation. With passage of time, it became clear that the model of SWaCH had the required ability and the dynamism to bring about a fundamental change in the SWM system of Pune.

A Unique Model

SWaCH is an inclusive model that recognises the contribution of ‘invisible’ workers who play crucial role in keeping the Pune city clean. Different from the PMC model, SWaCH follows a green model of waste collection that is not heavily dependent on fossil fuel or electricity.

Talking about the significance of SWaCH in the SWM system of Pune City, Aparna says, “The importance of SWaCH is multidimensional and affects various people at different levels. To the residents, SWaCH is important because they get reliable service at reasonable cost and with accountability. To the waste pickers it is important because it gives their work a dignity while integrating them into the formal sector along with upgrading their livelihoods as well as standard of living.  To the municipality it is important because the waste is collected in a more systematic manner and segregated at such nominal cost.”

Women constitute over 78% of SWaCH membership. While this holds for most age groups, the presence of men is higher in the youngest age group and among the aging. Most SWaCH members used to work as waste pickers or itinerant waste buyers. Housekeeping and cleaning workers constitute another significant group.

The SWaCH model is very unique in itself. Two workers collect source-segregated waste from 200-300 households, offices, shops and other establishments using manual pushcarts or motorized vehicles if the terrain is difficult. The waste pickers have the right over recyclables and retain income from the sale of scrap. This ensures maximum recycling and retrieval. Waste pickers separate the waste into wet and dry. Wet, organic and non-recyclable waste is handed over to the PMC. In some cases it is composted on site. Dry waste is sorted into categories like plastic, paper, metal, glass, leather etc. and then further fine sorted. Whatever has the market is sold.

The earnings of SWaCH members are derived from user fees and sale of recyclables. SWaCH members have relatively more stable income than other waste pickers in India. Their working hours vary from four to six hours including collection and sorting. Most also enjoy weekly holiday too.

Trials and Tribulations

As with every innovative idea, SWaCH too faces challenges from various quarters. From being slammed for being too transparent a model to being criticised as something that unnecessarily creates a parallel system, SWaCH has to deal with multitude of problems while still performing at its best.

“Other challenges notwithstanding,, the model being a user-fee based one is often met with resistance from the residents,” says Aparna. “Usually, we charge Rs. 10 to 30 per household per month in non-slum areas and in slum areas we charge Rs. 15 per household per month. We insist on user fees because SWaCH waste collectors are not paid by PMC for door to door collection. The service therefore needs to be supported by user fees paid by citizens. The fees facilitate a direct accountable relationship between the service user and the service provider.”

SWaCH+

As the primary collection system got established and began running in auto-pilot mode, the management of SWaCH decided to foray into allied activities to add more value and dimensions to their core endeavour. Calling it SWaCH+, the organisation began to offer services such as collection of unwanted household goods, collection of e-waste, garden waste, housekeeping and trading in recyclables. Under SWaCH+ the members are trained to handle mechanical composters and do manual composting. Members also work in bio-methanation plants established by PMC on Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) basis.

Innovations by SWaCH

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. SWaCH too found it necessary to go in for innovation, both to sustain its operations and also create newer sustainable livelihood options for more waste pickers. The out-of-the-box thinking of SWaCH has not only helped the organisation to explore its hidden strengths but also upgrade its image in the eyes of its partners, stakeholders and everyone associated with the mission. A range of financial, social, environmental and other benefits for PMC, waste pickers, citizens, and Pune city as a whole are being achieved by the innovative steps taken by SWaCH.

V-Collect Programme

SWaCH collects old electronic, electrical items, furniture, bicycles, kitchen utensils, repair and re-use what can be, while dismantle and recycle the rest. By organizing V-Collect events, SWaCH channelizes most of these items towards recycling and re-use, away from dumps.

SWaCH collects old newspapers from households and use them to produce ST Dispo bags and carry bags. Members are trained in making ST Dispo bags with recycled paper, glue, and thread. As it looks distinct, it goes into a separate waste stream. The waste pickers are saved the indignity of handling soiled sanitary napkins directly. The bags are made available at local stores in different areas of Pune.

SWaCH collects clean, useable clothes, sort them out according to size, gender age and style and sell those at nominal prices to waste pickers and other urban poor. Torn fabrics are recycled into cloth products like bags, coasters and dusters.

Green School Programme  

SWaCH in association with Parisar and CEE, has launched the Green School Programme which aims to widen the horizon of the school going children. The programme entails enhancing the children’s perspective on environment, sustainability and related issues. It helps students and teachers to carry out action-based projects to leading to environment conservation. It guides the school in setting up and implement best practices of solid waste and e-waste management. Throught he medium of hands-on activities the GSP covers topics like water, waste, energy, biodiversity, heritage, culture, traffic and transportation.

 Nirmalya Project : Over the past 7 years, by diverting huge amounts of waste – both organic and biodegradable – from Pune’s rivers, SWaCH members has significantly reduced the pollution of rivers and dumping of nirmalaya on ghats. Last year itself, SWaCH diverted 177 tonnes of Nirmalaya. This has encouraged responsible citizens of Pune to be more eco-conscious. After receiving the Nirmalaya, SWaCH members segregate it into various categories such as fruit, flowers, clothes etc., send the flowers to composting units for conversion into natural manure, distribute good fruits for consumption and the rest for composting, take materials like paper, plastic and thermocol for recycling.

Composting : The PMC has made it mandatory for all societies formed after the year 2000 to compost organic waste. Towards this end, SWaCH helps to set up a composting system which takes care of the wet waste efficiently. For a small cost, a trained waste collector maintains and manages the compost every day. A supervisor also makes periodic visits to the composting site to ensure that all is well.

 E-Waste Disposal : SWaCH has been authorised by the PMC to collect and channel e-waste according to the rules laid down by the government. SWaCH ensures the collection and correct disposal of e-waste at authorised PMC centres. Last year, over 7 metric tonnes of e-waste was diverted from the grey market and sold in the open market by SWaCH.

Success of SWaCH

In its eight years of existence, SWaCH has touched lives and livelihoods of the workers in ways that have made them more self-reliant, economically more stable and created a platform that promises to secure the future of the next generation.

Compared to their incomes as free-roaming waste pickers, the earnings of SWaCH members have increased manifolds since the launch of the initiative. Depending on the locality from where the collection is done, their income range from Rs. 1,500 per month to Rs. 15,000 per month. This has brought in stability into their lives which was absent in the days prior to SWaCH. It has helped them make plans for family’s future, educate their children and also save for the rainy day. Such has been the faith of the worker members in SWaCH that their well-educated children too have joined the organisation to serve the noble cause.

In a community which traditionally had little access to education and decent work, it is a matter of pride to see their children become the face of SWaCH’s future. Moreover, by branching out into waste related activities many waste pickers are upgrading their work standard, and in effect creating upward mobility in an occupation which was once considered lowest of the low.

The SWaCH initiative has come to represent the biggest effort to integrate waste pickers in India. The hitherto ‘faceless and nuisance-causing people’ are now people who interact with fellow residents on an equal footing. Surekha Gaekwad is a high school graduate and team leader of eight waste pickers. She and her team has diversified into housekeeping and composting. Sharing her transformation story Surekha says, “Five years ago, I spent my day at garbage bins. I ended up dirty and stinking by evening. I was looked upon with apathy and disgust. But now I have earned people’s respect. Today, when I go to collect my money, the lady there asks me to sit on the sofa. If she is drinking tea, she will order another cup for me.”  

Mangal, another SWaCH member expresses her happiness in these words. “The residents in the area who used to frown at me, now call me by my name and greet me too. A resident gave me a second hand bicycle. I ride to work on the bicycle. Today I am literate and am the treasurer of a credit co-operative.” The twinkle in her eyes and the broad smile speak another thousand words which, though unheard, do not go unheeded.

Towards a Swach Future

Good work never goes unnoticed. In 2014 series of Satyamev Jayte, Bollywood super star Aamir Khan invited SWaCH to share their story and experiences, giving the organisation a national platform. It underlines that the efforts and the endeavours of SWaCh are slowly and steadily gaining recognition as more and more people become aware of SWaCH and its impact on the lives of over 3000 waste pickers who form the SWaCH Cooperative. The future of an organisation like SWaCH is indeed bright and with the support from the authorities, educated civilians and those good Samaritans, SWaCH will accomplish what it set out to achieve – taking waste pickers from rags to recognition.

[arabfanon]

Dr. Lourdes Camacho Paneque, a specialist in gynecology and obstetrics, began to feel a vocation for the profession as a child, when her grandmother took her to visit the hospital where she worked in the municipality of Banes, Holguín province.

She is proud of her accumulated experience and contribution to helping the peoples of Bolivia (2006-2008), during an international mission, and now on a second mission in the La Tinta neighborhood, Alta Verapaz department, Guatemala, since 2017.

“Since I was five years old, I have lived in Havana and I undertook all my studies in the capital. At the end of my degree, I volunteered to go to the Cuban mountain range to provide rural services in the Manuel Piti Fajardo contingent.

“I was assigned to the community of Caney de las Mercedes, in Bartolomé Masó municipality, Granma province. I undertook the sixth year of my degree, plus another two, at the Mariano Pérez Barí Hospital. It was precisely at that stage that I learned about various gynecology procedures, so I decided to opt for the specialty.

“I like the obstetrics side. I have two children, and I always asked to see my labor through to the end because I wanted to know what a person experiences when she is in that process.”

How was the experience in Bolivia?

I worked in a place located at a high altitude above sea level. To get there, we were advised not to eat for a day before to avoid vomiting. The journey meant passing around a mountain on a road known by the population as Death Road. When it rained, the roadway got very slippery and cars overturned. It took about eight hours to reach the town. On that mountain there was snow and frost almost all year round.

Incredibly, upon arriving at the site, the medical college and the professionals who practiced private medicine there were opposed to us providing care to the population. They were part of the political opposition to President Evo Morales.

I remember that right on my arrival, a woman in labor in a very bad condition came into emergencies. Luckily I resolved the situation, and then sent her, with no risk to her life, to another institution in the capital for specialized treatments.

It turns out that the members of the medical college wanted to sue me, claiming that I did not clean the uterus properly. As I received the patient in a critical condition, I entered surgery accompanied by several doctors, including the director of the hospital. Everyone testified to how her life was saved and the lawsuit did not proceed. The best thing that happened to me was that one day I met that same patient, and she thanked me for being alive. The population there was very poor and it hurt to see how they took advantage of them.

In Bolivia, I faced extreme situations to save women who were almost at death’s door. I had the good fortune to be in Pando when President Evo Morales opened a hospital in that department, with first class medical services provided free of charge to the population.

Another case was that of an eight-month-old girl with a burn on her face. That had nothing to do with my specialty, but when we study in Cuba, we do medical rotations in each of the specialties, and one knows how to look for the information to face the circumstances in any environment.

Do Cuban doctors select the place where they will work?

Never, that decision corresponds to the leadership of the medical brigade, responding to the number of inhabitants in each municipality, and the needs of the country. We go with the willingness to work in the places where we are needed.

What have been the most difficult cases in Guatemala?

It is very common to attend difficult births, with premature and low birth weight babies, a product of medical negligence during pregnancy. There is no organized health system with a well-conceived maternal and child program. I have had cases of patients living in very remote villages who begin labor at 28 weeks. One must apply a lot of knowledge to that newborn so that it doesn’t die.

Generally, in remote areas, births are performed by midwives or birth attendants, who resolve situations, but when there is a complication such as with a child who is in a breech position, the woman comes to us in a very deteriorated state, because she has been in labor for many hours, and the infant has suffered in the birth canal.

In both countries, there are laws against abortion?

That subject is very distressing. In both places, abortion is prohibited and I have had to assist many adolescents and women who were raped and become pregnant.

In Guatemala, I receive a large number of women raped by relatives or people close to the family. There I practiced a cesarean section on a 12-year-old girl who was raped by five men. It was never reported and the men were not investigated. Others identify their rapist, report them, and the authorities do nothing. They even make me fill out a very extensive file describing the injuries caused and in the end, criminal proceedings never begin. Psychiatrists certify that raped women never recover from this trauma, even if they receive medical treatment and follow-up.

In these countries, they prevent access to abortion in a safe institution, which is why women go to other places, without the necessary hygienic-sanitary conditions, or they buy abortifacient drugs or insert implements through the vagina to interrupt their pregnancy. Then we receive them in the hospital in an advanced septic process, almost on the verge of death. The prohibition of abortion leads to two problems: one, unwanted pregnancies, and another, the possible maternal death of women who turn to unsafe contraceptive methods.

I can give you another example: I received a teenager with a full-term pregnancy who was diagnosed with eclampsia. She told her father, days before her admission, that her sister’s husband had raped her. We arrived convulsing and on investigating her family history, they told us that her entire pregnancy she had been very quiet and sad. She didn’t want to explain her suffering. A cesarean section was performed and she was hospitalized to apply medication. Then we noted a regression. It turned out that the rapist was visiting her in the hospital. After treating her with the psychologist, we got her to cooperate with the treatment.

Why go back to perform another mission?

Missions outside the country are a learning experience, and they remind me of that moment in which I worked in the mountains. Outside of Cuba, you face situations and conflicts with few available resources. Blood for transfusions is usually scarce, and obstacles are created by local medical personnel who see medicine as a business.

On missions, a professional learns about other cultures and much more. In Cuba, we have the support of our colleagues. On an emergency shift, there are residents, students, specialists and teachers. Outside the island, there is only the doctor and sometimes a nurse to solve a case.

In Guatemala, we now do 24 hour shifts. On a duty day, I usually do more than nine caesarean sections, and the work is very intense. We get patients who need blood transfusions, which we do not have, and we use all available resources to save them.

How do you view yourself?

As a fulfilled woman.

[lissahawthorne]

a new vision

Who: Clarissa Hawthorne

When: Summer 2008 - Summer 2012

Where: nowhere specific

What: Clarissa’s journey from the end of the Beijing games through the end of her career as an Olympic archer four years later in London.

Warnings: Abuse

Word Count: 1855

Notes: This is part 2 of 3. Part 1. Part 3.

After gold in Beijing, Clarissa was riding a high. A high that she never wanted to end, but a high that couldn’t possibly last. Unfortunately, her eyes were going to get worse. And they were going to get worse, fast. She did her best to focus on college, to take everything one day at a time. Except sometimes one day turned into three or four days where her eyes just didn’t work. Where she couldn’t read her textbooks, where almost everything had to be read to her. Where she was lucky if she could even open her eyes without feeling like her head was going to explode.

Her roommate was her saving grace.

Jill was the kind of girl who would do anything for a laugh, but especially to make Clarissa laugh. She often considered the archer to be too stiff, too unwilling to be a young adult. Sure, she figured this had to do with how Clarissa was raised, how she’d been treated on the world stage, but it was something that could change. And it was something that Jill was going to make sure happened. Jill, in a lot of ways, just wanted to see Clarissa succeed in life. No matter what that might mean she’d have to do. Whether it was dragging Clarissa out to clubs to party or helping her adjust to life, Jill did it. When it came to Clarissa’s notes, classwork, and the like, Jill painstakingly recorded everything she could and read aloud what she couldn’t for when Clarissa’s eyes weren’t working. It was something Clarissa was beyond thankful for, and often tried to pay the other back, but was generally turned down at every turn. They were friends, that’s what they did.

They worked together well and agreed to move into an off campus apartment their sophomore year. It gave them the liberty to live out in the city itself and pay way less than they had been on campus. It also gave them a headstart on helping Clarissa figure out bus routes without entirely relying on her sight to do so. Not that her eyesight was to that point, but it was good practice and a good deal of fun. They often tried to see if they could start at opposite ends of town and figure out the quickest bus route to a central point the fastest. Typically speaking, the central point was somewhere important, their apartment, the grocery store, their favorite restaurant. To most people it probably seemed weird, the way the pair worked, but they were just being themselves.

During that time Clarissa played hockey, helped support the rugby team, and continued to practice archery. Though, it became increasingly more obvious that things like hockey and archery, at least the act of participating in them, were going to come to an end. Sooner, rather than later. The prospect wasn’t new to Clarissa, but it also wasn’t something she was looking forward to. Or even really saw herself being able to accept. Jill tried, a number of times, to get Clarissa to start the process early. To start transitioning to a life where sports weren’t going to be as big a part of them as they were, but didn’t succeed in the slightest. If anything, the few times Jill pushed her to do such, Clarissa withdrew into herself. The denial was strong and, admittedly, Jill really couldn’t blame her.

Clarissa had a number of relationships during that time. Very few of them were good for her. In fact, many of them were very negative. People not wanting to deal with the way her eyesight could be a problem. The way she sometimes needed a little extra help on dates. How movie dates, or any dates that involved a lot of eye power in general, were fun but draining in a way that left her not really wanting to do much else. Or how her eyesight could get in the way of her even being able to go on a date. How things had to be planned out while still being open to canceling or extreme changes to accommodate her. Many of the relationships ended on very poor terms, Clarissa getting angry and breaking things off, or her partner getting frustrated over not wanting to deal with everything. Her sight was failing her, and it seemed like no one really wanted to put up with that. Not that this was something that surprised Clarissa, of course. It was the kind of thing that made her already strange reputation even worse. That just added to the way people avoided interacting with her if they could help it.

In the fall of 2010, Clarissa met Elias Westwood. He was a charismatic and charming guy, who genuinely seemed to want to know Clarissa for who she was. He was interested in her archery, her love of hockey, the things that made Clarissa, herself. Elias was a couple years older than her and she’d met him at a function on campus. They bonded over a love of video games and good music. He was a grad student and the way he looked at her made her feel special. Made her forget about the way her eyes ached and the looming reality that her time as an Olympic archer was coming to an end. He picked at her insecurities and promised to never hurt her the way other people had.

And he didn’t. He did so much worse.

The first clue that he was going to be nothing but bad news was also the first thing Clarissa chose to ignore. Hard to see red flags for what they are while wearing rose colored glasses. Whether Clarissa wanted to admit it at the time or not, Elias drove a wedge between Clarissa and Jill. The other girl warned Clarissa that he really wasn’t as great a guy as he seemed. That he was playing her like a fiddle. Clarissa refused to listen. Refused to see reason. He made her feel special and she hated the idea of there possibly being something wrong with that. Even as Elias slowly started to show his true colors. He started getting clingy, at first. Little things. Wanting to know when she’d be out of a class, where she was headed to after. Who she was spending time with. It wasn’t all the time, just every once in a while. He said he was worried about her getting hurt. She believed him.

However, his actions slowly amped up more and more. Getting accusatory whenever she gave him an answer. Swearing she was lying to him. He never went so far as to say she was cheating on him but he got close. Close enough that it started to strain her other relationships. Friendships she’d worked hard to cultivate despite distance. Friendships she’d made at college and wanted to explore for what they were, purely platonic and supportive relationships. Everytime Clarissa managed to talk him down from whatever imagined ledge he was on, Elias was amazing for a couple weeks. Apologized for freaking out, made up excuse after excuse that were less and less believable. And then he stopped even doing that. He started arguing with her over everything. The little details. Things that really shouldn’t have made any real difference. Then, once he got his way, he never mentioned it again, leaving Clarissa to wonder just what was happening. Even still, she refused to see it as the emotional abuse that it was. Refused to admit to anyone that there were days when she expected him to stop yelling and start using his fists. No one needed to know that.

The summer after Clarissa graduated with her bachelor’s degree, she found herself diving headfirst into work. She had a job that she loved and that she would be able to work around both her own disability and getting her doctorate in occupational therapy, as well as training for the 2012 Olympic games. This also kept her from seeing Elias as often, which, on some days felt like a life saver, while on others felt a bit like a death sentence. Even still, she found herself in love with everything she was doing and once the fall rolled around again, she was barely seeing Elias at all. He was constantly texting and calling her, but with everything going on, she didn’t have as much time for him. Something he’d, at one point, said he understood as it’d been something very similar, at times, with him getting his master’s.

In December of 2011, Elias’ temper rose to new heights. He became extremely possessive of her. Even managed to stop her from going into work a few times, making her lie to her boss as to the why. Until he was making her choose between their relationship and her work. The work that would establish a future for her after the summer of 2012. The work that had become her passion. And in a rather explosive fight, Clarissa chose her job.

A few days later, Jill took Clarissa to adopt her first cat, Haruhi.

With her focus back on her future instead of poor relationship choices, Clarissa started to prepare herself to announce her departure from Olympic archery after the London games. It was still massively terrifying, knowing that the one thing she’d been extremely good at her entire life was coming to an end even before she hit her mid twenties. But she had a new future and a new plan.

It was her final interview of the 2012 Olympic games. She’d won gold but barely, something she hated to admit. Despite her sight having not only stabilized but improved quite a bit, a strange occurrence that no one could explain but that Clarissa was thankful for, in the year prior to the games, she had still struggled. A struggle that paid off, sure, but one she wished hadn’t existed.

“Future plans?” The interviewer was kind, already knowing that there were rumours floating around the Olympic Village about the young archer’s future in the sport.

“Finishing college and starting a proper career as an occupational therapist. As for archery, unfortunately, my time is up. I’ve been struggling with loss of sight since I was fifteen. The truth is, I’m surprised my eyesight was good enough to both qualify and compete in the games this year. I’m forever thankful for it, for the chances I’ve had to compete, to meet people, to stand on the world’s stage and show what I’m capable of. But, all good things must come to an end and, as sad as it is, this is the end of the road.” Clarissa did her best to smile through it, to let the look of pity on everyone’s faces not touch her. To roll off her back. Even as they stabbed to her very core.

And like that, Clarissa’s life as an archer had come to a close. She was ending on a high note, even if a bitter sweet one. Olympic gold in a town she’d once called home, for the country that still held her heart.

[talabib]

Make Your Money Work For You.

Getting on top of your personal finances can be tricky. For millennials, it’s a trickier proposition still, because this generation faces a unique set of economic and financial challenges.

But if your financial situation poses a problem, avoiding that problem will only make it worse. It’s time to rip off the band-aid, bank-account-wise. The sooner you learn to budget, start to save, and educate yourself about investment options, the sooner you’ll achieve financial success.

Being debt-free and financially autonomous has a positive knock-on effect that you’ll notice in every aspect of your life. Taking control of your finances means being able to pursue your passions, hone your confidence, and broaden your career options – it might just be the ultimate form of millennial self-care.

Millennials need to adapt to a changed economic landscape.

Millennials are a generation often stereotyped: They’re addicted to Instagram! They love queuing for cronuts! Such stereotypes, though, are far too narrow to accurately apply to all millennials. After all, this generation of people, born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s, is the largest and most diverse generation in history. Unfortunately, there is one thing most millennials do have in common, especially in the US. They face unique challenges on the road to achieving financial success.

Previous generations since the 1950s have enjoyed relative economic stability throughout most of their working lives. As a result, they trod a fairly uncomplicated path to financial success. Let’s call this path the success sequence. It starts with acquiring a steady, life-long job, followed by purchasing property, acquiring assets, and finally, retiring with a healthy nest egg.

In the wake of the 2008 global recession, however, the economic landscape changed. The job market became volatile right at the moment many millennials were trying to enter the workforce. A steady job, the first step in the conventional success sequence, became hard to find.

Post-recession, many millennials are still scraping by: The cost of living continues to rise, whilst at the same time, wage growth is sluggish with salaries unable to keep pace with inflation. Housing prices are through the roof, which means millennials struggle to get onto the property ladder. And, finally, when it comes to securing a decent retirement, 72 percent of millennials have less than $10,000 saved for this purpose.  

It’s clear that millennials face obstacles to achieving financial security. Worryingly still, many millennials currently lack the knowledge and confidence necessary to overcome these obstacles. A 2014 study by The George Washington School of Business surveyed over 5,500 millennial Americans between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-five. It found that 76 percent were financially illiterate, meaning they were unfamiliar with even the basic concepts of personal finance. 

No wonder then that, according to a 2015 Gallup study, 70 percent of millennials report feeling financially stressed! The conventional success sequence that worked for previous generations is no longer applicable. This doesn’t mean, though, that millennials can’t achieve financial success on their own terms. 

You’re not bad with your finances – you just lack confidence.

Forget stocks, bonds, and equity. Your greatest financial commodity is your confidence.

Financial confidence is the secret ingredient that empowers you to take control of your money and start making smart financial decisions. It’s not tied to how much you earn, either. You could be earning a lot of money but lack the financial confidence to convert your salary into monetary freedom. Conversely, you could be making a moderate wage except, with financial confidence, are able to convert your income into real, lasting wealth. 

If you’re scared to look at your bank balance or you’ve put saving for retirement into the ‘impossible’ column, you’re probably lacking financial confidence. That’s understandable! Our financial systems are designed to confuse consumers and undermine their confidence. 

Banks want you to pay higher fees. Lenders want you to lock into disadvantageous loans. Credit card providers want you to rack up debt. At the same time, media and advertising bombard us with messages to buy items like designer handbags or the latest smartphone, which distract us even further from the goal of financial security. It explains why so many of us slide into debt or make ill-advised impulse purchases. But here’s the good news. A patchy financial track record doesn’t mean you’re innately bad with money. It means you lack the skills and knowledge to handle your money with confidence.

One key factor inhibiting your financial confidence may be that you can't accurately envision financial success. Many of us have an inaccurate idea of what financial success actually entails. We picture wealth in terms of things: houses, cars, designer clothing, expensive meals and holidays. But this picture of financial success can seem totally unattainable. Worse, it can lead us to make poor purchasing decisions in a misguided attempt to live the ‘rich life.’ 

If you want to achieve true financial success, you shouldn’t work toward simply acquiring material things. Instead, you need to work toward financial autonomy. When you’re financially autonomous, you’re debt-free and not living paycheck-to-paycheck. 

After you achieve financial autonomy, work towards financial freedom. This means having enough of a cushion that your finances don’t dictate what your life looks like. Imagine having the financial flexibility of taking time off work to travel, or to pursue a passion project! 

If you’re ready to start working towards total financial freedom, the next step is tough but necessary: you need to become debt-free.

The main obstacle to financial freedom is debt.

Being in debt can be an isolating experience. Your peers are out there flaunting new purchases on Instagram, while you’re up at 3am wondering if you’ll ever be able to pay off your credit card bills. Rest assured, if you’re in debt, you’re not alone.

Take credit card debt, for example. In 2017, according to the Federal Reserve, US consumers put $1.021 trillion worth of purchases on credit. Additionally, roughly half of millennials report having debt spread across more than three credit cards. 

The problem with credit cards is that they make it incredibly easy to live beyond your means and, unless you pay off the balance each month, this debt can snowball. That’s because every month, your bank charges you interest on purchases that aren’t paid off. Ever heard of TCP? It stands for Total Cost Price. Paying for items on credit often means their TCP works out higher than the number on their price tag. If,for example, you put a $2000 laptop on credit and didn’t pay it off for three months, factoring in the interest, the TCP on that purchase is now somewhere around $2260.

Worst of all, when you’re in debt, any money you have to spare goes into paying off that debt. When you’re debt-free, however, you can put that spare income into assets or investments, which can generate wealth. 

Financial freedom and debt are simply incompatible. Whether you’re paying off your credit cards or your student loans, going debt-free should be your first financial priority. Here’s a simple way to tackle the problem.

To start, list all your debts in ascending order. It’s tempting to tackle big debts first, but strategically, it’s better to pay off the smallest ones. Researchers at Northwestern University have found that paying off smaller debts creates a sense of momentum. People who followed this approach were, in general, more likely to pay off the rest of their other debts.

You can meet your repayment targets by creating a rudimentary flash budget.This is a budget designed around one goal only – in this case, becoming debt-free. Establish your income and your expenses, and then subtract your expenses from your income. Whatever’s left over goes straight to that debt. Cutting your expenses or upping your income will accelerate your ability to pay off your debt for good.  But best of all, living within a budget doesn’t mean living without indulgences.

Sticking to a budget doesn’t mean giving up life’s pleasures.

Millennials, or so the stereotype goes, would rather spend their hard-earned cash on avocado toast than into savings. If they budget right, though, millennials can have their avocado toast and save, too.

It’s all too easy to equate budgeting with cutting out purchases that, while inessential, bring passion and meaning to our lives. But, guess what? The secret to budgeting doesn’t lie in living ascetically, it’s in prioritizing purchases that bring you pleasure. 

There’s a widely-used formula in Silicon Valley known as the 80/20 rule. The idea behind it goes that eighty percent of effects can be traced back to only twenty percent of causes. The best strategy, therefore, is to identify and concentrate on the small proportion of your actions that are yielding the largest proportion of results. 

The 80/20 rule applies neatly to personal budgeting. Take account of your fixed expenses, like rent, debt repayments, and monthly bills. What you’re then left with are your variable expenses, or non-essential purchases. From there, identify which core groups of variable expenses bring you the most pleasure. 

You can approach this task by going ‘old-school’ and printing off your account statements. Highlight all the variable expenses on the document that feed your passions and circle all the variable expenses that didn’t. You might be surprised by how many passionless purchases you make each month! These are the expenses you’re going to try and eliminate. 

Meaningless expenses differ from person to person. If you’re a serious coffee-lover, don’t even think about cutting down on your morning latte. But if you drink your daily to-go coffee without even registering the taste, this might be an expense you can do without. 

 Once you’ve eliminated meaningless purchases from your budget, you’ll have more cash to play with each month. It’s key that this extra cash goes towards paying off debt or into growing your wealth, so make sure the surplus never hits your checking account. Instead, set up an automatic payment to either your savings account or to your credit card account. That way, while your debt dwindles or your savings grow, you’ll still get to treat yourself to the things you love.

Buy big-ticket items strategically to get the most out of your purchases.

Sick of taking the bus to work every day? Ready to stop lining your landlord’s pockets with rent checks? If you’re on the brink of making a big-ticket purchase, like buying a car or investing in property, be smart about it.

Here’s the thing about investing in a car – it can’t be done. That’s because a car isn’t technically an investment. An investment appreciates, meaning its value grows over time. A car is an expense that depreciates, or loses value year after year. According to a survey by Carfax, the typical new car depreciates by 10 per cent the minute you drive it out of the dealership. 

So, if you’re in the market for a car, the smart money is on buying second-hand. Ideally, plan to pay for your car in cold hard cash. Many dealers are willing to negotiate on price if you can give them cash upfront.

Unlike a car, a house is an investment. But that doesn’t mean you should be falling over yourself to get on the property ladder. 

For millennials, buying a house too early might be the worst financial investment they can make. Millennials can expect to change jobs every 3.7 years and move house up to 11 times on average. If you buy a house and then suddenly need to sell up and move, you could easily lose money.

If you’re ready to take the plunge and go in for a home, all your debts should be paid off before you buy. If you have a bad credit score, your lender is likely to set you a higher interest rate. In addition to being debt-free, you should have a 20 percent deposit ready to go.

If this financial prep sounds like a hassle, consider this: in 2018, the average American home cost $362,000. But the length and terms of the average home loan can vary wildly, according to your credit rating and the size of your initial deposit. If, for instance, you take out a 30-year loan with a fixed interest rate of 4.591 percent, totalled up, that $362,000 house will actually cost you $652,110. Compare this to the same home, paid for through a 15-year loan with a fixed interest rate of 3.645 percent. Ultimately, it will cost you $448,777 – that’s over $200,000 cheaper than the same house paid for with a less favorable loan. It goes to show that investing before you’re ready can end up costing you more. 

So, remember: don’t invest early, invest optimally – that’s the secret to living the rich life. 

Three easy steps to saving will set you up for life.

Thinking about how to fund your future can be stressful. But don’t get overwhelmed – take control! Meeting three simple savings objectives will get you on the right track.

Your first savings goal should be an emergency fund, with enough in it to cover any unexpected expenses that might otherwise push you into debt. As a rule of thumb, the typical millennial should aim to have about $3,000 stashed away. Make sure this money isn’t tied up in investments. It should be easily accessible in the event of an emergency. This is, after all, what it’s there for.

Next, establish a slush fund. You should have enough money in here to cover your expenses for three to six months. If you become sick or lose your job, you’ll be grateful for this cushion. While your slush fund should be in an account that’s easy to get at, don’t let that cash just sit there. Choose an account with a high APY or Annual Percentage Yield – an interest rate paid to you annually.

The final non-negotiable savings goal? Your retirement fund. If you’re a millennial, time is on your side here. Start investing in your retirement now and you’ll reap the rewards down the line. To build a healthy nest egg, though, your money needs to be earning interest. The best way to do this is to deposit it in a high-interest, dedicated retirement account.

If you’re an American millennial in an entry-level job, opening up a Roth IRA, or a Roth Individual Retirement account, is one of the smartest financial decisions you can make. As of 2018, you can deposit $5,500 in your fund annually. Best of all, the capital you invest and the interest your capital accumulates aren’t considered as part of your taxable income. That means you’re saving for your retirement and saving on tax at the same time.

It’s always a good idea to diversify your savings and investments, by splitting your savings into different accounts or funds. With that in mind, consider splitting your retirement savings between an IRA and a 401K, another tax-advantaged, dedicated retirement account. Some workplaces offer contribution matching, where every dollar you invest in your 401k is matched by your employer. Failing to take advantage of this scheme is like saying goodbye to free money!

If you’re living and working outside the United States, look for dedicated retirement accounts that offer similar tax advantages, and check to see if your employer offers matched contributions on retirement funds.

With an emergency fund, a slush fund, and a retirement fund established, your financial outlook gets a lot brighter, and you can start looking to the future with anticipation, rather than dread.

Investing might be more accessible than you think.

You work hard for your money, but does your money work hard for you? When you invest, you put your money to work. As a result, you can quickly grow your capital. 

But how does investing work, exactly? Here’s the basic principle. Money has utility, or buying power. When it’s sitting in your account, untouched, you’re not accessing that potential utility. Lending your money to a third party, like a bank or a fund, allows them to use your money to turn a profit. In exchange, that third party offers you a rate of return, or a percentage of any profit they’ve made with your initial investment. There’s a catch, though. If that third party doesn’t make a profit, you won’t see a rate of return. You might even end up losing your initial investment. Nevertheless, investing wisely is the surest way to grow your finances.

When it comes to what you invest in, you have a number of options. Here are some of the most common:

Many people choose to invest by buying equity, meaning they purchase a stake of ownership in a company. This equity is issued in the form of stock, which is a small fraction of a company. When you own a fraction of a company, you receive a fraction of any profits the company makes. As an individual investor you can buy stocks through public stock exchanges, like the NYSE, NASDAQ, or LSE.

As an alternative to investing in stock, you can invest in bonds. Here, you’re still dealing with a company, but rather than purchasing a stake in it, you’re lending the company money. A bond functions like an IOU. For example, if the company needs to raise capital to make a large acquisition, it releases a number of bonds. After an agreed amount of time has passed, the company returns your money with interest.

If investing in stocks and bonds yourself doesn’t sound appealing, try investing in a mutual fund. Mutual funds are collectively financed by investors who decide to buy into them. Their pooled contributions are then invested by a fund manager. Having a professional manage your investments eliminates the need for guesswork and is a great option for those who don’t feel confident playing the stock market themselves.

Streamline savings and invest efficiently by embracing technology.

Now that you’ve given your finances a makeover by paying off your debt, streamlining your savings, and started investing, it’s time for the finishing touch: setting your accounts and investments to autopilot.

To begin, find your financial flow. Every month, as your salary comes into your checking account, it’s up to you to divert that stream of money so that it flows to meet your financial goals. Establish how much of your monthly income you want to put towards paying off debt, bulking up savings, and growing investments. If you’re tackling a student loan, set aside 15 percent of your monthly income for making loan repayments. To do that, set up an automated payment for that amount which will go from your checking account to your student loan account every month. Do the same for savings and investments. With your financial flow established, you don’t have to think about how to allocate your finances each month. 

Another useful tip is to try and consolidate your accounts as far as possible. Open your checking account, your emergency fund account, and any other savings accounts through the same bank and try to use the same brokerage firm for your retirement accounts and investments. That way you’ll save on transfer and withdrawal fees.

Tech-savvy millennials are also uniquely placed to capitalize on automated investment services. In the past, investors have managed their portfolios by turning to financial advisors. But a qualified advisor can be expensive to hire and many won’t take on clients whose portfolios fall below a certain value. As a result, entry-level investors have been shut out from accessing this level of support. 

Some players in the financial services sector, however, have started to embrace automation. This means that formerly intricate and labor-intensive processes can now be performed with ease by automated robo-advisors. The new breed of online investment services can offer high-level services such as rebalancing, whereby an investment portfolio is continually reshuffled so it never takes on too much risk. Previously, these kinds of services were only offered by financial advisors to clients who could make a hefty initial investment. Betterment, Wealthfront, and Personal Capital are all web-based investment services that offer robo-advising for personal investors.

As an added bonus, these online services are far less costly. Conventionally, financial advisors charge a fee that comes to between one and two per cent of AUM or Assets Under Management. That means, if you hire an advisor to manage an investment of $100,000, you’re on the hook for $1,000 to $2,000 in annual fees. By contrast, automated investment services charge an average of 0.5 percent.

So, consider downloading a portfolio management app, where you can check your investments between scrolling Instagram stories. Now you’re making money, millennial-style!

Many millennials feel overwhelmed by the economic challenges they face, and are often ill-equipped to get their finances together. But this doesn’t need to be the case! Simple steps like learning to budget with passion, structuring your savings account, and taking the plunge and investing in homes, stocks or bonds, can set the typical millennial on the road to financial success. If millennials can cultivate the confidence to establish sound financial habits, they’ll soon start to reap the rewards.

 Action plan: Get (financially) naked.

Thinking of getting married? Then, you and your partner need to bare all, financially speaking. Financial stress is cited as one of the leading factors in divorces. That’s why your “happily ever after” begins with laying numbers on the table. Sit down with your partner and compare your respective debts, savings, and credit scores. Awkward as it may seem, having a frank conversation about your financial status, spending habits, and savings goals will set you up for a healthy financial partnership with your future spouse.

[auburnfamilynews]

Political rookie goes to Washington.

As expected tonight, former Ole Miss, Texas Tech, and Cincinnati head football coach Tommy Tuberville, who lived off of a government paycheck in his previous positions, will continue to live off of a government paycheck as he wins the race for U.S. Senate in Alabama tonight over incumbent (who??) Doug Jones.

BREAKING: Republican Tommy Tuberville wins election to U.S. Senate from Alabama, beating incumbent Sen. Doug Jones. #APracecall at 9:10 p.m. CST. #Election2020 #ALelection https://t.co/lGfinjTqT4

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) November 4, 2020

Oh, but there’s an Auburn connection here as well! In case you didn’t know, Tuberville happened to spend a decade in our little town coaching the intercollegiate football squad. I think we’ve got some grainy footage here —

Wow, who knew? Seems like a special time from a long gone era. Either way, he’s in a completely different role now in the state of Alabama, so let’s review some of the concerns we’ve got with the new Senator.

TOUGH OPPONENTS TO START: Tuberville wins the seat as a Republican, so he’ll have to deal with established Washington Democratic players like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Shumer, and his colleagues (and former Presidential candidates) Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar. It remains to be seen how he’ll handle working hand in hand with the opposition instead of grinding things to a halt, like what happened in 1999 when his Auburn team was set to play Florida State.

CRONYISM: During his time at Auburn, Tuberville came under fire for his loyalty to a certain cadre of assistant coaches known colloquially as the BBQ Buddies (or Gang, or Crew, you get the idea). Those guys who’d been with him for years, but who may not have been the best performers for the job. It was such that his supremely-talented 2003 Auburn team, that would go on to an undefeated season the next year with essentially the same roster, fell flat in 2003. The reason? Tuberville didn’t search for a new offensive coordinator. He promoted one of his boys, who flubbed the season. He was more loyal to his friends than to Auburn. Will he be more loyal to his friends than to his state and country? 2003 was only mildly saved when an outside consultant was brought in (imagine that happening now) and then when Tuberville finally went outside of his comfort zone to hire Al Borges from Indiana. To tell you the truth, this may actually work in his favor in politics.

WILTING IN THE FACE OF A TRUE CHALLENGE: How can we know that Tubs won’t bolt when the going gets tough? In the offseason after 2006, Tommy Tuberville’s job got a good bit more difficult when Alabama fired Mike Shula and hired Nick Saban from the Miami Dolphins. Saban came in, worked hard, and dominated the in-state recruiting. Furthermore, he developed those players once they got to Tuscaloosa. Tuberville’s strength was always as a player developer, but he would look for the diamonds in the rough, so to speak, and coach them up. When you’re coaching up 3-star players, and your opponent is better at coaching up 5-star players, it’s not going to end well for you. Instead of hitting the recruiting trail when Alabama was down, Tuberville won the SEC once with a great team, but had the talent to win it from 2002-2006. He should have had Alabama in the grave when Saban was hired, but it took them one full year to get back to top strength.

POOR PLANNING: This ties in with the above, but Tuberville’s god-awful recruiting efforts after 2007 are what led Auburn to endure the lull toward the end of Gene Chizik’s tenure. Give Tubs credit for the offensive line class of 2007, which helped win a national title in 2010, but that’s it. Only a couple of those guys even saw practice squad time in the NFL, and nobody else that he recruited after that point got drafted. Cam Newton was throwing to three-star receivers and destroying the SEC. Imagine if he’d had a Julio Jones type. If Tuberville hadn’t been let go after 2008, then he would’ve led Auburn to a crumbling collapse in subsequent years. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that if Gus Malzahn had the benefit of an Alabama team as bad as Tuberville did, we’d have a couple national championships and far better talent.

RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CURRENT BUYOUT STRUCTURE IN COLLEGE ATHLETICS: When Tuberville lost 36-0 to Alabama in 2008, and Auburn missed a bowl game for the first time since 1999, he “resigned”, but somehow received a $5.1M buyout, with $3M payable within 30 days of his departure and the rest due within a year. That was the start of what we see now. You know when folks talk about getting rid of Gus and we have to wonder where we’d get $21M? That started with Tommy Tuberville.

Those are some serious strikes against the man who will now help represent the state of Alabama in the U.S. Senate. What has Tommy Tuberville said that he wants to accomplish when he gets to Washington? His campaign issues page reads like a McNuggets box of conservative talking points, but there’s no subtance. No solutions, just complaining.

I’m shocked that we don’t see the following issues on the link above:

THE BCS: The got-dang system that screwed him and allowed the SEC to receive the benefit of the doubt years later never really paid off for Auburn. Tuberville got the short end of the stick with the BCS in 2004, but he never coached in a situation where he would’ve been in contention for the College Football Playoff.

ARKANSAS/HOUSTON NUTT: Dang Hawg Hex! Arkansas was the bugaboo for Tuberville for years during his early days. Fred Talley, Matt Jones, those guys usually ruined what was a promising season for Auburn. Arkansas cost Auburn at least two SEC West titles in 2002 and 2006. It’s not the first time that a folksy guy in Arkansas messed things up for Republicans...

BOBBY LOWDER: I wonder how much money Tubs has in FlightTracker’s current stock. It’s essentially what saved his job in 2003. After losing like he had in his first couple of seasons, especially to one of the worst Alabama teams in recent memory, nobody really blamed the Auburn powers for trying to replace him. If they hadn’t done it secretly, then it wouldn’t have been such a problem.

INSOLENT STUDENTS: See below —

CHUBBY MATT STAFFORD/REGGIE BALL: Why aren’t these criminals in jail for their crimes against Auburn? Somehow Tuberville had no idea how to plan against these two quarterbacks and Auburn went a combined 0-5 against them during Tubs’ tenure. Georgia Tech was awful with Reggie Ball, but we couldn’t seem to figure out a way to beat them. Matt Stafford is a little more excusable, but in 2006 when Auburn was still in the hunt for a national title in November, Stafford ran all over Auburn as a freshman for an unranked Georgia squad.

Seriously, don’t you wonder why Tuberville isn’t more beloved by people involved with Auburn? He’s got a dominant record against Alabama and the 2004 season under his belt, but he’s not the most cherished ex-coach we’ve got. Now he’s helping run the country.

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