#corporate citizenship

[duncans-idahoe]

Yeah I believe in democracy… but America IS NOT and HAS NEVER been a true democracy

Democracy isn’t the problem… the American government is

[ferretshark]

Project 2025 Cliff Notes:

1. Complete ban on abortions, without exceptions (pg. 449-503)

2. End marriage equality (pg. 545-581)

3. Elimination of unions and worker protections (pg. 581)

4. Defund the FBI and Homeland Security (pg. 133)

5. Eliminate federal agencies like the FDA, EPA, NOAA, and more (pg. 363-417)

6. Mass deportation of immigrants and incarceration in "camps" (pg. 133)

7. End birthright citizenship (pg. 133)

8. Cut Social Security (pg. 691)

9. Cut Medicare (pg. 449)

10. Eliminate the Department of Education (pg. 319)

11. Teach Christian religious beliefs in public schools (pg. 319)

12. Use public, taxpayer money for private religious schools (pg. 319)

13. End the Affordable Care Act (pg. 449)

14. Ban contraceptives (pg. 449)

15. Additional tax breaks for corporations and the 1% (pg. 691)

16. End civil rights & DEI protections in government (pg. 545-581)

17. Ban African American and gender studies in all levels of education (pg. 319)

18. End climate protections: (pg. 417)

19. Increase Arctic drilling (pg. 363)

20. Deregulate big business and the oil industry (pg. 363)

Not to increase anxiety, but I found this buried on Reddit. From six months ago. very good thing to have in your pocket so you are prepared

[itsnothingbutluck]

Environmental degradation. Poverty and malnutrition. Disease and illiteracy. As the world's human population skyrockets and resources grow scarce, the multinational corporation—with its ability to mobilize massive human and capital resources across geopolitical boundaries—may be mankind's best defense against an onslaught of social ills. Many companies have already joined the fray, launching ambitious global corporate citizenship programs designed to improve the quality of life in the communities and nations in which they operate. Their activities, the focus of this groundbreaking work, are precursors to a new age of enlightened capitalism, and their bold break with tradition is putting them now, more than ever, in the public eye...

[dimartinolawgroup]

Entering the US with a Green Card After Travel

Congratulations! You’ve explored new horizons, embraced cultural experiences, and now prepare to return to the land of opportunity—the United States. But before you waltz through customs with carefree ease, remember: you’re a returning green card holder, and specific procedures await. Don’t worry, though! This comprehensive guide will equip you with the knowledge and steps to ensure a smooth re-entry into the US with your green card.

[specialagentartemis]

I’ve increasingly seen the take that Gurathin, being the only one of the PresAux group originally from the CR, understands SecUnits better than the others and understands corporate greed and underhandedness and violence better than his idealist space socialist leftist colleagues… which always rings odd to me, because it’s well established that Mensah and Pin-Lee understand what they’re dealing with as intelligent, savvy professionals!

Mensah is the Planetary Administrator of Preservation; she is very nearly the President of the Whole Planet. It’s hard to believe she could get there and be regarded as a good leader of a small planet with neither military nor economic power in the galaxy and remain unaware of how the Corporation Rim works and how to deal with them to keep her polity safe. The company executives presented Murderbot to Mensah directly in their pitch for why the team needed to take a SecUnit; her multiple objections to this indicate that she does, in fact, know how unethical (and likely dangerous) SecUnits are.

Pin-Lee, meanwhile, is a corporate lawyer; she’s described as CombatUnit-like, and based on the fact that she went not only with this scientific survey but also with Mensah at the end of Network Effect on this short-notice and desperate chase across the galaxy, seems to be the go-to person to deal with off-world legal issues. Murderbot notes early on that being under the Company’s surveillance seemed to affect her more than the others. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that’s because she knows what shit companies put in their contracts, and what they do.

They aren’t naïve leftists who don’t understand how the Real World works, they are well-too-aware of the abuses and surveillance and callousness of companies!

(Ratthi watches Sanctuary Moon, evidently a CR production—Preservation aren’t isolationists. The whole Preservation backstory is of a community’s escape from callous, profit-driven corporate abandonment of their grandparents’ generation to die. I would think Preservation people would be, as a society, aware and very wary of CR corporations.)

Their trust they place in Murderbot in All System Red is very likely influenced by Preservation’s cultural values of dignity, support, freedom, responsibility to each other, bot citizenship, all that good stuff—but it’s certainly not blindly, naïvely unaware of alternative possible perspectives. And that’s why it’s powerful: they’re making a conscious choice, measuring its actions and its rights as a person against the propaganda and fear, that Murderbot deserves that respect and dignity and freedom and trust as a person and not just as an arm of untrustworthy corporations.

(And like. Also the fact that “Gurathin is from the CR” is not explicitly canon, either. We don’t know where he’s from originally; the CR is a reasonable interpretation, certainly, it fits the facts, but it’s still an interpretation that fans have to make rather than actually being text. And I think in these discussions that ought to be remembered too. )

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #23

June 14-21 2024.

On the 12th anniversary of President Obama's DACA program President Biden announced a new pathway to legal status and eventual citizenship for Dreamers. DACA was an executive action by President Obama which deferred any deportation of persons brought to the US as children without legal status. While DACA allowed Dreamers to work legally in the US for the first time, it didn't give them permanent legal status. Now the Biden administration is streamlining the process for employers to apply for work Visas for Dreamers. With Visas Dreamers will for the first time have legal status, the ability to leave and reenter the US legally, and a pathway to a Green Card and eventual citizenship.

President Biden also announced protections for the undocumented spouses and children of US citizens. The new rule allows the spouse, or step-child of a US citizen to apply for lawful permanent residency without having to leaving the country. It's estimated this will help 500,000 undocumented people married to Americans, and 50,000 children under the age of 21 whose parent is married to an American citizen. Current law forces spouses to leave the United States if they're here illegally and wait and unclear period of probation before being allowed to return, but being allowed back is not assured.

The IRS announced that it'll close a tax loophole used by the ultra rich and corporations and believes it'll raise $50 billion in revenue. Known as a "pass-through" has allowed the rich to move money around to avoid taxes in a move the Treasury is calling a shell-game. Pass-throughs have grown by 70% between 2010 and 2019 and the IRS believes it helped the rich avoid paying $160 billion dollars in taxes during that time. The IRS estimates its crack down on these will raise $50 billion in tax revenue over the next 10 years.

The EPA and Department of Energy announced $850 million to monitor, measure, quantify and reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. Methane is the second most common greenhouse gas, responsible for 1/3rd of the global warming. The funding will focus on helping small operators significantly reduce emissions, as well as help more quickly detect and cap methane leaks from low-producing wells. All this comes after the EPA finalized rules to reduce methane emissions by 80% from oil and gas.

The Biden Administration took steps to protect the nations Old Growth Forests. The move will greatly restrict any logging against the 41 million acres of protected land owned by the federal government. The Administration also touted the 20% of America's forests that are in urban settings as parks and the $1.4 billion invested in their protection through the President’s Investing in America agenda.

The Biden Administration released new rules tying government support for clean energy to good paying jobs. If companies want to qualify for massive tax credits they'll have to offer higher wages and better conditions. This move will push union level wages across the green energy sector.

The Department of Education announced large reductions in student loan payments, and even a pause for some, starting in July. For millions of Americans enrolled in the Biden Administration's SAVE plan, starting in July, monthly payments on loans borrowed for undergraduate will be reduced from 10% to 5% of discretionary income. As the department hasn't been able to fully calculate the change for all borrowers at this point it will pause payment for those it hasn't finalized the formula for and they won't have to make a payment till DoE figures it out. The SAVE plan allows many borrowers to make payments as low as $0 a month toward having their loans forgiven. So far the Biden Administration has forgiven $5.5 billion wiping out the debt of 414,000 people enrolled in SAVE.

The Biden Administration celebrated the 1 Millionth pension protected under the American Rescue Plan. Senator Bob Casey joined Biden Administration officials and Union official to announce that thanks to the Butch Lewis Act passed in 2021 the government would be stepping in to secure the pensions of 103,000 Bakery and Confectionery Union workers which were facing a devastating 45% cut. This brings to 1 million the number of workers and retirees whose pensions have been secured by the Biden Administration, which has supported 83 different pension funds protecting them from an average of 37% cut.

The Department of Energy announced $900 million for the next generation of nuclear power. This investment in Gen III+ Small Modular Reactor will help bring about smaller and more flexible nuclear reactors with smaller footprints. Congress also passed a bill meant to streamline nuclear power and help push on to the 4th generation of reactors

Vice President Harris announced a $1.5 billion dollar aid package to Ukraine. $500 million will go toward repairing Ukraine's devastated energy sector which has been disrupted by Russian bombing. $324 million will go toward emergency energy infrastructure repair. $379 million in humanitarian assistance from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to help refugees and other people impacted by the war.

America pledged $315 million in new aid for Sudan. Sudan's on-going civil war has lead to nearly apocalyptic conditions in the country. Director of USAID, Samantha Power, warned that Sudan could quickly become the largest famine the world has seen since Ethiopia in the early 1980s when a million people died over 2 years. The US aid includes food and water aid as well as malnutrition screening and treatment for young children.

Bonus: Maryland Governor Wes Moore pardoned more than 175,000 people for marijuana convictions. This mirrors President Biden's pardoning of people convicted of federal marijuana charges in 2022 and December 2023. President Biden is not able to pardon people for state level crimes so called on Governors to copy his action and pardon people in their own state. Wes Moore, a Democrat, was elected in 2022 replacing Republican Larry Hogan.

[she-is-ovarit]

It's all connected. Corporations began marketing gay pride themed merchandise. An increase in "I-identify-as" populations began to flood gay bars and events, where outward appearance (marketed as "gender expression") became heavily emphasized.

Commercial visibility and marketability does not equal human rights progress.

Ability to consume does not equal citizenship to an oppressed group.

Biology, (referring to sexual orientation and sex) is not a brand you can buy into or boycott out of.

Corporations selling rainbows do not reflect our values.

The churning out of new "all inclusive" pride flags to pledge allegiance to is not indicative of liberation.

A historical homosexual slur being sold by the multi-billion dollar media obfuscates predominantly lesbian relationships ("queer women", "queer relationship") and retraumatizes many gay and lesbian people.

Gay pride only extending to people able to purchase detracts from the meaning of gay pride and distracts from the struggles of the most vulnerable. It positions the most privileged within marginalized and oppressed groups as those who represent the whole.

And associating body modification, aestheticism, and "expression" with self identity turns the lived experiences and material realities of entire subgroups of people into niche market categories that people who aren't even a part of these groups can identify into and out of based on social trends.

Biology becomes devalued, overshadowed by the social and manufactured "genders". Infinite genders means infinite target audiences. Lived, material realities of certain groups of people become materialism.

Human rights movements are becoming human rights industries, with the wealthy more directly capitalizing off of the exploitation of the poor, of the homosexual, of the female, of the immigrant, of the dark skinned, of the mentally ill, of the disabled, of the sick, of the marginalized and oppressed.

Don't buy into it.

[transit-fag]

What's your 'murica gets its head out of its ass wishlist' for urban planning and other major policy shifts?

Mine is:

Left side driving

Changing to metric already

Universal income, extra for disabled people

Universal healthcare for everyone in any part of the US

Defund the world spanning military, grant statehood or subsidized independence to our colonies. Maybe just like idk patrol our own waters and skies perhaps?

Defund the police, and create community outreach orgs to help all suffering ppl, including jerks who struggle so much they think killing ppl is ever okay.

Establish limits on copyright law being 20 years like patents. (With none of the bullshit loopholes)

Establish that all intellectual property deemed a public good by someone kind is forced into the public domain irrevocably. (Careful I will rant about the patent on heated boxes or life saving meds)

Requiring any company that operates in the US to pay taxes to the US, and hold their executives responsible for damages to anything or one they cause.

Public trains to/from anywhere with more than double digit population. Some other form of public transit that gets its own lane at least for anywhere that is infeasible.

Make safe, secure, private, and well made housing, a right and not a commodity.

Make food a right.

Make clothes a right.

Make good internet a right.

Make electricity a right.

Make privacy a right.

Make education an unlimited right.

All people in the US are eligible for all rights and protections etc. (Citizenship is not a requirement to be treated well)

Ban plastics in anything where natural materials are better.

Subsidize growing actual food people want to eat, not industrial resources.

Ban golf courses anywhere they cannot naturally survive.

Exclude all organizations from exerting powers like the law except for the government.

Anyone making disproportionate use of a public good like water, transportation, etc, gets taxed proportionately. (Semi trucks bad, trains good)

Provide water reclamation resources to areas without renewable clean water, no matter the cost.

Require that people in any position of power be good kind people.

Make rule of law actually mean something, if the law applies to everyone equally than enforce it equally. (Including the government and military)

Make corporations not legally people (they aren't)

No nukes or WMDs

Give NASA 10% the national budget or smth, they deserve it.

Require that companies pay the union dues of their employees.

Encourage unions.

Make the NSA about aquatic biology instead. Say the National Aquatic Association or smth.

No guns in civilization, wilderness or rural only for civilians.

Disband the CIA.

Full audits of the government all the time, no classified or secret bullshit. With great power comes great scrutiny and actual responsibility.

Establish an actual nationwide recycling system to turn trash into compost or useful materials.

Establish restorative justice practices nationwide.

I uh went off a bit sorry, I miss anything?

I agree with most of this except left side driving, that is an evil British scheme.

Also how the fuck do you require people in power to be "good kind people" do you not see how that could be abused, it's completely subjective

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

de Adder

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 8, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 09, 2024

Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil. 

There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s advisors told Jim VandeHei and MIke Allen of Axios that Trump wasted valuable time at the beginning of his first term and that they will not make that mistake again. They plan to hit the ground running with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, deregulation, and increased gas and oil production. Trump is looking to fill the top ranks of the government with “billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders and loyalists.” 

After the election, the wealth of Trump-backer Elon Musk jumped about $13 billion, making him worth $300 billion. Musk, who has been in frequent contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin, joined a phone call today between President-elect Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. 

In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.

Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.  An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” 

In The New Republic today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”

Tomasky noted how the work of Matthew Gertz of Media Matters shows that nearly all the crazy memes that became central campaign issues—the pet-eating story, for example, or the idea that the booming economy was terrible—came from right-wing media. In those circles, Vice President Kamala Harris was a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, while Trump is under assault and has been for years, and he’s “doing it all for you.”

Investigative reporter Miranda Green outlined how “pink slime” newspapers, which are AI generated from right-wing sites, turned voters to Trump in key swing state counties. Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’” 

In a social media post, Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”

In the 1850s, white southern leaders made sure that voters did not have access to news that came from outside the American South, and instead steeped them in white supremacist information. They stopped the mail from carrying abolitionist pamphlets, destroyed presses of antislavery newspapers, and drove antislavery southerners out of their region.

Elite enslavers had reason to be concerned about the survival of their system of human enslavement. The land boom of the 1840s, when removal of Indigenous peoples had opened up rich new lands for settlement, had priced many white men out of the market. They had become economically unstable, roving around the country working for wages or stealing to survive. And they deeply resented the fabulously wealthy enslavers who they knew looked down on them. 

In 1857, North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper wrote a book attacking enslavement. No friend to his Black neighbors, Helper was a virulent white supremacist. But in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, he used modern statistics to prove that slavery destroyed economic opportunity for white men, and assailed “the illbreeding and ruffianism of the slaveholding officials.” He noted that voters in the South who did not own slaves outnumbered by far those who did. "Give us fair play, secure to us the right of discussion, the freedom of speech, and we will settle the difficulty at the ballot-box,” he wrote.

In the North the book sold like hotcakes—142,000 copies by fall 1860. But southern leaders banned the book, and burned it, too. They arrested men for selling it and accused northerners of making war on the South. Politicians, newspaper editors, and ministers reinforced white supremacy, warned that the end of slavery would mean race war, and preached that enslavement was God’s law.

When northern voters elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 on a platform of containing enslavement in the South, where the sapped soil would soon cut into production, southern leaders decided—usually without the input of voters—to secede from the Union. As leaders promised either that there wouldn’t be a fight, or that if a fight happened it would be quick and painless, poor southern whites rallied to the cause of creating a nation based on white supremacy, reassured by South Carolina senator James Chesnut’s vow that he would personally drink all the blood shed in any threatened civil war. 

When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, poor white men set out for what they had come to believe was an imperative cause to protect their families and their way of life. By 1862 their enthusiasm had waned, and leaders passed a conscription law. That law permitted wealthy men to hire a substitute and exempted one man to oversee every 20 enslaved men, providing another way for rich men to keep their sons out of danger. Soldiers complained it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” 

By 1865 the Civil War had killed or wounded 483,026 men out of a southern white population of about five and a half million people. U.S. armies had pushed families off their lands, and wartime inflation drove ordinary people to starvation. By 1865, wives wrote to their soldier husbands to come home or there would be no one left to come home to. 

Even those poor white men who survived the war could not rebuild into prosperity. The war took from the South its monopoly of global cotton production, locking poor southerners into profound poverty from which they would not begin to recover until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to pour federal money into the region.

Today, when I received a slew of messages gloating that Trump had won the election and that Republican voters had owned the libs, I could not help but think of that earlier era when ordinary white men sold generations of economic aspirations for white supremacy and bragging rights. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[probablyasocialecologist]

The World Food Summit of 1996 approached food security through the principles of ensuring there is enough safe and nutritious food that can be accessed daily to meet healthy dietary needs and food preferences. By definition, this is a desirable and worthy goal. However, in the years since, food security has developed into a paradigm which does not question the underlying power dynamics and the reproduction of material conditions that make food insecurity a permanent feature of the global order. At its core, the food security paradigm deals only with access to food, without challenging the political and economic structures that determine and control access, as well as distribution.  By failing to address the root causes of hunger and famine, the food security paradigm makes it impossible to end hunger globally. Of course, many people worldwide possess food security, but this is restricted to increasingly limited geographic pockets. In terms of the people localised in one area, food vulnerability is influenced and determined by class, race, gender and, of course, citizenship status. Globally, “underdevelopment” and “de-development” lead to widespread food insecurity across areas. Another problem with the food security paradigm is that it is easily co-opted to generate partial answers that pose no threat to the corporate food system, or worse, that even open up new profit opportunities. Accelerated by other crises, the food security paradigm becomes ever more dependent on aid, be it through direct food delivery, cash transfers or small development projects that cannot compete with the food giants and their price-setting powers. In practice, a “science of food security” emerges, one which takes as its focus calories and the output that is compatible with precision agriculture having the aim to increase crop yields and to assist management decisions using high technology sensor and analysis tools. This model tends to be reliant on “Green Revolution” technologies that rely on chemical fertilisers and pesticides and that are tied to colonial projects and corporations, in order to optimise resources in aid response and/or development projects.  In this rationale, food insecurity can be addressed by reaching optimum yields of certain crops that should meet the demand for fats, fibres and protein. All of this is carefully managed and data-driven. Precision farming is advocated by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) with the objective of optimising, “agricultural value chains […] critical in advancing food and nutrition sufficiency without increasing the size of land under cultivation.” The framing of food that reduces it only to “optimal input” relegates vital elements of food production and the culture of eating, like territory ownership, taste, heritage, care, well-being and connection as secondary. This reductionist approach has, though, proved useful to corporate agriculture, since it reinforces the case for genetically modified crops (GMOs), more efficient fertilisers, and the standardisation of food production for market purposes. Advocates of plant breeding technologies (including GMOs and hybrid seeds) argue that government overregulation is an obstacle to achieving food security. Overregulation, as the argument goes, denies populations the opportunity to grow crops that have increased nutrient use efficiency and are more resilient to climate shocks. 

[...]

The paradigm of food security is about optimising productivity. It’s true that productivity matters – after all, feeding the world requires enormous quantities of food. But if productivity is approached solely as a technological problem, it reinforces the tendency to fragment the quantitative and qualitative aspects of food production and consumption. On the quantitative side, production for food security is viewed as a challenge of multiplication. Whereas division, that is, distribution of food, is left to logistical planning. This ignores what Raj Patel identified in his influential 2007 book Stuffed and Starved, as the bottleneck of power that concentrates international food distribution among a small set of corporations. This bottleneck excludes the poor and small-scale food producers from decision-making. It also normalises worrying tendencies, such as an overreliance on industrial animal exploitation as a protein source, which has direct health implications, as well as longer term consequences like the proliferation of new viruses, greenhouse gas emissions and inefficient use of water and soil.

28 May 2024

[soon-palestine]

HP hewlett packard

HP-branded corporations provide and operate technology that Israel uses to maintain its system of apartheid, occupation and settler colonialism over the Palestinian people. Hewlett Packard’s violations of Palestinian human rights have been well documented. Aside from providing services and technology to the Israeli army and police that maintain Israel’s illegal occupation and siege of Gaza, HP provides Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority with the exclusive Itanium servers for its Aviv System. This system enables the government to control and enforce its system of racial segregation and apartheid against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and is directly involved in Israel’s settler colonialism through its “Yesha database”, which compiles information on Israeli citizens in illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

HP has been described as the “Polaroid of our times”, a reference to huge mobilisations against the use of Polaroid technology by the South African apartheid regime for its racist passbook system. Polaroid’s 1977 withdrawal from South Africa marked a turning point in the international effort to end apartheid there.

HP-E is contracted by Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority to provide and maintain the Itanium servers that house Israel’s population registry through 2020. Known as the Aviv System, this population registry is the basis of Israel’s ID card system. This ID system forms a core part of the Israeli apartheid regime’s tiered system of citizenship and residency that privileges Israel’s Jewish population and gives inferior status and rights to Palestinians, especially those in East Jerusalem. This leads to institutionalised racial discrimination and segregation in freedom of movement, housing, employment, marriage, healthcare, education, and policing. This discrimination is further exacerbated in the case of Palestinian “residents” in occupied East Jerusalem, whose most basic rights can and are being revoked arbitrarily.

The system also holds information about Israeli citizens living in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, therefore serving Israel’s settler colonial project directly. HP-E’s spin-off DXC Technology runs an R&D facility in the illegal settlement of Beitar Illit.

In 2015, HP split into HP Inc.- which carried on the brand name and provides consumer hardware, and HP-E for business and government services. In such a scenario, the BDS National Committee maintains that: “The onus is on each company to demonstrate to the public that it is free of illegal and unethical business activities.” Further, despite multiple requests for clarification, both the new companies sharing and profiting from the HP brand are yet to provide unambiguous evidence to show that their business activities with Israel do not violate International Humanitarian Law and Palestinian Human Rights. HP has, in the past, held a contract with the Israeli Ministry of Defence under which it developed and maintained the Basel System- the biometric identification system installed on checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian Territory, controlling the mobility of Palestinians. It also worked with the Israeli military, helping build its IT infrastructure. This included a program with the Israeli Navy which enforces the illegal naval blockade on Gaza. For these and other past ties of complicity with Israel’s occupation, apartheid and settler-colonialism, HP-branded companies must provide reparations to the Palestinian victims of these crimes.

https://bdsmovement.net/boycott-hp#tab3

[void-botanist]

About

I'm Rose (he/they/ze/she) and I'm a queer white neurodivergent writer, artist, and web designer. My writing is mainly sci-fantasy, sometimes romance and horror, and I make visual art in both digital and traditional mediums. I'm always dabbling in something new! Outside of the blorbos in my brain, I'm a gay husband and doctoral student. ¡Hablo español también!

I'm an adult and I write for adults. Minors, please look for other writeblrs to follow instead.

Update Jan 21 2025: my askbox is temporarily closed while I get through old asks!

I follow from @an-elegant-void, but I prefer to be tagged in games/posts on this blog. You can also follow me on bluesky and check out my (under construction) nekoweb.

I do commissions! 🇵🇸 Details here! 🇵🇸

Writing tag: #rose writ // Art tag: #rose arts // Picrews I've used

Main WIPs

The Fourth Android

Setting // Pajiir, a fantasy planet somewhere in the Milky Way

Synopsis // Dez is an android, and he's supposed to be doing holiday stuff with his human builders' family, but he's weaseled his way into earning his citizenship on a remote island so he can meet his other family - Pajiir's other three androids.

Tag // #wip: tfa, also #c: Dez, etc. for the characters

Another Ocean's Moon

Setting // locality space, a galaxy filled with inhabited planets

Synopsis // Sid, a young human man, teams up with his bitchy middle-aged friend Avis to escape his abusive parents and get back to their planet of origin. Finally, Avis is going to divorce her cheater husband Sorian and Sid is going to see his best friend, Sorian's illegitimate son, and they're both going to get on with their lives - hopefully.

Tag // #wip: aom, also #c: Sid, etc. for the characters

Nicea

Setting // locality space, a galaxy filled with inhabited planets

Synopsis // Cady, the captain of the warpship Nicea, died while warp racing a decade ago, leaving his husband and the rest of their crew to pick up the pieces. Yet somehow, after ten years, they receive a message from Cady and set off across the galaxy to retrieve him, no matter what it takes.

Tag // #wip: nicea, also #c: Cady, etc. for the characters

Derelict Corridors

Setting // a vague sci-fi galaxy I call "corporate space"

Synopsis // Moochia works dereliction for Rosclial Inc. It's a decent enough gig, recovering resources and crushing up old ships to be recycled. Most importantly, it's a solitary job, and should never involve meeting conversational undead weirdos, but that's just her luck, isn't it?

Tag // #wip: dc, also #c: Moochia, etc. for the characters

I have more WIPs/ideas than this. Check out my master list for more (you can ask me about any of them!).

[yanxioustrikas]

dmitri

link to the latest art of dmitri

this post is simply called dmitri, and this is hopefully everything you need to know about them! or just some fun facts lol

(this was sitting in draft since SUMMER, and since there is another rise of ocs in supablr, i thought this would be a good opportunity to revise and post this)

biography

full name: dmitri mikhailovich sokolov

pronouns: he/they

sexuality: bisexual

gender: genderfluid

age: 16 (debut), 17 to 18 (super league junior career), 19 to early 20s (post-super league junior)

birthday: may 23

height: 191 cm/6'3 ft

nationality/citizenship: russian-south african

ethnicity: russian + cameroonian

residence(s): st. petersburg, russia (birthplace), johannesburg, south africa (permanent), toronto, ontario, canada (for uni)

language(s): russian, french, english, afrikaans (fluent in first three, limited proficiency in afrikaans)

significant other: hiram romilly-choucair

family

father: mikhail sokolov

mother: nadine bahanag

sibling(s): matvey (older brother; oldest), avdotya (older sister; middle)

pet(s): squeaky (white maine coon cat)

super league junior profile

team: invincible united junior fc

jersey number: 17

position: midfielder + captain

award(s): rookie of the year, star of the match (x10), slj captain of the year (x2)

post-secondary profile

type: university

location: toronto, ontario, canada

program: fashion design - bachelor of design

varsity sports team: men's ice hockey - goaltender

extracurricular clubs: francophone club, visual arts club, cameroonian student association, literature club

possible future career: fashion designer, fashion journalist, or dressmaker

hobbies and interests

ice hockey

soccer

visual art (won a few high school awards for his artworks)

creative writing

sewing and designing

flute

dance (contemporary ballet)

russian and french literature

cooking (not great at it so they call their sister for help lol)

making mocha

strawberries

extra stuff about his family because they all have interesting lives lol

mikhail (father), he/him

a therapist, specializing in cognitive behavioural therapy and psychotherapy, and is among the best psychologists in johannesburg

did practicum at the oasis, and used to work for cognito fc for a year

ex-ballet dancer from a wealthy (and horrible) classical ballet family in moscow

other interests include dance (for old time sake and to pass on the sokolov techniques to his kids), sudoku, pilates, cooking

nadine (mother), she/her

a corporate lawyer working at one of south africa’s high-ranking law firms

cousin of el matador’s female lawyer (both also attended the same law school)

during her youth, she played defence for the u-18 cameroon's women's national soccer team

other interests include yoga, cardio, playing piano, reading classical books

matvey (brother), he/him

a flute player studying at a prestigious conservatory in london, england

has a huge platform on various social media for showcasing his passion for music

part-time job as a music tutor

other interests include reading philosophical literature, working out, photography, playing ice hockey at a recreational league (defender), dance

avdotya (sister), she/her

a food science major and a culinary enthusiast

was a contestant (two-time champion) at a national (russian) junior chef competition

currently co-president for her university’s culinary club

other interests include painting, playing intramural ice hockey (forward), dance, weightlifting, journaling

squeaky (cat), he/him

a male cat who is very talkative and friendly

was adopted from a shelter in johannesburg at 5 months olds

loves to watch the birds from inside the house, but never chases them if outside

dislikes eating fish itself, will eat if the fish is eaten with something else in the bowl

the kids love hockey and dance sm