Rafael Bernabe and Manuel Rodríguez Banchs, writing at Latino Rebels, give us a comprehensive historical context for the conditions in Puerto Rico, post Hurricane Maria:
Open Letter to the People of the United States From Puerto Rico, a Month After Hurricane María
Since 1898, Congress has never, we repeat, never consulted the Puerto Rican people in a binding plebiscite or referendum on whether to retain the present status, become independent or a state of the Union. Having retained its plenary powers, Congress should assume responsibility for a territory it claims as a possession: yet it has often skirted that responsibility. This again should come as no surprise, as Congress has often ignored and overlooked many unjust situations in the United States (affecting workers, women, African-Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, among others), unless activism and mobilizations forced it to do otherwise.
But colonialism has an economic, as well as a political, dimension. After 1898, Puerto Rico’s economy came under the control of U.S. corporations. Puerto Rico then specialized in producing a few goods for the U.S. market. One consequence has been the constant outflow of a significant portion of the income generated in Puerto Rico. At present, around $35 billion leave annually. This is around 35 percent of Puerto Rico’s Gross Domestic Product.
This capital is not reinvested and does not create employment here in Puerto Rico. Thus, Puerto Rico’s one-sided, externally controlled and largely export-oriented economy has never been able to provide enough employment for its workforce: not when sugar production was the main industry; not in the 1950s and 1960s with light-manufacturing that came and often went; not today, through capital intensive operations, among which pharmaceuticals are the most important.
This dependent and colonial nature of Puerto Rico’s economy lies at the root of the high levels of unemployment, not the alleged laziness of Puerto Rico’s workers, an old racist stereotype now taken up by President Trump.
Rosemary Hendricks, also writing at Latino Rebels, discusses how the imposition of English damages families and communities:
The Linguistic Violence of Speaking American
The linguistic violence that is inflicted upon non-English dominant students begins in kindergarten, where the language skills that students bring from home are deemed deficient. Whether more colloquial forms of English or languages other than English, these language skills are systematically stripped from them. The students will be pulled out of class and subjected to yearly tests that measure their proficiency in standard academic English and will determine their academic placement for the rest of their K-12 experience, while their home language skills atrophy….
Instead of teachers “undoing” the language mistakes learned at home or “sanitizing” the “contaminated” varieties of language that students bring to class, what is needed are language policies that are responsive to the identity and linguistic needs of all students and that draw from their lived experiences as a source of knowledge. This cannot be done as long as school systems continue to view students’ home language practices as “broken” and school the place where it can be “fixed” and it most certainly cannot be done as long as teachers yell at students to speak “American.”
Maya Dusenberry, at Feministing, writes about the significance and generally unrecognized implications of#metoo:
#METOO: On Trust.
I hope that men see every “me too” post as representing a very good reason—and usually more than one—for all women not to trust men. #YesALLmen because it’s precisely that uncertainty—and the consequent need for constant guardedness—that’s so corrosive. If being distrustful of a whole gender strikes you as terrible and unfair—well, yes, that it absolutely is. It is no way to live but that is the reality that all women are forced to manage in some way…
Sometimes, some of us—and I’d count myself in this—may recognize that it’s just a matter of luck (often with a good dose of privilege) but consciously and recklessly choose to trust men anyway because, whatever the risks, being always wary takes a toll on your soul too. Sometimes we are just afraid…
I’m not sure that this current outpouring will change much, if it does provoke some self-analysis among men, I’d suggest starting here: How does it feel to know you are distrusted because of your gender? What toll does that take on your soul? And how much power are you willing to give up to make that not true?
Angel Helm at The Root reports that police body cameras have little effect of police violence:
New Study Shows Body Cams Have Little Influence on Police Brutality.
Well, the results are in, and they don’t look promising for police bodycams being the end all be all in stopping police abuse and brutality. But I think we knew this. As many anti-brutality activists have maintained, it’s not about tactics (though they may help) but dismantling the system and culture.
A new study by the Lab @ DC found that there was not a “statistically significant effect of the body-worn cameras,” according to a researcher who took part in the report. Meaning, police abuse is about the same as it has always been, even with the body cameras being worn by officers.
Richard Prince, also at The Root, gives the spotlight to journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, recipient of the MacCarthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant:
Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones Wins MacArthur Fellowship
A few years ago, says Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer for the New York Times Magazine, “I was told I was writing about black people too much” and was punished for it. On Tuesday, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant for “chronicling the persistence of racial segregation in American society, particularly in education, and reshaping national conversations around education reform.”
The news organization then packaged “The Best of Nikole Hannah-Jones” as a feature on nytimes.com.
If you’re a subscriber, you can follow the link at the NYT to see what an amazing writer Hannah-Jones is.
On the other side of the world, Giovanni Tiso reports on recent elections in New Zealand at Overland, a bastion of progressive thinking and writing based in Australia:
New Zealand has a new government – where to now?
For progressives, the greater challenge is how to respond to a centrist coalition whose main point of agreement is that fighting inequality passes through curtailing immigration. Over the past term of National’s government, Labour has aggressively positioned itself as an anti-immigration party, all but matching the histrionic brand of racism displayed over the years by the leader of New Zealand First. The Greens themselves flirted briefly with this position, before internal dissent and – possibly – the realisation that the field was becoming too crowded made them change course again. But it’s difficult to imagine how they might be able to moderate the new government’s stance on immigration from outside of cabinet.
In this as in other areas, the country has precious few public institutions capable of providing an incisive and coherent critique of the government from the left, and – if history is any guide – the civil society groups that were active while Labour was in opposition could end up bargaining their more radical demands in exchange for the illusion of influence. In such an environment, there is a significant danger that criticism of the government would come exclusively from National’s very large contingent of MPs – with all the resources and question-time slots that this entails – and a heavily corporatised media whose interests strongly align with those of the business community.
This concern should resonate with progressives here in the US: ‘the civil society groups that were active while Labour was in opposition could end up bargaining their more radical demands in exchange for the illusion of influence’.
Carbon Brief focuses on energy and the environment, and Simon Evans shows us how renewables bring not just electrical power, but economic and political power to the marginalized communities of the world (all while maybe helping us not destroy our planet):
Renewables will give more people access to electricity than coal, says IEA.
Around the world, more than a billion people still lack access to electricity.
This number is shrinking, down by one third since 2000, despite rising population levels, according to an International Energy Agency (IEA) special report on energy access, published today.
The report says that while coal has supplied nearly half of the progress from 2000 to date, its role is set to decline “dramatically”. This is because renewables are becoming cheaper and because the hardest-to-reach people are in remote, rural areas where off-grid solutions offer the lowest cost…
Around the world, the share of new electricity access supplied by renewables will nearly double to 60%, up from 34% over the past five years (green, blue and yellow columns, below). This pattern is even more extreme in India, where the share of new electricity from renewables will triple to 60%
If the world wants to meet the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of providing universal energy access for all by 2030, then 90% of the additional electricity connections over and above the IEA’s central scenario will come from renewables, its report suggests.
This reflects the fact that the hardest-to-reach populations are those least likely to benefit from grid expansion. For these people, decentralised systems, predominantly supplied by solar (yellow columns, below), offer the “lowest cost pathway” to electricity access. (emphasis added)
And for those who don’t have enough to read, and want to challenge or broaden their perspective of whatever it is that progressive might mean, there’s Radical Philosophy: A Journal philosophical journal of the independent Left, which describes itself as ‘a UK-based journal of socialist and feminist philosophy’. From the archives, Victoria Browne offers a critical examination of feminist views of the political economics of gender:
‘The money follows the mum’: Maternal power as consumer power.
As a cost-cutting manifesto that contributes to the general drive towards privatized or marketized public health, there is clearly much for feminists to oppose in the National Maternity Review. But given the ease and apparent sincerity with which it formulates its economic ideology in the language of women’s ‘control’ and ‘empowerment’, the Review also indicates a serious need for feminists to critically address the central role that notions of ‘empowerment’ and ‘control’ continue to occupy within feminist reproductive politics. Women’s health-care movements since the 1970s have, in the words of Adrienne Rich, made important and ‘strong connections between knowledge of our bodies, the capacity to make our own sexual and reproductive decisions, and the more general empowering of women’. [27] But Rich and other feminists have also been highly aware of the ways in which ‘the principle of individuality and control over one’s own body may be perverted into what is truly bourgeois individualism’. [28]…
Of course feminists can always protest that this kind of scenario is miles away from what Rich and other advocates for women’s reproductive freedom have had in mind, and insist upon alternative or ‘properly feminist’ meanings of bodily autonomy or maternal power premissed upon solidarity and relationality. But the space for articulating such alternatives is hard to find, and, as the Maternity Review shows so clearly, support for women’s autonomy or empowerment can be quickly seized upon by market champions and distorted through the prism of consumer power. As such, there is a strong case in the current climate for resisting the language of individual control and empowerment in relation to maternity care, and replacing it with a renewed focus on health equity: putting the weight of feminist politics behind social models and standards of health that transcend private economic interests and challenge social divisions based on differing access to power and resources.
There is, however, a lot at stake in abandoning, even quietening, talk of personal control and bodily autonomy within the sphere of reproductive politics. As Rosalind Petchesky asked almost forty years ago: ‘can we really imagine the social conditions in which we would be ready to renounce control over our bodies and reproductive lives?’ [34] To illustrate how unsettling or wrong this kind of move can feel, she points to Alison Jaggar’s sketch of a ‘Marxist feminist’ defence of abortion, which suggests that the ‘right’ of women to an abortion is contingent upon ‘women’s situation in our society’, and hence that ‘if the whole community assumes the responsibility for the welfare of mothers and children, [then] the community as a whole should now have a share in judging whether or not a particular abortion should be performed.’ [35]
… with regard to maternity services for women who continue being pregnant and go on to give birth, the strategic value of asserting women’s right to, or need for, choice and individual control is arguably more ambiguous, when such assertions are so easily co-opted by an economic programme that can only benefit a small group of elite or ‘savvy’ pregnant women who exercise their maternal power as consumer power. Petchesky is surely right to claim that as long as patriarchal power structures remain, feminists cannot afford to abandon the general principle of control over our bodies and reproductive capacities. But in the current political context of health care in the UK, as state and commercial interests become ever more aligned, the political risks of affirming women’s need for individual or personal control are as high, if not higher, than they have ever been. [40]