What deadline? It’s the first sunny day in a week and we. Are. Going. On. A. HIKE. please.
“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”
- Jesus, when asked about the 1%
Jesus was a communist. Merry Marxmas everybody
CPP: Philippines is a military pawn, not an ally of imperialist U.S.
The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) today blasted the military alliance between the United States government and the Philippine state as nothing but “a big myth.” “The reality is that for the past 60 years of semicolonial rule, US imperialism have only used the Philippines as a pawn in its military interventionism, wars of aggression and power projection in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.”
The CPP issued this statement a day after the visit of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the Philippines to mark the 60th anniversary of the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT). In a ceremony aboard the USS Fitzgerald, Clinton and Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto del Rosario signed “The Manila Declaration” where the US and Philippine governments reaffirmed the MDT and their supposed commitment to “address regional and global challenges, including maritime security and threats to security such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and transnational crime.”
“Filled with rhetoric on ‘equality’ and ‘cooperation’, the Manila Declaration is nothing but a reaffirmation of the long-standing unequal military, political and economic relations between the Philippines and the US, between a semicolony and an imperialist power,” pointed out the CPP.
“The fact that the declaration was signed aboard an American naval shipped docked in Philippine waters in outright contempt of Philippine sovereignty is symbolic of the MDT as a document of prevailing neocolonial relations between the puppet Philippine government and its imperialist master.”
![kamalayankonsciousness:
The Cola Walls.
Back in late 2007 I was in Pasig working with a childrens org and notices that all the walls of homes and buildings had the colours and logos of colas (Coke, Pepsi, RC, etc). I asked the residents and found out that the paint and some of the siding was provided for ‘free’ by the cola companies.
*humph*
Uber-marketing in the form of corporate social responsibility…
[post and photo by alex felipe]](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lrxy7jYRqi1qdxspvo1_500.jpg)
The Cola Walls.
Back in late 2007 I was in Pasig working with a childrens org and notices that all the walls of homes and buildings had the colours and logos of colas (Coke, Pepsi, RC, etc). I asked the residents and found out that the paint and some of the siding was provided for ‘free’ by the cola companies.
*humph*
Uber-marketing in the form of corporate social responsibility…
(Source: fuckyeahmarxismleninism)
I live in the Philippines where poverty, unemployment, corruption, and injustice prevails. A man sleeping on the street, or a kid selling flowers along highways in Manila are common sights. Still, my heart breaks every time I see such things, the same way my heart broke when I read your stories.
I’m tired of the filthy rich on top of the social triangle who keeps getting richer. I’m tired of politicians stuffing their pockets with money while their countrymen drown in poverty and debt. I’m tired of their greed and selfishness.
That damn triangle should be inverted.
It’s time for a social revolution.
America’s 99%’s fight= the rest of the world’s 99%’s fight (and we are quite a lot).
We are the 99%.
I can’t say I haven’t felt the same feelings powering this person’s writing. Every day I pass streets peopled with children whose eyes wrench my heart out. But I have to say with all the violence and intensity and love and rage in my bloodstream: no.
I do not stand with America. Not because I do not believe in the aims behind these protests, but for the simple fact that I cannot. I do not stand with America because the idea that the fight of America’s 99% is the fight of the rest of the world is terrible and dangerous and murderous.
I do not stand with America because of the weight of history. I do not stand with America because of the blood price for which my people was bought. I do not stand with America because of the Philippine-American war and Bud Dajo and Balangiga’s silent bells still on American soil and the artifacts and rich culture imprisoned in America’s museums. I do not stand with America because of false promises and the stranglehold of English on my throat and the self-hate it has taught me, the seeds of famine its legacy has planted in my skull. I do not stand with America because of plunder and the abuse of our land and our forests and our mines and what it did during the Marcos years and what it is doing in Mindanao. I do not stand with America because I am not its little brown sibling. And you may say that these are old wounds that my bitterness is preventing from healing. That may be true. They are old; they are wounds; they are bitter.
But think of it: all this past horror, and its shadow remains as darkness hung over my land. I live in a country of rot and canker and broken institutions — institutions whose brokenness was encouraged and enacted and perpetuated by first our American occupiers, then later our American allies. I cannot see how I can say “the fight of America’s 99% is the fight of my country’s 99%” when part of the reason we are in such dire straits is because of America’s continuing influence and coercion and use of imperialistic force over our politics and our economy and our society. When precisely the same kind of thinking — that America’s fight is our fight — continues to keep us in chains. When we have been broken and bound and denied even the acknowledgment of that history, when it is such a simple thing to kick earth over bloody graves and keep us in terrible debt.
No. I do not stand with America. I will stand with the poor and the hungry and the oppressed, wherever they may be. I will stand with those on the fringes of society, those erased and rubbed raw by the margins. I will stand with those who have no strength to stand and I will raise my voice in whatever capacity I can with those who have little breath left to speak.
But I will not stand with America. Its fight is not my fight. It never has been.
From the moment the first call for a SlutWalk in the US went out, the AF3IRM membership – transnational women who are im/migrants or whose families are im/migrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa – has been analyzing and discussing this burgeoning movement to address the issue of sexual violence and continuing victimization of rape victims by police, the justice system and other agents of authority.
It is a testament to the compelling nature of SlutWalk’s call against women’s victimization that we hung fire for months, hammering out our position and analyzing why, while we applaud the effort of those who organize SlutWalk, we remain uneasy about responding to such a call.
We realize that we are the ones who compose the majority of sex trafficking victims in this country, who comprise the majority of those sold in the mail-order-bride system, who are the commodities offered in brothel houses ringing US military bases in and out of this country, who are the goods offered for sexual violation in prostitution. We who are and historically have been the “sluts” from whom traffickers, pimps, and other “authorities” of the global corporate sex trade realize $20 billion in earnings annually cannot, with a clear conscience, accept the term in reference to ourselves and our struggle against sexual violence and for women’s liberation.
<!—more—>We therefore feel it is our responsibility to address the organizers and participants of SlutWalk and remind them that Women’s Struggle Cannot and Should not Be Monochromatic.
Our Concerns
We call upon the SlutWalk steering committee to reassess language use and re-examine how it is, in a sense, offensive to our history, how it is neglectful of historical and cultural sensitivity and competency. Indolent ideology only further pushes transnational women, women of color, away from the current mainstream feminist narrative. It prevents us from establishing a broad front that can create a powerfully dynamic and long-lasting women’s movement. The ebb-and-surge of the women’s movement in the US is clear enough an indictment of such neglect of the historic particularities of the condition of transnational women and women of color.
Our collective transnational histories are comprised of 500 years of colonization. As women and descendants of women from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, we cannot truly “reclaim” the word “Slut”. It was never ours to begin with. This label is one forced upon us by colonizers, who transformed our women into commodities and for the entertainment of US soldiers occupying our countries for corporate America. There are many variations of the label “slut”: in Central America it was “little brown fucking machines (LBFMs)”, in places in Asia like the Philippines, it was “little brown fucking machines powered by rice (LBFMPBRs)”. These events continue to this day, and it would be a grievous dishonor to our cousins who continue to struggle against imperialism, globalization and occupation in our families’ countries of origin to accept a label coming from a white police officer in the city of Toronto, Canada.
There are two pervasive pejorative words used for women globally, and “slut,” puta (in Spanish, Tagalog), sharmoota (Arabic), Jendeh (Farsi), Ahbeh (Lebanese) - is one. This label has become integrated in our languages and cultures, and has followed us across oceans into our own communities here in the United States. It has followed the poisonous spread of feudalism and capitalism into the economies and ultimately cultures of the global South, building its own systems of power and exploitation of women’s bodies. It has followed us into migration and still plagues us in our communities here in the United States. Women are treated and dismissed as “sluts”, “putas”, etc., as a product of both the structurally racist and sexist US society, as well as transplanted cultures from our families’ countries of origin.
We invite you, organizers of SlutWalk, to study how many times im/migrant women of color have been coerced into sex by immigration personnel, by border patrols, by jailors. Surely that will suffice to underscore why even the idea of joining a SlutWalk is like a massive boulder on our chests, squeezing out our breath, killing us, in effect.
We invite you, SlutWalk organizers, to peruse the catalog of women offered to men by mail-order bride agencies. Surely that would suffice to underscore why joining a SlutWalk would be equal to accepting an identity conferred on our being by this sexist, exploitative society of violence.
We invite you, SlutWalk organizers, to walk the brothel houses and see how our women are treated truly as “sluts” – i.e., mindless flesh with orifices from which profit can be made. Surely that would suffice to underscore why every fiber in our mind and being scream in protest at the word.
AF3IRM rejects this label; AFIIRM refuses this identity; AF3IRM views it as an abomination. It has been used to exacerbate class-exploitation, race and gender discrimination. AF3IRM prefers to work to eradicate it from the common vocabulary, along with other five-letter, four-letter, words derogatory of the humanity of womankind. More, AF3IRM works to eradicate the material social conditions which have made these words possible and acceptable.
We are not sluts. We are women, whose struggles are very much layered, trying to end the pervasive view of women as objects and commodities for profit and entertainment.
AF3IRM hopes this will serve as a basis for a dialogue with the Slut Walk organizers, because to achieve the egalitarian society we all aspire for, we need, will need, and have always needed a movement of women of all colors.
Thank you and we await your response.
