Every Sunday Morning, a place where various things get thrown out, shot at, cut open, and dissected. Topics of interest: psychological, and medical anthropology, privatization, globalization, excess, language, humor, hip-hop culture, jazz, brain and mind, memory, urban space development, Los Angeles, the Chicago Bulls, UCLA Bruins, FC Barcelona, and mankind.
Now's time for some of the best videos on the subjects.
A short clip of music: No on 98
40-Second Clip on Prop 98
The Organizing around Props 98 and 99
Investigating the Destructiveness of a Yes Vote on Prop 98
Key phrase from the last video: [A Yes on 98 Vote means] We will be faced with insurmountable economic burden."
Prop 98 in the Bigger Scheme, Bigger Picture of Things in Cartoon from SAJE!
SAJE Video on housing and condominium conversions in Los Angeles
It's really quite appalling how greedy and disconnected people are. Making way for luxury housing when they already have all the options in the world, while displacing those who don't have any. Luxury housing? Fool, we need necessity housing!
YES on the Homeowners Protection Act (HPA), Proposition 99
NO to California Property Owners and Farmland Protection Act (CPOFA), Proposition 98
I think it's critical to know the difference between the two eminent domain reforms that will be in California's June ballot.
The simplest act, Homeowners Protection Act, Proposition 99 is best and relatively straightforward. Vote Yes on it.
However, the California Property Owners and Farmland Protection Act, Proposition 98 is under the guise of eminent domain reform, but actually not...otherwise it would be the Homeowners Protection Act. Vote No on it.
With the California Property Owners and Farmland Protection Act (CPOFPA) Proposition 98, what they're trying to do is two main things:
1) Move towards the elimination of rent control and mobile home destruction.
2) Erode Environmental Protections for public water use.
Essentially what they try to do is capitalize on the hate for eminent domain going towards private development to say that: poor people are actually "private" entities and that the go
Before the actual initiative is introduced on their website this is was they say about private use:
"Private property may not be taken by eminent domain for private use under any circumstances (i.e. to build a shopping center, auto mall or industrial park)."
Focus on the word "private use."
They want you to think that this is all about protecting your house from being taken over by the government to be given to private developers.
In the actual document they are very smart to use the phrase "private use" only about twice in the entire document, but this is the key phrase.
"Private property may not be taken or damaged for private use."
And these are two key ways they define "private use"
"(ii) transfer of ownership, occupancy or use of private property or associated property rights to a public agency for the consumption of natural resources"
(iii) regulation of the ownership, occupancy or use of privately owned real property or associated property rights in order to transfer an economic benefit to one or more private persons at the expense of the property owner."
Just a use of the word "private use" already packs so much meaning for those with a hand in drafting the act, but such ambiguity to make it seem non-confrontational and thus appealing to an average voter.
The clause numbered "(ii)" is an attempt to make it difficult for government agencies to acquire land for public water projects such as reservioirs and other public water storage projects. Essentially, private property may not be taken or damaged so that public agencies can "consume" natural resources. "Consume" is another ambiguous word because that can encompass a lot of things.
This seems like the type of thing that will just open and strangle public water projects in litigation, all the while indirectly opening the market even wider for private companies "to come to the rescue" and start showing how efficient they are at privatizing water and profitting off your basic needs.
The clause numbered "(iii)" is the attempt to savage rent control and open mobile home projects.
Despite their compensations for being rent controlled properties, they're saying that the government putting regulations on how much they charge equates to the government basically using their property. No one told these people that they had to own land. It's not like these people with the power don't have a choice.
What this act is saying is that the government cannot regulate what property owners such as landlords and mobile park owners do in charging rent. If that were suddenly the case, it is likely that they'll work, jack and pump up those prices more than a 13-year old boy on summer vacation at home with a stack of material not meant for reading. All the folks who take on the lowly-paid jobs would be pushed the hell out of cities where the jobs are. Pushed out because there's no space to live anywhere.
At this point, if you're not sure about the act and it's always best to actually know what it is you're voting for, take a brief look at who else supports this act.
California Federation of Republican Women California Republican Party Riverside County Libertarian Party California Republican Taxpayers Association
Aren't these the groups that traditionally run against humanistic interests such as affordable housing and environmental protections?
Are these groups more tied with selfish, business and privatization interests?
Any tenants rights' organizations?
Any water agencies?
Are there any environmental groups you see?
According to California for Democracy:
"Wealthy apartment and mobile home park owners spent close to $2 million to qualify their deceptive rent control rollback proposition for the June 2008 ballot. The landlords are going to try to trick voters into believing their measure is about eminent domain."
They definitely paid people to make their bullshit hard to detect, so of course the language will all seem agreeable.
Everything that they write about seems to be good on the surface, but their game is, (and has been since some folks from Europa took land from indigenous people) about creating bullshit laws and finding loopholes to exploit till people take action to stop it, and/or till they can find more loopholes to create.
Are they going to come out and say "we seek the abolishment of rent control" or "we really don't give a shit about what we do to the environment just as long as we get money?"
It's not so much about what they do say, it's about what they don't say.
Prop 68 is basically a measure that would continually screw Native Americans, again.
The Yes on prop 68 have taken the angle that Indian casinos are not paying their fair share and are screwing everyone over. This position is advocated by rich white guys from out of state looking to expand their casinos all over California with the passing of this proposition.
The practical defense against prop 68 is that with casinos comes this increase in crime, prostitution, drugs near schools, suburbs, and subsequently jamming up highways. It's supported by law enforcement agencies, teachers, Native American tribes, and Arnold. I guess the Arnold thing should take care of most Republicans.
But I'm not really aiming to appeal to Republicans 'cause I'm not a politician.
Once this prop is done and hopefully NOT passed, Native Americans will still be an issue mainly because dem white guys robbed them of their land and and as insult, have tried to enforce their own great grand rules of fairness and freedom on them as if Native Americans had no sense of that before.
Sure in popular culture, native Americans have been celebrated for their humanness.
However, their histories with whites and being in America have largely been romanticized. In particular with Pocahontas the animated feature, both world views of the English and Native American were fairly well-represented with what you can expect in a Disney movie. However, it's a Disney movie. The priority is that they teach how morals solve things to 5-7 year old kids rather than educate. And so the white guys and copper-skinned guys battle was resolved when Pocahontas basically spread her legs for John Smith in the name of good will, thereby bringing closure and any wonderance about stark realities Native Americans faced when the rest of the European entourage came.
I mean, I know it's tough to represent minorities because there will be critics like me micro-analyzing things, but it's not like minorities are majorities. But again, whatever, that's for kids they don't need to know the truth just yet, just tools to deal with things.
However, nowadays back in the real life, "adult" life, there's all these Native American exhibits opening up. The Smithsonian in particular has opened one up. But one issue some Natives take offense to is that they refuse to show how the white guys continually screwed the Natives up. There would be so many less museum-goers if they did that.
Seeing a pattern ?
In politics and history, we still do not really see how Native Americas get screwed.
It's hard to see in movies, it's hard to see in museums, I'll be damned if I see anything like I described in popular tv without the initials PBS or mention of the words "educational" or "learning" and even more so if this generation that blogs and takes in too many useless information but then is so adverse to learning and intellect (not intelligence, there's a difference that Cornel West pointed out) spends a second of free time typing in "native american" on google.
So if people's mediums to Native Americans are limited and thus biased, how can people clearly see what's happening to them today ?
I mean, some schools and the internet are doing a pretty good job of letting us know what really happened, but then everything else in our American culture seems to suggest that "it really wasn't that bad. It's life. Capitalism baby. Solve your own problems with good morals."
As I quote the great Triloki Pandey who quoted one of his colleagues, "not a single one of the Native American treaties with the USA has been honored." They've been pushed around. Mountain Climbers climb what used to be the Cheyenne's, Sioux worship places in Devil's Tower (you wouldn't climb Mount Rushmore would you ? (http://home.pacbell.net/acmc/devilstwr.html). Mining companies routinely decimate what you would consider rocks but what they would consider their homes and worship places. They are still the poorest demographic in America. I have yet to come in counter with one in college, despite them apparently rolling in dough. You don't hear them complaining, because their voices are put on mute by the American honchos.
And this brings me back to the point of No on prop 68. Casinos are a way of assimilating Native Americans into American society. Some tribes like the Hopi Nation are rabidly against these casinos because they don't feel it's what represents them. However, it's hard for them to get back to their way of life namely because their traditions of farming and hunting and gathering have been cut off from them in these reserves, not to mention a whole bunch of them dying (pre-European domination, there was 10 million, and now there's just a million AFTER a growth in people identifying themselves as such) from disease, Europeans forcing them out of places, and Europeans killing them in war.
Rush Limbaugh recently re-signed from ESPN because of criticism for saying that one player, Donovan McNabb was overrated (which would have been fine if he just stopped here) because of the "liberal" media's hype of him and their desire to see a black quarterback succeed. The funny thing is that Rush would support Prop 54.
Proposition 54 calls for a 'color-blind' society. Ideally that's a great thing but it would work only in a society that did not have such diverse living conditions. Fact of the matter is that race is an issue because people are still segregated. Individual people still segregate themselves because they feel like they don't belong. And being segregated, they have different concerns and interests.
Prop 54 would regress from dealing with specific people's concerns and interests. It's just thinking about one part of society. The only society these Prop 54 proponents think about in proposing Prop 54 is the segment of society that seeks and thinks they get denied jobs. (In the grand scheme of things, these proponents eventually find jobs and go on to do bigger and better things like yell at poor folk, with blacks and Hispanics in mind, for failing to "work for their money.") There's more to society than those that seek jobs or college admissions.
In the rest of society, there are what you call doctors, educators, and scientists that actually need race to discover and treat trends.
Doctors need race and ethnic information to be able to treat ethnic-specific diseases because fact is that diseases are not color-blind. Sickle-cell disease gets African-Americans. Tay-Sachs gets those of Eastern European descent. Asian women are four to seven times less likely to develop breast cancer than American women; yet when Asian women migrate to the U.S., their risk of breast cancer rises by 80 percent over two decades (Breast Cancer Facts 2001, The Breast Cancer Fund, 2001).
Educators and scientists need race to discover trends of this society. For example, South Central Los Angeles, 90058, which is 59% black and 38% Latino, has five times the level of hazardous materials emissions as the next worst zip code in the state ("California's Endangered Communities of Color," Environmental Justice and Equal Protection, 1994). Or the Bayview Hunters Point section of San Francisco, where 91% of the residents are people of color, has ten times as many contaminated water dischargers on a per capita basis as the rest of San Francisco, four times as many polluted air dischargers, five times as many facilities storing acutely hazardous materials, three times as many leaking underground storage tanks, and four times as many contaminated industrial sites (Hastings West-Northwest Journal of Environmental Law and Policy, Clifford Rechstschaffen, 1996).
People living in such a diverse amount of conditions will not have the same concerns. An accented NO on Prop 54 should help keep focus on what certain groups of people are suffering from and how they are not doing well. Without a No on Prop 54, we'd would be more than just color-blind. We'd actually have to use Braille.
And no, this guy below had zero influence on my supporting of 54. But it was nice to hear him speak on Thursday.
Add me to your reading list.
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