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Arabica Robusta

Climate justice meets racism: Standing Rock was decades in the making | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...ing-rock-was-decades-in-making

petro-capitalism indigenous standing rock pipeline

shared by Arabica Robusta on 04 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Yet where these environmental ordeals did not so much draw the kind of activism now swelling at Standing Rock today, they have similarly intensified attention to the greater systemic problems that exist whenever ancestral tribal lands are targeted for energy development.
  • Yellow Jr., 37, added, “It’s why a lot of people say that we’re stuck here.” The social problems, many tribal residents say, began when treaties were broken and ancestral lands were lost to colonizers. The existing land base of the Standing Rock Sioux was determined by the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. When the U.S. government claimed victory 11 years later, following the Great Sioux War, the terms of that treaty were amended. Threatened by starvation, the tribe, under duress, ceded a great deal of Laramie land to the federal government. In partial recognition of this painful history, modern federal Indian law today accords certain rights to tribes, including entitlement programs linked to health care, housing, education, and even gaming.
  • But there’s one catch: All IDs must have a current address. “In Indian Country we all know damn well that we don’t have physical addresses,” said Iron Eyes.  The 38-year-old attorney and member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe is running for Congress, challenging incumbent Kevin Cramer, a Republican, who’s been the U.S. representative for North Dakota’s at-large congressional district since 2013.
Arabica Robusta

Decolonizing the Western Worldview: Interview with Cherokee activist/scholar, Randy Woo... - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...activist-scholar-randy-woodley

gold newmont Ghana

shared by Arabica Robusta on 06 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • He talks about [how] the Western worldview substitutes time as the universal for place.
  • So when the missionaries came to America, it didn’t matter what was going on here. It didn’t matter what the beliefs were. They already had this Utopian vision that superseded anything else that they saw here.
  • It’s all about laying this other template on top of that and saying that all doesn’t matter… No plants, no things that happened on the land, the ceremonies that were held, [and] the appreciation, whether it was for Salmon culture or Acorn culture or Pinenut culture or Buffalo culture. It’s just as if none of that mattered.
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  • They had basically expended the world that they were living in.
  • When you grow with the land you learn how to make an even exchange. But when you come into a new place with another worldview from a another land and another culture, it’s a little harder unless you’re open to understanding what’s really happening here, what reality is in this place.
  • the philosophical error that undergirds everything, almost everything, is dualism.
  • Let’s talk about the physical: Plato, Socrates, and the Utopian vision are all about a spiritual or a mind perfection. The physical becomes less important. You have this Utopian vision of this place that you’re supposed to reach, this plane of thinking.
  • We pay people who think generally higher wages than those who do physical labor. With theology, for example, we have people with PhDs that are are higher than what we call “practical” theologians.
  • We went through whole ceremonies and things to make sure that we thanked the animal, we thanked the earth, we thanked the creator, but most of all to remind ourselves that we’re taking a life here.
  • The problem is that we’re all affected to one degree or another by this Western worldview which is a handicap to understanding what the possibilities are. And secondly we’re never on the land long enough to understand how the relationship worked.
  • What I believe sustains our people and makes community possible and made this relationship possible are the values that developed over time. For me it seems frustrating if people are trying to adapt Native things without Native values.
  • I don’t know the ultimate answer to this but I can at least trace it to the Greek idea of dualism, right? And the higher mind philosophy, and all this. I can trace the influence in America from that.
  • I know the things I can see in the Greek culture that created the Western worldview: the physical dualism, the moral dualism, the religious intolerance, the individualism, the extrinsic categories, the hierarchy, the competitiveness, the Utopianism, all the anthropocentric “humans are over nature,” the triumphalism, the patriarchy. All of those things can be traced through those movements.
  • Also, Greece and Rome and England and America all have been very young civilizations. I think perhaps their brief age shows the immaturity of thinking. When civilizations are older, like many Indigenous civilizations, they have more time to learn, perhaps they come to understand that war, competition, capitalism, individualism, etc., all eventually lead to instability and are simply bad for everyone, including the ecosystems, and this type thinking should be avoided as much as possible.
  • Unlike Augustine, the famous Christian theologian so revered among Christians, I do not believe people are born corrupted or sinful and are such “by nature.” I believe we are all born with choices to make.
Arabica Robusta

Claims that the 'NAFTA 2' Agreement is Better are a Macabre Joke - CounterPunch.org - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...t-is-better-are-a-macabre-joke

gold newmont Ghana

shared by Arabica Robusta on 18 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Can this really be true? Or have congressional Democrats reverted to normal form, rolling in the dirt at the feet of Republicans yet again?
  • the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), or NAFTA 2, isn’t substantially different and remains a document of corporate domination. It would appear that appearances, not substance, drove Democrats in the House of Representatives to approve the deal.
  • So the expectation of a profit across the spectrum of business activities is well covered here, and of course the expectation of a profit — in actual practice, the demand for the biggest possible profit regardless of cost to others — is what the owners of capital expect these agreements to help deliver. The secret tribunals used to adjudicate disputes, frequently presided over by corporate lawyers who in their day job specialize in representing the corporations who sue in the tribunals, consistently interpret the language of “free trade” agreements to mean corporations are guaranteed maximum profits above all other considerations.
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  • This is the language invoked in the secret tribunals that adjudicate these cases to rule in favor of corporate plunder and against regulations.
  • No Party shall expropriate or nationalize a covered investment either directly or indirectly through measures equivalent to expropriation or nationalization (expropriation).” The word “indirectly” is crucial here.
  • Here’s Article 14.17 in full: “The Parties reaffirm the importance of each Party encouraging enterprises operating within its territory or subject to its jurisdiction to voluntarily incorporate into their internal policies those internationally recognized standards, guidelines, and principles of corporate social responsibility that have been endorsed or are supported by that Party, which may include the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. These standards, guidelines, and principles may address areas such as labor, environment, gender equality, human rights, indigenous and aboriginal peoples’ rights, and corruption” (emphasis added).
  • In the standard language of trade agreements, rules benefiting capital and erasing the ability of governments to regulate are implemented in trade-agreement texts with words like “shall” and “must” while the few rules that purport to protect labor, health, safety and environmental standards use words like “may” and “can.” The USMCA is no different. It’s the same sleight of hand.
  • Article 17.5 explicitly bans any limitations on the activities of financial institutions and Article 17.6 prohibits any restrictions on taking capital out of a country.
  • In disputes between the U.S. and Mexico, Article 14.D.3 states that disputes will be settled in the ICSID, but the two sides can agree to have it heard in another forum.
  • So even if ICSID, or the other two secret tribunals, are not used and instead a new panel specific to the USMCA becomes the new forum, the same conditions and same cast of characters, using the same precedents, will be in force. There is no reason to expect any effective difference from NAFTA.
  • One is that hearings will be conducted in public (Article 14.D.8) (although there does not appear to be a requirement that a public notice be made). The second is that a side agreement in force only between Mexico and the U.S. that purports to uphold workers’ rights by prohibiting denial of free association or the right to collective bargaining to the extent that doing so impacts the other country (Annex 31-A). A panel is supposed to adjudicate this issue should it arise, and apply International Labor Organization standards.
  • Not only are these types of rulings precedents, but recall, as noted above, that Article 14, which elevates expectations of profits above any conflicting consideration, supersedes all other articles. And to repeat a point made earlier, WTO standards are obligatory. “Technical barriers” to trade as the WTO defines them won’t be exceptions.
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