Thanks a fucking lot, England.

This Alien Legacy: The Origins of "Sodomy" Laws in British Colonialism

>December 17, 2008

This 66-page report describes how laws in over three dozen countries, from India to Uganda and from Nigeria to Papua New Guinea, derive from a single law on homosexual conduct that British colonial rulers imposed on India in 1860. This year, the High Court in Delhi ended hearings in a years-long case seeking to decriminalize homosexual conduct there. A ruling in the landmark case is expected soon.

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We are living in a klepotocracy

Burger King Bailout Shocker

Goldman Sachs, where former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was once CEO, switched from an investment bank to a bank holding company last year so it could qualify for $10 billion in bailout funds. They then spent $6.8 billion on bonuses for their financial staff. Goldman's recklessness is one of several scandalous stories of Wall Street giants abusing the bailout at the expense of taxpayers and the economy. But in this case, Goldman's excessive spending has had an immediate and profound impact on the American work force.




Who's Keeping Burger King Workers Below the Poverty Line?

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Reproductive Justice

Nadya Suleman and the Choice We Never Respect

While we need children to ensure that our species continues to be perpetuated, we do little to act in their best interest. Our society is driven my capitalism and commerce, therefore common communal needs often get over looked or suppressed.

The conflation of reproduction and motherhood means that certain children will be valued based on the race and class position of the mother. The degree to which the mother ascribes to patriarchal norms will also play a role in the acceptance of the child into the larger society. Jon and Kate and the Duggar family both consist of what today we would deem inordinately large families. Both of the mothers in these situations have fulfilled what patriarchy would deem their social contract in that they are married and do not work outside of the home.

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The resentment of Ms. Suleman is partly due to the fact that she lacks an active male figure in her life. Her desire to reproduce without being in a heterosexual committed relationship flies in the face of patriarchal norms. We consistently claim that children do better in two parent families, but neglect to mention that even in this situation women continue to have the bulk of the responsibility. A male presence provides an extra income and therefore a child is less likely to grow up in poverty, but a father in the household does not necessarily lead to more engagement for the child or less work for the women involved. Knowing that this is the pattern of the majority of heterosexual couplings it is quite possible to surmise that, partly, the issue is that Ms. Suleman has chosen to not align herself with a male in a long term relationship.MORE

From My Inbox: Pledge-a-Picket for New Clinic in Montana

I propose to begin a Pledge-A-Picketer Campaign in support of Mountain Country Women's Clinic. The concept is simple, and it mirrors the grassroots style of the Obama campaign, during which many small contributions created a huge impact. Each of us signs on to donate, say, $1/picketer to Susan's clinic. If, over the period of a week, 17 picketers parade on Main Street, we each send a check for $17. It isn't much, but if $17 gets multiplied by 50 people, it comes to $850. If 100 people send in checks, we raise $1,700.

At the end of the week, Susan posts a sign on the clinic window. It might say, THANK YOU PICKETERS. THIS WEEK THE SUPPORTERS OF MOUNTAIN COUNTRY WOMEN'S CLINIC RAISED $850 IN THEIR PLEDGE-A-PICKETER CAMPAIGN. THESE FUNDS WILL HELP INDIGENT PATIENTS IN NEED OF OUR SERVICES. THE MORE YOU PICKET, THE MORE SUPPORT MCWC RECEIVES. MORE

"The Business of Being Born" 2007 Trailer

www.thebusinessofbeingborn.com

Birth: it's a miracle. A rite of passage. A natural part of life. But more than anything, birth is a business. Compelled to find answers after a disappointing birth experience with her first child, actress Ricki Lake recruits filmmaker Abby Epstein to examine and question the way American women have babies. The film interlaces intimate birth stories with surprising historical, political and scientific insights and shocking statistics about the current maternity care system. When director Epstein discovers she is pregnant during the making of the film, the journey becomes even more personal. Should most births be viewed as a natural life process, or should every delivery be treated as a potentially catastrophic medical emergency?

The DVD

On Doulas

Wikipedia:

A doula is an assistant who provides various forms of non-medical support (physical, emotional and informed choice) in the childbirth process. Based on a particular doula's training and background, the doula may offer support during prenatal care, during childbirth and/or during the postpartum period. A birth doula is a care provider for labor. Thus a labor doula may attend a home birth or might attend the parturient woman during labor at home and continue while in transport and then complete supporting the birth at a hospital or a birth center. A postpartum doula typically begins providing care in the home after the birth. Such care might include cooking for the mother, breastfeeding support, newborn care assistance, errands, light housekeeping etc. Such care is provided from the day after the birth, providing services through the first six weeks postpartum. In some cases, doula care can last several months or even to a year postpartum - especially in cases when mothers are suffering from postpartum depression, children with special needs require longer care, or there are multiple infants. MORE

ChildBirth.org

A doula...

• Recognizes birth as a key life experience that the mother will remember all her life...
• Understands the physiology of birth and the emotional needs of a woman in labor...
• Assists the woman and her partner in preparing for and carrying out their plans for the birth...
• Stays by the side of the laboring woman throughout the entire labor...
• Provides emotional support, physical comfort measures, an objective viewpoint and assistance to the woman in getting the information she needs to make good decisions...
• Facilitates communication between the laboring woman, her partner and clinical careproviders...
• Perceives her role as one who nutures and protects the woman's memory of her birth experience.

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Being a Radical Doula:How pro-choice advocacy and birth activism go hand in hand.

When a woman is giving birth in an American hospital, the doctors, nurses, and extended medical team are almost wholly focused on the status of the fetus inside of her--constantly employing technologies to monitor it and drugs to regulate it, allowing fetal well-being to be their dominant concern. When we think of a woman with an unintended pregnancy (and this could be the same woman, in a different phase of her life), a similar logic applies. Anti-choice activists don't trust women to make responsible decisions about their lives and ability to parent; they instead focus on the potential life inside a woman, and place all emphasis on the future of the fetus rather than on the future of the woman. Anti-choice activism and overly-medicalized birthing practices are both based on a lack of trust in women. Consider the many restrictions imposed on birthing women: rules regulating out-of-hospital midwives, mandatory waiting periods for abortions, forced C-sections, and biased pre-abortion counseling are all examples of how people do not trust women (or their support networks) to make responsible decisions about family well-being.
What is unique about the role of the doula is that she gets to be one of the only people in the birthing process exclusively focused on the woman. She focuses entirely on how the woman is feeling, providing accompaniment and support through a process that can be scary and lonely, particularly in a hospital. Studies show the positive effect that this kind of unconditional support and attention can have on both the mother and her child. That's the logic that really connects the birthing and the pro-choice movements--if we support women and their decisions, everyone will fare better, including children.MORE

Conscious Choice:Doula Rebirth

The ancient system of women helping other women is an effective way to help inner city expectant mothers, especially those in Latino neighborhoods

Although the doula system can trace its roots to ancient Greek times, it’s now being revisited as a very effective way to tend to the needs of modern urban mothers. Doulas are trained to give mothers support during labor and postpartum. Their role is to give physical and emotional support and to inform and emotionally assist mothers before, during and after labor. Unlike a midwife, a doula does not perform medical procedures.

Following the birth of her son, Christian, the nurses from the medical center asked Felix if she was interested in becoming a doula herself. She completed a training program at Chicago Health Connection, a non-profit health education and advocacy organization. Felix, who eventually married her boyfriend in 1995 and had a second child, Daisy, now works full-time as a doula at El Centro de Servicios La Villita, a health-care facility in Chicago’s Little Village community.

“Our clients are younger. Their parents were immigrants and many of the clients have been born here or were born in Mexico and brought here as children,” said Brenda Humber, director of midwifery services for Access Community Health Network. MORE

Blog: Radical Doula Blog

Resources that said blog informs of:

National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health

The Phenomenon of Abortion Doulas

The Dar a Luz Project:holistic health and healing for pregnant women of color.

The Birth Attendants: volunteer doulas serving incarcerated women in Washington State.


New York City Abortion Doula Project Launched

National Doula Sites (Plenty of WOC centered Doulas available)


The Turtle Women:American Indian doulas find success in providing culturally specific support to new mothers.

A Culturally Specific Program
Pat Welch created the Turtle Women’s Project to be culturally specific, beginning with its name. Because in most American Indian tribes the turtle symbolizes creation, instead of using the Greek word doula, meaning “woman servant,” the program calls them Turtle Women. These Turtle Women receive DONA training for doulas, but they also have the knowledge that comes from being American Indian.

“All the Turtle Women are American Indian, and there’s just a sense of really knowing that you don’t have to explain anything,” Welch said. For example, a laboring woman wouldn’t need to take her focus off her own experience to tell a doula why she wanted to smudge a hospital room. (Smudging, the traditional practice of burning sage, is done to cleanse the surroundings.)MORE

Fond du Lac Public Health Nursing Department:Parent to Parent Mentor Program: American Indian Doulas

Doula Care and Practice for First Nations Women and Families (PDF)For more info contact:National Aborginal Health org. which deals with adbvancing the health of First Nations, Inuits and Metis.


American Indian Family Collaborative :Project name: Family Center Community Doula Program (In Missouri)


Community Doulas in Minnesota


African American Doula Direcory

Black Family: A Doula Story:On teh frontlines of teen pregnancy From Black Public Media

A Doula Story documents one African American woman’s fierce commitment to empower pregnant teenagers with the skills and knowledge they need to become confident, nurturing mothers. Produced by The Kindling Group, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization, this powerful film follows Loretha Weisinger back to the same disadvantaged Chicago neighborhood where she once struggled as a teen mom. Loretha uses patience, compassion and humor to teach “her girls” about everything from the importance of breastfeeding and reading to their babies, to communicating effectively with health care professionals.

(no subject)

The Small Arms Trade

Dealing and Wheeling in Small Arms, a new documentary from Sander Francken, explores the world of small weapon’s dealers and how weapons used by the United Nations and NATO in places like the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere are “recycled” throughout the developing world, especially Africa. There are no international regulations governing the trade in small arms and, according to Francken, there are some 840,000 small arms circulating worldwide.

A Movement in Oaxaca

In 2006, New York reporter and activist Brad Will was killed by paramilitaries in Oaxaca, where he was covering a teachers’ strike. Since the strike--demanding higher salaries and free books for all students--the movement has expanded but the violence hasn’t stopped. Tami Gold, in her film Land, Rain and Fire looks at the impact of NAFTA, privatization, and land appropriation on the people of the region. The teachers union has continued to oppose the privatization of public education in the midst of severe repression.

US Empire and the Conflict in Israel/Palestine

Why Palestine? It’s hard to overstate the significance of Israel/Palestine to global politics. Some say that Barack Obama’s success or failure will be judged on whether a resolution to the conflict is reached during his presidency. For others the issue has deep moral resonance. As an indication of the fault lines in America, Hampshire College’s recent decision to divest from companies that do business with Israel has been both repudiated and celebrated as a major breakthrough.
Ali Abunimah, editor and founder of The Electronic Intifada says that Palestine matters precisely because it is the site of the last Western colonial project in the Third World and that opposition to Israel is also opposition to US hegemony in the region.
Abunimah, Brian Van Slyke of Hampshire College’s Students for Justice in Palestine, Kanwal-Shazia Chaudhry a Doctor in Brooklyn who recently traveled to Gaza with the American Medical Mission to Gaza, and Hannah Mermelstein, co-founder of Birthright Unplugged take on the question of why Palestine matters.

Links

How Regulation came to be: 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act

According to an AP article that appeared in our local daily this morning, one of the tools the federal government may use in going after Stewart Parnell and other management of the Peanut Corporation of America is the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Ironically, the 1938 law has its roots in an incident of corporate hubris and disregard for public safety not unlike the present salmonella-tainted peanut butter case.
"A spoonful of sugar," Julie Andrews sang in her role as Mary Poppins, "Helps the medicine go down." In the middle of the Great Depression, the S. E. Massengill Company found something much better than sugar. Or so they thought. The disaster unfolds on the flip.MOREblockquote>

Chicken in America: A Lesson In Irony (And Bad Taste).

There are a lot of reasons why chicken today has no taste, but the main one is because someone seems to have decided that chicken must be cheap. And for chicken to be cheap, each chicken must be cheap to raise, which is to say quick and easily-managed. Thus, for starters, you need to get rid of genetic diversity, which is what occurred in the 1950’s with the wide-scale commercial production of chickens. In a recently-published study by William Muir of Purdue University, it was found that more than 50% of the diversity of ancestral breeds has been lost. See Native birds might restock poultry industry's genetic stock, Add to this the fact of commercial chickens being fed a diet of "super-grow" chicken feed, which is typically 70% corn, 20% soy, and 10% other ingredients such as vitamins and minerals, and you have the perfect recipes for chickens that grow quickly but taste like nothing.
It need not be this way, however. And in France, it is not. There, chickens that have earned the designation "Label Rouge" are guaranteed to taste not just better than commercially-raised chickens, but to actually taste like chicken. The label started in the early sixties when French chicken farmers banded together in cooperatives to protect the traditional methods of raising chickens on small farms. To be entitled to the coveted red-sticker that is the Label Rouge, farmers must comply with a long list of strict requirements, including the raising of only slow-growing breeds suited for living outdoors, which is what the chickens do, roaming in the open air for their relatively long lives. For a longer discussion of Label Rouge and Chickens, and other quality-labels prevalent in the European Union, please see Sticker Shock, by Barry James MORE

Green Energy and the Stimulus - the details

The American Recovery and Investment Act contains $61.9 billion in energy-related public spending and industry building tax credits and bond provisions estimated at $20 billion over a ten year period (in reduced tax revenues).
So lets take a look at that $61.9 billion
1. R&D total : $8.2 billion
$8.2 billion has been set aside for research into renewable energy and improving energy efficiency. This will be administered by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).
Of this research funding, $800 million is to be spent on biofuel research, $400 million on geothermal projects, and $50 million on the integration of the grid with information technology. I assume this last provision is related to the "smart grid".
$3.4 billion of the R&D total is fossil fuels related including clean coal (what a waste) ... $1 billion for fossil energy R&D programs, $1.52 billion for carbon capture, $800 million for Clean Coal, and $70 million for geologic carbon sequestration.MORE

Meet the Stans: Turkmenistan

Turkmenistan lies on the Eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, with Iran to its southwest, Afghanistan to its southeast, and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to its north. The country is dominated by the massive, flat Kara Kum desert, which takes up over 80% of the country. The Kopat Dag mountain chain runs along the south of the country, forming the border with Iran and home to the capital city, Ashgabat (whose name, supposedly, means "city of love"). The other major mountain range is the Kugitangtau chain in the southeast, which contains the country's highest elevation, 10,290 ft, at Mt. Ayrybaba. In total land area, the country is slightly larger than California.
According to the CIA world factbook, most (85%) of the population are ethnic Turkmens. Their language, Turkmen, is similar to Turkish (I've read there is a degree of mutual intelligibility, but knowing neither language I can't say for certain). The country also possesses small minorities of Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Russians. Most Russians are Orthodox Christian, and the other inhabitants are mainly Sunni Muslim. The total population is slightly over five million.MORE

Steelworkers, Hip-Hoppers and Tree-Huggers Get It On at 'Green Jobs 2009'!

When you walk into a large and stately Washington, DC hotel lobby and find it teeming with thousands of smiling, buzzing people-half in labor union jackets and ball caps, the other half dressed in 30-something hip-hop causal-you know some special is happening.

This was the lively, energized scene for three cold wintry days this Feb 4-6 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, as nearly 3000 activists and organizers gathered for the "Good Jobs, Green Jobs" National Conference. The gathering was convened by more than 100 organizations, representing every major trade union and every major environmental group in the country, among others.

It's called the "blue-green alliance," the core of which is the United Steel Workers and the Sierra Club, which jointly launched the "Green Jobs" movement nationally at a conference in Pittsburgh, PA a year ago. The turnout this year is triple in size and highly energized by both the victory of President Barack Obama and the looming onset of an economic crisis unmatched in scope since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In addition to the steelworkers, the building trades were well represented, and the green groups spanned a wide range of concerns, for toxics to alternative energy to climate change. Also notable was the participation of a contingent of "high road" corporations rooted in the growing "green economy." Gamesa, a major Spanish firm specializing in wind turbines, and Piper Jaffray, a large paper company focused on recycled paper products, are two examples.

But a critical new dimension was added by Green For All, an organization rooted among inner city youth, and headed up by Van Jones. Jones is the author of "The Green Collar Economy" and an inspirational voice for a rising generation of multinational, multicultural insurgent youth.MORE

Going EV #13: Everything you ever wanted to know about the Aptera electric car (almost!)

How to obtain Medical/Prescription assistance in this financial crisis

Food Democracy Now: 10 Ideas for a Sustainable Future

Unschooling Instead of High Schooling

Solar vs Coal, Land Area Comparison.


Behind The Great Firewall

Historic firsts in labor history

Big business using civil rights imagery to fight EFCA/UPDATR

United Healthcare Workers Holding Our Ground

The Myth of Data Mining