Posts on My Trip to the Philippines Coming Soon
Mankayan, Benguet, Cordillera, Philippines (Photo by Jack Stephens)
This Bridge Called My Baby: Legacies of Radical Mothering
There has been a call for submissions to an upcoming anthology on motherhood which highlights the struggles, triumphs, and views of radical women of color. Guerrilla Mama posts an excerpt about the upcoming anthology on the blog flip flopping joy:
All mothers have the potential to be revolutionary. Some mothers stand on the shoreline, are born and reborn here, inside the flux of time and space, overcoming the traumatic repetition of oppression. Our very existence is disobedience to the powers that be.
At times, in moments, we as mothers choose to stand in a zone of claimed risk and fierce transformation, the frontline. In infinite ways, both practiced and yet to be imagined, we put our bodies between the violent repetition of the norm and the future we already deserve, exactly because our children deserve it too. We make this choice for many reasons and in different contexts, but at the core we have this in common: we refuse to obey. We refuse to give into fear. We insist on joy no matter what and by every means necessary and possible.
In this anthology we are exploring how we are informed by and participating with those mothers, especially radical women of color, who have sought for decades, if not centuries, to create relationships to each other, transformative relationships to feminism and a transnational anti-imperialist literary, cultural and everyday practice.
Anak Pawis Rep. Rafael Mariano Speaks for Justice for the Hacienda Luisita Farmers
links for 2010-08-17
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IBON is a fantastic organization in the Philippines and I love their book store which is located near Barangay Kamuning in Quezon City. I spent a few hours just browsing through their books before I bought a bunch.
"IBON is a research-education-information development institution. IBON undertakes the study of socio-economic issues that confront Philippine society and the world today. It explores alternatives and promotes a new understanding of socio-economic issues that best serve the interests and aspirations of the Filipino people. IBON commits to bring this knowledge and information to the greatest number so that the people may effectively participate in building a self-reliant and progressive Philippines, a nation that is sovereign and democratic."
links for 2010-08-15
Sham Land “Reform” for the Peasants of Hacienda Luisita
Click on the pic for more information.
A press release from the militant peasant and farmer organization Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas:
Staunch allies of striking Luisita farm workers—the militant peasant Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) and the left-leaning fisherfolk alliance Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamalakaya ng Pilipinas (Pamalakaya) on Sunday urged lawmakers from both houses of Congress to conduct either a joint or separate congressional investigation on the alleged irregularities and acts of fraud that led to the signing of the Hacienda Luisita compromise deal between the management and a few leaders of unions who misrepresented the entire 10,000 farmer beneficiaries.
In a joint press statement, KMP secretary general Danilo Ramos and Pamalakaya national chair Fernando Hicap said while the controversial and highly questionable breakthrough deal will be decided by the Supreme Court, Congress is empower to subject the compromise deal in aid of legislation because the deal according to agrarian legal experts like Christian Monsod, one of the framers of the 1987 Constitution and Atty. Jobert Ilarde Pahilga, lead counsel of Luisita farm workers in the case against the Stock Distribution Option (SDO) had dismissed the deal as unconstitutional, unlawful and anti-land reform.
“In the light of these common views shared by legal experts in land reform, we humbly submit this proposal to Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile and House Speaker Feliciano “Sonny’ Belmonte to initiate a full-blown investigation on how the questionable deal was reached the HLI management and some leaders who misrepresented the 10,000 farmer beneficiaries during discreet negotiations,” the two leaders said.
Ramos and Hicap said senators and congressmen should cross party lines and conduct a deeper investigation on the Hacienda Luisita land deal.
“The Hacienda Luisita compromise deal according to legal experts violated the 1987 Constitution when it negated land distribution and keep the vast tract of sugar plantation under the monopoly control and disposal of the reigning feudal empire of the Cojuangco-Aquino family. The assertion does not include the issues about misrepresentations, coercions and other fraudulent acts committed by the HLI management in clinching this anomalous deal. The Senate and the House of Representatives have no other choice but take this matter and let the truth come out in the name national interest,” both leaders asserted.
Update on the Philippines: The Urban Poor Sector
Catmon, Malabon City, Manila: The community we stayed in for two days and one night (photo by Jack Stephens).
On August 2nd and 3rd the five of us, plus two of our guides, were able to stay with an urban poor community in Catmon, Malabon City, Manila. We spent our time at a trash site that is also home to a community of folks who make their living digging through the trash, sorting through recyclable materials, and making and processing coal (as well as your typical underground economy and illegal activities that come with any urban poor and poor community). For me, this experience was incredibly emotional, overwhelming, and exhilarating. It was also one of the best times I’ve spent in the Philippines since it was filled with warmth from the people, deep conversations, music, singing, stories of heartbreak and triumph, and hard work interspersed with bouts of laughter. During my stay there I meet the most amazing people I’d ever seen in my life: despite all of the hardships they would take care of each other, share what little they had, truly build a community based off of mutual respect, and continue to organize against the ruiling classes that are trying to destroy their community (and hence, making their lives ever worse off then before) and not given up in their fight for the national democratic struggle in the Philippines.
Catmon, Malabon City, Manila: A resident digs through the trash trying to find any valuable material to sell; such as plastic bottles, bottle caps, and any kind of metal. Once they reach a certain depth they hit water since the trash site is on top of a lake. Despite this they continue to work in the water which is a mixture of sewage and trash (Photo by Jack Stephens).
While we were there we integrated with the residents by working as trash pickers, sorting out plastic bottles, paper, and metal cans, by loading and unloading garbage trucks, and making cloths pins. While doing the work we were able to interview and get to know the residents and hear how they got to Catmon and the everyday struggles they go through. Many of them come from the families of peasants or were once peasants themselves: either forced of their land by greedy landlords and corporations or lured into the city by promises of more money and jobs. Many reiterated that their lives became much worse once they moved into the city. The community has also been under constant threat by the schemes of the local government, banks, and NGOs which are trying to disperse the community by using loan programs that promise to “better” the families by promising them the “responsibility” of “owning their own homes.” These programs, however, are merely profit seeking ventures that often burden the families with unwieldily debt, break up the communities and their current livelihood, and leave them homeless.
The street, right outside the house where we stayed for the two days. The roads are made from a combination of layers of dirt and trash (photo by Jack Stephens).
The local well is filled with trash and many of the residents often fall ill with flue like symptoms due to the conditions of their living and the conditions of their workplace (one in the same). Babies, toddlers, and children are sick often in the early stages of their life. The child at the house we stayed at, no more then 12 months old, was often hacking up mucus and coughing uncontrollably. One of the parents said that they don’t “coddle” their kids when the roam around the community and play with each other because early exposure to the conditions, while making them sick, also builds up their immunity to the point where they are able to drink the water and walk around barefoot without getting nasty infections. While the conditions sound, and are, horrific the community is very close and people are constantly helping each other out, laughing, and singing. At one point my fellow companion Toni and I played guitar and sang to a group of kids (who also sang along) for about an hour or so. One of them brought out a few song books for us to look at and to also help us sing along with them as many of the songs they sang I needed to actually look at the lyrics in order to keep up.
Catmon, Malabon City: A mother with her child outside a small sari-sari store (photo by Jack Stephens).
Overall this was one of the most intense, informative, and funniest times I’ve had in my life and I will always remember this community while I continue to organize back in the U.S. and I will look forward to visiting them again in the near future.
One of the main organizers for BAYAN in the community with two of her three children. Despite struggling as a single mother and making cloths pins to earn a living she also organizes for the rights of the community and for national democracy (photo by Jack Stephens).
Richard Seymour on Obama’s Pakistan Frontiers
Richard blogs:
Our understanding of the war in Pakistan is bracketed by implicit, unspoken exclusions. The glimpses we get are like occasional narrow slits in an otherwise solid screen. We are encouraged to draw our attention to, for example, suicide attacks on government officials in Peshawar. But we otherwise have little context with which to interpret such bloody doings, apart from some general catch-all explanations about the medievalism and bloodlust of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). This narrowness of focus, instead of contextualising such attacks in the war launched by the Pakistani military, at the behest of the US, on the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), rather provides a pretext and pseudo-explanation for that war. A multi-faceted conflict is reduced to the simple dichotomy of ‘extremists’ and ‘moderates’.
To the extent that there is context in the Anglophone press, it tends to come from the perspective of counterinsurgency, and reduces the population of the NWFP to a xenophobic, insular, ethnonationalist rump, and reduces the insurgency to the issue of nationalism. In Pakistan itself, this analysis has manifested itself as deep-seated bigotry toward the Pashtuns, as Riaz Ahmed recently wrote. In fact, the insurgency is more complex, transcending Pashtun nationalism in the name of pragmatic alliances and an Islamist ideology that is not specific to any ethnicity. Its primary motivation in this war is opposing the US expansion of the ‘war on terror’ into Pakistan and the decision of the Pakistani military to join Washington in attacking pro-Taliban forces in these areas. But its relationship with the state is by no means one-dimensional, as the Pakistani military has previously relied on the TTP to support Pakistani interests in Afghanistan, which is why some in the Pakistani ruling class are unhappy with the strategy of aligning with the Washington axis.
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Pakistan’s reluctant – but once launched, brutal – war against the TTP and its support base has resulted in a dramatic escalation in the activities of the TTP and sympathetic groups. The Pakistani military’s massacres, and the murderous drone assaults that Obama has escalated, threw people into the arms of the Taliban and other Islamist groups that are prepared to fight NATO and the military. The TTP have demonstrated their ability to strike in unpredictable ways, with devastating results. Between 2005 and 2008, the rate of insurgent attacks in Pakistan increased by 746%. Thousands were killed and injured as a result, as officials in the government, police and military headquarters. Neither a change in the national government, nor in the local administration has restrained this trend. In the February 2008 provincial elections, a ‘progressive’ coalition of the Pakistan People’s Party and the Awami National Party (ANP) took control of NWFP, defeating the reformist Islamist grouping who had run the region until then.
If these parties had a solution to the grievances of local populations, they would have retained support. Instead the war continued, and the Taliban sought to position themselves as the most committed anti-US force in the province. There followed a sharp rise in attacks on local government officials, particularly in the provincial capital, Peshawar. Whatever people thought of the perpetrators, the targets didn’t gain much sympathy. Unable to offer an alternative, the ANP sought to cut deals with the Islamists, and lost much of the support they had previously gained. The TTP have also lost support since mid-2009, however, due to their harsh disciplinary practises and the gruelling civilian toll of their insurgency. Gallup polls estimated that they had the sympathy of about 11% of people in NWFP by June 2009, and that it had fallen to 1%. It’s possible that such polls underestimate Taliban support, as they have been known to do in Afghanistan, but the decline is likely to be real.
Update on the Philippines: The Youth Sector
The past few days have been quite a blur but luckily I’ve been taking extensive notes in my notebook. I just don’t have enough time to rearrange them and turn them into blog posts at the moment as I only have a half-hour or so at this internet cafe in near Barangay Escopa in Project 4 of Quezon City. Over the next few days the group will be heading down to Hacienda Yulo where we will be integrating with the peasants. The hacienda is close to 7,000 or so hectares (don’t have my notebook on me at the moment, don’t know the exact number) and is owned by the Yulo family which is trying to push the coconut growers and harvesters off their land to develop it into different crops, houses, golf course, and various kinds of eco-tourism (quite a popular trend in liberal bourgeois circles).
The five of us (and our various guides from the League of Filipino Students) have been going from university to university (culminating in the People’s State of the Nation address) meeting with students and student organizers, taking part in cultural sharings (music and poetry mostly), visiting different class rooms and talking about our experiences, and spending time with many Anak Bayan, LFS, and Kabataan Partylist organizers.
The past few days we visited University of the Philippines Diliman, University of the Philippines Manila, University of the East, and Polytechnic University of the Philippines which I’ve blogged about before (not to mention University of the Philippines Baguio during our integration with the workers and indigenous organizers in Benguet).
One of my highlights was being able to spend one night and two days at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines which has a strong National Democratic presence at the school. I was able to meet some amazing organizers and had some fabulous discussions and announcements with the students doing room to room presentations with two LFS PUP organizers, Charms and Elvin. The students were hanging on their every word. Standing up in class, cheering, laughing, shouting out in agreement: especially on the need to pressure the university to keep tuition fees low and to take on corrupt school officials and teachers.
More blog posts, and plenty of photos, to come!
Native Guns: Handcuffs
Justice for Oscar Grant! “Off the Pigs!”
Prometheus Brown Reviews “Bakal Boys”
Rapper, BAYAN-USA organizer, and cinema connoisseur Prometheus Brown reviews the 2009 movie Bakal Boys:
The “bakal boys” are Filipino kids as young as five years old who dive into the dangerous, polluted sea to salvage scrap metal that they trade at junk shops at a rate of 20 pesos (about 50 US cents) a kilo. Currently, 1-2 of these kids a week are found dead or disappeared. The film opens with Bungal (Tagalog for “toothless”) and Utoy and their barkada going on various diving missions. They joke, laugh, and occasionally fight until one day they find an anchor, and Bungal goes missing. Utoy then becomes the focus of the film, as he earnestly wanders in search of his friend.
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Walking out of the theater, I overheard gripes about how depressing the story was (newsflash: not all slumdogs become millionaires) and how some uninterrupted shots felt “too long” (a complaint I wholeheartedly disagree with – a truly realist film will expose you to the beauty and banality of life). If you’re looking to be entertained from a distance rather than integrated into an environment, this film is not for you. While Bakal Boys doesn’t end with a sentimental resolution, it isn’t entirely hopeless. The open-ended climax is a perfect statement on these kids’ resilience despite their conditions. Those looking for a grander statement than that fail to see that that is the grandest statement of all.
Update on the Philippines: In Baguio
Outside of Mankayan in Benguet, Philippines (photo by Jack Stephens).
I’m in Baguio, Philippines and just got back from visiting the mines of Leponte in the municipality of Mankayan in Benguet, Philippines. The last update I had was from day 4 so I’ll just keep this short since I’ll be busy the next few days and don’t have enough time to write a bunch of blog posts on what I’ve been doing. But once I get a few hours free, I will.
Overall, the three day extersion to Mankayan was one of the most wonderful experiences in my life. During the three-and-a-half-hour van ride on a narrow road (blasted into the side of a mountain) where the driver dodged oncoming traffic in the thick fog and rain while practically teetering off a cliff I was a little nervous that Mankayan would be the last thing I’d ever see in my life (not to be, though). But once the van passed over the highest peak of the mountain and broke through the fog what I saw made my jaw drop. It was the most beautiful scenery I’d ever seen in my life. Watching the lush green hills with fog rolling over the ancient rice terraces all of my anxiety melted away. At that moment I was in bliss.
After the ride the group entered into the local KMU office for the barangay where the KMU officer gave us a lecture on the current situation in Mankayan and the socio-economic background.
Much of the region is extremely underdeveloped and is heavily dependent on mining and cash crops. In the barangay of Paco, where we stayed for two nights, there is heavy industrial mining in the area (mainly for gold) by the Lepanto corporation which has affected the general health of the residents and has poinsed much of the Abra river (and Abra itself, much farther north) and the local water sources. Also, the heavy tunneling (without proper precautions) is causing many areas of Poblacion and Paco to collapse and sink. Overnight (after years of corrosive tunneling) a local high school collapsed due to the tunneling beneath it by the Lepanto corporation.
The site of the high school collapse with the barangay of Poblacion in the background (photo by Jack Stephens).
As for the mine workers themselves the used to be a company union and then gradually became independent. They executed two very succesfuly (and month long) strikes back in 2003 and 2005 with guidance and help from KMU. Eventually they decided to join KMU in 2005 and since then they’ve been battling to make the company hold up its side of their collective bargaining agreement. The main issues are back pay, no pay, late pay, safety, not supplying the general stores with rice, not paying into a form of social security, and harassment and intimidation of the workers and union officers, plus the militarization of the whole municipality. But I’ll blog more on that latter.
Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies
In the book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies author Jodi Dean argues
for the realization of a progressive left politics in the United States. Through an assessment of the ideologies underlying contemporary political culture, Jodi Dean takes the left to task for its capitulations to conservatives and its failure to take responsibility for the extensive neoliberalization implemented during the Clinton presidency. She argues that the left’s ability to develop and defend a collective vision of equality and solidarity has been undermined by the ascendance of “communicative capitalism,” a constellation of consumerism, the privileging of the self over group interests, and the embrace of the language of victimization. As Dean explains, communicative capitalism is enabled and exacerbated by the Web and other networked communications media, which reduce political energies to the registration of opinion and the transmission of feelings. The result is a psychotic politics where certainty displaces credibility and the circulation of intense feeling trumps the exchange of reason.
Dean’s critique ranges from her argument that the term democracy has become a meaningless cipher invoked by the left and right alike to an analysis of the fantasy of free trade underlying neoliberalism, and from an examination of new theories of sovereignty advanced by politicians and left academics to a look at the changing meanings of “evil” in the speeches of U.S. presidents since the mid-twentieth century. She emphasizes the futility of a politics enacted by individuals determined not to offend anyone, and she examines questions of truth, knowledge, and power in relation to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Dean insists that any reestablishment of a vital and purposeful left politics will require shedding the mantle of victimization, confronting the marriage of neoliberalism and democracy, and mobilizing different terms to represent political strategies and goals.
Cities Under Siege
The streets of Pittsburgh during the G20 Summit of 2009 (photo by AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
The new book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham argues that:
[c]ities have become the new battleground of our increasingly urban world. From the slums of the global South to the wealthy financial centers of the West, Cities Under Siege traces how political violence now operates through the sites, spaces, infrastructures and symbols of the world’s rapidly expanding metropolitan areas.
Drawing on a wealth of original research, Stephen Graham shows how Western and Israeli militaries and security forces now perceive all urban terrain as a real or imagined conflict zone inhabited by lurking, shadow enemies, and urban inhabitants as targets that need to be continually tracked, scanned, controlled and targeted. He examines the transformation of Western militaries into high-tech urban counter-insurgency forces, the militarization and surveillance of March international borders, the labelling as “terrorist” of democratic dissent and Politics/Geography protests, and the enacting of legislation suspending “normal” civilian law. In doing so, he reveals how the New Military Urbanism now permeates the entire fabric of our urban lives, from subway and transport systems hardwired with high-tech “command and control” systems and the infection of civilian policy with all-pervasive “security” discourses; to the pervasive militarization of popular culture.
Day 4: Conversations with a PISTON Member
On my fourth day here I was hanging out at the national office of Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), a militant labor center in the Philippines that is affiliated with BAYAN, where I met a member of PISTON. PISTON is a transport workers union that organizes for the rights of tricycle, jeepney, bus drivers, and other types of transport workers and is one of the unions affiliated under KMU.
The PISTON worker is originally from Hacienda Luisita, a place which I visited last year during an integration with Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, but came to Quezon City some years back to be with his wife and to help organize in the transport sector that he was working in.
We talked over lunch in the back room of the KMU office where PISTON members were cooking some rice and grilled egg plant mixed with some onions, tomatoes, garlic, and soy sauce. Many of the KMU national organizers and some of the PISTON members are vegetarian and try to bike to the office often, in order to stay healthier (this is one of the few BAYAN affiliated offices where you will not see people smoking an endless chain of cigerates).
One of the points he stressed with the complete lack of development in the Philippines. ”This country is completely under developed politically and economically.”
He gave an example of how this affects the transport drivers and workers. He said because of the underdevelopment there are no local factories that make engines or any type of supplies for either cars, buses, or jeepneys. ”Much of the jeepneys’ engines were originally left over by General MacArthur, from World War II.” The jeeps, abandoned by the U.S. Army, had been modified by Filipinos who made them wider and longer in order to transport people (for a fee) around the cities and country side (a cross between a taxi and a bus).
“There are no independent manufactures in the Philippines that employ Filipinos.” All of the cars and buses come mostly as surplus from Seoul or Tokyo.
He also talked about the semi-feudal system of the country and how much of the power is held in the hands of land lords and national bourgeoisie who have interests in keeping the Philippines underdeveloped. In Hacienda Luisita, where he’s from, much of the farm work is still done by hand with almost no help from machines. The land lords are able to keep a system of subservience with the peasants by loaning them even simple tools such as shovels for high interest rates.
“But, maybe, in the future, things can get better.” He said, giving examples of some of the organizing drives PISTON has done to try and make the lives of the transport workers better and how PISTON has always keep an anti-imperialist line and does not separate its work from politics.
“If there was not KMU there would be not PISTON.”
