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Showing posts with the label Tomas Agupa'

Protecting White Privilege in the United States

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This is a pretty good interview with Nicholas Kristof, discussing race, inequality, privilege and the inability to perceive that privilege among white people in the United States. Comedian Bill Maher recently made a joke, that the idea of white Christians being an oppressed group today, which is being attacked on all sides, is bewildering, because there are no articles and videos of white pastors and priests being brutally attacked and sometimes killed by cops with itchy trigger fingers. Privilege comes in so many forms, and part of its power and the reason it is so difficult to give up, is because as a regime of knowledge and power, it comes equipped with ways of projecting blame elsewhere, or doing everything possible to justify and mystify it, even to the point of taking ludicrous positions that in any other context, you would see as being shameful and embarrassing. It is easy to not realize the ways in which the color of your skin privileges and protects a person, at so many diff

ACA

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Opposition to the Affordable Care Act by Bruce Karolle Letter to the Editor Marianas Variety 10/29/13 AMAZINGLY, Obamacare threatens America’s unique status among the world’s advanced economies. As a nation where access to regular medical care has been a privilege, a privilege, according to many right-wing conservatives, that must be earned. We are the only advanced, Western-oriented country in the world with such a privileged healthcare system. Our friends in Canada and our buddies the Brits (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), perhaps America’s two closest allies, have had for years superior national health plans for all their citizens, as have other developed countries, i.e., France, Australia and Israel. When measured comparatively, their costs are far less than ours over the past decades. Since the days of President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt (early 1900s), seven other U.S. presidents, in my lifetime, have proposed national heal

Adios JAL!

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My grandfather, echoing older days of politics on Guam, often says that the Guam Legislature always needs at least one Lujan. Its for that reason that in the 2008 election, in which grandpa was particularly displeased and disgusted at the character of the potential candidates for the office, he only cast two votes. One for Doug Moylan ( sa' ga'mumu yan ga'gumantes gui') and the other for Jesse Anderson Lujan, also because ga'mumu gui', but more so because Lujan gui'. Unfortunately the votes of my grandfather, my grandmother and even my brother weren't enough to put Jesse Anderson Lujan or "JAL" as I fondly refer to him as over the top in this past election, and so next year the Leyesleturan Guahan will be without a person who has Lujan as their last name. Oh, they'll be plenty of people with Lujan parientes or relatives, but no one left whose main family identifiers are Lujan, through either their mother or father (at least on the surface,