Another brick in the fascist wall that Trump is building. The mission statement of the USCIS has change to become an anti-immigration agency.
Source: U.S. agency’s new mission statement: America no longer a ‘nation of immigrants’
Month: February 2018
Conor Friedersdorf, in a piece defending Bari Weiss calling American-born Mirai Nagasu an immigrant, apparently doesn't realize Asian immigrants couldn't naturalize because of racist exclusion laws until 1952. The levels. pic.twitter.com/ObRfTEtOaR
— mtp (@tsengputterman) February 21, 2018
This Conor F. is part of *the* *press*. He writes for The Atlantic, which is a liberal magazine/website. He should know better, or someone there should be schooling him. He doesn’t know that Asian people were denied a path to citizenship from 1868 to 1952 century. Eighty-four. 84 years of (at least some) immigrants from Asia being excluded from citizenship. In the middle of that long period, people from Asia were prohibited from immigrating.
All the stuff that Trump is talking up about Mexico, or El Salvador, or whatever, is part and parcel of trying to bring back these policies of exclusion and preventing entry. The fascists know history, and want to repeat this part of it.
Also, during this 84 year period, concentration camps were built to displace Japanese Americans, to destroy the community. People often say that they lost their property, but, it was the Americans who lost property – the immigrants were not allowed to buy land, due to Alien Land Laws.
Trump and his fascist supporters have been talking about bringing back Alien Land Laws.
I know, a lot of people think it can’t happen, but it can, because it has happened. We must stop it.
This feels like a good snapshot of why so many organizations are uniting against SB 827, the upzoning law that gives away a lot of value to landowners and developers, without capturing that value, and without protecting tenants.
I’m also looking into the history of property ownership by people of color. Over and over, it’s been thwarted.
Chinatowns were burned down or destroyed, with the support of the state.
Black Wall Street in Tulsa, OK. A prosperous Black community formed… and the white people burned it down.
Chavez Ravine usually cast in terms of Mexican Americans being evicted, is really the story of being dispossessed.
Alien Land Laws prohibiting property ownership to citizens, coincided with denying citizenship to Asians. (It’s becoming a potential factor, again, because the current anti-immigrant bigots are pushing that law again.)
Freeways cut through working class communities, and communities of color, like Russian Flats in Boyle Heights: transit has not been a friend to these communities.
Property ownership is, theoretically, considered an absolute: you own, or you do not own. In reality, people need credit, from a bank, to buy a house. People need government support by the police, to protect it. It’s a provisional right that exists only when the state spends money to protect it.
Transit policy, and even progressive plans, haven’t been kind to communities of color seeking to acquire a house, to build capital, and participate in the capital accumulation.
Objections to development need to be considered as part of a larger struggle for achieving equal rights.
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What are Coworking Spaces?
TL;DR:
“This is more like a bar or a club than a workspace,” said the local member of provincial parliament, taking in the scene.
They kind of missed the point, which was that the spaces provide meeting rooms, and also ongoing opportunities for networking between workers and investors. They exist, mainly, to cater to the needs of investors more than the workers.
People have been able to rent small offices and share offices and space at Kinkos for decades. These new “workspaces” are not really for “work,” but for meetings, which are a kind of work.
Source: Why It’s so Hard to Actually Work in Shared Offices
This page is a summary of research conducted to understand the movement for rent control in Long Beach. Long Beach is large city with around 60% renters, located in LA County adjacent to Orange County. It’s long been a conservative/centrist city government, but has shifted more liberal in the past couple decades. The downtown area has undergone heavy redevelopment and gentrification, with old buildings being reused and turned into a large shopping/entertainment district.
I was reading some random web pages, and came across an article (not linked) advocating that libertarians should support immigration controls. It was a baffling article, and stuck in my craw, because the old school libertarians were for open borders. They’re way past where the Democrats and some socialists are. They’re way over in anarchy-land.
The mapping of around 60,000 buildings in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve of Guatemala has revealed a civilization much larger than previously estimated, at an estimated 10 million people. See how this compares to Los Angeles County, an area with 10 million people.
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Facebook 2009, Part 1
I was participating only lightly in Facebook before 2009. I had gotten a job that required more social media interaction, so I started to post partisan political material on my account. I had some before, but, that’s been deleted. Now I’m deleting this old stuff.
February 24, 2009
I don’t check this account often.
Please contact me by email. I check this account around once a month.
Some Headlines from 2009
Mar. 24: Video about Safety in the Laundry Business, and Employee Free Choice
MS Access, Outlook: recording bounced email addresses
Xubuntu + Xfce + SSH + public/private keys + USB flash drive = PAIN
MS Access: Display A Subreport Even When There Are No Records
**Pee Commerce**
“I got into a discussion about fertilizing with human manure, and defended the practice, mainly because my grandmother did it.”
This linked to an article about the feces collection business in Japan. It was turned into fertilizer.
March 24: Video about sweatshop labor and outsourcing.
Time Machine: The Minimum Wage Causes High Unemployment
Computer Programmer’s Labor Union?
MS Access: Me.Dirty = falce; Forcing a Form to Update a Record
Redlining is like Segregation, Real Estate Style
April 10: Another Cheap Thumb Gallery Maker
MS Access: Inserting Records with Visual Basic and DAO
April 13: Guilds, Patents, and Cottage Industry
Shellie asks: John, don’t you turn 40, this month??????? how can we help you celebrate??????
Unemployment Lifeline – resources for the unemployed.
It was the Great Recession, and unemployment had battered the people. We were two years into the damage. Unemployment took a while to hit. I recall moping about it, and worrying about it, at work, for months, before we got the bad news from members. We were quite insulated from the pain, believe it or not.
I was worrying, largely, on my understanding of theory. Shortly after the Bear Stearns collapse, people were talking about a market correction. I took that to mean a recession, but given the scale of the failure, I figured we’d be in for a real recession, with some job losses. Like the good leftist I was, I assumed that this would usher Keynesian thought back into Washington, and we’d increase government spending on everything, to give the economy a softer crash.
I was so wrong. Instead, we got some BS bank bailout, without any kind of nationalization of assets. Then we got “cash for clunkers”, a lame, small bailout for car manufacturers. Rather than using the clunkers to create some jobs, like a government-taxi-service for old folks, we destroyed these cars. It was like sacrificing the environment to keep a company or two afloat.
Mobile Phone Developer Sites – about J2ME, Android, Symbian, Blackberry, iPhone, etc.
Asperger’s Quiz – I took it and scored 36, which indicates I may have it. I think autism was just starting to be well known.
April 27, 2009 – Joint Compound, My Favorite Goop – “We’re moving into an old house, and though we’re renting, I like to live in a nice looking place, at least inside, so we’re repainting a couple rooms.” We also fixed some big holes, sealing them up with joint compound. I miss living in that house.
May 4: Taco is the Sushi of the Street
May 14: MS Access Address Cleanup Macros – I wrote these to clean up improperly typed addresses in a database. They weren’t too long, but handled almost 100% of errors. They were entirely based on heuristics and recognizing common errors.
May 17: Jeff Wall, Mimic. Miley Cyrus, viral photo of pulling eyes into slits.
May 20: How to Avoid Late Fees on Your Credit Card
Oct 21: A guy called “tank9” doing the industrial stompy dance at the Vietnamese mall.
Sep 29: BofA just broke off their relationship with ACORN. Didn’t banks get a $700 billion bailout? Where did that money go? Didn’t Warren Buffet make billions by betting on the administration bailing out Goldman Sachs… because the administration is packed with GS alumni? Where’s the real corruption?
Video of sit in protest at Aetna in NY.
Sep 28: Community Shuts Down Nazi Rally in Riverside. Story from LA Indymedia.
Sep 26: UC Students Walk Out Statewide
LA Health Reform Rally Sticks it to Fox
Los Angeles Vigil for Leonard Peltier
39th Anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium: “Still Here, Still A Force”
Aug 23: I just go this from Rosalio Munoz. There was a march in East LA to Roybal-Allard’s office today, at the same time as this WF protest.
Drank too much green tea and couldn’t sleep. Studied MIDP game programming.
Prepping for tomorrow’s Whole Foods demo. Making a couple signs by hand, to counteract the hypnotic effects of pre-printed signs likely to be handed out at the event.
Aug 19:
LOS ANGELES – In the early morning hours on August 5th Arturo Velasquez’ car was set on fire outside his home. Arturo is a leading member of the Campaign for Renters Rights. He has been organizing tenants in his building for two years. Arturo is popular with tenants for helping force the landlord, Alfredo Alverado, to make major repairs. Through his efforts Arturo has considerably improved the quality of the life for his family and all the tenants at his apartment building. The building is located in a low income neighborhood in East Hollywood, Los Angeles.
After Arturo helped lead the tenants campaign, the landlord took Arturo to court in an attempt to evict his family. The landlord lost this eviction attempt. But yet again, this year the landlord attempted to take Arturo’s family to court on another charge. Once again, the courts sided with Arturo and his family. Last week the landlord turned down Arturo’s attempts to get them to enter into mediation. Two days later his car was set on fire. Fellow activists and tenants are suspicious of the timing of the attack and are demanding a full investigation. From the Newswire: Arson Attack On Tenant Activist by DntMrn…Organize
Update: Tenants picket councilman’s office, demanding investigation: Small victory against arson attack by DntMrn
Update: Tenants picket councilman’s office, demanding investigation: Small victory against arson attack by DntMrn
I wasn’t very prescient with this post:
Coming Soon: Anarchy! – Reports from the Anarchist Conference
I hadn’t listened to this show before, and my first introduction was the episode before this one. Titled “How Democracies Die”, it irked me, not only in the big picture idea that the center holds things together, but in the particulars of how they picked out Hugo Chavez as their example of an anti-democratic demagogue, and some irritating errors. It was like listening to two upper middle class liberals who were clueless. However, I am not going to write that screed.
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Facebook Memories
Every day, Facebook shows you an old post, hoping you will retweet it. I usually delete the originals, and ignore it forever. Now, I’ll archive some of them, here. Return and refresh for updates.