Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.

Latter on when I got back to the BAYAN office, after the noise barrage (and after having lunch with the Secretary-General of Bayan, Nato Reyes, in where I had a soft drink, rice, curry chicken, and a banana for P85; that’s US$1.77 !), there was a lot of activity in the anticipation that a political prisoner would be released that night from jail.

As I stated in the previous post she wasn’t released that night, but was released latter due to pressure on the government inside the prison (form the prisoners) and outside the prison.

As people were preparing to take off toward the jail (we were on the bottom floor, an open area beneath the four story Bayan building and enclosed by a large gate) I saw a young man walk in with the cutest damned baby you ever saw (she was only around six months old and had chubby cheeks). As we were introduced and after acting like a fool around the baby (you know how it is, all talking in a squeaky voice and such) I was told by one of the Bayan officers that the father of the child had actually been captured by the military and was heavily tortured during his one year of capture. They had accused him of being a communist and a member of the New People’s Army (the communist guerrilla insurgency). He was able to escape from the place and later ended up going to the UN and successfully petitioned the Court of Appeals in the Philippines for a Writ of Amparo (which forces the government to give protection to a person seeking the Writ of Amparo).

After talking to the father for a bit the same officer pointed to the security guard (an unarmed man wearing no uniform who mainly watches the gate and lets people in or keeps folks out) and said, “He lost his father under Marcos.”

Then she pointed to someone else and said, “Her daughter disappeared under [the current president] Arroyo even though [her daughter] wasn’t an activist.”

She then turned to me and said, “So you are surrounded by victims, torture victims, and people on hit lists.” She too is on a hit list as well. Obviously, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed.

Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.

Today is the day I start my series on how my experience was in the Philippines. Basically I’ll be digging through my notebook and photos and will be posting a post or two a day on what I had done for that day and my general feelings of the whole situation. So, naturally, I’ll start at day one, which I blogged about for a bit while I was in the Philippines.

My first day was quite busy, my flight arrived at MNL (Ninoy Aquino International Airport) at around 4 am on Monday, July 20th. When I got to the BAYAN office (after arriving at the Kilusang Mayo Uno office in Project 3 in Quezon City on Narra St.) on the corner of Maaralin St. and Matatag St. it was around noon and I was informed that I would be going on a four day march with workers, peasants, and youth all the way from Calamba, Southern Tagalog to Makati City, Manila.

Latter on there was a press conference at the BAYAN office condemning the fact that there are BAYAN officers and organizers that are on military hit lists and watch lists. Then I went to a “noise barrage” were around 50 people or so from different BAYAN organizations held up signs and chanted along the street (I think it was Quezon Blvd.) in Quezon City to essentially “advertise” the upcoming protest of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s State of the Nation Address the following week. During the noise barrage I bumped into two amazing organizers from FOCUS from San Jose, California, Melissa and Noemi (whom I latter went on an incredible three day trip to Isabella, Bulacan to see what the local KilusangMagbubukid ng Pilipinas chapters were doing to organize the peasants).

Later that night I arrived back at the BAYAN office where many folks were in a celebratory mood because one of their comrades and friends was being released from prison after two years (after she was originally kidnapped by the Armed Forces of the Philippines and then resurfaced after four days). The daughter of the prisoner was there getting ready to hop into a van with a group of eight or so people to greet her mother as she was to be released from prison. I was told she was originally jailed because she is an adviser for the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDF) and the government had trumped up charges that she had murdered people (this was to make sure she couldn’t get bail) but she was being released because the NDF and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) are going to restore peace talks between themselves. However, I was informed the next day, despite government orders to release her, the military refused to release her (however she was eventually released I believe two days latter, after initiating a hunger strike and coordinating protests with other prisoners).

This, of course, was only day one of twenty-one, I was just beginning.

Mendiola St., Manila, Philippines: Protesters apart of BAYAN (Bagong Alyansang Makabayan) gather at Mendiola in Manila to oppose the president’s plans to change the constitution to allow her to become Prime Minister and hold power after 2010 (Photo by Jack Stephens)

So I got back from the Philippines on Sunday night and the trip was one of the more amazing experiences in my life. So over the next month I will be going through my notebook and pictures and will be posting some pics and reactions to my days in the Philippines on my blog.

Plenty of these happened during my trip, a four day march from Calamba, Southern Tagalog to Makiti City, Manila, the death of former President Cory Aquino, and me being accused by local militia of being a communist rebel.

Hope you all look forward to the posts.

Recently Al Robles, a figure prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area Filipino American community passed away.  Here is a short excerpt from a post I did on him:

Manong Al was a native San Franciscan and fought for the rights of the poor and the elderly all throughout his life.  During the 1970s he fought against the eviction of elderly Chinese and Pilipino American residents at the I-Hotel during which time the fight for the I-Hotel became a symbol of corporate greed and community solidarity across race and class.  While the elders were evicted from their homes and the I-Hotel was demolished, creating a crushing defeat and feelings of despair for the Chinese and Pilipino community in San Francisco Manong Al (like many others as well) did not give up.  He and the community continued to fight and kept the spot where the I-Hotel originally stood from being developed.  Finally, around four or so years ago the I-Hotel rose from the ashes and became a center of housing for low-income senior citizens and a space for community organizers and the Manilatown Heritage Foundation.

Throughout the years Manong Al continued to be an advocate for the elderly and especially for the manongs and manangs of the Pilipino American community; those folks who immigrated from the Philippines to work, hunched over with broken backs, in the fields of California.  As he would deliver meals to the manongs and manangs and provide other services for them he would collect their stories of joy and hardship, and he was ever the consummate oral historian, and in turn would put their experiences down in the form of poetry.  He also became something of a father figure for many community artists and activists at the Kearny Street Workshop and imparted his wisdom onto the many folks who walked through those doors as well.

Found this good report on Al Jazeera English.

I knew Fox News was bad and wasn’t even really an actual journalistic television station, but this? Damn!

…what exactly the Internet is for and what it has unleashed upon our society…

Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.

Coming soon (within the next two weeks) xMabaitx and I will be doing a joint half-hour podcast (either bi-weekly or monthly, not sure) that can be best described as kind of PTI format, except its just us talking about one topic that has to do with either academia, race, news, and (mostly) philosophy.

We got the idea because when we get together and talk we tend to spout off a lot of opinions and one-liners and get into deep (and often funny…to us) discussions on post-structural, post-modern, and Marxian theory.

Our upcoming inaugural podcast, which might be called PA (for “Public Announcements from a Priest and an Atheist”), will be on existentialism, mostly on Jean-Paul Sartre and possibly some of crazed Nazi Martin Heidegger. We’re not sure what to talk about, we were thinking of just quoting some of our favorite Sartre passages and then rant and rave about how hard and fucked up it is to understand him but we are also thinking about tackling Sarte’s views on Zionism.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Heads up, cause xMabaitx is ’bout to light up the podcast-sphere.

Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.

I can’t believe I didn’t catch this sooner, it wasn’t until I read it today on As’ad AbuKhalil’s blog.

John Hope Franklin, a prolific scholar of African-American history who profoundly influenced thinking about slavery and Reconstruction while helping to further the civil rights struggle, died Wednesday in Durham, N.C. He was 94.

…

In an article in The Atlantic Monthly in 2007, he wrote, “If the American idea was to fight every war from the beginning of colonization to the middle of the 20th century with Jim Crow armed forces, in the belief that this would promote the American idea of justice and equality, then the American idea was an unmitigated disaster and a denial of the very principles that this country claimed as its rightful heritage.” (Read the rest of the obituary here)

Images from:
Sam Litzinger
New York Times

Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.

Who wants to check out the raps of a pissed-off, punk-rocking, straight-edge, vegan eating, 31337 typing, Pilipino activist blogger and scholar?

I do!

And so you do you God damn-it! The power of the simulacra of Xst compels you!

Where else can you get the postmodernist ramblings of a blogger (studying for his masters in sociology) on Donna Haraway’s cyborgisms and Marx’s alienation of labor and its use for interpreting the mega-blockbuser dark comedy Robocop (it was pretty hilarious, in a dark movie sense, the way officer Murphy got trashed by all that lead).

Just checking out his sidebar is an exercise in Internet cheekiness. His del.icio.us sidebar is titled mas.a.rap (”delicious” in Tagalog) and his monthly achieves reads “B0Mb SCh3matiCs.”

So if your down for an exercise in postmodernist intellectualism and boots on the ground Sartean Marxian activism then head on over to the 50 Megaton Paper Tiger.

Cross-posted from Double Consciousness.

[Hat tip: xMabaitx and SF Chronicle]

The World Bank came out with a report today stating that the world economy would shrink, which is the most dire assessment that an institution of economists have come out with for the economic prospects this year.

The New York Times reports:

The World Bank said in a new report that the crisis that began with junk mortgages in the United States was causing havoc for poorer countries that had nothing to do with the original problem.

And in a press release the World Bank states:

Many of the world’s poorest countries are becoming ever more dependent on development assistance as their exports and fiscal revenues decline because of the crisis. Donors are already behind by around $39 billion on their commitments to increase aid made at the Gleneagles Summit in 2005. The concern now is that aid flows will become more volatile as some countries cut their aid budgets while others reaffirm aid commitments, at least for this year.

The report can be found here in pdf format.

Today is my birthday (25) and to celebrate I present to you all…

Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.

First read this on the e-mail list serve I’m on for the website Community Labor News. In an article by Mumia Abu-Jamal, he writes:

In Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County, there are 9 judges of the Court of Common Pleas. Two of them just pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to convict and sentence juveniles to a private prison, so that they could get kickbacks from the prison’s builders and owners.

…

At least 22% of their judges have admitted being corrupt, in the sordid business of selling the freedom and well-being of poor children for profit.

And the worst part is that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court originally rejected the petition to hear the case.

The media reports on this outrage and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court expresses a little interest. This is the nature of judging these days; when even kids are expendable fodder for the Prison Industrial Complex.

This fantastic documentary (which I can’t speak of highly enough!) is now offered, in full, on YouTube. If your are in a rush just watch the first 2 minutes and 14 seconds to get a feel for it.

Through a chronological history of the South African liberation struggle, this documentary cites examples of the way that music was used in the fight for freedom.

Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.

Lani Silver, a native of San Francisco and an anti-racist teacher and activist, who founded the Bay Area Holocuast Oral History Project, passed away, just found out through San Francisco supervisor Eric Mar on his Facebook:

Lani’s work with the Holocaust lead to her discovery of Chiune and Yukiko Sugihara. Chiune was a Japanese diplomat who rescued thousands of Jews in the Holocaust while stationed in Lithuania in 1939. Sugihara is called the “Japanese Schindler.” Sugihara, with the support of his wife Yukiko, and in cooperation with the Acting Dutch Consulate Jan Zwartendijk, issued visas to Jews against the orders of the Japanese government. After the war Sugihara was dismissed from the Foreign Service for “that incident in Lithuania.”

Lani’s funeral is this Sunday, February 1, at Beth Israel Judeo, Brotherhood Way, in San Francisco. It will be at 12:30 PM.