An elephant calf just a few days old has her first bath in the waterhole with her helpful nanny elephants – but climbing out is harder than getting in.
Elephant Family and Me: Wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan travels to the spectacular Tsavo wilderness in Kenya to try to get closer than ever before to a wild elephant family. African elephants are among the most dangerous animals in the world, killing more people than lions or any other predator. But Gordon believes that elephants become dangerous only because of our actions towards them.
Young female orphan elephants have a tougher social life than non-orphans, a new study suggests, adding to a growing body of evidence of how the impacts of poaching cascade through elephant societies: here.
Presented by Trina R. Williams Shanks, PhD, Associate Director Vivian A. & James L. Curtis Research Training Center Associate Professor, School of Social Work University of Michigan
Dr. Shanks is currently Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. She has a PhD in Social Work from Washington University and a Masters in Comparative Social Research from the Univerity of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Her Research interest include the impact of poverty and wealth on child well-being; asset building policy and practice across the life cycle; and community and economic development.
Dr. Shanks is currently one of the national network co-leads for the Social Work Grand Challenge: Reversing Extreme Economic Inequality. She has been a research investigator for the Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment (SEED) demonstration problem and consults with several other child savings account initiatives, including one started in Lansing Public Schools and at a non-profit organization in Detroit.
Social studies teachers denounce anti-democratic changes to Michigan education curriculum
26 June 2018
More than 200 social studies teachers, high school students, parents and others packed a meeting at the Oakland Intermediate School District building in Waterford, Michigan, north of Detroit on Wednesday. There were furious denunciations of several changes to the state’s social studies curriculum, centered on the charge that the changes would undermine teaching about civil rights, global warming, and LGBT issues.
The Michigan Department of Education (MDE) is sponsoring a series of “Listen and Learn” town hall-style meeting statewide to discuss changes in the social studies curriculum that will have a wide-ranging effect on what is taught and on what children are required to learn.
The meeting began with a collective groan and loud boos when representatives from the State Board of Education claimed the reason for changing language about teaching “core democratic values” to “core values” was in the interest of being “balanced” and “politically neutral”, by avoiding use of the word that appears in the name of the Democratic Party.
It quickly emerged this was only one of numerous proposed changes in the curriculum motivated by far-right Republican State Senator Patrick Colbeck, one of four candidates for the Republican nomination for governor this year, who was invited to join the MDE standards panel after pressure from a cabal of right-wing Michigan state senators.
Over and over, teachers asked how Colbeck even got on the panel in the first place and why no Democrats were invited to be participants. Teachers were particularly angered by the fact that the panel had apparently extended invitations to other notorious right-wing legislators in addition to Colbeck.
Colbeck elsewhere has claimed that the United States was founded as a republic, not a democracy, an argument that is current in ultra-right-wing circles in the United States, particularly since the stolen election of 2000. It is associated with the rejection of the right to vote as a basic right, made notorious by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, when he declared, supporting the Bush v. Gore ruling, that Americans had no fundamental right to vote for president (in his view, state legislatures could simply appoint electors to the Electoral College without bothering with a popular vote).
When teachers were finally able to make contributions from the floor at the end of the Waterford meeting, the really sordid role of Colbeck’s influence on politics in the state and on the MDE was documented.
As one teacher declared, “In this age of ‘alternative facts’ why do we want to change American from a democracy to some sort of republic thing?’”
Hussein Bedoun, who teaches history and social studies at Dearborn’s Edsel Ford High school, which has a substantial Muslim and Arab-American population, joined other speakers in denouncing the dropping of any mention of religions besides Christianity from sections of the text. He spoke directly of Colbeck’s influence on the curriculum proposed.
He asked the MDE representatives: “How can you entrust our children’s future to an imbecile like that?” He then reviewed some of Colbeck’s racist and anti-Muslim statements in the past. He noted that Colbeck is known for claiming Muslims are trying to take over the country.
Colbeck is not really running to win the Republican nomination. He has used his campaign to whip up anti-Muslim hysteria, centered on denunciations of one of the Democratic candidates for governor, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, former Health Director in Detroit, claiming that he represents the Muslim Brotherhood and would impose sharia law in Michigan if elected.
Teachers denounced the removal of a mention of the KKK from one part of the standards, as well as the elimination of the word “genocide” from a section about the Holocaust. MDE panelists defended the deletion, saying that they were trying not to be repetitious.
There were several attempts by the representative from the private company hired by the state board to “facilitate” the meeting to dampen down the loud and frequent outbursts that punctuated the rest of the meeting. There was a great deal of concern from teachers who felt their questions were not being answered.
There were questions about how the panel was selected. One speaker pointed out that there was no representation from Detroit, Saginaw or Flint. Few would not know that these are major urban areas where questions of democracy, civil rights, poverty, and inequality are everyday issues.
Marsha Lewis, a teacher from the Detroit Public Schools, said that racism, civil rights and social issues had to be included at the center of the standards. “I say this not just because I am a teacher. I don’t want my child to live in a world where she thinks she will be forgotten.”
One teacher questioned why the world history standards for high school were changed to begin with the 1500s. She said this was aimed at presenting a Euro-centric view of the world.
This was the third of six such meetings planned for various locations around the state this summer. The two already held, in Flint and Saginaw, were smaller in size but just as contentious. The Waterford meeting is the only one in the Detroit area. The three remaining will be next week in the Upper Peninsula, in Lansing, the state capital, and in Grand Rapids, in the western part of the state, the home town of US Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her ultra-right billionaire family.
When asked at the end of the meeting why the right-wing partisan Colbeck was invited to be part of the process, panelist Linda Forward from MDE admitted, “I cannot give you any rationale that would hold any water here.”
“Students need to learn that history”, she told the assembled teachers, “including the history of the civil rights struggle and other struggles, to have the tools to take up the serious issues they face today.”
She expanded on her remarks later, speaking to the World Socialist Web Site: “I have a little theory of my own. I think this is how fascism comes. When I was reading the standards, I saw all these red lines striking out such important history and topics. It was jarring. You can go online and actually see this. They show the old, 2007 standards side by side, and you can see the important sections removed.
“We will be teaching kids who will not be able to do anything because they do not have the foundation in history. Our foundation was dissent, and they are taking away that foundation.”
Rita Chester is a retired teacher who lives in Waterford, Michigan, where the meeting was held. She told WSWS reporters after the meeting: “My granddaughter in Seattle called me and said ‘Grandma, you have to go down there! They are trying to change the education standards!’ She read about it online out in Seattle and called me. One thing she was concerned about was that references to LGBTQ were being removed, other things were being removed. So here I am!”
Emily Halls is studying music education at Michigan State University. She told the WSWS that she and her “peers” are much more aware of politics now than ever before. This is because so much is going on in the world today that affects us.
“When I saw online that in the new standards sections were removed that relate to climate change and to civil rights, I knew I had to come here tonight. Even though I teach music, my students are going to be affected by politics.
“The effects of climate change are happening now, and they are happening rapidly. By removing key parts of the topic from the main text, bringing these problems to students’ attention will not be a priority in every classroom.
“We had the luxury for a long time of not paying attention. This is especially true in the case of climate change. But now every student and young adult is starting to pay attention. Everyone needs to know what the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change Treaty means. No one can afford to be uninformed.
“Even as a music educator, I feel I should be well-versed in these things. We talk about music for music’s sake. The way the changes were made here is explained as consolidation. But it is troubling that things like the NAACP, Roe V. Wade, are removed.
“We say about a piece of music that there is not one way to understand it, one way that is right and one way that is wrong. This is an important lesson that applies to how students should think about things. They should have all the information.”
Sudden closure of for-profit Education Corporation of America leaves 20,000 students without an education: here.
This 14 June 2018 video shows two young little owls at their nestbox in Winterswijk in the Netherlands. One of the youngsters jumps on the roof of the nestbox.
By now, the young owls have fledged, but they still visit the nestbox regularly.
“I tell you what, I get more calls of thank you from evangelicals, and I see it in the audiences and everything else, than I do from Jewish people”, Trump said. “And the Jewish people appreciate it but the evangelicals appreciate it more than the Jews.”
The pro-Trump, openly nazi, Holocaust-denying site the Daily Stormer claims: ‘The Trump Train is driven by Jesus Christ himself’; while ‘the Jew Train’, they write, is going to Auschwitz.
Ivanka Trump Donates $50K To Anti-Gay Church To Help Families Separated At Border: here.
In Spain, a lawsuit has been initiated against an 85-year-old doctor suspected of involvement in the “stolen baby’s scandal”. In the last century, according to various estimates, some 300,000 babies disappeared in the country just after they were born. Doctors told the new parents that the children had died, but in reality they were stolen to give to other couples.
Thousands of families and dozens of doctors are said to be involved in that scandal. Doctor Eduardo Vela is the first to stand trial. Vela has been accused by Inés Madrigal, who suspects that she is such a stolen baby.
Madrigal’s mother Inés Pérez got a newborn child in 1969, wrapped in cloths, in her hands from Dr Vela. “A surprise”, according to the doctor. At the time, 46-year-old Pérez was childless and had helped Vela care for another boy. Baby Inés was a kind of thank you.
When Madrigal turned 18, Pérez told her that she was not her biological mother. She had the forged birth certificate, the signature of Dr. Vela was below it. But then they did not realize yet how often this kind of practice had taken place.
Around 2010, more and more comparable stories came out. Parents recognized themselves in messages on Spanish internet forums that told about missing babies. Usually the story was that the new mother of the baby had died immediately, or just after the birth, after which the parents did not see the baby anymore. Further questions to the doctors were answered evasively and with that all was finished, for the doctors at least.
In the decades of Franco’s regime, these practices continued and even expanded. Newborn children of non-government-minded families were taken away from the parents. Later the same happened with babies from poor families and single or unmarried mothers. According to the dictatorial regime, it was better for such a child to grow up in a Catholic and conservative family.
But the death of the dictator in 1975 did not mean that the stealing of babies stopped. The illegal baby-trading system was maintained by the numerous doctors and nuns involved. Only in 1987 did the system come to an end with a new, stricter adoption law.
‘Cases without proof’
The case is very much alive in Spain, the attention in the media is big. Some fifty demonstrators gathered outside the court this morning. They were carrying signs with texts such as “justice” and “human rights for stolen babies”.
At the Spanish courts there are still about 2000 complaints that might seem like similar cases. But, although there are enough irregularities in the books – such as people who are twice in the birth register, or who died before they were born – it is difficult to prove the complaints beyond any doubt, says Guillermo Peña, lawyer for the organization SOS Stolen Babies Madrid. “Without hospital data nothing can be checked and then you have a case without proof.” Also the statute of limitations is often a problem.
Earlier, a lawsuit was filed against an employee of Vela’s clinic, the nun Maria Gomez. In 2012 she had to appear before a Spanish court. But before the verdict could come, she died. Gomez has always denied knowing anything about the illegal adoption of 1982 with which she was associated.
Vela has admitted that the signature on Madrigal’s birth certificate is his. He is charged with abduction and forgery of official documents. The public prosecutor has claimed eleven years of prison against him.
Madrigal does not expect Eduardo Vela to tell her the truth, or to say who her real mother is. “But I hope that a ruling will lead to more possibilities for similar cases.”
A DOCTOR who stole a newborn baby nearly 50 years ago will escape punishment because the statute of limitations for the crime has expired, a Spanish court ruled today. Eduardo Vela, 85, abducted Ines Madrigal on her birth in 1969, faking documents to imply she was the child of the couple who raised her. The verdict that he did indeed abduct Ms Madrigal, now a railway worker, is the first in relation to the theft of tens of thousands of children from their real parents under the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Mothers were often told a child had died at birth or shortly after: here.
The resulting debt crisis was followed by widespread public sector layoffs. Since then, the federal PROMESA law created an unelected financial oversight and management board, or Junta, which has moved to impose yet more austerity on the island. And that was before Hurricane Maria hit.
More than three hundred schools have already been closed and huge numbers have left the island. Puerto Ricans are profoundly traumatized — which is precisely what successful shock doctrines depend on.
That’s what Naomi Klein’s new book The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists is all about. Daniel Denvir recently spoke with Klein and Mercedes Martinez, the president of the Puerto Rican Teachers Federation, for the Dig, his podcast on Jacobin Radio. You can subscribe to Jacobin Radio here and listen to this episode here.
Puerto Rico is still devastated after Hurricane Maria. Actually, Hurricane Maria just uncovered what’s been happening in Puerto Rico for decades, since we’ve been a US colony and a Spanish colony as well. We now have the fiscal board, which is imposing severe austerity measures against the working class, against our children. Yesterday was the last day of the semester and 265 schools are set to shut down permanently, affecting 55,000 students. Eighty-four percent of the schools set to be shut down are in rural areas of extreme poverty.
Law 80 is going to be abolished. It’s a law that can defend private working employees from unjustified layoffs, so they get just compensation. They are proposing to lower the minimum wage for our youth, twenty-five years and under. They are proposing to increase tuition fees at the University of Puerto Rico and shut down different campuses. So it’s disaster capitalism on steroids while we are living here in Puerto Rico right now.
NK
We’re talking a week after the Harvard study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine that estimated that the death toll in the aftermath of Hurricane [Maria], the “excess deaths,” as they call it, were around five thousand people as of the end of December. They noted that there was no sign that the numbers were going down.
These “excess deaths” were happening before Maria as a result of public policy. If you look at that Harvard study, it’s clear that a natural disaster did not cause those deaths. The deaths because of high winds or falling debris were relatively small.
This has everything to do with the fact that before Maria hit, Puerto Rico was experiencing a very high dose of what I’ve called the “Shock Doctrine”, of using a crisis — before Maria, it was an economic crisis, a debt crisis — to impose one of the most brutal austerity regimes in the world.
We see such a high death toll because the systematic starving of the public sphere is why the infrastructure collapsed as spectacularly as it did. But now, rather than pulling back in any way, there is this intensification of that very program — a doubling down.
DD
Mercedes, can you explain the entity that’s imposing this austerity and these shocks on Puerto Rico — the financial oversight and management board that islanders call “La Junta.” What is it? How did it come about? Who sits on it? What is it trying to do?
MM
La Junta, or the oversight control fiscal board, is a dictatorship.
It was appointed by the US Congress during Barack Obama’s presidency. Obama approved the law, called PROMESA. It was written to create ways to allow the Puerto Rican people to pay an odious debt of $72 billion.
The Junta, or the oversight fiscal board, is composed of seven members, unelected officials, who can overrule our laws and budget, who submit fiscal plans, who approve anything that happens in our country. So that is not democracy. That is a dictatorship of seven unelected officials who are governing our country.
They are not here to put behind bars all the corrupt politicians or the bondholders, the people that put the Puerto Rican people into debt. It’s very curious to see that two of the members of the oversight fiscal board were involved in the bonds that were [issued] on behalf of Puerto Rican people when they worked at Santander Bank and the Banco Gubernamental de Fomento para Puerto Rico, which is the bank of the government of Puerto Rico.
They are responsible for these bonds that were [issued] on behalf of our people. They are, as we say here, playing pitcher and catcher on both bases. They created the debt and we have to pay for it while they get benefits.
NK
Everybody knows the debt is not going to be paid back. The debt is unpayable. So Puerto Rico is being “structurally adjusted” through the use of debt.
Some of the debt may be repaid, but what is happening now is the debt is being used as an economic weapon to force privatization and other profitable reforms. So it becomes the weapon that is used to demand the privatization of the electricity system — which itself carries a huge debt but is very profitable.
So the profitable parts of the public utility will be auctioned off to private players while the debt will be offloaded onto the public. What Mercedes has been fighting is a similar process in the school system, cracking open the education system to charter schools.
DD
The Puerto Rico education secretary, Julia Keleher, said that New Orleans should be a “point of reference” for the island.
MM
She has been here for such a short time and created so much damage. She needs to get lost. She needs to leave our island immediately.
She’s a business woman. She’s coming here as a puppet of the oversight fiscal board, to perform these atrocities against Puerto Rican children. She’s earning a quarter of a million dollars in salary, more than any [education] secretary in Puerto Rico’s history. Higgins, in the energy agency corporation, is making almost $500,000. The executive director of the fiscal board is making $625,000 a year.
They have all approved their own personal version of Law 80, which is the law that they want to abolish, where you get just compensation if you get fired for not finishing your contract or for unjust layoffs. They created their own Law 80, so that even if they get laid off or even if their contract is expired, they get to collect all their money.
They are damaging the children of Puerto Rico.
Right now, as we speak, we have parents occupying the schools, making sure that no one takes anything from them, that no materials go out and nothing comes out, so they can save them. We are suing the government [over these closures] and expect the courts to rule in favor of us, on behalf of the children of Puerto Rico.
Julia Keleher (who has a company called Keleher and Associates based in Philadelphia) came here four years ago and to make the conditions of privatization possible, to lay off thousands of teachers, to save hundreds of millions of dollars, without caring about the human necessities of the children of Puerto Rico and the teachers of Puerto Rico.
NK
We hear all this rhetoric of humanitarian aid and recovery going to Puerto Rico, but this is child abuse. You hear these figures about closing three hundred schools. It can seem abstract, but these are children who have lived through a profoundly traumatic event. Hurricane Maria was a massive trauma for everybody in Puerto Rico: we’re talking about children who lost their homes, who lost family members, who had this experience of it seeming that the natural world had turned against them.
Everybody who has worked with children or is a parent knows that what children need in a situation like this more than anything is a return to some kind of normalcy, some kind of routine, to have a space of safety to process their experiences. That’s what school can and should be in a moment like this. So this is a process of just incredibly heartless re-traumatization of children and families in Puerto Rico.
MM
A week after the hurricane, teachers themselves reopened the schools. They reconditioned the schools, machete and chainsaws in hand, and put the roofs back on the schools. And we sent Keleher a letter saying, open at least the lunch room, because children have no electricity. Children have no water in the houses. You have gas stoves and you have food there that you can feed the entire community. Open them up and we will cook. She denied that, so a lot of parents occupied even the lunchrooms after the hurricane, to be able to feed the children and all the community members.
Then, as two weeks passed, the schools were ready to reopen in the majority of the cases, thanks to the work of the people. Because only the people will save the people. The government did not appear — not federal, not state.
NK
The pretext for why these school closures are happening is that there aren’t enough students to justify it, right? But if you look at the numbers, the student-teacher ratio in these schools is actually where it should be. The student-teacher ratio was way out of whack before because the schools were so underfunded, but this “crisis” that they were trying to fix is actually a healthy student-teacher ratio.
DD
Which apparently the students of Puerto Rico don’t deserve.
Governor Ricardo Rossello said that Maria had turned the island into a “blank canvas.” Naomi, you write that it’s a vision of “Puertopia”, using huge tax breaks to lure rich transplants, including “cryptocurrency bros”, to the island. There’s a 4 percent corporate tax rate, dividends from island-based companies to island-based individuals are tax free. No federal income tax. To benefit from these tax subsidies these rich transplants just have to spend 183 days of the year on the island, which, as you point out, Naomi, is perfect for rich people who’d like to spend their winters somewhere warm.
Talk about this development scheme that the Puerto Rican government and business elites are pushing, including this bizarre crypto invasion.
NK
It really is just a scheme. It’s about trying to have some kind of economic activity on the books.
The irony is that this most recent economic crisis in Puerto Rico was catalyzed by the expiration of tax breaks that used to be offered to American companies to encourage them to build factories in Puerto Rico and create very large numbers of jobs. Puerto Rico really was the laboratory for the export-processing zone, free-trade model that swept the world, because Puerto Rico is an American territory.
In the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, an economic project called Operation Bootstrap gave American companies these tax breaks so that they would go to Puerto Rico and build factories. They were low-wage factories that eventually moved to Mexico and Central America and then Asia.
You didn’t need free trade deals to do this in Puerto Rico because Puerto Rico is a US territory. It still was technically “made in America.” But what really started to devastate Puerto Rico’s economy was when NAFTA was signed and markets with even lower wages and weaker regulations on offer. Those tax breaks were allowed to expire because they were no longer needed.
So the whole model was replaced by the free trade model. The end date for the expiration was 2006. That was the economic shock that catalyzed the debt crisis.
At least those tax breaks required that these companies create jobs and build real factories. Now what they have are these laws that allow American companies to change their addresses to Puerto Rico, but we’re talking here about financial companies, tech companies, and increasingly, cryptocurrency-related companies. They’re not building factories and employing huge numbers of Puerto Ricans. There used to be a requirement that they create four jobs, and just a year ago they got rid of even that requirement. You don’t even have to hire a Puerto Rican gardener if you don’t want to, to benefit from this buffet of tax giveaways.
No capital gains tax, no tax on interest — so if you are a crypto trader and you want to cash out, you want to sell your bitcoin and turn it into hard US currency, then what you’re most afraid of is getting taxed on that, right? So what Puerto Rico is offering to those crypto bros is, “Come here, do your trading and you won’t get taxed at all.” The corporate tax rate, as you mentioned, is 4 percent. You think about that in the context of Trump’s tax cut, which lowered the corporate tax rate in the US mainland to 20 percent, which was already a significant cut. And this is what Puerto Rico is offering, so you can imagine why it is such an appealing offer. Like I said, it’s a scheme, because there’s just so little job creation connected to it.
DD
One key aspect of this dystopian model for the island’s future is depopulation, which has been taking place for many, many years but has rapidly accelerated in Maria’s wake. It’s a process that, if not intentional, is at least pretty welcome to those pushing to implement this Puertopia vision on the island. What has the flight of people from the island looked like?
MM
Hundreds of thousands of people have already left the island. One study showed that 6 percent of the people that left aren’t coming back to our country. It’s obvious that they want to depopulate our country.
If you close a school in a rural area where it’s the only school, and the closest school is fourteen kilometers away and people have no cars, you are making them leave the mountains and you are making them leave our country, and you have no jobs. Last year, more than 45,000 jobs in the private sector were lost in our country.
Right now they are imposing “incentivized retirement.” They pay you for a year, but then for five years you can’t work on any government agency. The private sector is not offering any jobs — where are the people going to go after the year?
They’re pushing people out of our country to allow the rich to come here and create their own towns, their own cities, their own Puerto Rico. They’re coming here trying to buy the land and have their own private hospitals, their private schools, their private land, their private anything.
NK
In Puerto Rico, the superrich are taking advantage of this massive rolling humanitarian disaster to come in and go, “Oh, yeah, I see a blank slate here. This is a great place for us to build our private fortress, a climate change-proof little enclave.”
DD
Before the hurricane hit, Puerto Rico was in a high state of social movement mobilization. Last spring, there was this massive strike at Universidad de Puerto Rico protesting proposed tuition hikes and budget cuts. There were massive May Day protests.
At the time Naomi writes that these movements had seemingly stalled the most draconian austerity plans, but “Then came Maria and all those same rejected policies came roaring back with Category Five ferocity.”
Mercedes, tell me about these mobilizations that were underway, what happened when Maria hit, and moving forward, what movements are going to do given the enormous power of your enemies.
MM
Prior to the hurricane, there were huge mobilizations. Students of the University of Puerto Rico had a strike for seventy-two days and they won one of their claims against the tuition fee increase. On May 1 last year, around 80,000 people flooded the streets of San Juan, particularly on what is called the Gold Mile, which is where the bankers are, protesting against these severe austerity measures, and were able to stop a lot of them.
The Governor of Puerto Rico amended the penal code in Puerto Rico to implement many more years of incarceration for people that protest if they commit a crime — people that block the streets, people that block the entrance of the schools for the occupations. So they are trying to make people feel scared to protest.
This May 1 was amazing as well. The banks were shut down. The biggest mall in Puerto Rico was shut down. Police brutality has been implemented against all of those who struggle. We saw this on May 1, where tear gas, rubber bullets, 1,100 cops were sent to demonstrations of the working class, of university students, environmentalist groups, feminists. They are trying to implement terror, but people are fighting back.
We have been arrested for doing civil disobedience to ask the government to open the schools. But we are not scared. They think that they are going to drive us away or scare us through these terrorizing policies and police brutality against the people of Puerto Rico. They are wrong. We have nothing else to lose.
NK
I don’t think anything has inspired me more than seeing what Puerto Ricans are capable of organizing in the most trying of circumstances. Not just resisting, not just saying “no” to these horrific, predatory practices, but with the lights still off and without water and with families being split apart, coming together to say, “What do we want instead?”
And creating space to dream, which was pointed out to me when I was in Puerto Rico, is exactly what colonization was designed to extinguish. The right of people to dream their own future and design their own destiny. The fact that the Puerto Ricans are doing this under such extraordinary circumstances, I think, is something we all have to learn from.
Daniel Denvir is the author of All-American Nativism (forthcoming from Verso), a writer in residence at The Appeal, and the host of “The Dig” on Jacobin Radio.
US financial board spars with Puerto Rican authorities over how best to pillage island: here.
Researchers have estimated there were 2,975 excess deaths in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria from September 2017 through the end of February 2018. The researchers also identified gaps in the death certification and public communication processes and went on to make recommendations that will help prepare Puerto Rico for future hurricanes and other natural disasters: here.
For those looking for more information about his or her Surinamese ancestors, doing research on Surinamese slavery or preparing lessons on slavery, the search from today will be easier. The Surinamese slave registers are now available online from today on.
The slave registers consist of 43 big books with a total of almost 30,000 pages. They are classified by the names of the slave owners or plantations. The name of the enslaved person is registered, just like the date of birth, the sex and the name of the mother (the father was not registered). Information about sales, contagious diseases, release and other information that was important for the status and monetary value of people in slavery can also be found in the register. Approximately 80,000 people are registered who lived in slavery in Suriname from 1830 to 1863.
“The slave registers are unique, it is the only source with detailed information that gives the possibility to follow all people in slavery over 35 years”, says initiator Coen van Galen.
Coen van Galen of the Radboud University in Nijmegen and Maurits Hassankhan of the Anton de Kom University of Suriname are the initiators of the project ‘Make the Surinamese slave registers public’. Together they have recruited 1500 volunteers who have contributed to digitizing the registers. The volunteers have put the information of all scans in a database within four months. With a crowdfunding campaign and donors, the initiators have raised money for the project.
“The slave registers in the National Archive of Suriname were not easily accessible, for example there was no index, so you could not search easily”, says Hassankhan. That has changed now. “It is now easily accessible to everyone worldwide.”
The fact that the registers are now digitally accessible is important both for the public and for science. “People need to know where they come from and learn more about their ancestors”, says Hassankhan. “This is important for your identity as an individual and as a group.” This source is also important for science. According to Van Galen, it gives scientists the opportunity to understand what slavery was and meant for people. …
The slave registers are from today on online and accessible to everyone via the website of the National Archives in The Hague and the Nationaal Archief Suriname. The symbolic launch date of the slave registers is July 1st during Keti Koti. …
On July 1, the Netherlands, Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles celebrate the abolition of slavery during the Keti Koti Festival. Keti Koti is Surinamese for ‘broken chains’.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 