mapping paid maternity leave.

North America comes out on top. And bottom.

Some things that aren’t represented in this map are the fact that undocumented workers don’t have access to these supposedly “progressive” benefits in the liberal blue-teal-green countries. Also, there’s a gaping silence regarding men as parents from paternity or “parental” leave all the way down to the much more critical situation of single fathers and dads who are primary parents yet don’t have access to federal or  private sector support in the ways provided by maternity leave.

What we need is a paradigm shift toward parental leave policies, and not this gendered institutionalization of what kind of people can be committed parents. Beyond this, there needs to be a broader sense of caregiving, which can account for taking care of young folks (who aren’t necessarily still babies), elderly folks, people with chronic illness, or even people enduring episodic mental instability.

I ended up in a short back-and-forth with a friend of a friend about this map a couple months ago. She was trying to salvage the US neoliberal fuck-over situation through an anecdotal testimony of her employer, a MAJOR U.S. bank, and their generous maternity policy, and how great it is that even though the Federal law provides no support, ‘we shouldn’t hate because private corporations have gone above and beyond’ even what northern European governments offer.

I of course responded with a critical perspective of particularly large corporations (especially banks??!!), and the bizarre neoliberal/ libertarian logic that corporations should make a killing by-any-means-necessary, the government should give them some space and stop taxing and regulating them for chrissakes, and then we should be grateful/ adorning/ impressed that they take a sliver of their hard-fought earnings and invest it in some HR policies that keep the workers pacified in their frustration, even obliged to the pirating cartels corporations for “taking care of them.” And then of course its understandable when corporations are going through tough times of austerity, that they cut back on “excesses” and “benefits” such as the aforementioned generous big bank maternity policy, since they have a business to run afterall…

I’m not saying that the State is my bestie (lord knows they never cut back on social programs like parental leave, pensions, or medical aid!), but I don’t think we should be so naïve as to think that our jobs/ bosses/ companies are the answer to accessing support when new children/ babies come into our lives.

Reporting Live from Dad Duty,

Sunshine Superboy

Grace Lee Boggs on #OWS and the 99% Move

reblogged from the Mariposa Co-op’s Food Justice and Anti-Racism blog

Happy Birthday to Bayard Rustin, Jorge Ben, and… to Me!!! (Sunshine Superboy!)

Its Mid-March! There are a couple truly stupendous March babies* (not babies anymore!) whom we ought to pause for a moment and appreciate. Lets get to it..!

Bayard Rustin was born 100 years ago, on March 17th! He is one of the dopest organizers, not just of American History, but of the entire 20th century, the world-over (IMHO).

His most visible achievement was organizing- as deputy director of mobilization and logistics- the 1963 March on Washington (in which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the hallowed “I have a Dream Speech”, and at which a multi-racial coalition of singers performed- from Bob Dylan, to Joan Baez, and Gospel legend Mahalia Jackson- cuz thats how he rolled!) It was Bayard Rustin who visited Gandhi in India, and cross-pollinated the Sattyagraha and Nonviolent precepts, bringing them to the US south and working closely with King among others. Rustin was a quaker, a singer, a socialist, and…wait for it… unapologetically the gay! (Hooray!)

It was for this homophobia latter identity that King was counciled to throw Bayard Rustin under the bus (in the parlance of our times), which is why he has been largely written out of mainstream and much African American history.

As our culture starts to warm to the idea of gender justice and queer liberation (we’re getting there…) Rustin is slowly being woven back into narratives and history of Civil Rights organizing in the 20th century.

On the deeply regarded Bayard Rustin:

Another force of brilliance I’d like to celebrate this week is the very much alive and kicking-ass, Brazilian Samba-Rock Godfather, Jorge Ben who marks his 70th birthday on March 22nd! Jorge Ben makes me smile, move, shuffle my feet, and sometimes sigh in melancholy (see “Gabriela” where he openly weeps on the recording!) with his genius fusion of samba, bossa nova, soul and rock n roll. The execution is something you just have to listen to in full to appreciate.

As with most artists who where on their A game in the 70s, there are some awkward albums and singles that followed the apogee of their songwriting, but most of his albums are slam dunks from start to finish. Perfect for cooking brunch (a favorite pastime of yours truly), doing dishes, playtime with toddlers, or drinking on your back porch in the evening. Impress your date with your refined musical taste!

His lyrics “blend humor and satire with often esoteric subject matter” including politics of Black Liberation, and post-colonial dreams for Africa (again think 60s and 70s composer here). He intersected with the Tropicalia movement of Brazil, and his song “Mas Que Nada” (song/ video below), which was his first big hit in Brazil, remains to this day ‘the most played song in the USA sung entirely in Portuguese’. I seriously heart this dude.

Enjoy the song and slide show with some rando pictures of the 1960s (??!)

oh, and I’m not that important, but I just celebrated my birthday on March 16th so I just wanted to dredge up some homies of mine who I happen to think about or listen to every day because they are badass.

You look like a Rock Star and you shred like one too!!!

(…and many more!)
Sunshine Superboy

*ps- we also welcomed some amazing babies to our spinning planet this month (and more to come!) and I wanna holler to them too (especially you baby Marlowe xoxoxo)

Decolonize BART!

Happy Fall Decolonization Fest part II!
What are you thankful for? Decentralized movements for social justice? The building up of a post-capitalist solidarity economy? Maybe just the sheer joy of public transit??

So many opportunities to reflect on the legacies of colonialism, slavery, genocide, and imperialism for those of us in the Western Hemisphere. Good tidings, and may this map of a reclaimed San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit system keep good company to you and your people.

Thanks to my buddy Kenji for this cartographic gem!

If you’ve missed other awesome/ imaginative BART maps, you can click here and have your mind ravaged by BARTOR- the Transitator!!!

June Jordan bound train arriving at platform ONE in seven minutes…
Angela Davis International Airport bound Train is now boarding…

Sunshine Superboy

Worker Co-ops Support the 99% Movement

Just to add to some of the smart things people are saying about the 99% Movement, for example perspectives from New Orleans, Detroit and Oakland.

Worker Cooperatives support Occupy Wall Street…
The United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC) stands in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street
movement, and the Occupy movements around the world. As a national grassroots membership organization of
worker cooperatives—businesses owned and democratically controlled by our worker members — we support
and are honored to join you in this call for an economy organized to meet human needs.
We are heartened to see the beginnings of a genuine discussion and debate about different economic models —
models that value fairness at their core. As many of us come together for the first time to discuss the problems
that face us, and as we begin to collectively reimagine our economy and society, we believe it is critical to
actively make space for all voices to be heard. We urge this new movement to remain open and plural.

…and we invite you to join us in occupying Main Street

Cooperatives are the fastest growing socioeconomic movement in the world, with close to one billion members.
Worker cooperative businesses are in all sorts of industries: engineering, importing coffee,
baking bread, doing web development, cleaning houses, nursing and home health care, running
grocery stores, driving taxis, and more. But worker cooperatives are part of a much larger cooperative
economy that includes credit unions, consumer coops, housing coops, agricultural producer coops, and rural
electric coops — in the US, nearly 30,000 cooperative enterprises own over $3 trillion in shared assets.

Cooperatives are based on values.

Worker cooperatives are businesses that are owned and operated on democratic principles by the people
who work in them. Because they are organized around the will, talents and needs of the human
beings who work in them rather than the imperative of growth and ever-increasing profit margins,
worker cooperatives have the capacity to promote and extend new, humane and imaginative ways of
meeting the material needs of people by producing and distributing goods and services in society.
When dozens, hundreds and thousands of these enterprises pool resources and cooperate with
each other based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and
solidarity, a fundamental transformation of culture and society occurs. This has taken place most notably
and enduringly in Mondragon, Spain, and the Emilia Romagna region of Italy, where worker coops drive
the economy and fund and control social services, health care, retirement and education.

The cooperative movement needs you. And the world needs the cooperative movement.

As the Occupy movements have made clear, and as the UN recognized in declaring 2012 the
International Year of Cooperatives, we need a new way forward to a better world. Cooperatives can be
economic engines and laboratories for democracy — a powerful, practical part of building an economy
and society that works for all its members.

We are the 99.

Sunshine Superboy

Currently Occupied…

WE. ARE. EVERYWHERE.


Just for Example…

would love to see links to other maps of occupations, and perhaps some analysis. I usually like to offer some and I will update this with some thoughts.

Share your links in the comments section below.

We. Are. Mobilizing.
Sunshine Superboy

I Wanna be David Blair Black! R.I.P. This Strong Voice from Detroit

David Blair was a friend of mine, especially back when I was living in Michigan. Blair was a fierce soul, a talented crooner, a passionate poet, and a kindred black geek with deeply powerful politics.

This is a video from Blair’s performance at the 2009 Allied Media Conference. It took place mere days after Michael Jackson’s death.

What Kinda Black??!

“What interests me about [Jackson's] life – and about writing about him – is that everything that he is calls to mind a discussion of race, gender, sexuality, poverty, stardom, rags-to-riches and age,” Blair told Between the Lines in 2009. “He’s a very American figure. I don’t think that all that Michael Jackson is could’ve been produced anywhere else in the world but right here.”

Over the weekend, renowned poet, singer and songwriter David Blair was found dead in his apartment. Blair, who was born in New Jersey but lived in Detroit since the 1990s, was a prolific artist. He earned a National Poetry Slam Champion title, performed with Urban Folk Collective and the Boyfriends, and taught poetry and songwriting in Detroit Public Schools. Performances took him throughout the U.S., Russia, Europe and South Africa.

Blair was also a 2010 Callaloo fellow, a 2009 Seattle Haiku Slam champion and the recipient of Seattle’s 2007 BENT Mentor Award for LGBT Writers. He was named best urban folk poet by Detroit’s Metro Times and best folk artist by Real Detroit Weekly.

His first book of poetry, Moonwalking, about the life of [Michael] Jackson, hit book shelves in April 2010. Although a cause of death has not been confirmed, Blair may have suffered heatstroke before he was found by a maid. No foul play is suspected. He was 41 years old.

He also made Emily Dickinson’s “Farewell” an African-American spiritual like Omigod. Here’s a link to the vimeo of it at Detroit’s Institute of Arts. And below is Blair’s performance at the TEDxDetroit fest last Fall.

Blair, buddy, we will miss you sorely…

Be at Peace,
Sunshine Superboy

Blair and the Boyfriends

Ain’t No Such Thing As a Superman: Gil Scott Heron, Action Comics, and Global Superpower

This weekend, we lost the legendary badass Mr. Gil Scott-Heron at the age of 62.

Gil Scott-Heron was a Jamaican-American composer, musician, poet and author whose writings and recordings provided a vivid, and often stinging, commentary on social injustice and the black American experience; his declamatory singing style, allied to the overtly political content of his work, made him widely recognised as one of the inspirational figures of rap music.

Dude was only 18 when he wrote what is perhaps his best known piece The Revolution Will Not Be Televised- an attack on the mindless and anaesthetising effects of the mass media and a call to arms to the black community:

“You will not be able to stay home, brother/
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out/
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip/
Skip out for beer during commercials/
Because the revolution will not be televised”

Gil Scott-Heron’s Aint No Such Thing as a Superman

This reminds me of last month’s abdication by DC Comic’s Superman, of his American citizenship in Action Comics #900

The key scene takes place in “The Incident,” a short story in Action Comics #900 written by David S. Goyer with art by Miguel Sepulveda. In it, Superman consults with the President’s national security advisor, who is incensed that Superman appeared in Tehran to non-violently support the protesters demonstrating against the Iranian regime, no doubt an analogue for the recent real-life protests in the Middle East. However, since Superman is viewed as an American icon in the DC Universe as well as our own, the Iranian government has construed his actions as the will of the American President, and indeed, an act of war.

Superman replies that it was foolish to think that his actions would not reflect politically on the American government, and that he therefore plans to renounce his American citizenship at the United Nations the next day — and to continue working as a superhero from a more global than national perspective. From a “realistic” standpoint it makes sense; it would indeed be impossible for a nigh-omnipotent being ideologically aligned with America to intercede against injustice beyond American borders without creating enormous political fallout for the U.S. government.

… or within American borders for that matter. The truth is that rather than fighting for justice, Superman has always fought for the American Way, which encompasses a hegemonic cosmology of what exactly counts as ‘justice’ and ‘injustice’. Why did an inter-galactic super-being align himself with an imperialist Superpower in the first place? Oh yeah, he was raised in Kansas and indoctrinated (in the 40s and 50s of all moments!) into a fundamental belief in the supremacy of the American Way, and the perspective that US domestic and foreign policy was totally where its at.

Now while I understand that everyone (left and right) is getting excited (knickers in twist), about Superman’s renunciation of US citizenship, I want us all to think on the analysis of Gil Scott-Heron and keep a few things in mind:

1) The motivation for this move does not stem from a sudden realization that the US is a problematic imperialist power, and should therefore be counter-balanced in some way. Rather, Superman doesn’t want his independent actions to reflect poorly on US diplomacy. He is doing this to aid the State, not to critique it. J Edgar Hoover would have lobbied Superman to do the same thing, if he could, and if we imagine this as some parallel to our very real world, I’d bet Hillary Clinton had something to do with this abdication. Now Superman can show up in the streets of Tehran without his presence being tantamount to a declaration of war.

2) Clark Kent, our grand hero’s alias, remains a US Citizen, and therefore, all of this rhetorical posturing is empty. A super-being with the power to fly and the asylum of a Fortress of Solitude on a stateless continent of ice has little need for citizenship in any event, and certainly needs no assistance to navigate national borders. Beyond this, however, the very real powers of a US Passport, and all the rights associated with American citizenship are fully retained by Our Glorious Hero, so all of his “I’m a global citizen” bullshit is just that. I’d like to see Clark Kent go ex-pat and pursue citizenship in Palestine or Taiwan, or Tibet for that matter, and then Action Comics can claim some sort of political solidarity for what thats worth. What we should be asking ourselves is what is it that Kent’s US Citizenship allows Superman to do, that renouncing it entirely would not?

3) The power, legitimacy, and resource hoarding that once was unflappable behind the seal of American citizenship has dissolved somewhat in the 21st Century. Anyone, including Mulit-national corporation and the US State Department itself, wishing to maintain such command has made strategic shifts to re-brand from “American” to “Global”, “International” or “Worldly”. In the globalized, post-colonial world, power is hard-pressed to get away with much exertion of force or influence without waving some UN, World Bank, IMF, or “coalition” cred- and this is just Superman doing the same.

I won’t pretend for a minute that the editors at DC Comics are as savvy and strategic as all this. In DC’s attempts toward verisimilitude, however, they’ve come marvelously close to capturing the zeitgeist of global power, transforming Superman into just another heuristic for understanding the multi-lateral shifts of imperialist power.

In our own world, then, Scott-Heron remains correct that there ain’t nothing but a superman, afterall, what would an all powerful being need with a US Passport and a stable position in a major media firm in New York City?

Up Up and Awaaaaaaaaaay!
Sunshine Superboy

State of the Unions

I’m been meaning to post the Wisconsin Fist of Solidarity for weeks and weeks and now their cuckoo-bananas Governor has gone and signed the crazy union-busting bill. Well, here it is for those who haven’t seen it and for those who are in solidarity:

from Democracy Now:
In Wisconsin, more than 100,000 people filled the streets of Madison Saturday in what what has been described as the state’s largest protest ever. The massive rally was held one day after Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed a the controversial Bill Act 10, legislation that sharply curbs collective bargaining rights for most public employees in the state of Wisconsin. Speakers at the rally included many of the 14 Democratic senators who had fled the state three weeks ago in an attempt to stall the legislation.

wisconsin union t-shirt

Up up and Away!
Sunshine Superboy

Mapping the Clamour in Africa

Everybody wants to rap about Africa this week. Nelson Mandela is out of hospital. Tunisia’s successful people-led ousting of their government has emboldened thousands among their Arab neighbors. The people of Egypt took bravely to the streets of Suez, Alexandria, and Cairo among other cities (see map below) and recently forced the police to go home! And oh yeah, didn’t the people of Southern Sudan just vote in record turnout to secede from the north a few weeks back?

Seems a fitting time to share some basic political geography of Africa. Of course, it doesn’t reflect the impending bifurcation of Sudan, but it gives places the names that are commonly used for them and all that, and it will save you from looking dafty (or worse, racist!*) while you’re discussing “the Africa” with all your pals. Maybe now Africa will seem less “mysterious” if indeed it previously had.

And while you’re at it, you can turn that geographic literacy into stunning smug commentary on the latest flashpoints of protest across the Map of Egypt.

…will never be defeated
Sunshine Superboy

*so actually not knowing the names and corresponding geographies of African countries does not make you racist. this was a joke just to have some fun with some of the folks who are jumpy about whether or not they are being racist- as if there were no way anyone could ever know for sure? LOL. buuuut, nor does not knowing shit about Africa make you “anti-racist”. Do us all a favor. Save yourself the embarrassment by brushing up a tad on this stuff. And for the love of god, please don’t refer to “Africa” out of wholesale uncertainty when you are really just talking about one specific city, ethnicity, culture or region within the vast, vast continent. Be brave and be specific. You’re smart, you’ll do great. (yes I do mean it).