Arieso226

mhhmmm yea

You know what's wrong with this? I could totally see this happening. Like, they and all the avengers and Loki reading the books. Except Loki is with the four of them, and laughing maniacally ( EHEHEHEHE) when Steve and Tony look at Thor like this

The Federal Reserve

NO. 1

Today, we’re going to asking some questions all focused on the Federal Reserve. Who created the Federal Reserve? What is its purpose? And how does it continue to control us, poor and middle-class folks, today? The Federal Reserve Act was signed by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913. Generally speaking, it has five general functions, ‘‘like conducts the nation's monetary policy to promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates in the U.S. economy; promotes the stability of the financial system; promotes the safety and soundness of individual financial institutions; fosters payment and settlement system safety and efficiency and promoting consumer protection and community development.

NO. 2

The first myth about the Federal Reserve, is that it is controlled by the federal government, hence the name. But in actuality, it is a private institution whose shareholders are commercial banks, hence the term, ‘bankers bank’. The word ‘federal’ is designed deliberately to create the impression that it is a public entity. Indeed, misrepresentation of its ownership is not merely by implication or impression created by its name. More importantly, it is also officially and explicitly stated on its website: ‘The Federal Reserve System fulfills its public mission as an independent entity within government. It is not owned by anyone and is not a private, profit-making institution” [1]. To unmask this blatant misrepresentation, the late Congressman Louis McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee in the 1930s, described the Fed in the following words: ‘Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders.”

NO. 3

Henry Ford quoted, ‘It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” In simplistic terms, the Federal Reserve basically controls the money supply, and average citizens, like you and me, work for any valuable company, and in order to receive those paychecks, you used where only a fraction of bank deposits are backed by actual cash on hand and available for withdrawal. This is called fractional reserve banking, and it is done to theoretically expand the economy by freeing capital for lending. Every single person on this planet is working under the Federal Reserve.

For more information, please watch the documentary ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’, based on Thomas Piketty's best-selling book, on Netflix. They give a widespread selling of how far back the plans to implement the Federal Reserve goes.

Unfortunately

This could seriously be a whole video essay series cause many folks raised in the Global North (Western-oriented countries and communities) will frame all history as a matter of black/white events when, in actuality, history is informed by our indigenous, immigrant, and diaspora pasts and their present day afterlives.

I'll keep my thoughts about executive director Pinkett's spiritual bypassing on private for now, BUT I will say this: Egypt is a part of Africa and Africa belongs in our garden of history cause there are enough miracles, memories, and magic across our African histories and their cultures that we don't have to produce miseducated docuseries that try to pass as Pan-African history pieces or afrofuturist reimagings (when in actuality they are just reinventing bougie versions of well-worn imperial histories).

Egypt is a part of Africa and Africa belongs in our garden of history.

The Animal Manifesto

NO. 1

Aristotle wrote, ‘’Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of deformation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form should lie.’’ (Book VIII, pg.6) to compare this to his hierarchy the ‘’The Great Chain of Being’’ in his book, ‘’The History of Animals, where humans are at the top, and slaves and non-human animals are at the bottom, justifying the subjugation and oppression of these beings. But that isn’t fact, it’s just a theory to support this type of biased reasoning at the time. In this essay, or manifesto, I will explore my four main steps that I believe will benefit all animals, humans, and the environment.

 NO.2

    The discussion about the cruel treatment of animals, particularly agricultural animals like cows, chickens and pigs, and the harmful effects it has on our society and on the environment is still talked about now. In her paper called In Defense of Slavery, sociologist, Marjorie Spiegel compares the suffering of animals and humans. For example, chickens cramped in cages, stacked on top of each other, to the slaves in the south. The comparison of non-human animals to humans isn’t the right way to make the point across that we need to liberate all animals that we use for food from these machine-type farms, because comparing animals to captive human beings is wrong.

      The difference between non-human animals and humans, are what early scientists has described as, ‘’The argument to prove that the reason why animals do not speak as we do is not that they lack the organs but that they have no thoughts; (Humans) We all have moral status because we *think*. If animals think, they must use language. Humans who do not speak use symbolic language to express original thought.’ (Descartes, 1646). This type of thinking is why for centuries the abuse of animals has gone on for so long, and it has only caught attention during the last two decades. 1) My point is, all animals, including humans, share the Earth and we must co-exist to help protect it. Since we can speak, we believe we are the superior species, and even then, we feel that way and dominate other races of humans, anyone or anything we feel that is ‘other’.

   NO.3

  All animals have a right to life, even the right to bodily integrity, Regan, (pg.25) ‘’If animals have rights, and if rights are the trump card in the moral game, their rights override any benefits, real or imagined, we have gained, or stand to gain, from using them in biomedical research.’’ And this is something I agree to. Utilitarianism, the practice of maximizing the good stuff and minimizing the harm, and is connected to animal welfare, is the complete opposite. (Bentham, pg.9) The liberation of all animals, from zoos, farms, circuses, labs, etc. is, in my opinion, the moral way. I understand the reasoning behind using animals as test subjects for research and medical cures, but I know there are other ways to cure diseases. All animals deserve to be in there, natural habitat, and it is not fair for us to be keeping them in tanks and simple four inch. rooms with the door locked. The only animals that should be involved with humans are domestic dogs, cats and birds, etc. Simply because they wouldn’t survive in the wild, since they are descended from actual wild animals.

       In Marc Beckoff’s, The Animal Manifesto, one of the reasons he uses to envision the world a better place is, ‘’Connection breeds caring; alienation breeds disrespect,’’ is one very important step we humans must learn if we want instill peace, for all living beings. For example, humans express lighter emotions, especially to dogs and cats, animals we normalize and see as pets, whereas we express extreme dislike and contempt to many animals, like rats, pigeons, reptiles, bugs and even some dogs, like the pit bull. For example, during the late 1800’s, the English Sparrow was one of the most documented problem animals of that time. ‘’The English Sparrow is a curse of such virulence that it ought to be *systematically attacked and destroyed’’,  (U.S Department of Agriculture, 1889). The hatred of this particular bird stem from moral attributes, rather than scientific ones. They are foreigners, they attack American birds, there character is disreputable, and they need to be controlled as foreigners.  Humans also show contempt to other humans, those of a different race and different culture. We still don’t understand one another, and so we make up stereotypes from one person we’ve met, and suddenly that stereotype is placed on the whole race of people, alienating and disrespecting a whole people. It leads to social problems, fear, and occasionally, death, toward the oppressed.

  NO. 4

  The environment is the most important place we all have to take care of, and it fits into my thinking of the human-animal relationship because we are the cause for its downfall. The Rain forest in South America is nicknamed, ‘The lungs of the Earth’’ for a reason, and every day it is getting destroyed, or cut down to make room for more land, which is damaging to animals’ habitats and the ecosystems, and to ourselves. We dominated and distanced ourselves from nature.  The only reason why it is affected is because humans are destroying the natural order. The Meat and Dairy industry is giving land animals’ products displaying scientific substances inside it to speed up the process of killing for consumption. The animals, on the one hand, excrement is filled with nitrogen, and when that piles up all together, the air is affected.

The main reason, alongside the obvious reasons, for global warming is because of how much meat and dairy, we are consuming. As long as there is a want and need for meat, global warming will always be a problem. Wanting to eat meat is not a horrendous thing, seeing that humans are omnivores. But there is simply no reason to speed up the natural process for killing these animals by mixing drugs with their food. Most humans know about the daily abuses these animals go through, but we ignore the social world, so we don’t see it, and we sanitize everything, and it lets us off the hook. This is called the toilet assumption, (Spiegel, 1988). In my opinion, we can improve the way we treat animals, even land animals. We can do better, the way we treat others, we can show more compassion and love to everyone and everything. And my final point is again from (Beckoff, 2010) and that is acting compassionately helps all beings and our world. Showing compassion to animals and to non-human animals can definitely affect our day-to-day understanding of the world. We all have our own personal beliefs, and it’s okay to disagree, but respectfully.

Housing Discrimination

NO. 1

 Racial exclusion, or segregation had real damage to the black communities persistent in their fight for freedom to own and be included in everything whites were already allowed in; the fight for equality, economic security, for education, and for fair housing was just beginning. Racial exclusion was such a severe enough problem, since in every near northern city, black newcomers crammed into old and run-down housing, mainly in dense central neighborhoods left behind by upwardly mobile whites. White builders, in charge of housing and agencies related could dictate who could own, and William Levitt, of Leviittown where massive developments were made in the suburb, was no exception. 

       These types of houses were ‘affordable for the common man’, and remade America’s landscape after World War II. The iconic images of little ranches and Cape Cods, set in spacious yards on curvilinear streets, stood for everything that America celebrated in the Cold War era. These subdivisions attracted a heterogenous mix of surburnites, blue-collar workers employed by U.S Steel factories, teachers, clerks, and administrators. Levitt celebrated the ‘American-ness’ of these houses, saying ‘’No man who owns his house and lot can be a communist. He has much to do.’’ Don’t really know how owning a house can get in the way of your political ideologies, but alright. And when Levitt was questioned about the racial homogeneity of his planned community, he responded, ‘’We can solve a housing problem or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.’’  But the housing and racial problem was connected, as blacks could not get these houses because they were black. One instance of racial exclusion was in metropolitan Philadelphia, where between 1946, only 347 of 120,000 new homes built were open to blacks. Langston Hughes, popular poet described black neighborhoods as the ‘land of rats and roaches, where a nickel cost a dime.

 NO. 2

   Economist Robert Weaver spoke, ‘’among the basic consumer goods, only housing for Negroes are traditionally excluded freely competing in the market.’’ The struggle to open housing was not just a matter of free access to a market excluded to blacks. Racial segregation had high stakes. In post war America, where you lived shaped your educational options, your access to jobs, and your quality of life. The housing markets also provided most Americans with their only substantial financial asset. Real estate was the most important vehicle for the accumulation of wealth. Breaking open the housing market would provide blacks to access to better-funded, higher-quality schools. It would give them the opportunity to live in growing communities–near the shopping malls, office centers, and industrial parks where almost all new job growth happened. And more importantly, it would narrow the wealth-gap between blacks and whites. The battle against housing discrimination in Levingttown, or anywhere else would be the most important in the entire northern freedom struggle.

      NO. 3

 Housing segregation in the north was built on a sturdy foundation of racial restrictions encoded in private regulations and public policy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Midwest–and especially Indiana and Illinois, were dotted with ‘sundown towns’ places whose residents drove blacks off by force, enacted ordinances to prohibit black occupancy (although such ordinances were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1917), and sometimes posted signs, like that in Wendell Willkie’s Elwood, Indiana, warning blacks of the dire consequences of staying around after sunset. Such crude techniques succeeded in driving blacks out of small towns, but they were less effective in the major northern metropolitan areas that attracted the vast majority of African American migrants beginning in World War I.

Three devices were used to help housing discrimination: first, private but legally enforecable restrictive covenants—attached to nearly every housing development built between 1928 and 1948— forbade the use or sale of a property to anyone other than whites. Second, federal housing policies, enacted during the Depression, mandated racial homogeneity in new developments and created a separate, unequal housing market, underwritten with federal dollars, for blacks and whites. And third, real estate agents staunchly defended the ‘freedom of association and the right of home owners and developers to rent or sell to whom they pleased, steering blacks into racially mixed or all-black neighborhoods. Whites in the North had economic reasons to fear the ‘Negro invasion’ as they called it. Their ability to secure mortgages and loans were at risk. But their motivations were not solely economic. Intertwined concerns about property values were fears of black predation. North and South recoiled at the prospect of miscegenation. In the South, they feared the legal restrictions on intermarriage and racial mixing in public spaces; the North feared the regulation of housing markets.           

Whatever you’re thinking, think bigger. What got you here won’t get you there.