Red Light Politics
Welcome to my short form Tumblr blog. My name is Flavia Tamara Dzodan, I am a business developer, writer, public speaker, ideas instigator, content creator, media facilitator and trend watcher living in Amsterdam.
This Tumblr is about the spaces and intersections between politics, culture, race and gender matters with some humor and pop culture thrown in the mix.
My long reads blog is Red Light Politics.
I also blog at Tiger Beatdown.
If you would like to know more about me, visit this page .
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Noted Elsewhere
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What did I miss?
I’ve decided that I am not even going to try to catch up on Tumblr since Friday. Nope. Not gonna do it.
So, did anything important...
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Interesting
Just got a job offer? I know the company, it has a good reputation. And awesome downtown offices.But it’s not quite my style - their...
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“The new rules, which were given the force of an executive order, are a clear improvement over a draft version. If monitored and enforced, they could...”
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Heroism in the Supermarket:
Vitamin Water wants me to believe that drinking their sugary concoction will help to make me a superhero rather than...
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…and The Onion for the win, forever.
Tl;dr: All 10 ways are “Revolutionary Terror.”
(via TheNoobYorker)
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Last night got the pleasure to met and chat with the German Tumblr team.
These women were totally awesome. Total girl crush!
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“The institution of marriage is not under attack as a result of the President’s words. Marriage was under attack years ago by men who viewed women as...”
Tag Results
8 posts tagged European Union
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Switzerland’s government needs to do much more to tackle rising racism and xenophobia, a Commissioner from the European Council on Human Rights said in a letter to the Swiss foreign ministry.
The ECHR Commissioner Thomas Hammarberg sent his strongly worded letter earlier this month to Swiss foreign minister Didier Burkhalter.
“Manifestations of racism and xenophobia appear to be on the rise in Switzerland. Disturbing political campaigns with aggressive, insulting slogans against foreigners are tendencies of great concern,” the letter read.
”The Local - Swiss racism on the rise: human rights chief
Also from the article:
The letter also raised concerns about the recent move to restrict migrants’ abilities to include family members in their applications, making family reunification even harder than it previously has been.
Vatican told to pay taxes as Italy tackles budget crisis
via The Independent:
After several years of scandal in which the Catholic Church has faced allegations of financial impropriety, paedophile priests and rumours of plots to kill the Pope, the Vatican is now facing a new €600m-a-year tax bill as Rome seeks to head off European Commission censure over controversial property tax breaks enjoyed by the Church.
As the EC heads closer to officially condemning the fiscal perks enjoyed by the Catholic Church and introduced by the Berlusconi administration, Prime Minister Mario Monti has written to the Competition Commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, saying that the Vatican will resume property tax, or Ici, payments.
Mr Almunia said in 2010 that the exemption amounted to state aid that might breach EU competition law.
Now, if every government told them to stop meddling in the usual restrictive and oppressive politics that made them infamous in most of Latin America, we might be on the path to some change.
And then I went down the rabbit hole of the European Union’s policies on the treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers. This is not the first time it happens. Last year I wrote quite extensively about the corporate profits behind the detention of undocumented immigrants. This time, however, I was interested in the policies and enforcement that lead to the abuses. People die. We forget. More often than not, we are not even aware of these deaths. Each of these immigrants, a person, a human being killed by State policies and the arm that executes them. I desperately wanted to understand why.
I don’t usually tell people to “go and read” something I wrote because really, people who are interested will click and those who are not will pass on. However, I believe this matters and it rarely gets a mention in European press. Especially not in the context of the magnitude of the human rights violations involved.
Immigrants referred to as a “burden” in EU financed report
The German Marshal Fund is a think tank financed by both local governments of the EU and the European Union as a whole (and a bunch of corporate and private donations). This week they released their annual report about “Transatlatic Trends on immigration” across the US and the EU (link to PDF). The report polls public opinion about the perception of immigrants and immigration. In a relatively short 30 page report, the words “burden” and “burden sharing” are used no less than 26 times to refer to immigrants, specifically those from countries that are currently experiencing the Arab Spring.
Additionally, the report repeatedly seeks to highlight the need to “share the burden” of these immigrants. Which leads me to obvious observation: these people are not being referred to as “human beings” but as a taxing load that States should endure in solidarity with each other. And of course, my immediate realization that this stance has been supported with public funds, of the kind that these “burdens” also contribute to.
My latest for Global Comment about the EU, democracy and the rule of financial corporations:
There is hunger in Europe. For the first time since World War II, this hunger and extreme poverty are not limited to pockets of exclusion in Eastern nations but running across the continent. Greece, Italy, Spain are in international media almost daily with depictions of hardships, soaring unemployment and deprivation. The European summer saw the birth of “the indignant ones”, a wave of protests sweeping these nations and to an extent, replicated across France. These “indignant ones” clashed violently with police at the peak of the Greek anti austerity protests, expressing a collective discontent that went, for the most part, ignored. Now, two months after these clashes, the European Union is still not responding with the haste that would be expected to aid its own citizens. A European Union that was once portrayed as “strength in unity” is now more fragmented and disunited than ever since its creation.
Europe’s food safety in hands of lobbies
Originally published in German by SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, reprinted in English by Presseurop:
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) was set up to protect consumers. That’s their job. And yet staff at the agency, who ought to be deciding independently on what new products are permitted to come to market, are working closely with the food industry itself.
As documents from the authority reveal, the Chairman of the Panel on Nutrition, Albert Flynn, also works for the U.S. company Kraft. Up until March 2011, EFSA management board member Jiri Ruprich worked for Danone in the Czech Republic, while since 2000 panel member Carlo Agostoni has received conference speaking fees from companies such as Nestle, Danone, Heinz, Hipp, Humana and Mead Johnson.[…]
That this is far from acting independently is revealed by the example of Albert Flynn, from Ireland, who heads the EFSA Panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies. Under his chairmanship, a particularly delicate decision related to the approval of a product from Kraft Foods Europe, “Biscuits for Breakfast”, was published on 21 July 2011. That the nutritionist is at the same time a member of a Kraft Foods advisory board evidently failed to ruffle the board.
More at the link, with details of other scandals and corruption.
This week, I came across a number of news items reporting human rights violations of Roma women in the European Union. So, here’s an overview of the pervasive oppression these women face on their grounds of their ethnicity and their gender.
This is my dog’s passport. I was putting away my travel documents and since I keep her passport and mine in the same drawer, I just took it out and then it hit me: my dog has more rights and more travel privileges than any non European Union immigrant (myself included, of course).
All it took for her to obtain this travel document was to go to the vet, get a couple of shots (the usual, anti rabies and something against parasites, I think) and then she was granted free transit across the whole continent. No special provisions need to be made if she has to travel to, say, Belgium or France or any such country. Moreover, she doesn’t even need to be in my company to travel freely, even though I am appointed in her travel documents as her “guardian”. I could send her out with a friend or family member and she would still be entitled to free transit across borders.
Me, on the other hand, as someone classified as a “non Western foreigner”, if I want to acquire a Dutch passport, need to prove my “worth”. Which is to say, I need to prove that I am “integrated” into this society (through tests and interviews) and if the State finds me wanting, I would be denied the right to have a similar document issued to my name. Asylum seekers are not even given the consideration these days. Their applications are systematically rejected and they are quickly sent back to their countries of origin without further explanation. Undocumented immigrants are just invisible. Unable to travel across borders because a routine check would have them deported practically on the spot, they usually cannot leave the confines of the city in which they reside. Some of them cannot even go in the proximity of airports (not even to wave goodbye to family or friends) because being requested proof of identity (which happens often in European airports, whether you are about to travel or not, as security checks) would mean their status as undocumented would have them immediately sent to a deportation center.
And yet my dog is fully recognized as a “free traveler” across European borders.
