Links To Freedom

It is always refreshing to see a candidate that thinks for himself and tells you his own thoughts, rather than just work on behalf of wealthy special interest groups. Ron Paul makes a lot of great point, but of course I don't agree with him about everything. Namely, he gives too much value to supposed private property rights, whereas I would question any person's "right" to control more than their fair share of natural resources or more natural resources than they are using at any given time. Also, I think Ron Paul is too skeptical of the science behind global warming. The idea that mankind doesn't contribute to global warming is as fringe of a theory as the belief that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, that people are not born gay, or that the Earth is flat. What do you think?

The True Cost of Living

2007-12-06T23:00:00.000-08:00

Check it out: The True Cost of Living

"As shockingly high as the official poverty rate appears, I think it still significantly underrates the problem."

You can discuss that post in this thread at the World Hunger and Poverty Forums. It's completely free, and all viewpoints are welcome.

Ron Paul Hip Hop

2007-11-24T19:12:00.000-08:00

I don't know how I feel about Ron Paul yet. His views regarding religion and state are sketchy, in that he does not fully believe in the separation of religion and state. Anyway, this hip-hop video promoting Ron Paul is worth watching:

What do you think?

John Edwards: Just Another Hypocrite

2007-06-23T16:20:00.000-07:00

Check out the following blog post: John Edwards' Hypocrisy: $400 Haircuts While Children Starve

John Edwards portrays himself as a champion of poverty, but he lives in a 28,000 square-foot mansion. He buys $400 haircuts!

You can discuss it at this thread in the Hunger & Poverty Forums.

Bush Makes Power Grab

2007-05-30T15:44:00.000-07:00

The following was published at http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55824

President Bush, without so much as issuing a press statement, on May 9 signed a directive that granted near dictatorial powers to the office of the president in the event of a national emergency declared by the president.

The "National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive," with the dual designation of NSPD-51, as a National Security Presidential Directive, and HSPD-20, as a Homeland Security Presidential Directive, establishes under the office of president a new National Continuity Coordinator.

That job, as the document describes, is to make plans for "National Essential Functions" of all federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal governments, as well as private sector organizations to continue functioning under the president's directives in the event of a national emergency.

The directive loosely defines "catastrophic emergency" as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions."

New Police Quote

2007-05-05T17:35:00.000-07:00

"In my personal experience, police seem like aggressive bullies with an inferiority complex who over-compensate by abusing their power. Police don't protect us from victimization. They use 'victimless crimes' as an excuse to victimize us." -Scott Hughes, Police Allegedly Used Excessive Force Against Anti-Poverty Group

I Advise: 71 Things You Can Do

2007-05-04T08:54:00.001-07:00

Check this out: 71 Things You Can Do by Scott Hughes

You can choose to live a happier and more successful life.

Follow the links to freedom...

2007-04-20T11:59:00.000-07:00

Today's blog posts:

Italian Schools Support Fair Trade

Kansas State Violence Prevention Tips

Spoken Word Video: Saw Her Again by Mr Hovis

Web Business: Make Money With Audio Streaming by Sean Mize

You May Have Missed

2007-04-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

Here are some good recent posts you may have missed:

Self-Defense:
Mourning and Reflection on Violence in America
Rally Raises Violence Awareness
Working Towards a World Without Violence
Workplace Violence Q&A
Expert Offers Cyber Security Tips
University of MN: Rape Response
Keep Your Kids Safe from Strangers
Josh Waltzing’s Self-Defense Workshop

Hunger:
Serving & Learning about Poverty
Poverty, Violence, and Health
Quality Schools Defeat Achievement Gap
Jeske & Poor Nicaraguan Villagers
King's Dream for an End to Poverty Goes Unfulfilled
Holocaust Survivors in Israel Live in Poverty
Poverty Causes US Illegal Immigration Crisis
New Program Addresses NY Childhood Hunger

Spoken Word & Performance Poetry:
Hip-Hop Leads to the Classroom
Spoken Word Video: Kavon Performs HIM
Hip-Hop & Homosexuality
Spoken Word Video: U.N.I.VERSE at DaVerse Lounge
Hip-Hop & Don Imus - The words that Imus used are freighted with complex meaning that mainstream culture doesn't understand.
Spoken Word Video: Asia Performs Spoken Word
Hip-Hop Goes to Church

Web Business Resource:
Using RSS for Your Web Site
Creating Your Own Digital Product
3 Tips To Spot the Affiliate Program Making Money Scams
Podcasting For Profit
Blogging 101 - What is a Blog and When Would I Ever Use One?
Traffic Creation Using PPC
Increase Traffic to Your Website and Affiliate Products With Ezines

Bush, Iran, and Selective Media Outrage

2007-04-02T13:07:00.000-07:00

by Robert Parry, Consortium News

One of the least endearing features of Washington’s political/media hierarchy is its propensity for selective outrage, like what is now coming from George W. Bush about the “inexcusable behavior” of the Iranian government in holding 15 British sailors whom Bush has labeled “hostages.”

This is the same President Bush who often mocks the very idea that international law should apply to him; he’s fond of the punch line: “International law? I better call my lawyer.” But Bush becomes a pious defender of international law when it suits his geopolitical interests.

The major U.S. news media predictably follows along, getting into an arms-crossed harrumph over foreigners trampling on the inviolate principles of international law, the same rules that should never constrain U.S. actions.

So, when British sailors were captured on March 23 after they may or may not have crossed over an ill-defined demarcation between Iraqi and Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf, the assumption in the U.S. media was that Iran must be wrong. After all, Bush has listed Iran as a charter member of the “axis of evil”; its leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a notorious hothead; and everyone knows the Brits always play by the rules.

Of course, left outside this narrow frame of reference was the gross violation of international law – the bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003 – that put the Brits there in the first place.

Back then, international law was deemed little more than a nuisance getting in the way of what President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair wanted to do, i.e. conquer Iraq, install a compliant government, "privatize" its resources, and threaten other countries in the region to get in line.

Bush regarded the United Nations Charter and its ban on aggressive war as some goofy experiment in multilateralism. Blair actually knew better. Though he recognized that the Iraq invasion would violate this fundamental tenet of international law, Blair went along anyway.

From a longer-range historical context, there were other facts that would need forgetting if one wanted to get worked up into a moral frenzy. These include British colonial domination of both Iraq and Iran, and the CIA’s role in overthrowing Iran’s elected government in 1953 and reinstalling the brutal Shah of Iran on the Peacock Throne.

The combined interventions by the United Kingdom and the United States may have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands – possibly millions – of Iraqis and Iranians over the past century, but somehow Blair and Bush have positioned themselves as the innocent victims – at least as far as the Western press corps is concerned.

Iranian Detentions

So, in December and January, when Bush ordered raids against Iranian government offices inside Iraq and had five Iranian military officials detained indefinitely, there was barely a peep in the Western news media about violations of international law. Though the Iranians weren’t formally charged, their plight elicited little sympathy.

There were expectations that the Iranians might be released on March 21, the start of the Iranian new year. After that date passed, some observers believe Iran may have opted for a tit-for-tat response in seizing the 15 British sailors.

If that is the case, the Iranians apparently don’t understand the rules of the game: that President Bush has the unilateral right to do whatever he wants in the world and any reaction is unjustified, if not an invitation to an American military retaliation.

Escalating the war of words with Iran during a press conference at Camp David on March 31, Bush dismissed out of hand any possible “quid pro quos,” such as a swap of the two sets of detainees.

“The Iranians must give back the hostages,” Bush declared. “It’s inexcusable behavior.”

Regarding the captured British sailors, Blair and other U.K. officials have taken particular umbrage over videos released by Iran showing the sailors eating or being interviewed. This complaint references the principle of the Geneva Conventions against subjecting captured soldiers to public humiliation.

This same Geneva provision also was an issue – and another example of Western double standards – in the early days of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

In the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriya, five American soldiers were captured and their images were broadcast on Iraqi TV. Bush administration officials immediately denounced the brief televised interviews as a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

"It's illegal to do things to POWs that are humiliating to those prisoners," declared Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld’s charge was repeated over and over by U.S. television networks as the American people were agitated to a fever pitch. But American TV reporters stayed silent about the obvious inconsistency between the outrage over the footage of the American soldiers and the earlier U.S. broadcasts of Iraqi prisoners of war.

The Iraqi POWs had been paraded before U.S. cameras as "proof" that Iraqi resistance was crumbling – and no U.S. journalist working for a major news outlet raised any question about a Geneva violation. Some Iraqi POWs were shown forced at gunpoint to kneel with their hands behind their heads as they were patted down by U.S. soldiers. Other Iraqis were bound by plastic handcuffs and shown with bags over their heads.

Beyond the hypocrisy implicit in the double standards, CNN and other U.S. cable networks apparently saw no irony in the fact that they presented these scenes of kneeling and bound Iraqis over the title, “Operation: Iraqi Freedom.”

Guantanamo Bay

In protesting alleged Geneva violations by Iraq in March 2003, the U.S. news media also was silent about the fact that Bush had drawn worldwide condemnation for his decision to strip many POWs captured in Afghanistan of their Geneva Convention rights.

Bush ordered hundreds of these captives to be put in tiny outdoor cages at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The prisoners were shaved bald and forced to kneel with their eyes, ears and mouths covered to deprive them of their senses.

The shackled prisoners were filmed shuffling about in leg irons or being carried on stretchers to interrogation sessions. Their humiliation was broadcast widely.

In early 2002, U.S. allies, including some British officials, objected to the treatment of these prisoners and to Bush's unilateral assertion that they were "unlawful combatants" outside the protection of international law.

Legal experts noted that "unlawful combatant" was not even a category recognized by international law. The Geneva Conventions also required that detainees whose status was in any doubt must be accorded all enumerated rights until a "competent tribunal" was established to determine each individual prisoner's legal status.

Instead, Bush insisted that he had the sole right to declare which prisoners were POWs (with protections under the Geneva Conventions) and which ones were to be considered "unlawful combatants" (with no protections under the Geneva Conventions). Even Bush-designated POWs only received the Geneva rights that Bush saw fit to grant.

Human rights groups charged, too, that the U.S. treatment of some prisoners crossed the line into torture, which also is forbidden by international law. According to a variety of public accounts, prisoners have been subjected to water-boarding, a practice that simulates drowning, and to painful stress positions for long periods of time.

For its part, however, the Bush administration has denied engaging in torture and insists that all prisoners have been treated humanely.

Though these controversies about Bush’s disdain for international law are well known to the U.S. news media, the context disappeared again when press interest turned to the captured British sailors in late March 2007.

Suddenly, it was a new day with Bush and Blair fully committed to international law. Even a relatively minor Geneva transgression, such as filming captives eating, became a justification for unrestrained outrage.

Without any acknowledgement about their own abrogation of international law, the British and U.S. governments lifted these principles from the gutter, dusted them off and put them on a pedestal. The grand human rights defender, George W. Bush, lectured other countries about “inexcusable behavior” – and no prominent Western journalist called him to account for his contradictions.

Source URL:
www.consortiumnews.com/2007/040107.html

We're All Human

2007-03-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

The point of the following video is that we are all human:

We all need to come together and build a world without any offensive coercion or violence.

What do you think?

A Place for Passion and Hope, not Hopeless Despair...

2007-03-14T15:40:00.001-07:00

A Place for Passion and Hope, not Hopeless Despair...

Below is a message from Scott Hughes:

Compared with the amount of visitors we get at the Hunger & Poverty Forums, not many people join and talk. It seems people don't have too much interest in discussing issues such as hunger, poverty and disease. I suppose I can understand, because these topics come across as depressing and very serious, and people generally like light-hearted and happy talk.

I see this as unfortunate, because we need to address these serious problems to have any chance at solving them. I see open discussion as the most important step in successfully fighting hunger, poverty, AIDS, and such. To successfully fight hunger and poverty, we need to raise awareness and come up with new methods, because the old ways have not worked. Open and rational discussion meets those ends. We can share our ideas, and brainstorm to develop well-thought-out plans to successfully end preventable social ills such as hunger, poverty, homelessness.

We cannot afford to ignore these issues any longer.

I do not see these as sad or depressing topics. On the contrary, we can approach it with hope and passion, by realizing that we can successfully fight these social problems. I created the Hunger & Poverty Discussion Forums not for useless whining, but rather for productive discussion.

Through such discussion, we can put our minds together and figure out effective ways to make positive changes to our society, thus making the world a better place for all. We can do that!

First, how can we get more people to join these important discussions at the Hunger & Poverty Forums?

How can we show people that the Hunger & Poverty Forums contain practical hope not fruitless despair?

I intend to put on my thinking cap, but please come to the Hunger & Poverty Forums and post any suggestions you have.

If you have not already, please join the Hunger & Poverty Forums, and please share your thoughts.

(Click here to join the forums for free.)

Thank you,
Scott Hughes
forums.millionsofmouths.com

The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2006

2007-03-13T09:49:00.001-07:00

Following is the full text of "The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2006" published by The Information Office of the State Council on Thursday:

On March 6, the U.S. Department of State released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2006. As in previous years, the State Department pointed the finger at human rights conditions in more than 190 countries and regions, including China, but avoided touching on the human rights situation in the United States. To help the world people have a better understanding of the situation in the United States and promote the international cause of human rights, we hereby publish the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2006.

* I. On Life, Property and Security of Person

The life, property and personal security of people of the United States are affected by rampant violent crimes.

The U.S. Justice Department reported on Sept. 10, 2006 that there were 5.2 million violent crimes in the United States in 2005,up 2.5 percent from the previous year, the highest rate in 15 years. Statistics released by the U.S. Justice Department in 2006 showed that in 2005 American residents age 12 or above experienced23 million crimes; for every 1,000 persons age 12 or older, there occurred 1 rape or sexual assault, 1 assault with injury, and 3 robberies. (Bureau of Justice Statistics Criminal Victimization, in: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs.) Murder, robbery and other violent crimes reported in the United States jumped 3.7 percent in the first half of 2006 over the same period in 2005, with robbery alone up by a starling 9.7 percent. Murders that occurred in cities with population of between 500,000 and 1 million in the same period were up by 8.4 percent year on year. (FBI: Violent Crimes up in 1st Half of '06. MSNBC.com, December 19, 2006. in: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11497293.) In the first half of 2006 murder was up a whopping 27.5 percent in Boston. In Memphis murder increased 43 percent in 2006. In Cincinnati murder was up 19 percent in the first six months of 2006. Robbery increases for the first half of 2006 across the United States were stunning: Rochester, N.Y., up 47 percent; suburban Montgomery County, Md., up 37 percent; Minneapolis up 36.8 percent. (Startling New Stats Show Cross-Country Crime Spike. ABC News, October 12, 2006.) From January 1 to Dec. 10, there were 384 slayings in Philadelphia, and the number exceeded the total toll of victims in 2005. (City Effort Needs to Grow. Editorial, Philadelphia Inquirer, December 12, 2006.) During the first 11 months in 2006, 147 murders were reported in New Orleans. That means the new Orleanians were murdering each other at a rate of 73.5 murders per 100,000 residents, exceeding that of the nation's most murderous city Compton, California, whose rate was 67 murders per 100,000 people in 2005. (Crime Takes Hold of New Orleans. USA TODAY, December 1, 2006.) Orlando, Florida, reported 42 murders in the first 10 months in 2006, nearly double the 22 slayings last year in the city of 200,000 people. (USA TODAY, November 1, 2006) And in Washington, police department declared a crime emergency and a 10 p.m. curfew for juveniles in July 2006, after the city had 11 homicides in 13 days. (Police Chiefs Cite Youths in Crime Rise, Call for More Federal Funds. The Washington Post, August 31, 2006.) The Washington Post reported on December 14, 2006 that there had been 35 bank robberies in Montgomery County in 2006, with three banks robbed on Dec. 13 within minutes of each other.

The United States has the largest number of privately owned guns in the world. The unchecked spread of guns has caused incessant murders. A report released by the U.S. Justice Department in 2006 said that in 2005, 477,040 victims of violent crimes stated that they faced an offender with a firearm. A Washington metropolitan police department report stated in 2006 that from 2001 to 2005, 901 of 1,126 homicide victims, or about 80percent, were fatally shot, while the percentage in New Orleans was 92 percent. (District Slaying Usually with Gun. The Washington Times, November 17, 2006.) Chicago was hit with 5 slayings and 3 injuries on late May 20 and early May 21, 2006. (Weekend Shooting Kill 5. The Chicago Tribune, May 22, 2006.) On Nov. 16, Detroit reported 2 people killed and 3 injured within 10 minutes in the western part of the city. (Detroit Man Charged with Murder, Assault in Apparently Random Shooting Spree That Killed 2. AP, Nov. 20, 2006.) In Kansas, Missouri, a man shot five people to death on Dec. 16, including his longtime girlfriend and three of their children. He then killed himself. (Man kills 5 in Family, Then Self. The Kansas City Star, Dec. 17, 2006.) And on Christmas Eve of 2006, a gunman opened fire at shopping people in a shopping mall in Florida, and then on the police, killing one man. (Mall Shooter Likely Knew Victim, Police Say. CNN.com, Dec. 24, 2006.)

Campus shootings are rampant in the United States. The country reported 3 campus shootings in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Colorado within one week from the end of September to the beginning of October 2006. Five girls were fatally shot and 6 others injured during the shooting incident in an Amish school in Pennsylvania on Oct. 2, 2006. (Man Shoots 11, Killing 5 Girls, in Amish School. The New York Times, Oct. 3, 2006.)

* II. On Human Rights Violations by Law Enforcement and Judicial Departments

In the United States, human rights violations committed by law enforcement and judicial departments are common.

Police abuses are very serious. A Human Rights Watch report issued on Dec. 4, 2006 said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. Department of Justice has used the material witness warrant to imprison without charge at least 70 men. The Washington Post reported on Dec. 1, 2006 that citizen complaints filed with a review board about alleged New York Police Department abuses had increased by 60 percent from 2001 to 2005. Craig Futterman, a law professor of the University of Chicago who has studied the ChicagoPolice Department's handling of complaints against officers, said over the past five years, 662 out of 13,500 police officers in Chicago had been the subject of 10 or more complaints, and he saw "a picture of impunity within the Chicago Police Department. You have a small number of officers who perpetrate crimes who have absolute impunity." (The Chicago Tribune, November 29, 2006) In September 2006, four members of the Special Operations Section of the Chicago Police Department were arrested for allegations of a string of robberies, kidnappings and false arrests. But investigation showed that the police internal affairs division had been aware of numerous allegations against the officers for four years without taking disciplinary action against them. In November2006, two former inmates at Cook County Jail filed suit in federal court alleging that they were attacked by guards and severely beaten while they were handcuffed. Michael Mejia, one of the inmates, was handcuffed by guards, who then grabbed the back of his neck and slammed his head and face into the cement wall. The officers also stomped and kicked the inmates when they were handcuffed and lying on the floor. The two men later filed complaints, but the jail's internal affairs division decided not to investigate. (Ex-inmates Charge County Jail Beating. The Chicago Tribune, November 15, 2006) On Nov. 17, 2006, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a 23-year-old senior of the UCLA, was stunned with a Taser by a campus police officer after he refused requests to show his ID card.( The Los Angeles Times, November 17, 2006) On the morning of Nov. 25, 2006, five officers from the New York Police Department fired 50 bullets at a car with three unarmed men inside after the car struck an unmarked police van. The car was struck by 21 bullets. One man in the car was killed and the other two were wounded.( The Associated Press, November 25, 2006) On Dec. 5, 2006, a Los Angeles police officer, Sean Joseph Meade, was caught on videotape applying a chokehold to a handcuffed 16-year-old boy inside the Central Division station. The officer's actions were recorded by a hidden camera that had been installed in the chair. (The Los Angeles Times, December 8, 2006)

Injustice of the judiciary is quite shocking. A yearlong investigation by The New York Times of New York State's town and village courts found a long trail of judicial abuses and errors. In some cases, defendants were sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. (In Tiny Courts of N.Y., Abuses of Law and Power. The New York Times, September 25, 2006) The Associated Press reported on March 4, 2006 that nearly all records are being kept secret for more than 5,000 defendants who completed their journey through the federal courts from 2003 to 2005. The percentage of defendants who have reached verdicts and been sentenced but still have most of their records sealed rose from 1.1 percent in 2003 to 2.7 percent in 2005. Such cases showed that the U.S. constitutional presumption for openness in the courts is not honored.

Frame-up and wrong cases can be widely found. The Los Angles Times reported in June 2006 that investigations and reviews by experts from the University of Michigan on 328 controversial criminal cases over the past 17 years found that all of them are frame-up or wrong cases. Based on that finding, experts estimated that currently there were tens of thousands innocent people jailed in the United States. A man in Chicago had been in prison since the mid 1990s after being convicted of raping a woman, and police turned down his repeated requests for DNA tests on the pretext of lack of evidence. In 2006, he was told that new DNA tests show that he was not the assailant. Following the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other government agencies have referred 6,472 individuals to prosecutors on terrorism-related charges. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University said nearly three-quarters of terrorism suspects seized by the United States in the five years following the September 11 attacks have not even made it to trial because of lack of evidence against them. In 64 percent of the cases, federal prosecutors decided that they were not worth prosecuting, while an additional nine percent were either dismissed by judges or the individuals were found not guilty. (Agence France-Presse, September 4, 2006)

The United States has the world's largest number of prisoners. According to a report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice on Nov. 30, 2006, by the end of 2005, nearly 2.2 million inmates were held in state and federal prisons or country and municipal jails. The adult U.S. correctional population, including those on probation or parole, reached a high of more than seven million men and women for the first time. About three percent of the U.S. adult population, or one in every 32 adults, were in the nation's prisons and jails or on probation or parole. Four states-Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma-have incarceration rates of more than 650 per 100,000, with Louisiana soaring above all other states with the astonishing rate of 797. (US Addiction to Incarceration Puts 2.3 Million in Prison. Human Rights Watch, December 1, 2006) As a result, state prisons were operating between one percent under and 14 percent over capacity. The federal system was operating at 34 percent over capacity. (Agence France-Presse, November 30, 2006) According to a report of New York-based China Press on October 4, 2006, there were currently 173,000 people jailed in the prisons of California State, and 1,700 of them failed to have normal living conditions. In 33 prisons the number of inmates was more than twice the capacity. Some gymnasiums were changed into temporary shelters for prisoners and even churches were used temporarily for prisoners to sleep.

Abuses in U.S. prisons are also common. The United States is the only country in the world that allows the use of police dogs to terrify prisoners. An investigative report by the Human Rights Watch said that five state prison systems in the United States, including Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, South Dakota and Utah, permit the use of aggressive, unmuzzled dogs to terrify and even attack prisoners in efforts to remove them from their cells. Connecticut prisons were found to have used police dogs for nearly20 times to take on prisoners. In Iowa State, 63 such cases were reported from March 2005 to March 2006. A U.S. government report, issued on Jan. 16, 2006, said that abuses of illegal immigrants happened in five prisons, which were negligent to illegal immigrants who went on hunger strike or committed suicide. The illegal immigrants were also provided with half-cooked food. (The Washington Post, January 17, 2007) It was reported that the Florida State Prison used chemical agents against prisoners 238 times in 2000, 285 times in 2001, 447 in 2002 and 611 in 2003 and 277 in 2004, which left 10 prisoners seriously injured and some with mental diseases. (www. Allhatnocattle.net, February 13, 2006)The United States has nearly 60 "super-security prisons", housing about 2,000 prisoners. The inmates are jailed in 6-square-meter wards, which are sound proof with lights and monitors on around the clock. Such prisons have left many prisoners with mental diseases. What's more, prisoners are often deprived of some basic rights. An editorial of The New York Times on July 31, 2006 said that the United States has the worst record in the "free world" when it comes to stripping convicted felons of the right to vote. In contrast, most European countries hold that right so dear that they bring ballot boxes into prisons.

Prisons become hotbeds of diseases and crimes. A report, issued by the U.S. Department of Justice on Sept. 7, 2006, said that more than half of the inmates in U.S. prisons suffered from mental problems. About 56 percent of inmates in state prisons, 64 percent in detention houses and 45 percent of federal prisoners had received treatment or shown symptoms of various mental diseases, including serious melancholia, mania and hallucination. More than 1.5 million inmates are released each year carrying life threatening contagious diseases. (Rising Prison Problems Begin to Trickle into Society. USA Today, June 12, 2006) Each year, approximately 7,000 Americans died in U.S. prisons and jails. Some of these deaths are from natural causes, but many more result from mental disorders left undiagnosed and diseases left untreated. (Prison Death: A National Shame. The Baltimore Sun, December 6, 2006) A report published by the U.S. Department of Justice in November 2006 showed that an estimated 37 percent of county and municipal jail inmates reported having a current medical problem other than a cold or virus in a national survey. During 2004, the number of confirmed AIDS cases in state and federal prisons increased from 5,944 to 6,027. The rate of confirmed AIDS cases instate and federal prisoners (50 per 10,000 prison inmates) was more than three times higher than in total U.S. population (15 per10,000 persons). Suicides among inmates are rising. The USA TODAY reported on Dec. 28, 2006 that 41 inmates committed suicides in California in 2006. In Texas's prison system, there were 24 suicides. Texas prisons also reported 652 attempted suicides in 2006, an increase of 17 percent compared with the number in 2005.

Sexual assaults in U.S. prisons are common. A report by the United Nations Committee Against Torture on May 19, 2006 said that at least 13 percent of inmates in U.S. prisons had suffered from sexual assaults and many have suffered frequent sexual abuses. It estimated that nearly 200,000 inmates currently in prisons were or will become victims of sexual violence. The number of prisoners who had suffered sexual assaults over the past 20 years is likely to exceed one million.

* III. On Civil and Political Rights

In recent years, American citizens have suffered increasing civil rights infringements.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. government has put average Americans under intense surveillance as part of terrorism investigations. According to a survey released in December 2006, two-thirds of Americans believe that the FBI and other federal agencies are intruding on their privacy rights. (The Washington Post, Dec. 13, 2006) A report from the U.S. Justice Department, dated April 28, 2006, disclosed that its use of electronic surveillance and search warrants in national security investigations jumped 15 percent in 2005. According to the report, the FBI issued 9,254 national security letters in 2005, covering 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal foreign residents. The Justice Department said the data did not include what probably were thousands of additional letters issued to obtain more limited information about some individuals or letters that were issued about targets who were in the U.S. illegally. (The Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2006) Reports show a Pentagon research team monitors more than 5,000 jihadist web sites, focusing daily on the25 to 100 most hostile and active. (MSNBC News Service, May 4, 2006) An internal memo of the FBI shows that the agency has spent resources gathering information on antiwar and environmental protesters and on activists who feed vegetarian meals to the homeless. In the United States, the government has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. According to USA TODAY, more employers feel they have justifiable reason to pry, track workers' whereabouts through Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite, implant employees with microchips with their knowledge and hire private investigators to check up on what employees are really doing at work. According to a study by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute, 76 percent of companies monitor employees' website connections, 65 percent block access to specific sites, and 36 percent track the content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard. More than half of employers retain and review e-mail messages. (USA TODAY, Nov. 7, 2006)

As The Associated Press reported on Jan. 4, 2007, a signing statement attached to postal legislation by U.S. administration may have opened the way for the government to open mail without a warrant. An internal review of the U.S. State Department has found that U.S. officials screened the public statements and writings of private citizens for criticism of the administration before deciding whether to select them for foreign speaking projects. The vetting practice, the Washington Post said, appears to have been part of the administration's pattern of controlling information, muffling dissenting views. (The Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2006) On May 23, 2006, Electronic Frontier Foundation, a U.S.-based organization committed to protecting citizens' privacy, accused the FBI for undercutting the intent of the privacy law, saying the agency has built a database with more than 659 million records culled from more than 50 FBI and other government agency sources. (http://www.eff.org/press/ Aug. 30, 2006)

The United States touts itself as the "beacon of democracy", but the U.S. mode of democracy is in essence one in which money talks.

In 2004, candidates for the House of Representatives who raised less than one million U.S. dollars had almost no chance of winning, the USA TODAY quoted a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics as saying in a report on Oct. 29, 2006. The average successful Senate campaign cost 7 million dollars, it said. In 2006, all state campaigns in the United States were predicted to cost about 2.4 billion dollars. In California, the oil and tobacco industries were the year's two biggest spenders with a total of 161.6 million dollars, and they became the two biggest winners. (The Los Angeles Times, Nov. 9, 2006) In the House race in Pennsylvania, the National Republican Congressional Committee spent 3.9 million dollars, mostly in ads against Democratic candidate Lois Murphy, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent 3 million dollars against Republican candidate Jim Gerlach. (The Baltimore Sun, Nov. 6, 2006) Seventy-four percent of respondents to a new Opinion Research poll say the U.S. Congress is generally out of touch with average Americans, as CNN reported on Oct. 18, 2006, and 79 percent of the surveyed say they feel big business does have too much influence over the administration's decisions.

Corruption is a serious problem in U.S. politics. More than 1,000 government employees, including hundreds of police officers, have been convicted in FBI graft cases in the past two years. Former high-powered lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion charges, revealing the biggest scandal of trading money for power to hit Washington in decades. (CNN, Jan. 3, 2006) Meanwhile, four Republicans have resigned from the House under clouds in the year. A handful of other members of the Congress are under investigation. (USA TODAY, Dec. 12, 2006) Over the past five and a half years, U.S. Republican and Democratic lawmakers accepted nearly 50 million U.S. dollars in trips, often to resorts and exclusive locales, as The Washington Post reported on June 6, 2006. From January 2000 through June 2005,House and Senate members and their aides were away from Washington for more than 81,000 days - a combined 222 years - on at least 23,000 trips. U.S. lawmakers accepted thousands of costly jaunts to some of the world's choicest destinations: at least 200 to Paris, 150 to Hawaii and 140 to Italy, it said. Twenty-five individual lawmakers accepted more than 120,000 U.S. dollars worth of travel during the period and private trip sponsors spent the most money on about two dozen congressional offices.(Seattle Times, June 6, 2006)

In the United States scandals of government manipulating the media give the lie to press freedom in the country. To serve its political purposes, the U.S. government often produces fake news stories and passes them off as normal news to domestic and overseas audiences. The U.S. State Department, among 20 federal agencies, was found to have produced and distributed such items. (The Independent, May 29, 2006) In recent years, some journalists were harassed or detained by U.S. law enforcement agencies for declining to reveal their sources. In 2005, a Rhode Island TV reporter spent four months confined at home by a judge for refusing to expose the source. In San Francisco, a federal prosecutor tried to force two San Francisco Chronicle reporters to reveal sources of secret grand jury testimony used in stories. (USA TODAY, June 22, 2006) Two journalists were sentenced to 18 months in prison for contempt of court in September 2006 and another Los Angeles freelancer was sent to prison for a year on contempt charge after refusing to turn over to a grand jury his private video clips. (SFGate.com August 1, 2006)

* IV. On Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

The United States is the richest country in the world, but it lacks proper guarantee for people's economic, social and cultural rights.

The Americans in poverty constitute the "Third World" of U.S. society. A report released by the U.S. Census Bureau on August. 29,2006 said there were 37 million people living in poverty in 2005, accounting for 12.6 percent of total U.S. population. The report also said there were 7.7 million families in poverty and one out of eight Americans was living in poverty in 2005. The poverty rates of Cleveland and Detroit were as high as 32.4 percent and 31.4 percent respectively and nearly one out of three was living under the poverty line. AFP reported on Feb. 24, 2007 that based on the latest available US census data, the McClatchy Newspapers analysis found that almost 16 million Americans live in "deep or severe poverty", the highest number since at least 1975, up by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. Between 2000 and 2005, the U.S. economy grew by 12 percent in real terms and productivity, measured by output per hour worked in the business sector, rose 17 percent. Over the same period, the median hourly wage-the wage the average American takes home-rose only three percent in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. That compared with a 12 percent gain in the previous five years was lower than it was in 2000. (Financial Times, Nov. 2, 2006)

Hunger and homelessness remain a critical issue. A report released by U.S. Department of Agriculture on Nov. 15, 2006 revealed that in the previous year 34.8 million Americans did not have enough money or other resources to buy food. A survey on 23 U.S. cities including Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that in 2006 requests for emergency food assistance increased by an average of seven percent over 2005,with 74 percent of the cities registering an increase. Also, requests for emergency shelter assistance increased by an average of nine percent over 2005, with 68 percent of the surveyed cities showing an increase. (U.S. Conference of Mayors-Sodexho, Inc. Release 2006 Hunger and Homelessness Survey, www.usmayors.org) Currently, there are 600,000 or so homeless people nationwide, including 16,000 homeless in Washington D.C. and 3,800 in New York City. (The New York Times, The Washington Post and Reuters reports, October to December, 2006) It is estimated there are 3,000 to 4,000 homeless people in Baltimore on any given night. (The Baltimore Sun, Nov. 20, 2006) In Hawaii, around 1,000 homeless people are living in tents along beaches. (The New York Times, Dec. 4, 2006) A survey found that in Los Angeles City and surrounding communities there were 88,345 homeless people, and the mayor declared the city to be "the capital of homelessness in America." (The Los Angeles Times, Jan. 12, 2006)

The average living standards in the United States are among the highest in the world but the United States lags behind most countries in legal protection for labor and family-friendly policies in the workplace. The Voice of America reported on Feb. 4,2007 that a study of 173 countries with high, middle and low income jointly conducted by Harvard University and McGill University found the United States is one of the only five countries that do not guarantee some form of paid maternity leave, the other four countries being Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea. Of the 173 countries, 137 provide paid annual leave but there is no federal law to guarantee such leave in the United States. One hundred and forty five countries provide paid sick leave for their workers but the United States has no federal law on this, leaving it to be decided by employers. The United States has no law on maximum work week length or a limit on mandatory overtime per week, but 134 countries have laws in this regard. There is no guarantee in the United States to protect working women's right to breast-feeding but at least 107 countries ensure their working women have breast-feeding breaks. The United States guarantees fathers neither paid paternity nor paid parental leave, but 65 countries grant fathers either paid paternity or paid parental leave.

Quite a few Americans are not covered by basic health insurance. A report released by the U.S. Census Bureau on August. 29, 2006 said the number of people without health insurance coverage rose to 46.6 million in 2005, accounting for 15.9 percent of the total population and up 1.3 million over 2004. Minnesota had the lowest percentage of uninsured of 8.7 percent and Texas had the highest percentage of uninsured of 25 percent. From 2003 to 2006, the basic Medicare premium increased more than 50 percent to 88.50 U.S. dollars a month from 58.7 U.S. dollars in 2003 and it was predicted that it would rise to 98.20 U.S. dollars in 2007.The administration said the cost of the drug benefit would grow an average of 11.5 percent a year in the next decade, more than twice as fast as the economy. (The New York Times, May 2, 2006) Statistics showed, in the past six years, average annual Medicare cost of a U.S. family reached 11,500 US dollars or nearly 3,000 for each American every year. More and more Americans are unable to afford the high Medicare expenses and looking for overseas medical treatment. In 2005, some 500,000 uninsured Americans trekked overseas for medical treatment, according to the National Coalition on Health Care. (Eagle-Tribune, Nov. 27, 2006)

* V. On Racial Discrimination

Racial segregation and discrimination are still deep-seated in the United States. African-Americans and other colored people are still living in "another United States".

The ethnic minorities are at the bottom of American society. Statistics released by the U.S. Census Bureau in November 2006 indicated that according to the 2005 data, the average yearly household income was 50,622 U.S. dollars for whites, compared with36,278 for Hispanics and 30,940 for blacks. White people's income was 64 percent more than the blacks and 40 percent more than the Hispanics. Three-fourths of white households owned their homes in 2005, compared with 46 percent of black households and 48 percent of Hispanic households. (The Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2006) The poverty rate for whites was 8.3 percent in 2005, while the rates were 24.9 percent for blacks and 21.8 percent for Hispanics. (U.S. Census Bureau, Aug. 29, 2006) Nearly one in five Hispanics lacked sufficient access to nutritious food and one in 20 regularly went hungry. Blacks took up 42 percent of all the homeless people in the United States. (USA TODAY, Dec. 22, 2006) The percentage of colored people uncovered by government health insurance was much higher than that of whites. In 2005, the uninsured rate was 32.7 percent for Hispanics and 19.6 for blacks, compared with 11.3 percent for whites. And in the hurricane-hit southern area, the poor and blacks lived a much worse life. During its eighty-seventh session the UN Human Rights Committee noted in its consideration of a report submitted by the United States on its implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, that the committee "remains concerned about information that poor people and in particular African-Americans were disadvantaged by the rescue and evacuation plans implemented when Hurricane Katrinahit the United States, and continue to be disadvantaged under the reconstruction plans". (Human Rights Committee, Eighty-seventh session, 10-28 July 2006)

The African-Americans and other ethnic minorities have been subject to discrimination in employment and workplace. The unemployment rate of the blacks was more than twice that of the whites. According to statistics released by the U.S. Department of Labor on Dec. 8, 2006, the unemployment rate in November 2006 was 8.6 percent for the blacks and 3.9 percent for the whites. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission receives more than 500 complaints against racial discrimination every week and more than 26,000 every year; in fiscal year 2005, it received 26,740 charges of race discrimination. A report released by an economic and policy research center in the United States on Dec. 15, 2006 said that biased government policies and negative coverage of the media have limited the development of the youngsters of ethnic minorities in the U.S. Whites are more easily to be promoted to the management than the blacks and Hispanics. An African-American employee of Merrill Lynch & Co. accused the largest U.S. retail brokerage of racial discrimination in 2005. And in 2006, 16 current and former black employees of the company joined the lawsuit, accusing Merrill of systematic and pervasive discrimination against African-American brokers and trainees nationwide in hiring, promotion and compensation. Tyson Foods Inc., the largest U.S. meat company was also accused by thirteen current and former African-American employees of racial discrimination in 2006. (Reuters, Nov. 7, 2006)

Racial disparities in education are also growing. According to U.S. Census Bureau's 2005 data, in the United States more than half ethnic minority males dropped school before high school graduation, 67.5 percent Hispanics and 53 percent blacks got no further education after graduating from high school. White Americans were more likely to hold a graduate or professional degree. At least 30 percent white adults held a bachelor's degree, compared with 17 percent black adults and 12 percent Hispanic adults. Racial segregation in education is in fact quite serious. According to a symposium held in the University of California at Los Angeles in October 2006, in the Los Angeles school district, 67 percent Hispanic students studied in 90 percent to 100 percent non-white schools. The racial divide in Los Angeles high schools was more serious. In Beverly High School, 73 percent students were whites, 8 percent were Asians, and 6 percent were Hispanics. As a contrast, among the 4,940 students in Rosevelt High School, 98.9 percent were Hispanics and 1 percent were blacks. There were big disparities in school facilities due to the racial divide.

Racial discrimination is deep-rooted in America's law enforcement and judicial systems. Discrimination against Muslims in law enforcement has persisted in the United States since the September 11 attacks. According to Associated Press reports, in November 2006 six Muslims, who were returning from a religious conference, were taken off an airliner from Minneapolis to Phoenix, handcuffed and questioned, only because a passenger had passed a note about them to a flight attendant. In the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks, four airlines accused of breaking federal anti-discrimination laws settled with the government. Transportation Department investigations found the airlines had unlawfully removed passengers because of perceived ethnic or religious backgrounds. (The Associated Press, Nov. 28, 2006) And Latino and African-American motorists in most areas of Los Angeles were significantly more likely than whites to be asked during police stops to leave their vehicles and submit to searches, according to a study ordered by the city in 2006 (Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2006).

In judicial practice, blacks are usually more severely punished than whites. According to statistics of the National Urban League, of the sentences issued in 12 crime categories in the State Courts, sentences for black males were longer than white males in all of them. (The State of Black America 2006, issued by National Urban League, March 27, 2006) Black people account for only 12.1 percent of the U.S. population, however, according to statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice, at the end of 2005, about 40 percent of all male inmates sentenced to more than one year were black, and 20 percent were Latino Americans. According to a report released by the Human Rights Watch on Dec. 1, 2006, the number of black inmates was 6.6 times that of whites and the number of Latino inmates was 2.5 times that of white inmates. Statistics showed that about one out of 12 black men were in jail or prison, compared with one in 100 white men. Researchers pointed to poverty, a lack of opportunities, racism in the criminal justice system forthe black-white prison gap. (Answer to AIDS Mystery Found Behind Bars, Washington Post, March 9, 2006)

Racial segregation and discrimination results in an increase of hate crimes. The number of extreme racist and neo-Nazi organizations has increased by 33 percent in recent five years, rising from 672 in 2004 to 803 in 2005. ([Argentina] Clarin, May 25, 2006) Meanwhile, the number of hate crimes kept increasing. Ananalysis of the 7,160 single-bias incidents by bias motivation revealed that 54.7 percent were motivated by a racial bias. (FBI press release, Oct. 16, 2006) New York City reported 230 hate crimes in 2006, about 8 percent more than in 2005, with the number of those targeted at Asian Americans more than doubled.

A CNN/Opinion Research poll published in December 2006 found that 84 percent of blacks and 66 percent of whites believe racism is a serious problem, and there are many different kinds of racism aimed at many different groups in U.S. society. (CNN, Dec. 15, 2006) ¡¡

* VI. On the Rights of Women, Children, the Elderly and the Disabled

The human rights situation of women, children, the elderly and the disabled in the United States is worrisome.

Women in the United States do not share equal rights with men in politics. Despite the fact that women outnumber men in the U.S. population, they hold only 82 seats in the 109th U.S. Congress, including 14 seats or 14 percent of the Senate and 68 or 15.6 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives. Among the 243 mayors of the cities with a population of over 100,000 in the United States, only 35 were women by January 2006. By December 2006, there were only 78 women serving in statewide executive office, 24.8 percent of the total 315 working posts, and 22.8 percent of the state legislators in the United States were women. (Women in Elective Office 2006, issued by Center for American Women and Politics, Dec. 2, 2006)

American women and men are not equally paid for the same work, and the income of women has always been lower than that of men. Statistics released by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2006 said the median earnings of women and men were about 32,000 and 42,000 U.S. dollars, respectively. The female-to-male earnings ratio was 76 percent. (U.S. Census Bureau, www.census.gov) On November 29, 2006,two female brokers of the Citigroup joined three others in filing an amended complaint with a local court in California, charging that the bank's policies were designed to deprive female brokers of opportunities offered to male brokers, and Citigroup kept male brokers at the top of the compensation scale and female brokers at the bottom. (Reuters, New York, Nov. 29, 2006)

Low-income American women lack proper labor protection and social security and live a hard life. A survey by the Community Service Society showed that among low-income working mothers living on less than 32,000 U.S. dollars for a family of three, more than half were not entitled to even a single day of paid sick leave; 61 percent did not have paid vacation; and 80 percent did not receive any employee health benefits for themselves or their children. In 2005, 37 percent of the low-wage mothers had to give up necessary medical care, and a third had their electricity or phone turned off because they could not pay the bills. Forty-three percent had to rely on food pantries, and 42 percent fell behind in their rent. (The Other Mothers, The New York Times, May 14, 2006) The poverty rate of single mothers is the highest in the population of the United States. A report released by the U.S. Census Bureau on August 29, 2006 showed that 28.9 percent of the mothers in the United States were single in 2005, and about 4 million were living below the poverty line.

The rate of female prisoners keeps increasing. Since 1995, the annual rate of growth in female prisoners averaged 4.6 percent. Females account for 7 percent of all prisoners in the United States. (Prisoners in 2005, U.S. Department of Justice, Nov. 30, 2006) The United Nation's Committee Against Torture reported on May 19, 2006 that treatment of female detainees in U.S. prisons needed to be improved urgently. The recommendations were made on the fact that female detainees were humiliated in prisons in the United States, where pregnant women had been kept in chains and leg restraints into the third trimester of their pregnancies; some had been shackled even while in labor. In March 2006, Chen Xucai, a woman from China's Fujian Province, was arrested in New York for selling fake brand name handbags. She was later found pregnant in jail. The jailers not only mistreated her rudely but also stopped her medication, resulting in her abortion in prison. (The China Press, New York, March 19, 2006)

American women face high risks of sexual offense. The FBI reported in September 2006 that during 2005, there were an estimated 93,934 female victims of forcible rape, or 62.5 out of every 100,000 women suffered from forcible rape. Women are often sexually harassed while at work. Statistics released by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2006 showed that the commission received 12,679 charges of sexual harassment in 2005, with 85.7 percent of them filed by women.

American children are among the groups with high poverty rate. According to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau in August 2006, 12.9 million children under 18 lived below the poverty line by the end of 2005, accounting for 17.6 percent of the population of this age group and 35.2 percent of the 37 million people in poverty in the United States. Twenty percent of children under six lived in poverty, and 42.8 percent of children under 18 living in female headed families, with no husband present, were poor. In Los Angeles County, an estimated three-quarters of the county's more than 1.2 million households with children struggled economically. Other statistics showed that the number of uninsured children under 18 increased from 7.9 million in 2004 to 8.3 million in 2005,and the proportion rose to 11.2 percent. (www.census.gov)

There are a large number of homeless children in the United States. According to a report of the Mexican newspaper El Universal on April 10, 2006, nearly 1.3 million American children who were homeless or fled home wandered in streets. Among the children aged 10 to 18, one out of seven fled home. About 5,000 waifs were killed every year in fights, diseases and suicide. Children in homeless families represent about 55 percent of the roughly 2,000 homeless people in Fairfax County, which has about 1million residents. (USA TODAY, Dec. 22, 2006) In California, there were 95,000 homeless children in 2005-06 school year, and two-thirds of them were primary school students.

The number of missing children is alarming. Reports said the U.S. Department of Justice received nearly 800,000 cases of missing children and kidnapping every year. The Department said among the nearly 100 dangerous missing cases each year, about 40 percent of the missing children were killed eventually. ( [Mexico]El Universal, April 10, 2006)

The United States is one of the few countries that sentence child offenders to death. Statistics showed that among the 2,985 inmates sentenced to death for whom the date of arrest was available, 342 inmates, or 11 percent, were 19 or younger at the time of their arrest. (U.S. Department of Justice, Dec. 10, 2006, www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs)

American juveniles often fall victim to on-campus violence crimes. Statistics showed that from July 1, 2004 to June 30, 2005,there were 21 homicides at American schools. Twenty-eight percent of students 12 to 18 years old reported being bullied at school, and 24 percent of students reported that there were gangs at their schools during the first six months of 2005. The Los Angeles Times reported on Nov. 14, 2006 that about 7,400 students were arrested for on-campus crimes in Chicago schools during the 2005-06 school year.

The situation of the elderly people in the United States is worrisome. Statistics released by U.S. Census Bureau in 2006 showed that the number for seniors aged above 65 in poverty increased from 3.5 million in 2004 to 3.6 million in 2005, with the poverty rate reaching 10.1 percent. A total of 1.5 million older Americans live in nursing homes, 90 percent of which have inadequate staffing. (The New York Times, Nov. 14, 2006) In California, 100,000 elder abuse cases were filed in 2003, accounting for 20 percent of the 500,000 similar reports nationwide. Some 6,000 cases of elder abuse were reported annually in Orange County in California. (The New York Times, Sept. 27, 2006)

The rights and interests of the disabled people in the United States are not properly protected. The Associated Press reported on April 10, 2006 that only 34 percent of working-age people with disabilities had full-time or part-time jobs over the past two decades, while people without disabilities had an employment rate of 78 percent. People with disabilities are nearly three times more likely to live in poverty than people without disabilities; 26 percent of people with disabilities had annual household income below 15,000 U.S. dollars, versus 9 percent those without disabilities. A survey conducted in Los Angeles County showed that49 percent of the 88,345 homeless people in the county had a physical or mental disability. (The New York Times, Jan. 15, 2006)

* VII. On the United States' Violation of Human Rights in Other Countries

Relying on its strong military power, the United States have trespassed on the sovereignty of other countries and violated human rights in other countries.

A large number of innocent Iraqi civilians have died in the war launched by the United States in 2003. On Oct. 11, 2006, the Washington Post reported that a survey of Bloomberg School of Public Health under Johns Hopkins University estimated that more than 655,000 Iraqis have died in Iraq since war started in March 2003, meaning about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country. The estimate was produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households in 47 neighborhood clusters throughout Iraq. On Nov. 19, 2005, a U.S. marine unit searched an Iraqi community door-to-door and slaughtered 24 Iraqi civilians after a marine was killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha. Those who died included a 76-year-old disabled man, a three-year-old child, and seven women. (Haditha 'Massacre' - One Year on, BBC News, Nov. 19, 2006) According to another report by British newspaper the Sunday Times (March 26, 2006), a family of eleven were shot dead by U.S. troops on March 15, 2006; among the dead were five children aged from six months to five years, and four women. On March 12, 2006, four U.S. soldiers raped 14-year-old girl Abeer Qassim al-Janabi and then killed her, her parents and her five-year-old sister ( [UK] The Independent website Aug. 7, 2006). On May 31, 2006, U.S. forces killed two Iraqi women, one of them about to give birth, when the troops shot at a car that failed to stop at an observation post in a city north of Baghdad. On June 5, 2006, CNN reported that U.S. squad took a 52-year-old disabled Iraqi to a roadside hole and shot him before planting a shovel and an AK-47 to make it appear that he was an insurgent planting a bomb. On December 8, 2006, U.S.-led forces killed 20 suspected insurgents during a raid targeting fighters from the group al-Qaeda in Iraq northwest of Baghdad. Amir Alwan, mayor of Ishaqi, said 10 men, four women and 10 children in his village were killed (The Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2006). The Associated Press reported that on May 9, 2006 four U.S. soldiers murdered three suspected insurgents (Iraqi civilians) during a raid called "Objective Murray" in Salah ad-Dinof Iraq. Raymond L.Girouard, a soldier of the four, said they were under orders to "kill all military age males", which is also the ROE (rule of engagement) of "Objective Murray".

The United States has a flagrant record of violating the Geneva Convention in systematically abusing prisoners during the Iraqi War and the War in Afghanistan. A report released in News Night of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), originally provided by the U.S.-based Human Rights First, showed that since August 2002, 98 prisoners had died in American-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the dead, 34 died of premeditated murder, 11 deaths were suspicious, and 8 to 12 were tortured to death (AFP, Feb. 21, 2006). A Human Rights Watch report in July 2006 said torture and other abuses against detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq were authorized and routine. Detainees were routinely subject to severe beating, painful stress positions, severe sleep deprivation, and exposure to extreme cold and hot temperatures. Soldiers were told that many abusive techniques were authorized by the military chain of command and Geneva Conventions did not apply to the detainees at their facility. Detainees at Camp Nama, a U.S. detention center at the Baghdad airport - in violation of international law - not registered with the International Committee of the Red Cross, were regularly stripped naked and subject to beatings. Some detainees were used for target practice. In May 2006 human rights group Amnesty International condemned the detention of some 14,000 prisoners in Iraq without charge or trial. On February 15, 2006, Australia's SBS TV aired more than 10pictures and video clips taken at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison; the images included: a man's throat was cut off, left forearm of a man was left with burns and shrapnel wounds, a blood-stained interrogation room, and a seemingly insane man's body covered with his own feces. U.S. army's criminal investigation division gathered materials included 1, 325 photographs and 93 video clips of suspected abuse of detainees, 546 photographs of suspected dead Iraqi detainees, all recorded between Oct. 18 and Dec. 30, 2003 ( [UK] Guardian, Feb. 17, 2006). Another report carried by the New York Times in December 2006 says a man named Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor, was detained by American soldiers and put into detention center Camp Cropper for 97 days. The man said American guards arrived at his cell periodically, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation. When he was returned to his cell, he was fatigued but unable to sleep, for the fluorescent lights were never turned off and at most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He was not allowed to use telephone and denied the right to a lawyer at detention hearings. The New York Times reported on March 18, 2006 that an elite Special Operations forces unit Task Force 6-26 converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room. In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts.

According to another report by British newspaper The Independent, 460 people were confined in the Guantanamo prison camp, including dozens of adolescent prisoners, with more than 60 under 18 and the youngest only 14. A young man named Mohammed el-Gharani was allegedly accused of member of al-Qaeda and conspiracy in the 1998 al-Qaeda London terrorist conspiracy when he was only 12. In 2001, he was arrested at the age of 14 ([UK] The Independent, Children of Guantanamo Bay, May 28, 2006). According to a report by the Washington Post, on May 30, 2006, 75 prisoners in Guantanamo went on a hunger strike against U.S. soldiers' maltreatment. On June 10, 2006, three prisoners hung themselves with bed sheets and clothing (The Associated Press, June 11, 2006). Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi's family said his organs including the brain, liver, kidney and heart were all taken away when the corpse arrived. Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi's cousin said that might be done to conceal the truth behind his brother's death. Another Saudi Arabian prisoner's father thought his son's death was not suicide but intentional hanging as he found bruises on his son's body. The Amnesty International described it as another "indictment" of the worsening U.S. human rights record. Human rights experts with the United Nations have condemned the United States for long-term arbitrary detention of suspects and abuses of detainees as serious violations of international law and relevant international conventions.

The U.S. Military Commissions Act signed into law on October 17,2006 allows more severe means be used to interrogate terrorist suspects. Martin Scheinin, UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of Human Rights and fundamental freedom, issued a statement noting that a number of provisions of the Act contradictthe universal and fundamental principles of fair trial standards and due process enshrined in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and relevant provisions of the International Convention on Civil Rights and Political Rights (UN Expert on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism Concerned That Military Commissions Act is Now Law in United States. Press Release, United Nations, October 27, 2006).

The United Nations and all peace- and justice-loving countries and people have unanimously condemned the U.S. act of disregarding internationally recognized human rights principles and trespassing on other countries' sovereignty and human rights. In July 2006, at its 87th session the UN Human Rights Committee expressed its concern over U.S. infringements on human rights overseas. The committee also expressed concerned and raised recommendations on U.S. security measures, detaining people secretly and in secret places for long periods, abuses of prisoners, and non-compliance with international conventions in the war on terror. On June 14, 2006 five independent UN Special Rapporteurs on human rights issued a joint statement calling on the United States to immediately close the Guantanamo Bay detention center (UN rights experts call for immediate closure of US Guantanamo centre after suicides, UN News Center, June 14, 2006. http://www.un.org/).

America's international image has been greatly hurt by its government's violation of human rights flaunting the banner of "safeguarding human rights". A poll by the BBC World Service released on January 23, 2007 showed that the image of the United States has deteriorated around the world in the past year. During the poll 26,381 people were questioned in 25 countries. Some 73 percent of the total disapproved of the U.S. government's handling of the military campaign in Iraq, with 49 percent of respondents saying Washington was playing a mainly negative role internationally. An average of only 29 percent of some 18,000 people surveyed in 18 countries over the last three months believed that the United States is having a mainly positive influence internationally, down 7 percent from the previous poll conducted a year earlier.

Though the poll did not directly address their reasons, GlobeScan President Doug Miller told AFP by phone, the negative views appeared to be driven by US intervention in the Middle East and the "disconnect" between its declared values and actions, such as in Guantanamo Bay (AFP, London, Jan. 23, 2007).

To "name and shame" other countries in annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices is a world strategy of the U.S. government to wage the Cold War in the second half of the last century and typical of Cold War mentality. To interfere in other countries' internal affairs and provoke international confrontations on human rights issues not only violates universally recognized international law principles such as equality of sovereignty and non-interference in other countries' internal affairs, but also goes against the trend of our times, which promotes peace, development and cooperation, and encourages dialogue instead of confrontation in the field of human rights. The United States has lorded it over other countries by condemning other countries' human rights practices while ignoring its own problems, which exposes its double standard and hegemonism on the human rights issue. We urge the U.S. government to acknowledge its own human rights problems and stop interfering in other countries' internal affairs under the pretext of human rights.

Extreme Poverty in USA Increased 26% under Bush

2007-03-02T17:57:00.000-08:00

Extreme Poverty in USA Increased 26% under Bush

How can he find a trillion dollars for a needless war, but he can't bring himself to help the hungry children in our own god damn country. Besides, did you see the bulletin I posted yesterday in which I showed statistics that says U.S. murder rates rival those in Iraq? For example, a black male aged 20-34 would have a higher chance of getting killed living in Philadelphia than fighting in Iraq.

This is ridiculous, and not in a funny way.

I don't blame Bush. I blame us, the American public, for letting this happen.

I don't pay taxes. I'm not funding this war or the government anymore.

Extreme Poverty in USA Increased 26% under Bush

What do you think?

U.S. Murder Rates Rival Iraq Warzone

2007-02-27T08:08:00.001-08:00

U.S. Murder Rates Rival Iraq Warzone

Instead of wasting trillions of dollars futilely trying to stabilize countries like Iraq, we need to stabilize our own country. We not only have 14 million hungry children living in our country, we have violent cities with murder rates that rival the Iraq warzone.

http://scottsafetyshop.com/blog/?p=130

What do you think

George Washington Owned Hundreds of Slaves

2007-02-19T14:01:00.000-08:00

George Washington owned hundreds of slaves.

The only place that ought to celebrate President's Day is hell.

60% of Washington's field slaves were women. 75% of his slaves were field slaves. His slaves were forced to work from sun-up to sun-down, everyday except Sunday. By 1799, when George Washington died, there were 316 slaves living on his estate.

Martin Luther King was a hero. Mahatma Gandhi was a hero. Henry David Thoreau and John Brown were heroes. George Washington was a racist slave-owning enemy-of-freedom.

I don't want to hear the excuse that slavery was commonly accepted "back then". Slavery wasn't commonly accepted by the majority of people. Perhaps, slavery was commonly accepted by rich white slave-owners, in the same way rape is commonly accepted by rapists, and the same way killing Jews was accepted by blond-haired Germans during Nazi Germany.

There's two types of people in the world: People who continue and promote exploitation, and radicals who fight to stop exploitation and inspire society to change its values for the better. George Washington was of the former class.

If I have offended you, just think, at least I didn't enslave you. I'm better than George Washington at least.

From George Washington to George Bush, I see no honor in being president of an offensively violent, coercive, and deceitful institution such as the United States Government, a major human rights violator.

Corrupt Child Protection Agents Steal Kids

2007-02-15T13:04:00.000-08:00

"While protecting children is a must, the current system in place allows for major abuse of power as each child removed from the home means a money rewards for the CPS office to the tune of thousands of dollars per kid. Every once and awhile a child who needs to be saved from harm actually is helped, but more often than not, children who are not abused or neglected get targeted and taken to meet state quotas for the federal funds. Mainstream media looks the other way because these agencies would accuse them of not supporting child welfare, while corrupt CPS caseworkers (not the good ones, the bad ones, as there are good workers out there) but the corrupt ones tear good, loving families apart and get away with it." -OpposingDigits.com

What do you think?

Report Says Pentagon Manipulated Intel

2007-02-09T14:23:00.000-08:00

The AP reports:

Pentagon officials undercut the intelligence community in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq by insisting in briefings to the White House that there was a clear relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, the Defense Department's inspector general said Friday.

Acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the office headed by former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith took "inappropriate" actions in advancing conclusions on al-Qaida connections not backed up by the nation's intelligence agencies.

Gimble said that while the actions of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy "were not illegal or unauthorized," they "did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to senior decision makers" at a time when the White House was moving toward war with Iraq.

Read entire AP article on Yahoo.

A trillion dollar war is very lucrative for a select few people, despite the damage it does to the taxpayers and the attacked country. Is it any surprise that the military-industrial complex would fabricate intelligence to facilitate a war? Of course not! The mega-corporations profiting from the wars give cuts to the politicians to send us to these needless wars. While taxpayers get robbed and soldiers get killed, politicians and corporate criminals make profits.

This is just another reason to stop paying taxes.

Don't Pay Taxes

2007-02-07T14:10:00.000-08:00

Taxes Fund War Instead of Social Services

In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau said:

"Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay [the State], and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible."

Don't let a government steal from you, especially to fund needless wars! Keep your money! Don't pay taxes! Civilly Disobey!

Why You Want to Avoid Taking Vaccines

2007-02-06T10:45:00.000-08:00

Why You Should Avoid Taking Vaccines
Dr. James Howenstine, MD.

Dr. James R. Shannon, former director of the National institute of health declared, "the only safe vaccine is one that is never used."

Cowpox vaccine was believed able to immunize people against smallpox. At the time this vaccine was introduced, there was already a decline in the number of cases of smallpox. Japan introduced compulsory vaccination in 1872. In 1892 there were 165,774 cases of smallpox with 29,979 deaths despite the vaccination program. A stringent compulsory smallpox vaccine program, which prosecuted those refusing the vaccine, was instituted in England in 1867. Within 4 years 97.5 % of persons between 2 and 50 had been vaccinated. The following year England experienced the worst smallpox epidemic[1] in its history with 44,840 deaths. Between 1871 and 1880 the incidence of smallpox escalated from 28 to 46 per 100,000. The smallpox vaccine does not work.

Much of the success attributed to vaccination programs may actually have been due to improvement in public health related to water quality and sanitation, less crowded living conditions, better nutrition, and higher standards of living. Typically the incidence of a disease was clearly declining before the vaccine for that disease was introduced. In England the incidence of polio had decreased by 82 % before the polio vaccine was introduced in 1956.

In the early 1900s an astute Indiana physician, Dr. W.B. Clarke, stated "Cancer was practically unknown until compulsory vaccination with cowpox vaccine began to be introduced. I have had to deal with two hundred cases of cancer, and I never saw a case of cancer in an un-vaccinated [2] person."

There is a widely held belief that vaccines should not be criticized because the public might refuse to take them. This is valid only if the benefits exceed the known risks of the vaccines.

Do Vaccines Actually Prevent Disease?

This important question does not appear to have ever been adequately studied. Vaccines are enormously profitable for drug companies and recent legislation in the U.S. has exempted lawsuits against pharmaceutical firms in the event of adverse reactions to vaccines which are very common. In 1975 Germany stopped requiring pertussis (whooping cough) vaccination. Today less than 10 % of German children are vaccinated against pertussis. The number of cases of pertussis has steadily decreased[3] even though far fewer children are receiving pertussis vaccine.

Measles outbreaks have occurred in schools with vaccination rates over 98 % in all parts of the U.S. including areas that had reported no cases of measles for years. As measles immunization rates rise to high levels measles becomes a disease seen only in vaccinated persons. An outbreak of measles occurred in a school where 100 % of the children had been vaccinated. Measles mortality rates had declined by 97 % in England before measles vaccination was instituted.

In 1986 there were 1300 cases of pertussis in Kansas and 90 % of these cases occurred in children who had been adequately vaccinated. Similar vaccine failures have been reported from Nova Scotia where pertussis continues to be occurring despite universal vaccination. Pertussis remains endemic[4] in the Netherlands where for more than 20 years 96 % of children have received 3 pertussis shots by age 12 months.

After institution of diphtheria vaccination in England and Wales in 1894 the number of deaths from diphtheria rose by 20 % in the subsequent 15 years. Germany had compulsory vaccination in 1939. The rate of diphtheria spiraled to 150,000 cases that year whereas, Norway which did not have compulsory vaccination, had only 50 cases of diphtheria the same year.

The continued presence of these infectious diseases in children who have received vaccines proves that life long immunity which follows natural infection does not occur in persons receiving vaccines. The injection process places the viral particles into the blood without providing any clear way to eliminate these foreign substances.

Why Do Vaccines Fail To Protect Against Diseases?

Walene James, author of Immunization: the Reality Behind The Myth, states that the full[5] inflammatory response is necessary to create real immunity. Prior to the introduction of measles and mumps vaccines children got measles and mumps and in the great majority of cases these diseases were benign. Vaccines "trick" the body so it does not mount a complete inflammatory response to the injected virus.

Vaccines and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome SIDS

The incidence of Sudden Infant Death syndrome SIDS has grown from .55 per 1000 live births in 1953 to 12.8 per 1000 in 1992 in Olmstead County, Minnesota. The peak incidence for SIDS is age 2 to 4 months the exact time most vaccines are being given to children. 85 % of cases of SIDS occur in the first 6 months of infancy. The increase in SIDS as a percentage of total infant deaths has risen from 2.5 per 1000 in 1953 to 17.9 per 1000 in 1992. This rise in SIDS deaths has occurred during a period when nearly every childhood disease was declining due to improved sanitation and medical progress except SIDS. These deaths from SIDS did increase during a period when the number of vaccines given a child was steadily rising to 36 per child.

Dr. W. Torch was able to document 12 deaths in infants which appeared within 3½ and 19 hours of a DPT immunization. He later reported 11 new cases of SIDS death and one near miss which had occurred within 24 hours of a DPT injection. When he studied 70 cases of SIDS two thirds of these victims[6] had been vaccinated from one half day to 3 weeks prior to their deaths. None of these deaths was attributed to vaccines. Vaccines are a sacred cow and nothing against them appears in the mass media because they are so profitable to pharmaceutical firms.

There is valid reason to think that not only are vaccines worthless in preventing disease they are counterproductive because they injure the immune system permitting cancer, auto-immune diseases and SIDS to cause much disability and death.

Are Vaccines Sterile?

Dr. Robert Strecker claimed that the department of defense DOD was given $10,000,000 in 1969 to create the AIDS virus to be used as a population-reducing[7] weapon against blacks. By use of the Freedom of Information Act Dr. Strecker was able to learn that the DOD secured funds from Congress to perform studies on immune destroying agents for germ warfare.

Once produced, the vaccine was given in two locations. Smallpox vaccine containing HIV was given to 100,000,000 Africans in 1977. Over 2000 young white homosexual males in New York City were given Hepatitis B vaccine that contained HIV virus in 1978. This vaccine was given at New York City Blood Center. The Hepatitis B vaccine containing the HIV virus was also administered to homosexual males in San Francisco, Los Angeles, St.Louis, Houston and Chicago in 1978 and 1979. U.S. Public Health epidemiology studies have disclosed that these same 6 cities had the highest incidence of AIDS, Aids related Complex (ARC) and deaths rates from HIV, when compared to other U.S. cities.

When a new virus is introduced into a community. It takes 20 years for the number of cases to double. If the fabricated story that green monkey bites of pygmies led to the HIV epidemic, the alleged monkey bites in the 1940s should have produced a peak in the incidence of HIV in the 1960s at which time HIV was non existent in Africa. The World Health Organization (WHO) began a African smallpox vaccination campaign in 1977 that targeted urban population centers and avoided pygmies. If the green monkey bites of pygmies truly caused the HIV epidemic the incidence of HIV in pygmies should have been higher than in urban citizens. However, the opposite was true.

In 1954 Dr. Bernice Eddy (bacteriologist) discovered live monkey viruses in supposedly sterile inactivated polio vaccine[8] developed by Dr. Jonas Salk. This discovery was not well received at the NIH and Dr. Eddy was demoted. Later Dr. Eddy, working with Sarah Stewart, discovered SE polyoma virus. This virus was quite important because it caused cancer in every animal receiving it. Yellow fever vaccine had previously been found to contain avian (bird) leukemia virus. Later Dr. Hilleman isolated SV 40 virus from both the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines. There were 40 different viruses[9] in these polio vaccines they were trying to eradicate. They were never able to get rid of these viruses ontaminating the polio vaccines. The SV 40 virus causes malignancies. It has now been identified in 43 % of cases of non-Hodgekin lymphoma[10] , 36 % of brain tumors[11] , 18 % of healthy blood samples, and 22 % of healthy semen samples, mesothiolomas and other malignancies. By the time of this discovery SV 40 had already been injected into 10,000,000 people in Salk vaccine. Gastric digestion inactivtes some of SV 40 in Sabin vaccine. However, the isolation of strains of Sabin polio vaccine from all 38 cases of Guillan Barre Syndrome[12] GBS in Brazil suggests that significant numbers of persons are able to be infected from this vaccine. All 38 of these patients had received Sabin polio vaccine months to years before the onset of GBS. The incidence of non-Hodgekin lymphoma has"mysteriouly" doubled since the 1970s.

Dr. John Martin, Professor of Pathology at the Univ. of Southern California, was employed by the Viral Oncology Branch of the Bureau of Biologics (FDA) from 1976 to 1980. While employed there he identified foreign DNA in the live polio vaccine Orimune Lederle that suggested serious vaccine contamination. He warned his supervisors about this problem and was told to discontinue his work as it was outside the scope of testing required for polio vaccine.

Later Dr. Martin learned that all eleven of the African green monkeys used to grow the Lederle polio virus Orimune had grown simian cytomegalovirus from kidney cell cultures. Lederle was aware of this viral contamination as their Cytomegaloviral Contamination Plan[13] clearly showed in 1972. The Bureau of Biologics decided not to pursue the matter so production of infected polio vaccine continued.

In 1955 Dr. Martin identified unique cell destroying viruses termed stealth viruses in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome. These viruses lacked genes that would enable the immune system to recognize them. Thus they were protected by the body's failure to develop antiviral antibodies. In March of 1995, Dr. Martin learned that some of these stealth viruses had originated from African green monkey simian cytomegalovirus of a type known to infect man.

The Lederle vaccine experience suggests that the higher-ups are not concerned about sloppy and dangerous preparation of vaccines. Animal cross infection is a huge unsolved current problem for all vaccine manufacturing. If this vaccine production sounds like an unbelievable mess to you, you are right.

The influential Club of Rome has a position paper in which they state that the world population is too large and needs to be reduced by 90 %. This means that 6 billion people must be reduced to 500 to 600 million. Obviously, creating famines and genocidal wars such as wrecked havoc in Africa, and loosing new laboratory-created diseases (HIV, Ebola, Marburg[14] , and probably West Nile virus and SARS) can help reduce the population. Other elitist groups (Trilaterals, Bildenbergers) have expressed similar concerns about excess people on planet Earth.

The company that was projected to produce the new smallpox vaccine in the U.S. was in serious trouble in England because of unsatisfactory quality of operations before setting up their facility in the U.S. Why would their performance here be any better than it was in England?

If there are important powerful groups of people that are determined to reduce the world population, what could be a more diabolically clever way to eliminate people than to inject them with a cancer-causing vaccine? The person receiving the injection would never suspect that the vaccine taken 10 to 15 years earlier had caused the cancer to appear.

Other Dangers From Vaccines

In the March 4, 1977 issue of Science Jonas and Darrell Salk warn, "Live virus vaccines against influenza or poliomyelitis may in each instance produce the disease it intended to prevent. The live virus against measles and mumps may produce such side effects as encephalitis (brain damage).

The swine flu vaccine was administered to the American public even though there had never been a case of swine flu identified in a human. Farmers refused to use the vaccine because it killed too many animals. Within a few months of use in humans this vaccine caused many cases of serious nerve injury (Guillan Barre syndrome).

An article in the Washington Post on Jan. 26, 1988 mentioned that all cases of polio since 1979 had been caused by the polio vaccine with no known cases of polio from a wild strain since 1979. This might have created a perfect situation to discontinue the vaccine, but the vaccine is still given. Vaccines are a wonderful source of profits with no risks to the drug companies since vaccine injuries are now recompensed by the government.

The steady escalation in the number of vaccines administered has been followed by an identical rise in the incidence of auto-immune diseases (rheumatoid arthritis, subacute lupus erythematosus, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, asthma) seen in children. While there is a genetic transmission of some of these diseases many are probably due to the injury from foreign protein particles, mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde and other toxic agents injected in vaccines.

In 1999, the rotavirus vaccine was recommended by the Center for Disease Control for all infants. When this vaccine program was instituted several infants died and many had life endangering bowel obstructions. Prelicensure trials[15] of the rotavirus vaccine had demonstrated an increased incidence of intussusception 30 times greater than normal but the vaccine was released anyway without special warnings to practitioners to be on the lookout for bowel problems. Children's vaccines are often not studied for toxicity possibly because such study might eliminate them from being used.

A large study from Australia showed that the risk of developing encephalitis from the pertussis vaccine was 5 times greater than the risk of developing encephalitis by contacting pertussis by natural methods.

Naturally acquired immunity by illness evolves by spread of a virus from the respiratory tract to the liver, thymus, spleen, and bone marrow. When symptoms begin, the entire immune response has been mobilized to repel the invading virus. This complex immune system response creates antibodies that confer life long immunity against that invading virus and prepares the child to respond promptly to an infection by the same virus in the future.

Vaccination, in contrast, results in the persisting of live virus or other foreign antigens within the cells of the body, a situation that may provoke auto-immune reactions as the body attempts to destroy its own infected cells. There is no surprise that the incidence of auto-immune diseases (rheumatoid arthritis, subacute lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis, asthma, psoriasis) has risen sharply in this era of multiple vaccine immunization.

Vaccine Induced Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus

Dr. John Classen has published 29 articles on vaccine-induced[16] diabetes. At least 8 of 10 children with Type 1 (insulin needing) diabetes have this disease as a result of vaccination. These children may have avoided measles, mumps, and whooping cough but they have received something far worse: an illness that shortens life expectancy by 10 to 15 years and results in a life requiring constant medical care.

Dr. Classen has shown in Finland, the introduction of hemophilus type b vaccine caused three times as many cases of type 1 diabetes as the number of deaths and brain damage from hemophilus influenza type b it might have prevented.

In New Zealand, the incidence of Type 1 diabetes in children rose by 61 % after an aggressive vaccine program against hepatitis B.. This same program has been started in the U.S.A. so we can now look forward to many cases of Type 1 diabetes in children. Similar rises in Type 1 diabetes have been seen in England, Italy, Sweden, and Denmark after immunization programs against Hepatitis B.

Toxic Substances Are Needed To Make Vaccines.

Vaccines contain many toxic substances that are needed to prevent the vaccines from becoming infected or to improve the performance of the vaccine. Among these substances are mercury, formaldehyde and aluminum.[17]

In the past 10 years, the number of autistic children has risen from between 200 and 500 percent in every state in the U.S. This sharp rise in autism followed the introduction of measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in 1975.

Representative Dan Burton's healthy grandson was given injections for 9 diseases in one day. These injections were instantly followed by autism. These injections contain a preservative of mercury called thimerosal. The boy received 41 times the amount of mercury which is capable of harm to the body. Mercury is a neurotoxin that can injure the brain and nervous system. And tragically, it did.

In the United States the number of compulsory vaccine injections has increased from 10 to 36 in the last 25 years. During this period, there has been a simultaneous increase in the number of children suffering learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder. Some of these childhood disabilities are related to intrauterine cerebral damage from maternal cocaine use, but probably vaccines cause many of the others.

Many vaccines contain aluminum. A new disease called macrophagic myofasciitis causes pain in muscles, bones and joints. All persons with this disease have received aluminum containing vaccines. Deposits of aluminum are able to remain as an irritant in tissues and disturb the immune and nervous system for a lifetime.

Nearly all vaccines contain aluminum and mercury. These metals appear to play an important role in the etiology of Alzheimer's Disease. An expert at the 1997 International Vaccine Conference related that a person who takes 5 or more annual flu vaccine shots has increased the likelihood of developing Alzheimer's Disease by a factor of 10 over the person who has had 2 or fewer flu shots.

When we take vaccines we are playing a modern version of Russian Roulette. We not only get exposed to aluminum, mercury, formaldehyde and foreign cell proteins but we may get simian virus 40 and other dangerous viruses which can cause cancer, leukemia and other severe health problems because the vaccine pool is contaminated due to careless animal isolation techniques. Congress has protected the manufacturers from lawsuits, so dangerous vaccines simply increase profits at no risk to the drug companies.

U.S. children aged 2 months began receiving hepatitis B vaccine in December 2000.No peer-reviewed studies of the safety of hepatitis B in this age bracket had been done. Over 36,000 adverse reactions with 440 deaths were soon reported but the true incidence is much higher as reporting is voluntary so only approximately 10 % of adverse reactions get reported. This means that about 5000 infants are dying annually from the hepatitis B vaccine. The CDC's Chief of Epidemiology admits that the frequency of serious reactions to hepatitis B vaccine is 10 times higher than other vaccines. Hepatitis B is transmitted sexually and by contaminated blood, so the incidence of this disease must be near zero in this age bracket. A vaccine expert, Dr. Philip Incao, states that "the conclusion is obvious that the risks[18] of hepatitis B vaccination far outweigh the benefits. Once a vaccine is mandated the vaccine manufacturer is no longer liable for adverse reactions.

Dr. W.B. Clarke's important observation that cancer was not found in unvaccinated individuals demands an explanation and one now appears forthcoming. All vaccines given over a short period of time to an immature immune system deplete the thymus gland (the primary gland involved in immune reactions) of irreplaceable immature immune cells. Each of these cells could have multiplied and developed into an army of valuable cells to combat infection and growth of abnormal cells. When these immune cells have been used up, permanent immunity may not appear. The Arthur Research Foundation in Tucson, Arizona estimates that up to 60 % of our immune system may be exhausted[19] by multiple mass vaccines (36 are now required for children). Only 10 % of immune cells are permanently lost when a child is permitted to develop natural immunity from disease. There needs to be grave concern about these immune system injuring vaccinations! Could the persons who approve these mass vaccinations know that they are impairing the health of these children, many of whom are being doomed to requiring much medical care in the future?

Compelling evidence is available that the development of the immune system after contracting the usual childhood diseases matures and renders it capable to fight infection and malignant cells in the future.

The use of multiple vaccines, which prevents natural immunity, promotes the development of allergies and asthma. A New Zealand study disclosed that 23 % of vaccinated children develop asthma , as compared to zero in unvaccinated children.

Cancer was a very rare illness in the 1890's. This evidence about immune system injury from vaccinating affords a plausible explanation for Dr. Clarke's finding that only vaccinated individuals got cancer. Some radical adverse change in health occurred in the early 1900s to permit cancer to explode and vaccinating appears to be the reason.

Vaccines are an unnatural phenomena. My guess is that if enough persons said no to immunizations there would be a striking improvement in general health with nature back in the immunizing business instead of man. Having a child vaccinated should be a choice not a requirement. Medical and religious exemptions are permitted by most states.

When governmental policies require vaccinations before children enter schools coercion has overruled the lack of evidence of vaccine efficacy and safety. There is no proof that vaccines work and they are never studied for safety before release. My opinion is that there is overwhelming evidence that vaccines are dangerous and the only reason for their existence is to increase profits of pharmaceutical firms.

If you are forced to immunize your children so they can enter school, obtain a notarized statement from the director of the facility that they will accept full financial responsibility for any adverse reaction from the vaccine. Since there is at least a 2 percent risk of a serious adverse reaction they may be smart enough to permit your child to escape a dangerous procedure. Recent legislation passed by Congress gives the government the power to imprison persons refusing to take vaccines (smallpox, anthrax, etc). This would be troublesome to enforce if large numbers of citizens declined to be vaccinated at the same time.

Footnotes:

1 Null Gary Vaccination: An Analysis of the Health Risks- Part Townsend Letter for Doctors & Patients Dec. 2003 pg 78
2 Mullins Eustace Murder by Injection pg 132 The National Council for Medical Research, P. O. Box 1105, Staunton, Virginia 24401
3 Gary Null Interview with Dr. Dean Black April 7, 1995
4 de Melker HE, et al Pertussis in the Netherlands: an outbreak despite high levels of immunization with whole-cell vaccine Emerging Infectious Diseases 1997; 3(2): 175-8 Centers for Disease Control
5 Gary Null Interview with Walene James, April 6, 1995
6 Torch WS Diptheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT) immunizations: a potential cause of the sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) Neurology 1982; 32-4 A169 abstract.
7 Collin Jonathan The Townsend Letter for Doctors & Patients 1988 abstracted in Horowitz L. Emerging Viruses Aids & Ebola pg 1-5
8 Harris RJ et al Contaminant viruses in two live vaccines produced in chick cells.J Hyg (London) 1966 Mar:64(1) : 1-7
9 Horowitz Leonard G. Emerging Viruses AIDS & Ebola pg 484
10 Vilchez RA et al Association between simian virus 40 and non-Hodgekin lymphoma Lancet 2002 Mar 9;359(9309):817-823
11 Bu X A study of simian virus 40 infection and its origin in human brain tumors Zhonghu Liu Xing Bing Xue Zhi 2000 Feb;21 (1):19-21
12 Friedrich F. et al temporal association between the isolation of Sabin-related poliovirus vaccine strains and the Guillan-Barre syndrome Rev Inst Med Trop Sao Paulo 1996 Jan-Feb; 38(1):55-8
13 Horowitz Leonard Emerging Viruses: Aids and Ebola pg 492
14 Horowitz Leonard G Emerging Viruses: Aids & Ebola pg 378-88 Tetrahedron Inc. Suite 147, 206 North 4th Ave. Sandpoint, Idaho 83864 1-888-508-4787 tetra@tetrahedron.org
15 Null, Gary Vaccination: An Anatysis of the health risks-Part 3 Townsend letter for doctors & patients Dec. 2003 pg 78
16 Classen, JB et al. Association between type 1 diabetes and Hib vaccine BMJ 1999; 319:1133
17 Brain 9/01
18 Incao, philip M.D. Letter to representative Dale Van Vyven, Ohio House of Representatives March 1, 1999 provided to www.garynull.com by The Natural Immunity Information Network
19 Rowen Robert Your first consultation with Dr. Rowen pg 20

(c) 2003 Dr. James Howenstine - All Rights Reserved

Dr. James A. Howenstine is a board certified specialist in internal medicine who spent 34 years caring for office and hospital patients. Curiosity sparked a 4 year study of natural health products when 5 of his patients with severe rheumatoid arthritis were able to discontinue the use of methotrexate (chemotherapy agent) after trying an extract of New Zealand mussels for the therapy of severe rheumatoid arthritis.

Dr. Howenstine is convinced that natural products are safer, more effective and less expensive than pharmaceutical drugs. This research led to the publication of his book 'A Physicians Guide To Natural Health Products That Work'. This book and the recommended health products are available from www.naturalhealthteam.com

Politics & Paper Chains by Scott Hughes

2007-02-03T11:25:00.001-08:00

Politics & Paper Chains by Scott Hughes

Here's an excerpt:

"A revolution is simply an intelligent and self-interested working-class bettering their own lives by refusing to passively accept the oppressive status quo. It's not a matter of charity. It's a matter of getting what we want. We want to feed and clothe our families. We want to educate ourselves and our children. We want to live in safe neighborhoods, free from rape, murder, theft, and violence. We want to keep the fruits of our labor. We want shelter and peace."

Politics & Paper Chains by Scott Hughes

What do you think?

Mumia Abu Jamal - What Did You Do?

2007-02-03T09:48:00.000-08:00

What will you do?

Canada & The War on Poverty

2007-01-26T14:27:00.000-08:00

Canada & The War on Poverty

Here's an excerpt:

When OCAP was launched, "I couldn't imagine that over its history the conditions of drab misery for poor citizens would actually worsen rather than improve," says Clarke. "I believe Canadians are concerned about homelessness, for instance. But passive indignation is not enough."

Canada & The War on Poverty

What do you think?

Concentration Summer Camp 2007

2007-01-17T06:35:00.000-08:00

Detention Camp for American Citizens?
prisonplanet.tv

A detention camp in Taylor Texas that currently holds hundreds of rebuffed asylum seekers who legally entered the country, half of which are children swept up in midnight raids, is a potential prime location for the enforced transfer of American citizens during a time of national emergency.

The Infowars team recently visited the facility and were promptly told to leave the premises before having their names taken, but not before they were able to get footage of the camp "playground" where some of the children were playing behind giant mesh barbed wire. The children were kept indoors throughout the taping and were only allowed out when the film crew left to eat lunch. One local said that other residents of the town were completely oblivious to the fact that the camp even existed, never mind its function and purpose.

What do you think?

CENSORSHIP: The Sexual Media and the Ambivalence of Knowing

2007-01-06T14:29:00.000-08:00

Below is an excerpt from a book by Judith Levine entitled Harmful to Minors. Discuss the book at the Book & Reading Forums.

CENSORSHIP

The Sexual Media and the Ambivalence of Knowing

At the turn of the twenty-first century, America is being inundated by censorship in the name of protecting "children" from "sex," both terms capaciously defined. In the 1990s among the most frequent targets were Judy Blume's young-adult novel Deenie, in which a teenage girl likes to touch her "special place," and Maurice Sendak's classic In the Night Kitchen, because its main character, a boy of about five named Max, tumbles through his dream with his genitals bare. The student editor of the University of Southern Louisiana yearbook was dismissed because she published a picture of a young woman feeding spaghetti to a young man. Both were shirtless. The New York State Liquor Authority denied a license to Bad Frog Beer. According to the authority, the label--a cartoon frog with his middle finger raised and the legend "An Amphibian with Attitude"--was "harmful to minors." Paul Zaloom, the star of the children's television science program Dr. Beekman's Universe, was forbidden by his producers to answer his viewers' most-asked question: What is a fart? Even sex educators are not allowed to speak about sex. In 1996, when author Robie Harris went on the radio in Oklahoma to promote her children's book It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health, the host requested that she not mention the S-word. Harris was obliged to refer to sex as "the birds and the bees."

The cultural historian Michel Foucault said that sex is policed not by silence but by endless speech, by the "deployment" of more and more "discourses" of social regulation--psychology, medicine, pedagogy. But our era, while producing plenty of regulatory chatter from on high, has also seen an explosion of unofficial, anarchic, and much more exciting discourses down below. When the sexual revolution collided with the boom in media technologies, media sex mushroomed. We started collecting statistics to prove it: 6.6 sexual incidents per hour on top-rated soap operas (half that number ten years before); fourteen thousand sexual references and innuendos on television annually (compared with almost none when Ozzie and Harriet slept in twin beds); movies most popular with teenagers "contain[ing] as many as fifteen instances of sexual intercourse in less than two hours" (Gone with the Wind had one, off-screen).

Sexual imagery proliferated like dirty laundry: the minute you washed it and put it away, there was more. In Times Square, whose streets were transformed into a Disney-Warner "family-friendly" mall, the neon signs from shut-down peep shows were put on exhibit in a sort of museum of the smutty past at the back of the tourist information office. Meanwhile, looming over the heads of camera-toting tour groups from Iowa, half-block-long billboards advertised Calvin Klein underwear, inside of whose painted shadows lurked penises as large as redwood logs.

As the ability to segregate audiences by age, sex, class, or geography shrinks, we have arrived at a global capitalist economy that, despite all our tsk-tsking, finds sex exceedingly marketable and in which children and teens serve as both sexual commodities (JonBenét Ramsey, Thai child prostitutes) and consumers of sexual commodities (Barbie dolls, Britney Spears). All this inspires a campaign with wide political support to return to reticence, especially when the kids are around.

History refutes the notion that we live today in a world of sexual speech but did not, say, three centuries ago. A child could witness plenty of dirty song-singing and breast-and buttock-grabbing in any sixteenth-century public house. Yet there is reason for concern about the world of unfiltered, unfettered sexual knowledge that is particular to the past several decades: pictures and words have attained unprecedented cultural influence in our time. Our marketplace produces few actual widgets; we make almost nothing but digitized ideas and the media to distribute them. As the economy moves from the Steel Belt to Silicon Valley, the boundary between the symbolic and the real is disappearing. Representation is no longer just a facsimile of a thing: it is the thing itself.

Nobody lives more in the "hypermediated" environment than the young. The critic Ronald Jones, writing about two young artists in the 1990s, distinguished them from the now-middle-aged postmodernists of the 1980s, who stressed that "the way the media represented the world was a constructed fabrication." Younger artists, the critic said, work from an assumption of "inauthenticity as a normal course of life." At the end of the twentieth century, a quarter of kids had their own televisions by the time they were five years old. It was no use telling them to go outside and get a "real" life. Why play sandlot baseball when you can pitch to Sammy Sosa from a virtual mound? Even technologized sexual speech no longer just stands for sex; it is sex. Sherry Turkle, a social analyst of computer communication at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described the on-screen erotic exchanges that Netizens call "tinysex": "A 13-year-old informs me that she prefers to do her sexual experimentation online. Her partners are usually the boys in her class at school. In person, she says, it is 'mostly grope-y.' Online, 'they need to talk more.'"

Where do you learn about sex? a television interviewer asked a fifteen-year-old from a small rural town. "We have 882 channels," the girl replied.

Discuss the book at the Book & Reading Forums.

New Years Article: We Need a New Era!

2007-01-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

New Years Article: We Need a New Era!

by Scott Hughes

Here's an excerpt:

"We don't need a new year, we need a new era! We need a new era in which no child goes hungry, and no child lives in poverty. We need a new era in which all people have access to education and socioeconomic opportunity. We need a new era in which healthcare is everywhere and homelessness is nowhere. We need a new era in which HIV and AIDS no longer spreads. We need a loving and happy era."

New Years Article: We Need a New Era!

Robert Kennedy Jr. in Burlington

2006-12-31T08:57:00.000-08:00

In the below video, Robert Kennedy Jr. speaks in Burlington Vermont about the failure of the Bush administration to uphold environmental laws. This is what a man who loves his country sounds like:

What do you think?

Cops Caught Stealing Protestors' Cameras

2006-12-18T15:15:00.000-08:00

See more police misconduct by clicking here.

Cops Caught Stealing Protestors' Cameras: In the latest attack on the first amendment, a shocking video has emerged of the NYPD attacking a protestor and stealing his camera and footage at a demonstration demanding justice for an independent video journalist who was shot and killed earlier this year in a state sanctioned murder.

The filmmaker, Flux Rostrum, was filming the interaction between protestors and police outside the Mexican Consulate in late October at a demonstration protesting the murder of journalist Brad Will, who was shot and killed on October 27, 2006 during the teachers' strike in the Mexican city of Oaxaca. His murderers are believed to be local officials.

Flux was not arrested, nor did he receive a receipt for seized property. Without any warning, he was jumped by two police officers, one of whom is an NYPD captain, and knocked down onto the asphalt of 39th Street. A police officer then snatched the camera out of Flux's hands. As Flux attempted to protect himself and his equipment from being trampled and beaten, the cop with the camera conferred with another officer and scurried back into the building to hide the camera.

Video of the events quite clearly shows the cop saying "I want that camera" before Flux is jumped and attacked.

When Flux attempted to get his camera back after the demonstration, he was threatened with arrest by a Lieutenant at the 17th Precinct. His lawyer was told that camera was found "abandoned" at the scene and that it had been turned over to the Manhattan District Attorney's office to be used as evidence against people arrested at the Mexican Consulate demonstration that day.

See more police misconduct by clicking here.

The Danger Of False Accusations

2006-12-17T13:23:00.000-08:00

The Danger Of False Accusations by Scott Hughes

Here's an excerpt:

"When activists, who actively oppose sexual victimization, try to recruit the help and cooperation of others and society as a whole, these activists often fail to understand the hesitance of others and society. The rightful fear of false accusations motivates this hesitation."

Poor people are like bonsai trees?

2006-12-15T10:23:00.000-08:00

Poor people are like bonsai trees?

Poverty Is A Threat To Peace

"To me poor people are like bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a flower-pot, you get a replica of the tallest tree, only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted, only the soil-base that is too inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong in their seeds. Simply, society never gave them the base to grow on. All it needs to get the poor people out of poverty for us to create an enabling environment for them. Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity, poverty will disappear very quickly." -Muhammad Yunus

Muhammad Yunus is the MAN. He fights poverty through his non-governmental organization and micro-loans. What do you think?

Michael Jackson: They Don't Care About Us

2006-12-10T08:33:00.000-08:00

Michael Jackson: They Don't Care About Us (Prison Version)

More than 5.6 million U.S. citizens are in prison or have served time there. (Source)

That's 1 in 37 adults living in the United States, the highest incarceration level in the world.

Over 25% are incarcerated for non-violent drug "crimes".

Private corporations get paid billions of tax-payers' dollars to build and maintain prisons.

The profits of which these companies use to bribe and lobby politicians.

16,000 children die from hunger everyday.

Thousands of working-class American soldiers died in the war in Iraq.

Over 600,000 Iraqi citizens died from the war in Iraq.

Well over half the U.S. government's federal budget goes to Pentagon spending.

Like the prison industry, military companies, weapons manufacturers, oil companies, etc. use their profits to lobby and bribe politicians.

The war in Iraq cost over $310 billion so far.

The war on drugs costs over $50 billion per year.

14 million children in the U.S. live in food insecure households.

Race, money and connections determine who goes to jail, rather than guilt. (See: Tyrone's story.)

Michael Jackson is right. They really don't care.

What do you think?

Public Schools Make Children Into Dumb Slaves

2006-12-10T06:00:00.000-08:00

Also check out: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen

The following is a 1980 article by Walter Karp, entitled The Teaching Of History:

Writing American history is a harmless occupation, but teaching it to American schoolchildren is a political act with far-reaching consequences. The reason for this is clear. You cannot recount the past without making fundamental political judgments, and you cannot deliver those judgments in a classroom without impressing them deeply on the minds of future citizens. Children know a great deal about many things, but about public affairs they know virtually nothing. Most of us carry to our graves scarcely altered the political lessons we imbibed half-consciously from long-forgotten history textbooks. Professors of American history erect Gothic cathedrals of erudition on political axioms acquired from their fifth-grade "social studies" readers. To teach American history to a great mass of American schoolchildren is to exercise genuine political power. Yet of all forms of political power, the power to teach history to children is the only one Americans have handed over without a struggle to a remote and unaccountable few, commonly known as the educational establishment. America Revised, by Frances FitzGerald, [subtitled "History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century." 240 pages. Atlantic/Little, Brown, $9.95] is an attempt to describe what the educational establishment has done with that power through the years.

FitzGerald's main achievement is the scutwork. She has pored through the pages of hundreds of musty American history textbooks, something nobody, I believe, has ever done before. She describes their contents, delineates their overall "philosophy," and shows how they changed from generation to generation. About what it all signifies, however, she has only confused and contradictory notions. She never really understands that her subject is the education--and miseducation--of a self-governing people. Still, FitzGerald's material is invaluable; when cast into a political history of which FitzGerald seems blissfully ignorant, it reveals a great deal about the way we are currently ruled.

Subverting True Political History

The history begins just before the turn of the century, when the first school managers powerful enough to impose their conception of history on a large number of children introduced the first American history text to the public schools. Until then what little history American schoolchildren learned they had direct from their schoolmarms by way of a sort of oral tradition. What they learned, however, they learned so well that historian Mark Sullivan blamed nineteenth-century schoolmarms for delaying our entry into the first world war. The only history they taught, Sullivan complained in his six-volume chronicle Our Times, was the American Revolution, and the way they taught it had made it impossible for most Americans to believe that England was fighting for "democracy against autocracy" in the trenches of France. The schoolmarms' American Revolution is readily reconstructed. On one side stood the tattered sons of liberty, whose forebears had come to an unknown continent in search of religious freedom. On the other side stood a tyrannical king and his arrogant Redcoats, foredoomed in their pride to a stunning defeat. What better way than this to inculcate love of liberty and hatred of tyranny in the future citizens of a free republic?

Since American educators always claimed they were providing "training for citizenship," the first history textbooks might have been expected to fortify the oral tradition of the schoolmarms. In fact, they did exactly the opposite. According to FitzGerald, the first history text taught children that the colonists had come to America for "commercial motives" and not for religious freedom at all. With that premise laid down, FitzGerald writes, the texts "looked on the American Revolution as a matter of practical politics more than anything else." Instead of the sons of liberty, the pioneer texts offered the sons of the dollar; instead of a revolt against arbitrary power, squalid maneuvering for economic advantage. The obvious lesson of these texts is that Americans who profess to fight against tyranny are probably hypocrites trying to make money, an excellent lesson if you happen to favor tyranny. Such was the "citizenship training" offered by the pioneer textbooks. Most American schoolchildren never read them, however, since they were used exclusively in a few big-city school systems "to Americanize" (as the phrase went) the children of immigrants. The first exercise of the power to teach history was an attempt to corrupt the utterly defenseless. It was also a harbinger of what was to come.

"Americanizing" native Americans was a far more delicate problem, and educational leaders were long reluctant to try it in any systematic way. The problem became inescapable, however, in the early years of the twentieth century, when, for the first time, Americans in large numbers began attending public secondary schools. This new turn of events, so far from being a source of pedagogical satisfaction, threw educators into a panic and set off the greatest crisis in the history of American education. The crisis was this: the public secondary schools, which had catered chiefly to the well-to-do and successful, adhered to a traditional liberal arts curriculum of "history, language, and literature--the "arts that liberate," as Montaigne has called them. With the children of ordinary people attending high school, American educators found themselves face to face with a specter that had haunted Europe for a century: the danger of educating people beyond their station, or, as the National Education Association preferred to put it, leading them "away from the pursuits for which they are adapted." The danger was largely political. By teaching the liberal arts to commoners, the new secondary schools might well become the spawning ground for popular tribunes, politically ambitious guttersnipes, and similar dangerous malcontents. As J. E. Russell, head of Columbia University Teachers College, put it in 1905: "How can we justify our practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be their leaders?"

Something had to be done quickly or democracy might one day break out. Educational leaders quickly worked out a solution. Let the secondary schools teach the children of workers what was fit only for workers. As Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton, sternly advised the Federation of High School Teachers: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." Since there was no way to stop "the masses" from entering high school, the only way to meet the crisis, in short, was to prevent them from learning anything liberating when they got there. Instead, the educational leaders said, the new secondary schools should offer vocational training in particular and something called industrial education in general. This, the influential Douglas Commission said in 1905. was a "new idea" in education. and in truth it was. Until ordinary Americans began attending secondary school, no secondary school in the civilized world had ever seen fit to teach its students a trade. FitzGerald attributes this vulgar innovation to the supposed fact that lofty university presidents like Wilson and Russell had lost their influence over public education--a perfect example of thoughtless snobbery.

The "new idea" must have been somewhat perplexing to schoolmarms of the old-fashioned sort. The public schools were supposed to train citizens, yet here were the country's leading educators--"we"--insisting they regard their pupils not as future citizens but as future working hinds, whom Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, urged teachers to "sort" by their "evident or probable destinies." If the schoolmarms were troubled, however, a stalwart band of educational reformers stood ready to reassure them that training Americans for their industrial "destiny" was the heart and soul of "democratic" education. By far the most important of the reassurers was John Dewey.

The "Realistic" Education of John Dewey

Neither the subtle reasoning, nor the ardent idealism of the famed educator mattered much in the history of American education. What proved important were a few of his salient principles. Suitably adapted, they have supplied educational leaders with the lasting framework for a pedagogical system designed to prevent "the masses" from ever learning in a classroom what a free people ought to know. For that purpose, Dewey's most important contribution was his conviction that democracy has little to do with politics and government. Democracy, according to Dewey, was "primarily a mode of associated living," which for most Americans chiefly meant working together in factories. Having stripped democracy of its political character, Dewey and his colleagues, who prided themselves on their "realism," went on to redefine it as "industrial cooperation." With this new, "realistic" definition, they effected a permanent pedagogical revolution. For one thing, it enabled the Deweyites (and more interested parties) to sever the venerable ties that bound the common schools to the needs and requirements of popular Government. The schools were to be adapted instead, Dewey wrote in 1897, "to the circumstances, needs, and opportunities of industrial civilization." Instead of the American Republic, the American economy would call the tune. The new "realistic" definition of democracy even stripped public education of its theoretical republican objective, which was, as Jefferson had said, to teach future citizens "how to judge for themselves what will secure or endanger their freedom." Such knowledge was unlikely to enhance, and might well impair, "industrial cooperation." The new object of "democratic" education, Dewey said, was to teach every child "to perceive the essential interdependence of an industrial society." Thus instructed, the future citizen (i.e., factory worker) would develop what Dewey called "a socialized disposition."

With economic "interdependence" as its subject and a "socialized" worker as its goal the new "democratic" curriculum had little place for history. For political history, which recounts the diverse deeds of men, there was to be no place at all. Jefferson had urged the schools to teach children political history so that Americans might "know ambition under all its shapes and [be] prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purpose." From the political past they would learn to detect the would-be despot wearing the cloak of the popular tribune and the oligarchy masquerading as the enlightened and the elect. How could free men protect their liberties if they never learned from political history that liberty, in fact, has ambitious enemies? To Dewey, on the other hand, political history was "undemocratic" (and FitzGerald wholeheartedly agrees with him) precisely because it deals with the deeds and intentions of ambitious men. The doings of the high and mighty, in Dewey's "realistic" view, were no business of American schoolchildren, who were to share in the public life of America by leading "a socialized life" in the American work force. Instead of political history they were to be given "social studies," ,which would teach them, among other industrial matters, about the modern division of labor ("how milk is brought to the city") and, in the loftier grades, about the "evolution" of American industry. Given such instruction, Jane Addams noted in her 1902 work Democracy and Social Ethics, American children would not only develop a cooperative disposition, but they would find their adult toil "much more exhilarating," realizing, as they did, the useful slot they were filling on the national industrial "team."

Stripping Deweyite "realism" of its idealistic trappings proved but the work of a moment to the educational leaders, who knew a good thing when they saw one. In 1911, a committee of the National Education Association, the largest and most influential of the teachers' organizations, urged the nation's high schools to drop history altogether, on the Deweyesque grounds that it failed to promote the "social efficiency" of the ill-bred. Social studies, history's fledging rival, would be better able, said the committee quite correctly, to "accommodate youngsters to existing conditions." That was not what Dewey had in mind, but it was latent in his "cooperative" precepts, and the educational leaders were not the only ones to realize it. Revealingly enough, the first public-school system organized on Deweyesque lines was established in 1907 in Gary, Indiana, a one-year-old company town founded by, and largely in thrall to, the U.S. Steel Corporation. J. P. Morgan knew a good thing when he saw one too. So did the United States Congress. Under President Wilson's leadership, it began funding "vocational education" in the public schools, the first serious federal attempt to shape the content of public education.

To the purblind Deweyites political history was elitist; to the powerful few it was politically dangerous--then and always. "Throughout history," as FitzGerald rightly notes (though, alas, only in a passing remark), "the managers of states have with remarkable consistency defined good citizenship as a rather small degree of knowledge of, and participation in, public affairs." To replace political history with Deweyite social studies was the perfect means of meeting the educational requirements of the powerful. In social studies, American youngsters would learn that America was chiefly an industrial system and not a republic at all, that a "good citizen" is a worker who gets up when the alarm clock rings and speeds to his job on time. In social studies, too, they would learn that the "real" history of America is the "development" of American industry--history without politics in it, which teaches the most corrupt of political lessons, that politics does not matter. Pedagogical wit could scarcely devise a better instrument for ensuring "a rather small degree of, and participation in, public affairs. To replace political history with social studies has been the abiding goal of America's educational leaders since ordinary Americans began attending high school. Interestingly enough, it took them more than half a century to register a complete triumph.

Industrial Education

FitzGerald does not try to explain why American parents, teachers, and local school boards resisted, circa 1911, what Americans since 1965 have accepted without demur. The general explanation, perhaps, is that corrupting a venerable republic is not the work of a day.

For one thing, the "new idea" of industrial education was a new idea seven decades ago. At the time, millions of Americans believed strongly that America was a democracy corrupted by industrial capitalism, alias "the money power." That America was nothing more than industrial 'capitalism--the essential axiom of social studies and Deweyism--had never crossed their minds. Indeed, it was still a fairly new idea even to advanced intellectuals. Americans were still a political people who thought in political terms. Samuel Gompers, the British-bred trade unionist, used to complain bitterly about the political proclivities of America's trade-union members. Instead of "bargaining at the workplace," as all good workers should, they insisted on contesting elections, backing insurgent candidates, and behaving for all the world as if they were citizens. Not surprisingly, Gompers was an ardent champion of "industrial education." Because Americans thought in political terms, they cared greatly about "the money power" but little about the division of labor. As for history, the only idea they had of it was political. In a history book you read about armies, wars, generals, rulers, heroes, and villains--George Washington on the one hand, George III on the other. What social studies was designed to root out of the popular mind had yet to be rooted out when the NEA urged the high schools to replace history with social studies.

The old habits of thought would no doubt have proved a flimsy barrier had the educational leaders enjoyed in 1911 the power to impose their will on America's decentralized public education. Today, a quite small number of educators have virtually unchecked sway over the curriculum of America's public schools, which have become, as one educator put it in 1962, "a monolith under oligarchic control." The "textbook philosophy" (FitzGerald's phrase) the educational oligarchy propounds is the "philosophy" the textbook publishers dispense--one that the large majority of school districts will buy, and pass on to the overwhelming majority of students. In 1911 the educational elite had no such sweeping power. Local control of the common schools, though waning, had not yet become a sham. To a degree, it could still meet the purpose for which it was originally intended: preventing the "managers of states" from teaching a republic's children that "good citizenship" consists in "a rather small degree of knowledge of, and participation in, public affairs." The usurpation of local control in the years after World War I was to be an essential element in the corrupting of a venerable republic.

Events on the national political stage proved a still more formidable barrier to the designs of the educational leaders, and almost derailed them completely. When "industrial education" was first concocted, Americans had seemed a thoroughly defeated people. A handful of finance capitalists controlled the economic arteries; a disciplined Republican party held national politics in thrall. A powerful few seemed to reign supreme in virtually every career and profession. America, as Henry Cabot Lodge said at the time, had at last become "an aristocratic republic." Then, quite suddenly, middle-class Americans awoke from their slumber and discovered that they were as powerless as everybody else. To the shock and dismay of Lodge--who thought it the end of civilization as he knew it--middle-class Americans, a complacent bourgeoisie for decades, began pouring into the public arena, determined to overthrow "the machine," to curb monopoly and bring the "money power" to heel. Just when the leading educators were urging the schools to look on America as an "industrial society," middle-class Americans who did the teaching, served on the school boards, and voted in the school board elections--had suddenly remembered that America was a republic, and an endangered one at that.

Traditional modes of thought, the absence of an educational oligarchy, and the middle-class political revolt combined to produce a surprising result. Although the new "industrial" pedagogy made rapid headway, America's schools, despite the united urging of big businessmen, trade unions, and leading politicians, refused to let go of history. Instead they fortified the curriculum with the only American history texts ever used that were not intended to corrupt future citizens. These texts flourished in the years between 1910 and 1930, which FitzGerald terms the "Hundred Flowers" era of American history texts. Written by trained historians, representing diverse points of view, the new texts, born of the Progressive revolt, were intensely political and remarkably free of cant. Their virtues are well worth noting, because eliminating those virtues was to be the immediate task of the educational establishment, which had to put off for another generation the extinction of political history.

Subverting the Threat of Real Political History

The most popular textbook of the period was American History, by David Saville Muzzey, first published in 1911. It was the antithesis of "industrial education" in every respect, since the grand lesson of Muzzey's text was that politics matters greatly, and matters to every citizen. Muzzey's readers learned, first and foremost, that the actions of people made American history and that the high and the mighty, in fact, have power--a liberating truth in itself. Moreover, the powerful bore constant watching, for villainy was not unknown in high places. In Muzzey's history President Polk, for one, was a bastard who instigated an unjust war with Mexico in order to grab some territory. Readers of Muzzey learned that democracy in America, too, bore watching. Indeed, Muzzey's history of America is largely the history of the vicissitudes of democracy. A Yankee Republican of the old school, Muzzey seems to have viewed all modern life as one giant menace to liberty and self-government. The major problem of the age, he warned young readers, was "the corruption of the government by the money power." American democracy needed defending, and it had nothing to do with industrial cooperation.

Muzzey's most successful rival was Willis Mason West, whose textbook American History and Government, published in 1913, seems to have been a rejoinder to Muzzey's. Whereas the latter thought democracy in America had gone from a Golden Age to the dogs, West, more a man of the Left, commenced his history with the bold assertion that "democracy has as yet been tried only imperfectly among us." Politically divergent though they were, the two leading texts agreed on the main point. American history was essentially political history, and the dramatic theme of that history, the impulse of political life and the catalyst of action, was the struggle over democracy itself.

While texts such as these were circulating, (often in watered-down revisions), the educational leaders seem to have bided their time until they were powerful enough to eliminate from the curriculum history lessons so inconducive to "social efficiency" and so unlikely to "accommodate youngsters to existing conditions." All through the post-Versailles years the nascent educational establishment, backed by state legislators, strengthened its hold on the public schools and on the schools that train public-school teachers. During those years the number of local school districts was cut from 120,000 to less than half that number. State educational commissions were established to reduce still further the formal autonomy of the remaining districts. By a dozen different devices--licensing laws, state guidelines, and so on--control of the curriculum passed completely out of the hands of citizens and into the grip of an increasingly tight-knit, ingrown professional oligarchy. All it needed to emasculate the lingering "Hundred Flowers" tradition was a sharp change in the political atmosphere. With the outbreak of World War II, the oligarchy struck at once, and the tradition, FitzGerald says, came "abruptly" to an end. For the next twenty-five years every new textbook used in the schools was written on the assumption that its readers were potential subversives.

In the new textbooks, which soon swept the country, political history became a hollow and meaningless form. Politics was reduced to acts of government, and villainy in high places vanished from the past. All American wars were now righteous and all American Presidents virtuous men who did, FitzGerald writes, "as well as could be expected given difficult circumstances." Imperialism, a term freely applied in the earlier texts to America's seizure of the Philippines, was now reserved exclusively for overseas ne'er-do-wells. Jingo nationalism, refreshingly absent in the "Hundred Flowers" era, pulsated through every page of the new propaganda texts. "There is a fascination with patriotic symbols," FitzGerald reports, "the flag, Independence Hall, the Statue of Liberty." Readers were adjured to accept, admire, and adore virtually everything about America except its republican institutions. In the new propaganda texts--and this is the telltale of their calculated corruptness--democracy ceased to be the theme and catalyst of American history; it excited no strife, inspired no banners, and suffered no defeats. Instead it became the fixed and unchanging attribute of the United States, like the spots on a leopard--"a Platonic form abstracted from history," as FitzGerald well puts it. Severed from history, democracy ceased to be menaced by anything except foreign enemies and their domestic agents, whose activities in the neighborhood, one textbook advised, should be promptly reported by "young people" to the FBI, "in line with American traditions."

Even as a "Platonic form," however, democracy was too dangerous to describe at length. From the new textbooks readers learned that democracy meant the right to vote and nothing more, a definition that does not distinguish America's republican institutions from the totalitarian politics of the Soviet Union. Even reduced to a nullity, democracy, to the educational establishment, was still too dangerous to praise too highly. The fear that citizenship might break out haunts the pages of the propaganda textbooks. Instead of lauding democracy. the textbooks found subtle ways to denigrate it. One of the major texts of the era, FitzGerald says, "concludes with an essay extolling the virtues of freedom not for its own sake but merely as the greatest asset in the world struggle." A more common technique of denigration was the textbooks' insistence that what was truly great about America was its enormous gross national product. The textbooks, FitzGerald says, were "far more enthusiastic" about the GNP than about the Bill of Rights. Without eliminating political history entirely, the textbooks, which devoted considerable space to "industrialization," were hearkening back to the corrupt basic tenet of Deweyism--that America was not a republican polity but, far more important, an industrial system. Times had changed, however. Whereas "cooperation" had been the dubious deity of the original industrial pedagogy, the new deity enshrined in the propaganda texts was productivity pure and simple. One prominent junior-high-school history text argued, for example, that slavery was not all that bad because it alleviated America's chronic shortage of labor. Whereas Lincoln had said that if slavery were not evil then nothing was evil, this modern school text, still in use ten years ago. taught children that nothing is evil if it enhances production--the common principle of the capitalist, the commissar, and the tyrant.

The Extinction of Political History

Such were the corrupt history textbooks the educational oligarchy inflicted on a republic's children, from the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the bombing of North Vietnam. Around 1965 that textbook era, too, came to an end with what FitzGerald calls "the most dramatic rewriting of history ever to take place" in America. The cause of this eludes her, but it, was quite obviously the civil-rights movement that provided the main spur for revision. At a stroke it exposed the sham of the propaganda textbooks. American democracy could hardly remain a "Platonic form abstracted from history" while Americans were out in the streets and on the hustings fighting for political liberty. Moreover, insurgent blacks demanded a place in the history texts, which had ignored their very existence for decades. Thanks to the civil-rights movement the time was peculiarly ripe for restoring to American classrooms a deeper and more exacting political history than even Muzzey and West had provided. Here was yet another educational crisis, almost comparable to the construction of high schools at the turn of the century. Educational reformers hit on a solution at once. If the corrupt political-history texts were doomed, what American schoolchildren should get in their stead was no political history at all.

One group of reformers, known as "The New Social Studies Movement," urged the educational establishment to teach sociology instead of history. Whereas the established social studies made do with crude notions such as the division of labor, the New Social Studies would teach budding scholars how to use such refined social-science concepts as "role," "status," and "culture." This, the reformers said, would sharpen their "cognitive skills," as it had so manifestly done for professors of sociology. The American past could remain in the curriculum, but only as a "laboratory for testing social-science concepts," to quote a New Social Studies manifesto. Grinding American history into sociological mush readily recommended itself to the educational bureaucrats in the Kennedy Administration, which supported the endeavor with the customary avalanche of grants.

A second group of reformers urged the school managers to offer textbooks that were "relevant" to the immediate problems of "disadvantaged" minorities. What these disadvantaged needed, their self-appointed spokesmen said, were history texts that enhanced their ethnic and racial "pride." Since no political history of America could possibly make anyone proud of being scorned, proscribed, betrayed, or enslaved, the new ethnicity, too, won rapid and pious approval. Through a judicious blend of "social-science concepts" and sops to ethnic pride, the educational establishment has found another way to secure "a rather small degree of knowledge of, or participation in, public affairs." It is not really new, however. It is simply the old industrial education dressed up in a new disguise.

As in the old industrial pedagogy, the first principle of the contemporary textbooks is that America is not a republican commonwealth. It is merely a society like a dozen others, including outright tyrannies and totalitarian regimes. That, of course, is fundamental to any system of corrupt education in America, as educational leaders had realized more than half a century before. Over the years, however. industrialism had lost its savor. The new America of the textbooks is not an industrial society anymore. It is now, FitzGerald says. a "multiracial. multicultural society" composed of distinct ethnic groups and races, each with its own history. achievements, and heroes--Cesar Chavez for Mexican-Americans, for example. This new textbook America, with its "multiple perspectives," FitzGerald regards as an intellectual advance over the "outdated" view of America as a nation-state. On the other hand, she notes, taking both sides of every issue from sheer inability to decide what is important and what is mere cant, this new textbook America is indistinguishable from Yugoslavia, or, for that matter, the Ottoman Empire. America's future citizens, previously taught to regard themselves as workers, are now taught to regard themselves as ethnic tribesmen--"We're family"--who must learn to live harmoniously with other tribes cohabiting on the North American continent and especially with American Indians, who, being the most tribal, are the most admired figures in the contemporary history texts. Millions of young American's, for example, know more about Ishi, the last "wild Indian"--he was captured in 1911--than they do about the Founding Fathers. A number of contemporary history texts begin with glowing accounts of the Aztecs and the Mayans in line with the basic textbook principle that America is a lot of tribes living in North America. "Poor Columbus," FitzGerald writes. "He is a minor character now, a walk-on in the middle of American history." So, too, is the American republic.

Like the old social studies of "industrial development," the new history texts offer a past shorn of politics and virtually devoid of people. The educational leaders have at long last triumphed over the very idea of political history. In the new textbooks no man and no deed is responsible for anything. History, in the social-science "laboratory" of the textbooks, is now the product. FitzGerald says, of "impersonal institutions and faceless social forces," which she regards as more "democratic" than political history--exactly what it is not and can never be. On the other hand, she is dismayed to discover that "there is no known case of anyone's creating a problem for anyone else" in this wonderland of abstractions. It is impossible for anyone to do so. In the new sociologized history texts, no human being has ever enjoyed sufficient power to do anything for good or ill. Famous men, in this "democratic history," are loci of impotence with illustrious names attached. Watergate, in the latest texts, is something that happened to Richard Nixon, and history in general is a slew of forces, pressures, and disasters inflicted by fate on the high and the mighty, who appear as hapless men of goodwill. "There are," FitzGerald says, "no human agencies left."

To erase every trace of human action, the textbooks perform prodigies of verbal mendacity. In one typical textbook, FitzGerald says, the authors attribute the "problems" facing post-Reconstruction America to "the era of Reconstruction," as if an "era" can possibly cause anything. In the no-action history of the textbooks, abstractions do everything because humans are forbidden to do anything. At all costs the readers must never be allowed to suspect that people are capable of making a difference. Like the Stone Age tribes they are asked to admire, our children are now taught to regard the American past as an incomprehensible destiny as empty of human purpose as the landscape of the moon.

The Success of "Sociology"

With the extinction of political history the educational oligarchy has finally resolved the grand crisis of twentieth-century education: how to prevent the masses from learning what is fit only for their leaders. From the new textbooks, the children of the American republic will never gain knowledge of, or the slightest incentive to participate in, public affairs. Nor will they ever learn from their sociologized texts how to detect "ambition under all its shapes." What the new textbooks teach on every page and with every passive verb is that, for all practical purposes, there is no such human activity as public affairs and no such human motive as political ambition. How can there be when "faceless social forces" make our history and the high and the mighty appear only as the victims of fate? No reader of these degraded texts will ever learn from them how to "judge for themselves what will secure or endanger their freedom." The new textbooks have snuffed out the very idea of human freedom, for that freedom at bottom is precisely the human capacity for action that political history records and that the textbooks are at such pains to conceal. In the "multiracial, multicultural" America of the textbooks every citizen is a tribesman and every tribesman the hapless subject of powers and dominions he does not even know exist. Such is "good citizenship" in the corrupted common schools of contemporary America.

The educational establishment, FitzGerald concludes, has deprived Americans of their "birthright," a personal loss she sincerely laments, but the judgment scarcely covers the ground. What the political history of the textbooks reveals is that a powerful few, gaining control of public education, have been depriving the American republic of citizens, and popular government of a people to defend it. And the American history textbook, so innocent-seeming and inconsequential, has been their well-chosen instrument.

by Walter Karp

What do you think?

Also check out: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen

SpyChips, RFID, and Real ID

2006-12-09T07:04:00.000-08:00

This 11-minute video is a good summary on the coming National ID System. The Real ID act started off as H.R. 418, which passed the House (261-161-11) and went stagnant. It was then attached as a rider on a military spending bill (H.R. 1268) by Representative Sensenbrenner (R) of Wisconsin (the author) and was voted upon (100-0). It was signed into public law (109-13) on May 11, 2005.

Also, check out wethepeoplewillnotbechipped.com.

Why support Hugo Chavez?

2006-12-09T06:41:00.000-08:00

To me, the below video isn't about Hugo Chavez. It's about the power of the people, and their non-violent revolution to regain control of their natural resources from a greedy elite who try to monopolize the natural resources such as oil by teaming up with foreign powers (namely the West) who want to exploit these countries for their natural resources.

Unfortunately, socialistic governments, such as the socialist democracy under the democratically-elected Chavez, have historically failed to bring in a new era of freedom, and instead develop into corrupt permanent governments; that is, an Animal Farm post-revolutionary failure of sorts. Hopefully, Chavez and the Venezuelan people will continue their activism in such a way that concludes with non-governmental organization and voluntary solidarity, rather than governmental corruption and political greed & selfishness. Such a success depends on the people, not on Chavez or the government.

Regardless of how we feel about Chavez and the Venezuelan revolution, the below 75-minute video about it is enlightening.

Here's the description I received: "Hope you all enjoy this movie... It gives you some insight into why Hugo Chavez is so important. If you kids feel moved to support this cause, stop buying gas from anywhere but Citgo... and your purchase will not support terrorists (Saudi Arabia) nor warmongers here in America. It will support literacy, health care, and a better state of living for all in Venezuela. Learn why the people love Chavez, and watch this. Agree or not with Chavez, but watch how the people REVOLTED when he was removed from power. The took the capital and occupied it. The military came to their defense. It was amazing... sh*t we dream of here in Amerikkka, really happening. And our news media just ignored the revolution in South America:"

Power To The People!

Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties

2006-12-09T06:06:00.000-08:00

To repost this, copy and paste the text below:
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Republican Pedophilia

2006-12-09T05:55:00.000-08:00

STOP REPUBLICAN PEDOPHILIA

Republican County Board Candidate Brent Schepp was charged with molesting a 14-year old girl and killed himself three days later.

Republican Congressman Mark Foley abruptly resigned from Congress after “sexually explicit” emails surfaced showing him flirting with a 16-year old boy.

Republican executive Randall Casseday of the conservative Washington Times newspaper was arrested for soliciting sex from a 13-year old girl on the internet.

Republican chairman of the Oregon Christian Coalition Lou Beres confessed to molesting a 13-year old girl.

Republican County Constable Larry Dale Floyd was arrested on suspicion of soliciting sex with an 8-year old girl. Floyd has repeatedly won elections for Denton County, Texas, constable.

Republican judge Mark Pazuhanich pleaded no contest to fondling a 10-year old girl and was sentenced to 10 years probation.

Republican Party leader Bobby Stumbo was arrested for having sex with a 5-year old boy.

Republican petition drive manager Tom Randall pleaded guilty to molesting two girls under the age of 14, one of them the daughter of an associate in the petition business.

Republican County Chairman Armando Tebano was arrested for sexually molesting a 14-year-old girl.

Republican teacher and former city councilman John Collins pleaded guilty to sexually molesting 13 and 14 year old girls.

Republican campaign worker Mark Seidensticker is a convicted child molester.

Republican Mayor Philip Giordano is serving a 37-year sentence in federal prison for sexually abusing 8- and 10-year old girls.

Republican Mayor Tom Adams was arrested for distributing child pornography over the internet.

Republican Mayor John Gosek was arrested on charges of soliciting sex from two 15-year old girls.

Republican County Commissioner David Swartz pleaded guilty to molesting two girls under the age of 11 and was sentenced to 8 years in prison.

Republican legislator Edison Misla Aldarondo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping his daughter between the ages of 9 and 17.

Republican Committeeman John R. Curtain was charged with molesting a teenage boy and unlawful sexual contact with a minor.

Republican anti-abortion activist Howard Scott Heldreth is a convicted child rapist in Florida.

Republican zoning supervisor, Boy Scout leader and Lutheran church president Dennis L. Rader pleaded guilty to performing a sexual act on an 11-year old girl he murdered.

Republican anti-abortion activist Nicholas Morency pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer and offering a bounty to anybody who murders an abortion doctor.

Republican campaign consultant Tom Shortridge was sentenced to three years probation for taking nude photographs of a 15-year old girl.

Republican racist pedophile and United States Senator Strom Thurmond had sex with a 15-year old black girl which produced a child.

Republican pastor Mike Hintz, whom George W. Bush commended during the 2004 presidential campaign, surrendered to police after admitting to a sexual affair with a female juvenile.

Republican legislator Peter Dibble pleaded no contest to having an inappropriate relationship with a 13-year-old girl.

Republican advertising consultant Carey Lee Cramer was sentenced to six years in prison for molesting two 8-year old girls, one of whom appeared in an anti-Gore television commercial.

Republican fundraiser Lawrence E. King, Jr. organized child sex parties at the White House during the 1980s.

Republican lobbyist Craig J. Spence organized child sex parties at the White House during the 1980s.

Republican Congressman Donald “Buz” Lukens was found guilty of having sex with a female minor and sentenced to one month in jail.

Republican fundraiser Richard A. Delgaudio was found guilty of child porn charges and paying two teenage girls to pose for sexual photos.

Republican activist Mark A. Grethen convicted on six counts of sex crimes involving children.

Republican campaign chairman Randal David Ankeney pleaded guilty to attempted sexual assault on a child and was arrested again five years later on the same charge.

Republican Congressman Dan Crane had sex with a female minor working as a congressional page.

Republican activist and Christian Coalition leader Beverly Russell admitted to an incestuous relationship with his step daughter.

Republican Judge Ronald C. Kline was placed under house arrest for child molestation and possession of child pornography.

Republican congressman and anti-gay activist Robert Bauman was charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy he picked up at a gay bar.

Republican Committee Chairman Jeffrey Patti was arrested for distributing a video clip of a 5-year-old girl being raped.

Republican activist Marty Glickman (a.k.a. “Republican Marty”), was taken into custody by Florida police on four counts of unlawful sexual activity with an underage girl and one count of delivering the drug LSD.

Republican legislative aide Howard L. Brooks was charged with molesting a 12-year old boy and possession of child pornography.

Republican Senate candidate John Hathaway was accused of having sex with his 12-year old baby sitter and withdrew his candidacy after the allegations were reported in the media.

Republican preacher Stephen White, who demanded a return to traditional values, was sentenced to jail after offering $20 to a 14-year-old boy for permission to perform oral sex on him.

Republican talk show host Jon Matthews pleaded guilty to exposing his genitals to an 11 year old girl.

Republican anti-gay activist Earl “Butch” Kimmerling was sentenced to 40 years in prison for molesting an 8-year old girl after he attempted to stop a gay couple from adopting her.

Republican Party leader Paul Ingram pleaded guilty to six counts of raping his daughters and served 14 years in federal prison.

Republican election board official Kevin Coan was sentenced to two years probation for soliciting sex over the internet from a 14-year old girl.

Republican politician Andrew Buhr was charged with two counts of first degree sodomy with a 13-year old boy.

Republican legislator Keith Westmoreland was arrested on seven felony counts of lewd and lascivious exhibition to girls under the age of 16 (i.e. exposing himself to children).

Republican anti-abortion activist John Allen Burt was found guilty of molesting a 15-year old girl.

Republican County Councilman Keola Childs pleaded guilty to molesting a male child.

Republican activist John Butler was charged with criminal sexual assault on a teenage girl.

Republican candidate Richard Gardner admitted to molesting his two daughters.

Republican Councilman and former Marine Jack W. Gardner was convicted of molesting a 13-year old girl.

Republican County Commissioner Merrill Robert Barter pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual contact and assault on a teenage boy.

Republican City Councilman Fred C. Smeltzer, Jr. pleaded no contest to raping a 15 year-old girl and served 6-months in prison.

Republican activist Parker J. Bena pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography on his home computer and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and fined $18,000.

Republican parole board officer and former Colorado state representative, Larry Jack Schwarz, was fired after child pornography was found in his possession.

Republican strategist and Citadel Military College graduate Robin Vanderwall was convicted in Virginia on five counts of soliciting sex from boys and girls over the internet.

Republican city councilman Mark Harris, who is described as a “good military man” and “church goer,” was convicted of repeatedly having sex with an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Republican businessman Jon Grunseth withdrew his candidacy for Minnesota governor after allegations surfaced that he went swimming in the nude with four underage girls, including his daughter.

Republican campaign worker, police officer and self-proclaimed reverend Steve Aiken was convicted of having sex with two underage girls.

Republican director of the “Young Republican Federation” Nicholas Elizondo molested his 6-year old daughter and was sentenced to six years in prison.

Republican president of the New York City Housing Development Corp. Russell Harding pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer.

Republican benefactor of conservative Christian groups, Richard A. Dasen Sr., was found guilty of raping a 15-year old girl. Dasen, 62, who is married with grown children and several grandchildren, has allegedly told police that over the past decade he paid more than $1 million to have sex with a large number of young women.

Republican Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the rape of children in Iraqi prisons in order to humiliate their parents into providing information about the anti-American insurgency. See excerpt of one prisoner’s report here and his full report here.

Source:

http://www.armchairsubversive.com/

Exxon Spends Millions to Cast Doubt on Global Warming

2006-12-07T09:57:00.000-08:00

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington and Stephen Castle in Brussels

The world's largest energy company is still spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund European organisations that seek to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on global warming and undermine support for legislation to curb emission of greenhouse gases.

Data collated by a Brussels-based watchdog reveals that ExxonMobil has put money into projects that criticise the Kyoto treaty and question the findings of scientific groups. Environmental campaigners say Texas-based Exxon is trying to influence opinion-makers in Brussels because Europe - rather than the US - is the driving force for action on climate change.

"ExxonMobil invests significant amounts in letting think-tanks, seemingly respectable sources, sow doubts about the need for EU governments to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," said Olivier Hoedeman, of the Corporate Europe Observatory. "Covert funding for climate sceptics is deeply hypocritical because ExxonMobil spends major sums on advertising to present itself as an environmentally responsible company."

It has long been known that the oil giant, which in 2005 recorded an all-time record for quarterly income, has spent millions of dollars to fund climate sceptics. Exactly how much is unknown but some estimates suggest $19m (£9.7m) since 1998.

In its 2005 report, Mr Hoedeman's group details payments by ExxonMobil to two organisations the International Policy Network, which received $130,000 and the Centre for the New Europe (CNE), which received $50,000.

The Observatory suspects Exxon has also funded other groups engaged in undermining legislation. Its report said: "There is mounting evidence that many EU-focused think-tanks are heavily funded by corporations and this raises serious concerns about their agenda and their independence." The two groups cited in the report have long been accused of denying climate change. Greenpeace's ExxonSecret website notes that in 2004 the network issued a press release criticising the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying it had "intentionally exaggerated its estimates of temperature increases by using highly implausible scenarios of future growth in emissions of greenhouse gases".

Greenpeace also lists a 2004 posting on CNE's website which claimed: "The Kyoto Protocol is failing because it is ineffective, costly, and unfair. It is also 'scientifically flawed'."

Last year The Independent revealed how a US-based lobbying group which received substantial funding from Exxon was seeking to develop a Europe-wide network of think-tanks, journalists and major businesses to act against legislation to counter climate change. The organisation claimed its approaches had been flatly rejected.

Kert Davies of Greenpeace said: "Europe is leading the world right now in terms of climate policy. Exxon know that if they can [enlist] lobbyists they may be able to slow things down. That is the tactic right now."

Such is the concern about ExxonMobil that earlier this year the Royal Society, considered Britain's leading scientific academy, wrote to it asking that it stop funding groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence".

Ellen Bisnath, a network spokeswoman, confirmed that the organisation had accepted $130,000 from the oil company. She said: "We are an independent think-tank and we are contributing to the scientific debate on climate change."

Homophobia, Self-Hate, & Sexual Insecurity

2006-12-07T05:03:00.000-08:00

I believe that most homophobics are either self-hating homosexuals in denial or otherwise insecure in their own sexuality.

Research that was done that supports this theory.

"The authors investigated the role of homosexual arousal in exclusively heterosexual men who ad-mitted negative affect toward homosexual individuals. Participants consisted of a group of homophobic men (n = 35) and a group of nonhomophobic men (n = 29); they were assigned to groups on the basis of their scores on the Index of Homophobia (W. W. Hudson & W. A. Ricketts, 1980). The men were exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian videotapes, and changes in penile circumference were monitored. They also completed an Aggression Questionnaire (A. H. Buss & M. Perry, 1992 ). Both groups exhibited increases in penile circumference to the heterosexual and female homosexual videos. Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli. The groups did not differ in aggression. Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies."

Take Back The Night!

2006-12-04T12:21:00.000-08:00

Take Back The Night!

It's about time we started to defend women and put an end to rape violence against women.

Get the druggies out of jail and put the rapists in. Stop enforcing victimless crimes (such as drug use and gun-ownership) and start protecting innocent people from victimization.

What do you think?

Take Back The Night!

Search for crops that can survive global warming

2006-12-04T07:59:00.000-08:00

Search for crops that can survive global warming

What do you think?

Video Of Man Killed By Police Torture While Restrained

2006-12-02T06:55:00.000-08:00

See this video and more police misconduct.

The use of electric shock as a method of torture was first documented in Nazi, Germany, but today it is still used as an acceptable use of ... all » torture in the United States.

In Gwinnett County, Georgia, an un-edited police videotape shows 31-year-old Deacon Frederick Williams being struck with a TASER five times in 43 seconds, just 4 minutes after being led into the jail.

He was handcuffed behind his back and in leg restraints, following an epileptic seizure at his home; an ambulance was called by his wife and son, but the police arrived first. His last words were: "Don't kill me, man. Don't kill me."

No charges have been filed in the torture / murder; the County DA refused to show this video to a Grand Jury, even though another man in custody was murdered just months earlier after being tortured with a TASER by the same police.

While the Bush administration seeks to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions to allow the torture for foreign detainees, few people realize that torture is already 100% legal in the US when a US citizen is tortured by American State or Federal authorities.

The torture standards now under debate relate only to foreign detainees, who presently retain far more rights than any US citizen. However, the Bush administration has refused to address the documented and widespread torture of its own citizens of which its own officials are fully aware.

See this video and more police misconduct.

War As Self-Defense?

2006-11-29T19:47:00.000-08:00

War As Self-Defense?

http://scottsafetyshop.com/blog/?p=94

Here's an excerpt:

"Politicians and warmongers call war 'self-defense' as an excuse and a disguise for it. Just like all motivations, the motivations for war come from selfishness, governmental corruption, and such. Politicians and the leadership couldn't care less about the safety of the people that they claim to defend."

What do you think?

Police fire 50 rounds, kill unarmed groom

2006-11-27T16:46:00.000-08:00

Police fire 50 rounds, kill groom on day of wedding:

Police say no gun was found in victims' car

Police say shooting stemmed from undercover operation inside the club

Relatives say dead man was Sean Bell, due to get married Saturday

Police shot Bell and two other men as they left strip club

CNN article

Click Here To View More Police Misconduct

NSTA Rejects Free Global Warming DVDs

2006-11-27T16:36:00.000-08:00

The below is a letter written by Laurie David:

Science a la Joe Camel

By Laurie David

Sunday, November 26, 2006

At hundreds of screenings this year of "An Inconvenient Truth," the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie.

The producers of former vice president Al Gore's film about global warming, myself included, certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for educators to use in their classrooms. It seemed like a no-brainer.

The teachers had a different idea: Thanks but no thanks, they said.

In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other "special interests" might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn't want to offer "political" endorsement of the film; and they saw "little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members" in accepting the free DVDs.

Gore, however, is not running for office, and the film's theatrical run is long since over. As for classroom benefits, the movie has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading climate scientists worldwide, and is required viewing for all students in Norway and Sweden.

Still, maybe the NSTA just being extra cautious. But there was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp.

That's the same Exxon Mobil that for more than a decade has done everything possible to muddle public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort to solve it. It has run ads in leading newspapers (including this one) questioning the role of manmade emissions in global warming, and financed the work of a small band of scientific skeptics who have tried to challenge the consensus that heat-trapping pollution is drastically altering our atmosphere. The company spends millions to support groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute that aggressively pressure lawmakers to oppose emission limits.

It's bad enough when a company tries to sell junk science to a bunch of grown-ups. But, like a tobacco company using cartoons to peddle cigarettes, Exxon Mobil is going after our kids, too.

And it has been doing so for longer than you may think. NSTA says it has received $6 million from the company since 1996, mostly for the association's "Building a Presence for Science" program, an electronic networking initiative intended to "bring standards-based teaching and learning" into schools, according to the NSTA Web site. Exxon Mobil has a representative on the group's corporate advisory board. And in 2003, NSTA gave the company an award for its commitment to science education.

So much for special interests and implicit endorsements.

In the past year alone, according to its Web site, Exxon Mobil's foundation gave $42 million to key organizations that influence the way children learn about science, from kindergarten until they graduate from high school.

And Exxon Mobil isn't the only one getting in on the action. Through textbooks, classroom posters and teacher seminars, the oil industry, the coal industry and other corporate interests are exploiting shortfalls in education funding by using a small slice of their record profits to buy themselves a classroom soapbox.

NSTA's list of corporate donors also includes Shell Oil and the American Petroleum Institute (API), which funds NSTA's Web site on the science of energy. There, students can find a section called "Running on Oil" and read a page that touts the industry's environmental track record -- citing improvements mostly attributable to laws that the companies fought tooth and nail, by the way -- but makes only vague references to spills or pollution. NSTA has distributed a video produced by API called "You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel," a shameless pitch for oil dependence.

The education organization also hosts an annual convention -- which is described on Exxon Mobil's Web site as featuring "more than 450 companies and organizations displaying the most current textbooks, lab equipment, computer hardware and software, and teaching enhancements." The company "regularly displays" its "many . . . education materials" at the exhibition. John Borowski, a science teacher at North Salem High School in Salem, Ore., was dismayed by NSTA's partnerships with industrial polluters when he attended the association's annual convention this year and witnessed hundreds of teachers and school administrators walk away with armloads of free corporate lesson plans.

Along with propaganda challenging global warming from Exxon Mobil, the curricular offerings included lessons on forestry provided by Weyerhaeuser and International Paper, Borowski says, and the benefits of genetic engineering courtesy of biotech giant Monsanto.

"The materials from the American Petroleum Institute and the other corporate interests are the worst form of a lie: omission," Borowski says. "The oil and coal guys won't address global warming, and the timber industry papers over clear-cuts."

An API memo leaked to the media as long ago as 1998 succinctly explains why the association is angling to infiltrate the classroom: "Informing teachers/students about uncertainties in climate science will begin to erect barriers against further efforts to impose Kyoto-like measures in the future."

So, how is any of this different from showing Gore's movie in the classroom? The answer is that neither Gore nor Participant Productions, which made the movie, stands to profit a nickel from giving away DVDs, and we aren't facing millions of dollars in lost business from limits on global-warming pollution and a shift to cleaner, renewable energy.

It's hard to say whether NSTA is a bad guy here or just a sorry victim of tight education budgets. And we don't pretend that a two-hour movie is a substitute for a rigorous science curriculum. Students should expect, and parents should demand, that educators present an honest and unbiased look at the true state of knowledge about the challenges of the day.

As for Exxon Mobil -- which just began a fuzzy advertising campaign that trumpets clean energy and low emissions -- this story shows that slapping green stripes on a corporate tiger doesn't change the beast within. The company is still playing the same cynical game it has for years.

While NSTA and Exxon Mobil ponder the moral lesson they're teaching with all this, there are 50,000 DVDs sitting in a Los Angeles warehouse, waiting to be distributed. In the meantime, Mom and Dad may want to keep a sharp eye on their kids' science homework.

laurie@lauriedavid.com

Laurie David, a producer of "An Inconvenient Truth," is a Natural Resources Defense Council trustee and founder of StopGlobalWarming.org.

While Poverty Persists, There Is No Freedom

2006-11-26T15:53:00.000-08:00

This is a link to a letter by Nelson Mendela:

Nelson Mandela: While Poverty Persists, There Is No Freedom

Other quotes by Nelson Mandela:

"No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones."

"No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."

"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."

"I must deal immediately and at some length with the question of violence. Some of the things so far told to the Court are true and some are untrue. I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the Whites."

"During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

Tyrone Brown In Jail For Life Over Marijuana?

2006-11-21T16:58:00.000-08:00

Tyrone Brown is serving a lifetime sentence in Texas over smoking marijuana - he has already spent 16 YEARS in jail!

Tyrone Brown was featured on ABC TV's 20/20 show on Nov 3, 2006. You can view the 20/20 Webcast of Tyrone's segment here:

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2632423

The "justice" system is broken. We need a revolution.

Michael Richards (a.k.a. 'Kramer' from Seinfeld) Racist

2006-11-20T16:08:00.000-08:00

LOS ANGELES - Michael Richards stunned a comedy club audience, shouting racial epithets at people who heckled him during a stand-up routine.

The 57-year-old actor-comedian, best known for playing Jerry Seinfeld's eccentric neighbor Kramer on the hit TV show "Seinfeld," was performing at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood Friday night when he launched into the verbal rampage, according to video posted on TMZ.com.

The tirade apparently began after two black audience members started shouting at him that he wasn't funny.

Diamonds Are Forever

2006-11-17T08:34:00.000-08:00

Kanye West's song, Diamonds from Sierra Leone, won the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Rap Song. The original song is about Roc-A-Fella, and the chorus "Throw ya diamonds in the sky" refers to the Roc-A-Fella hand sign, which is in the shape of a diamond. After making the song, Kanye West learned more about the plight of West African children who mine conflict diamonds and die in civil wars financed by diamonds and decided he would use the video to get this message across. He also recorded a remix of the song, featuring Jay-Z, where he talks about conflict diamonds. The remix was included on the album, whereas the original version was included as a bonus track. Here is the video to the original:

A conflict diamond is a diamond mined in a war zone to fund war. Even with regulations in place, you might be purchasing conflict diamonds that kill children. Don't buy mined diamonds.

Additionally, diamonds fall in the category of useless overpriced material crap that the powers that be push on us, and that we foolishly overvalue. In turn, we waste our money and often go in debt just to have a little bit of this overpriced natural resource, thus enslaving ourselves to the pseudo-capitalistic status quo. Thanks to our pathetic inability to resist commercials, while our communities live in poverty and we waste our wealth & potential, diamond manufacturers get rich by enslaving and abusing women and children.

Food Not Bombs Connecticut

2006-11-16T16:37:00.000-08:00

The following link is for a Google group for Food Not Bombs in Connecticut:

Google Group: Food Not Bombs - Connecticut

"Food Not Bombs is one of the fastest growing revolutionary movements and is gaining momentum throughout the world. There are hundreds of autonomous chapters sharing free vegetarian food with hungry people and protesting war and poverty. Food Not Bombs is not a charity. This energetic grassroots movement is active throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. Food Not Bombs is organizing for peace and an end to the occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. For over 25 years the movement has worked to end hunger and has supported actions to stop the globalization of the economy, restrictions to the movements of people, end exploitation and the destruction of the earth." -FoodNotBombs.net

Subscribe to Food Not Bombs - Connecticut

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Browse Archives

Where Your Money Goes (U.S.)

2006-11-16T09:13:00.000-08:00

That is why we must avoid paying taxes. Don't report your income to the IRS. Avoid buying so-called luxuries that are taxed in your state. (By ordering products from out-of-state, you can usually avoid paying state sales taxes.) If you're really brave, send the taxes to a charity of your choice, and send the IRS a note telling them what you did and why. If we voluntarily pay taxes to a plutocratic government that spends our money to kill innocent people, for the sake of military profits, then we are also guilty! For example, the blood of the over 600,000 Iraqis killed by the Iraq war is on the hands of the American tax-payers.

Boycott taxes! It's our money anyway, and they have no right to take it. Taxation is theft.

"Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." -Henry David Thoreau

John Stockwell: Crimes of the CIA (recorded in 1988)

2006-11-15T13:35:00.000-08:00

John Stockwell: Crimes of the CIA (recorded in 1988):

John Stockwell, an ex-CIA station chief, details the many illegal, unethical, immoral, and genocidal things the CIA has done to the world and to the American people. John Stockwell is the highest ranking official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned. This speech was given in 1988. He is author of the book, "In Search of Enemies"

Land of the Free?

2006-11-13T15:58:00.000-08:00

LJ Heiss - Land of the Free?