Slavery Still Exists on Our Planet

Published October 1, 2012 | By Iowadawg

It was 130 degrees when I was first introduced to the brick kilns of Nepal. In these severe temperatures, men, women, and children — whole families, in fact — were surrounded by a dense cloud of dust while mechanically stacking bricks on their heads, carrying them, 18 at a time, from the scorching kilns to trucks hundreds of yards away.

These are slaves. Deadened by monotony and exhaustion, they worked without speaking, repeating the same task 16 hours a day. They took no rest for food or water, no bathroom breaks — although their dehydration suppressed their need to urinate.

Around the world human traffickers trick many people into slavery by false promises of good jobs or good education, only to find themselves forced to work without pay, under the threat of violence. Trapped by phony debt, these slaves are hunted by local police and private security guards if they try to escape. Sometimes slaves don’t even understand that they’re enslaved, despite people working 16 or 17 hours a day with no pay. They’re simply used to it as something they’ve been doing their whole lives. Their bodies grow weak and vulnerable to disease, but they have nothing to compare their experience to.

For the last 28 years I have documented people in more than 100 countries on six continents. In 2009, at the Vancouver Peace Summit, I met a supporter of Free the Slaves, an NGO dedicated to eradicating modern-day slavery; weeks later, I flew down to Los Angeles and met with the director of Free the Slaves; thus began my journey into exploring modern-day slavery.

Oddly, I’d been to most of the locations where I started photographing slavery many times before. I even considered some of them homes-away-from-home. But there can be dark corners in familiar places.

These are not images of “problems.” They’re images of people. There are 27 million slaves in the world today: That’s more than double the number of people taken from Africa during the entire transatlantic slave trade. A hundred and fifty years ago, an average agricultural slave cost over three times the average yearly wage of an American worker, about US$50,000 in today’s money. Yet now, entire families can be enslaved for generations over a debt as small as $18. Slavery is illegal everywhere, but it exists all over the world.

Go and read everything and see all the pictures, slavery does exist on our planet!

Now go HERE.

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U.S. Army secretly sprayed St Louis with radioactive particles during Cold War to test chemical warfare, researcher claims

The United States Military conducted top secret experiments on the citizens of St. Louis, Missouri, for years, exposing them to dangerous compounds, a researcher has claimed.

Professor Lisa Martino-Taylor, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has spent years tracking down declassified documents to uncover the lengths which the US experimented on people without their knowing.

She has accrued detailed descriptions as well as photographs of the spraying, which took place as part of Manhattan-Rochester Coalition, which was an operation that dispersed zinc cadmium silfide particles over the general population, a compound that was presented as completely safe.

But Professor Martino-Taylor says that it wasn’t just the ‘harmless’ compound, radioactive particles were also sprayed on the unwitting public, predominantly in low-income and minority communities.

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Curious appetites: surgery and the foreign body

In 1939, the first stand in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England was dedicated to “foreign bodies”. This display might, at first, seem merely a cabinet of curiosities, but it so intrigued one Irish surgeon that he wrote an article on the topic. Published in the British Medical Journal, Ian Fraser’s text emphasised the importance of foreign body collections, claiming that these were not just oddities but told the “story of the human body”.

Many of the specimens described in Fraser’s article have since been lost, but other medical collections contain similar exhibits. Most famous perhaps is the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum in the USA, but such objects are also found in British pathology collections. Their location among human tissue specimens raises a number of interesting questions as to why (and how) they were collected, and how these displays were interpreted by collectors. Foreign bodies are often the only non-human specimens in pathology collections, indicating the ambiguous position they hold: a foreign body is not part of the human body, but neither can it be entirely separated from the place it was found.

The term foreign body, as applied to a substance of external origin present within the human body, seems to have entered medical language in the middle of the 18th century. The number of texts on the topic rapidly increased until 1880, followed by another peak around 1918. Often articles described techniques for the removal of such objects, the development of which certainly seems to have been a key point of interest in the early 20th century. Much of Chevalier Jackson’s work was dedicated to teaching his students the safe use of the newly available oesophagoscope and bronchoscope (Jackson developed his own in the 1890s). Before the introduction of such instruments, dangerous surgery was often required.

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Modern warfare is expensive. But it is about to become less so

MONEY, as Cicero observed more than two millennia ago, is the sinews of war. That is still true today. But lately, from the American point of view, things have got ridiculous. Guided missiles, in particular, are ludicrously expensive. A Tomahawk cruise missile costs about $1.5m, and even the Hellfire, an air-to-ground rocket that weighs a mere 50kg, is $115,000 a pop. In exchange for, say, an enemy tank, that is probably a fair price to pay. To knock out a pick-up truck crewed by a few lightly armed guerrillas, however, it seems a little expensive, and using its shoulder-fired cousin the Javelin ($147,000) to kill individual soldiers in foxholes, as is often the case in Afghanistan, is positively profligate. Clearly, something has to change. And changing it is.

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$$$$$$ Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Statement on Corporate Offshore Profit Shifting

…America stands on the edge of a fiscal cliff. This challenge lends new urgency to a topic this subcommittee has long investigated: how U.S. citizens and corporations have used loopholes and gimmicks to avoid paying taxes. This subcommittee has demonstrated in hearings and comprehensive reports how various schemes have helped shift income to offshore tax havens and avoid U.S. taxes. The resulting loss of revenue is one significant cause of the budget deficit, and adds to the tax burden that ordinary Americans bear.

U.S. multinational corporations benefit from the security and stability of the U.S. economy, the productivity and expertise of U.S. workers and the strength of U.S. infrastructure to develop enormously profitable products here in the United States. But, too often, too many of these corporations use complex structures, dubious transactions and legal fictions to shift the profits from those products overseas, avoiding the taxes that help support our security, stability and productivity.

The share of federal tax revenue contributed by corporations has plummeted in recent decades…

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Project Veritas Exposes SEIU Political Corruption

Newark, NJ – Project Veritas has released a new video exposing evidence of a quid pro quo relationship between Senator Robert Menendez and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

“The purpose of this investigation is to demonstrate the clear conflict of interest that exists when an elected representative of the American people is bought and paid for by organized labor,” says O’Keefe. “As we demonstrated in July, these union bosses don’t have the taxpayers’ interests in mind. Their primary objective is to get more public funding for make-work projects to increase compulsory dues and then use those dues to purchase political influence.”

In a previous report released in July, top New York union bosses were caught in candid discussions regarding a federally funded program known as “Green Jobs, Green New York,” with one leader calling much of the $112 million program “bullshit.”

“This is significant because labor unions are some of the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer-funded jobs,” says O’Keefe. “If they’re intentionally propping up paper jobs, then they’re complicit in the fleecing of taxpayers.”

The latest video from Project Veritas captures Newark SEIU President Rahaman Muhammad laying out in explicit terms the nature of the relationship between his union and lawmakers like Democrat Senator Robert Menendez.

Project Veritas: “So that means you’re going to get the union dues…”

SEIU: “Exactly!”

Project Veritas: “…to your campaign.”

SEIU: “Exactly! It benefits them.”

Chinese wind farm group to sue Obama

A Chinese-owned company that has been blocked from building wind farms near a US navy test site in Oregon plans to sue President Barack Obama, arguing that his order to stop the project was unconstitutional.

Ralls, a company owned by two Chinese executives, believes the president violated constitutional protections on property ownership and legal process.

The company is seeking to have the order overturned, or be paid compensation for its losses.

A person familiar with the case said: “The president is not above the law, even if national security is involved.”

The case is the latest sign of tension over US openness to Chinese investment, which has been called into question after election campaign rhetoric from Mr Obama and Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger, about standing up to China over trade.

No one has ever before sued the US president over this type of ruling, but Ralls argues that Mr Obama exceeded his powers when he blocked the project and without giving a detailed justification.

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Liberal spin on the book and the author. Will be seeing more of this.

Matt Bissonnette lied and dissed POTUS.

In Matthew Bissonnette’s book, “No Easy Day” detailing the UBL hit in Abbottabad, Pakistan. He makes a statement that he and his team were invited to the White House by President Obama, but that it never happened. He Lied.Matt failed to mention in his book that a private meeting with the President at the White House did happen. On January 21, 2012, Bissonnette brought four guests with him to the White House, assuming those guests are his immediate family according to White House visitor logs.The White House had some other interesting guests during that visit as well. Mr. James Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase Bank also brought his entire immediate family on that mid-Saturday private meeting.The White House released a press pool report for that weekend, stating that the President would not be making any public appearances that entire weekend.The White House had a total of 14 visitors that Saturday. Most revealing, is that all 14 guests had their appointments made on the 18th of January, three days before their visits. In short, they gained access to the White House almost immediately, which shows they were invited and not your typical tourist visitors.

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The Real Reason the Middle East is Rioting

Within hours of the killings this week of four Americans diplomats, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, in Libya, more than a dozen blog posts popped up around the internet asking, “Who is Sam Bacile?” It was a natural question to pose: “Bacile” is the pseudonym of the filmmaker behind The Innocence of Muslims, an American-made video whose insulting depiction of the prophet Mohammed appears, at this point, to have incited anti-U.S. riots in Benghazi, Cairo, Tehran, and Sana’a, Yemen. It now appears, however, that the attack on the diplomatic mission in Libya was a planned assault by religious extremists, who used the protests as cover to murder the four Americans. As truly awful as his film is, “Sam Bacile” appears to be at least something of a patsy. Moreover, there’s another important way in which the American media and political classes, in their focus on The Innocence of Muslims, have missed the forest for the trees.

A scene from the YouTube version of the “Innocence of Muslims,” which has been seen as the spark for recent attacks on U.S. diplomatic posts in the Muslim world. Is food insecurity the tinder for this blaze?

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