Showing posts with label Global Research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Global Research. Show all posts

Friday, 20 December 2019

The Hungry Keep Feeding Capitalism.


       Surely if in the richest capitalist country on the planet there are millions of the population going hungry, it should be blatantly obvious that the capitalist system doesn't work for the people. Country after country sees continuing and rising poverty and homelessness, and still we are sold the myth that capitalism is the best economic system for this planet. Do we honestly believe that this system of inequality and injustice and growing poverty and hunger is the best that the human mind can come up with? Ask anybody if they can think of a better way of distributing the wealth that we create and I'm sure they will come up with an answer, but we put that aside and accept the lies and illusions spun by the rich and powerful parasite class. Why?
This from Global Research: 


      In July of 2013, Rose Aguilar wrote a wonderful article for al-Jazeera (1), in which she discussed the dire hunger crisis that envelops the US today. In her article, she brought back a memory of something I had long forgotten, an event that so outraged the American public that the government was temporarily forced to respond with more humane policies. That event was a 1968 CBS special hour-long documentary called Hunger in America, in which viewers literally watched a hospitalized child die of starvation. Nixon responded because the public outrage left him no choice, but Reagan quickly dismantled those improvements.
      When Reagan came to power in 1980, there were 200 food banks in the US; today there are more than 40,000, all overwhelmed with demand and forced to ration their dispersals. Before 1980, one out of every 50 Americans was dependent on food stamps. Today, it is one out of four. Before Reagan, there were 10 million hungry Americans; today there are more than 50 million and increasing. A substantial part of the Great Transformation included not only tax cuts and other benefits for the wealthy, but a simultaneous massive reduction in budgets for social programs – in spite of the fact that Reagan and the secret government were creating the conditions that would desperately require those same social programs.
     That 50 million hungry Americans today includes the 25% of all children in the US who go to sleep hungry every night. About 25% of the American population today cannot buy sufficient food to remain healthy, with most of these being hungry for at least three months during each year. It is so bad that many college students have resorted to what we call “dumpster-diving” – looking in garbage bins for edible food.
      In 2013, America’s largest food bank in New York City delivered more than 35 million Kgs of food, and still 1.5 million of the city’s 8 million inhabitants are hungry. After that CBS documentary and prior to Reagan’s appearance, New York had almost no need for emergency food services, and had only 28 food agencies. Today that number is more than 1,000. The problem is so serious that many agencies fear that desperation for food will lead to increasing violence.
     By contrast, only about 5% of Chinese said there had been times during the previous 12 months when they had been hungry, while in the US that number is now 25% and still rising. Maura Daly, a social agency spokesperson said,
      “People have a lot of misimpressions about hunger in America. People think it’s associated with homelessness when, in fact, it is working families, it’s kids, it’s the disabled.”
        Perhaps even more alarming was the release of study data in the middle of 2014 documenting that 25% of the US military members are also dependent on food stamps, food banks and other civilian welfare projects for their survival. After compiling four years of data, the nation’s leading domestic hunger-relief charity, released its largest and most comprehensive study which showed, among other things that 15% of all Americans rely on food banks for all their basic nutrition. In other words, no other source of food. But perhaps the most shocking revelation was that 25% of military personnel were in the same financial position. Of course, the Pentagon was quick to take issue with the study’s methodology, using statistical babble to cloak their embarrassment.
       Across the other side of the planet, India, another super rich capitalist country, there is an army of hungry mouths while the wealth piles up in the bank accounts of the few.

Tuesday, 23 August 2016

USA Incarcerated Manufacturing Corporation.

         This post is to remind us that there is a prisoners strike planned for September 9th, in America's prisons, and why. Because of the utter appalling conditions, injustice and corruption of the whole prison system this strike demands our support. Caging animals is is seen as wrong, but we still tolerate the caging of humans, why?
           I doubt that the general public are aware that the so called leader of the free world, The Good Ol' US of A, is also the leader in incarcerating its own people. The US leads the world in nuclear power, and in general military power, to quell any resistance to its hegemony from overseas, but it also has a brutal system to quell any resistance by its own people to the tyranny of its savage system of capitalism.
         The American prison system is one big corporate money making machine, which recruits from the poorest and most disadvantaged sections of its communities. The judiciary in America is part and parcel of that corporate recruiting system. Once incorporated into its caged workshops, you are there for years, you lose all rights, and become a slave in one of the largest corporate money making enterprises in America. No union rights, no holidays, no days off, and punishment if you don't work hard enough.
      The U.S. imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. 
1. The United States has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners.
2. The total incarcerated population in the U.S. is a staggering 2.4 million — a 500% increase over the past 30 years. 
3. One in every 108 adults was in prison or jail in 2012.
4. One in 28 American children has a parent behind bars.  
5. At the end of 2007, 1 in 31 adults was behind bars, on probation or on parole.
6. Currently, 65 million Americans have a criminal record.
7. There are more people behind bars today for a drug offense than there were in 1980 for all offenses combined.
More facts HERE:
         The American corporate world have more or less taken over the prison system and are working it to create massive profits. It has nothing to do with punishment or rehabilitation, it is all to do with increasing the numbers of slaves and maximising the profits. 
Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don’t have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.
Read the full article HERE



Episode 198: This week we bring you another installment of our Which Side: Lectures series. This presentation was given by the Tucson ABC on August 2, 2016 in Salt Lake City, Utah at the Boing! Anarchist Collective. The Lecture is called: “Prisoner Support for Prison Abolition: National Prison Strike September 2016“.
In this lecture, members of the Tucson Anarchist Black Cross discuss past and present anti-prison struggles in the United States. The aim of the lecture is to provide historical context to mass incarceration, detail past struggles against prisons and policing by prisoners and folks on the outside alike, and to discuss current forms of creative resistance to the U.S. prison system. The conclusion highlights ongoing efforts to coordinate a national prison strike set to begin September 9th of this year, and note how an abolitionist perspective can inform effective prisoner support work. #fsd
You can find out more about Which Side: Lectures and all the other podcasts in the collective by visiting: http://whichsidecollective.org
Help Contribute: Anyone is free to contribute lectures they’ve recorded from events they’ve attended or speeches they have given. We actually encourage it… So please send your audio or video recordings to Lectures@WhichSideCollective.org #fsd
Episode Sponsor:
This weeks episode is sponsored by Prisoner Support!
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