Land Of The Free!!!!!

       It's common currency for the West, with America leading the charge, to shout about injustice, corruption and breach of human rights in other countries, but never batting an eyelid about the stinking cruel, corrupt and unjust prison system right in their own patch. The Greek prison system recently reached exploding point, however, America, "Land of the Free", leads the world in the percentage of its population that it locks up in its cruel privatised prison system.

 

      Prisons are for intimidation, control, repression, and now for profit, absolutely nothing to do with protecting society, justice or reform. This recently published letter from a prisoner in America highlights the vicious brutality and injustice of the system, with prisoners being held for long terms just waiting for their case to be heard.

This from Inside Out Alliance:

Dear IOA,
       Hope this letter finds you in best of health and spirits, as for myself I’m making it. I’ve been trying to get my writ of habeas corpus or motion to dismiss…accepted, but all have been denied without actually telling a fact. Each one of my writs or motions have been held under my constitutional right, each effort has been denied, which violates my constitutional rights and also shows due prejudice of the justice system in Durham county. Why, because I’m black.
       Each day I hear a person getting locked up for 2 grams of crack or heroin with habitual felon status and 28 grams or 14 grams with a gun and they got caught with the drugs or both and their bond is 50 for 14 grams of heroin no gun or 28 grams with a gun…I was never arrested around near any cocaine. By an informant. No arrest, still only accused. No lab work ever came back yet and now the charge is a year old. My bond was a million now for the last 5 months $500,000 bond. 7th Amendment is no excessive bond, cruel and unusual punishment. That’s why I asked your help and the Southern Coalition. My roommate and I watched your protest on the 13th of June, as we watched so did the same officers that accuse the lie on me and him. They watched all of you in the green Chevrolet, the Black F-150s, the white Ford work van, the black run down Crown Victoria with the windows down as you guys have now got their attention. I pray you watch your back for the next 4 to 8 months for just as my charge of a lie got me sitting here, I hope you better luck, if not your bond will be 1 million. Best of luck to all of you and I hope you keep your eyes open for all they do is create lies of past charges, and set up, and if you have a record of any kind they’re going to create a charge. So I ask again watch your backs you won’t know anything till they run up on you with a search warrant or indictment for some charge you done 15 years ago, but you will see them again. Three of them are S.J. Newton, D.T. Rose, and T. Thomas. There’s 18 in all, but you will learn they are a bunch of set-up artists and crooks. For I still don’t have no receipt for the last $150 they took from me when I was arrested on this charge by S.J. Newton. He still hasn’t turned it in or he paid his light bill with my money. There was no drug taken from me when they arrested me so my money since I am Black is theirs. Their word is all that counts and I’m going to sit in their jail because they can do it as long as they want for I have no help to get anyone else to come see me. My lawyer is —-, number is —-, call him tell him I said come see me. Just so you will know you call I will tell him about who I saw on June 13th…He works with District Attorney Nicholas Yates on my charge. I called both of them on the issue and haven’t seen the courtroom since they have been judge shopping ever since. This is why I asked to get the Southern Coalition to come see me. I sent the notarized affidavit of my action to you for record as well as the same copy I’m going to send the Southern Coalition. I ask again please help.
Y. B.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Private Prisons, Corruption And Inhumanity.

        Prisons are always degrading and humiliating, they are the state's attempt to keep control. In spite of centuries of campaigns fighting for prison reform, they are still an anachronism in democracy. Far from being places for "reform" they are cruel and inhumane and often brutal places. Here in the "developed" and advanced capitalist West, as we are being hit by austerity, which translates into less resources for prisons, and though crime figures are falling, we are seeing ever increasing numbers being imprisoned, most prisons are facing overcrowding. The UK is among the highest prison inmates per head of the population in Europe. However we would have to sink much lower in our inhumanity to reach the level of Greece. 

This from Community:

      More than 30 men were crammed into the cell, locked up night and day for weeks or months. Without enough bunks, many slept on the floor. The windows were painted over, blocking out the sun, and the air was thick with cigarette smoke and the reek of the one toilet everyone shared.

    But what might come as the biggest surprise about this prison was its location: In Greece, squarely in Europe. That’s where former prisoner Giorgos Aslanis spent about three months a roughly 40 sq. meter (400 square feet) police holding cell in the northern town of Serres. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in October that conditions in the cell broke European laws against inhuman or degrading punishment and awarded him 8,000 euros ($11,000) in damages.

Read the full article HERE: 

        However, for the real professionals at dehumanising  people and making billions of dollars in the process, you have to go to that leader of the free world, the land of the free, the good ol' US of A. America leads the world in locking up its own people, though it has only 5% of the world's population, it has 25% of the world's prison population. Privatised prisons are probably the pinnacle of corrupt capitalism, Billions of dollars made from enslaving people for anything from vagrancy to drug use. Greedy shareholders growing rich on the misery of society's vulnerable and unfortunates.

Published on Nov 7, 2013

     Today the US is home to 5% of the world's population but a quarter of the world's prisoners. It also has the highest rate of youth imprisonment and on any given day there are more than 70,000 youths in detention. And the biggest winners of this mass incarceration? The for-profit prison companies whose business models essentially depend on locking more and more people up.

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Where we got our information for this video:
https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/ban...
http://ir.correctionscorp.com/phoenix...
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/24/1512766...
https://www.aclu.org/blog/prisoners-r...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMa5od...
http://www.eastidahonews.com/2012/06/...
http://boisestatepublicradio.org/post...
http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/ar...
https://www.aclu.org/cca
https://www.aclu.org/maps/sexual-abus...
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-new...
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/judge-...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08...
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/2...
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/sh...
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/inde...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/natio...
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opin...
http://en.avaaz.org/1300/obama-martin...

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Inch By Inch, You Lose Control.

      Like a tape-loop message, I keep repeating, that we are marching quietly towards full blown fascism. It won't be recognised by the jackboots on the streets, nor just by people being locked up for not doing as they are bid. No, it will be much more subtle than that. Just slowly bit by bit, the state introducing ever stronger legislating to control every bit of your life. The establishment making more and more arbitrary decision over our heads. They have already neutered the spontaneity the trade unions by legislation, and tied protesters in legal loops. There other things that pass almost unnoticed, but show state power acting out what can only be called dictatorial acts, unchallenged. For example, the case of the young man how decided to show his disgust at the elitism in the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, by swimming across the Thames as the race was in progress. What it boils down to is that he disrupted a sporting event. It now turns out that he is to be deported, having lived here for 12 years and has a wife and child here, he is to be torn apart from his family, and the child will lose its father. Ask yourself, if he had disrupted a darts match, or a snooker match, would he have suffered the same brutal punishment? I think not, this was Oxford and Cambridge having their annual rowing get together, and these bloody commoners must be taught a lesson. In another case the powers that be, forced a woman by court order to have a caesarian operation and her child immediately taken into care. What makes this even more bizarre is the fact that the woman was an Italian, visiting this country. Her lawyer described the case as unprecedented, and John Hemmimg, Liberal Democrat MP, went further and stated “This has a fair chance of being the worst case of human rights abuse I've ever seen.

    Surreptitiously, the all knowing, all powerful, all for your own good, state, reaches in and controls every aspect of your life, and it can do it at will, through its various agents. Who do you believe has the right, the benevolent character, and the humanity to take control of your life? No doubt your answer will be nobody, then why do we tolerate the faceless ones in nice suits, to control all avenues of our life? 

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Bedroom-tax - Poll-tax!!

      We in the UK are heading for some real battles and should be preparing now. Come April there will be the implementation of the "bedroom tax"  on top of increasing food poverty and fuel poverty. This "bedroom tax" will put three options before all those in social housing, if they are deemed to have an extra bedroom. As an "under-occupier" you can pay extra, take in a lodger or get out, non-compliance will trigger eviction notices. This is probably the most vicious attack in decades on the ordinary people of this country. The legislation comes into force and they are well aware that there isn't enough right sized accommodation to fulfil that legislation, but that won't stop them going for evictions. Even if there were enough right-sized apartments for everybody, but there isn't, the monumental upheaval to people's lives, sick, disabled, elderly, young families, as they are shunted around to the satisfaction of some millionaire cabal's bullshit economics, is inhumane, unjust and downright vindictive. This is "poll-tax model two.
       While our millionaire parasites that lord it in those Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption are spewing out crap about it all being necessary and "for our own good" a UN official, Mr De Schutter, the UN's Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has stated that the explosion of people in the UK, depending on food handouts could represent a human rights abuse. He points to the dramatic rise in the number of food banks as evidence that governments had "failed in their responsibility not to leave the poorest behind". Here in the UK the number of food banks as exploded tenfold  since the start of the recession.
       This is the UK today, massive fuel poverty with energy prices still rising. Food poverty with food banks the only growth industry in town. A third of children living in poverty. Unacceptable unemployment among our young people. Being forced through "workfare", to work for free in some tax dodging corporate greed machine. Now the threat of evictions being heaped on the shoulders of the already struggling public.
        These are drastic times and drastic action by the organised public is the only answer. We may not yet be where the people of Greece are as far as deprivation is concerned, but we are moving inexorably in that direction, it is only a matter of time. It is inevitable, unless we the public, by mass organised resistance, come together and drive our society in a different direction. Another world is possible. 

POWER CUTS, a daily reality in Greece by docupraxi

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THE WORLD IS PROTESTING AGAINST THE STATE.

        Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, France are in the news with unrest, people taking to the streets, mass protests, but  one country that doesn't get much coverage by that babbling brook of bullshit, the media, is Belarus. In that country the president, Lukashenko, has been in power since 1994 and at recent elections, of the 109 winning candidates all were from pro Lukashenk parties, it is not unusual for ballot papers to have just one name. His human rights record is so atrocious that he was banned from appearing at the London 2012 Olympics. Every action has to be sanctioned by the state, even distributing leaflets can have you in prison as it can be deemed "illegal mass media production". A simple act like attending a punk concert can see you arrested. Repression is brutal but still the people take to the streets in their fight for a better life.

       Is there a country on the planet where the people are happy with the state? People across the world are fighting for change, a better life, a better way of organising their lives, an end to the state and capitalism. It is a global struggle and we are winning.

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USA, - MILITARY DICTATORSHIP!!

       Some time today the America Congress will vote on a bill that will increase military control in that country. The legislation would allow the military to arrest and detain indefinitely, without charge, any American citizen it deemed to be a danger to the country. This dictatorship type legislation would circumvent the FBI and other civil law enforcement agencies. If this passes, it will be the final proof that there is no such thing in America, as even a sham of democracy. The state usually justifies such legislation in time of national emergency and war, of course, America is permanently at war, as are all Western capitalist "democracies" so perhaps that is their thinking. What we should be aware of is that if America introduces such legislation you can rest assured the rest of the Western countries will be looking at it with interest. We live under what at best can only be called the illusion of democracy. The brutal slashing of the living standards of most of the people in the developed world, against their wishes, is proof enough of that.

FROM HUMAN RIGHTS FIRST.

         As early as today Congress will vote on the final version of this dangerous defense bill. It then goes to President Obama. This bill threatens both U.S. national security and fundamental American ideals. It would:

• greatly expand the military's role in domestic counterterrorism, sidelining the FBI and local law enforcement;
• authorize the indefinite detention without trial of terrorism suspects, including American citizens; and
• effectively make Guantanamo a permanent prison.

President Obama promised to veto the bill if the final version contained these provisions. Tell President Obama on Twitter to protect our national security and our rights with a veto of the NDAA.

The Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the FBI, and Obama's Counterterrorism Advisor have publicly expressed opposition to the bill, as have 16 former interrogators and counterterrorism professionals and 26 of the nation's most respected retired military leaders.

Retired four-star Marine Generals Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar wrote in a New York Times op-ed that "this budget bill—which can be vetoed without cutting financing for our troops—is both misguided and unnecessary: the president already has the power and flexibility to effectively fight terrorism."

Please act quickly. Tell President @BarackObama @WhiteHouse: Protect #US National Security and #VetoNDAA!

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GLASGOW HUMAN RIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL.

Document 9 : International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival
Thursday 20th - Sunday 23rd October 2011
LAUNCH - Thursday 20th October, 7pm onwards, CCA Document 9 Film Festival launch with live music from Andrea Marini & opening film: Soy Libre I am free

8.00pm10.00pm CCA 4 & 5
OPENING FILM - Soy Libre: I am Free
Andrea Roggon, Germany, 2011, 86 mins
      The Cuba of Raoul Castro: a camera glides through the streets of Havana like the eye of a recording angel witnessing moments of interaction in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Off-camera, other voices talk about their feelings, hopes and fears, and the search for personal happiness in a country at a crossroads between the old revolutionary ideals of Fidel and Che and whatever changes the new economic realities of the 21st century will bring. Faces, voices, sounds. From its dreamlike imagery to the candid insights of the unseen, unidentified speakers, a strikingly beautiful and thoughtful film that becomes a kind of visual poem.

The Director will lead a Q & A with the audience afterwards.

http://documentfilmfestival.org/

@ CCA (Centre for Contemporary Art)
350 Sauchiehall Street
Glasgow G2 3JD
http://www.cca-glasgow.com/contact

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GLASGOW'S OWN DOCUMENT 9, FILM FESTIVAL.

      October, a dark and dreich month here in Scotland, but we have one thing that brightens up the month, Glasgow's own International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival. This will be the ninth year of this festival, hence its name DOCUMENT 9. and it is appropriately named, 2011 - A Year of Protest. Those who put this festival together, start the hectic and sometimes tiring work immediately after each festival, it takes a year of meetings viewings and all the other bits the film goers don't see, all we see is the wonderful and exciting results, which this year will run from 20 - 23 October. The festival will be screening over 50 International human rights documentary films along with talks, discussions, live art, performances, exhibitions and music. The launch of the festival takes place at the CCA 350 Sauchiehall Street Glasgow, 7pm on the 20 October 2011. The film festival runs in conjunction with a series of exhibitions, running from 13 – 23 October.

All the details and venues of the Film Festival and the Exhibitions can be found on their website

HERE.

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12,000 ON HUNGER STRIKE.

       12,000 prisoners on hunger strike against inhumane conditions and treatment??  No this isn't some banana republic, it is sunny California in the land of the free the good ol' U.Sof A. It preaches human rights and freedom to the world and does its damnedest to bomb the world into freedom and democracy but has thousands of prisoners own its own soil who feel ill treated enough to go on hunger strike.

THIS FROM SACC.

       In September 6,000 prisoners in California began the 2nd wave of a hunger strike against inhumane conditions in California Secure Housing and Administrative Segregation (Ad-Seg) Units. Numbers released by the federal receiver’s office show that on September 28th, nearly 12,000 prisoners were on hunger strike.
     Lawyers from the prisoner’s legal & mediation team have been banned from communicating with hunger strikers and family members of hunger strikers have also been denied visits. This is an added punishment that increases isolation for hunger strikers in an attempt to break the strike and conceal retaliation.

More background and updates at http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/

10 ways to support the strike: http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/take-action/

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MURDER OF HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS.

       Here in the West we tend to take trade union activity for granted. Agreed we do get hassle in many forms but we never expect to be murdered because our trade union activity. However, the same corporate capitalist system that exists here works hand in glove with violence across the globe. In most developing countries you can and do, face threats, intimidation, beatings and death, simply for standing up for your human rights.Today, in the 21 century, ordinary working people are being murder because the want a decent standard of living, that's corporate capitalism and the state working hand in hand, it is corporate fascism.

       This is an appeal from Labour Start.

Guatemala: End the murders of human rights defenders

        Idar Joel Hernandez Godoy, treasurer of the central executive committee of SITRABI, the banana workers union, was gunned down in cold blood on May 26, less than two months after the murder of another of his comrades, Oscar González Vázquez. SITRABI is calling for international solidarity as they demand justice. Guatemala is now sadly the second most dangerous country in the world in which to be a trade unionist. (Colombia is the first.) According to the latest annual survey of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), 10 trade union activists were killed in Guatemala in 2010 and 10 further killings have been reported so far in 2011. Learn more and send off your message here:

http://www.makefruitfair.org.uk/get-involved/appeals/guatemala-end-murders

Thank you!

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LAND OF THE FREE!!!! MY ARSE.

      

     As the West lead by America claims the moral high ground and goes about the world lecturing other nations about their human rights abuses and bombing freedom and democracy into others, who is there to point the finger at the West's record on human rights? What seems to go unnoticed by all and sundry is America's  appalling record on the incarceration of its own people. Where is the world's condemnation of the staggering number of Americans locked up behind bars, in what is a commercial incarceration industry. American crime rate has fallen quite dramatically over the years but the number of Americans imprisoned has shot up. America leads the world in locking up its own people, it has the largest proportion of its own people behind bars than any other country in the world. A strange record for a country that has the arrogance to lecture the world and threaten the world with sanctions and war if they don't improve their human rights record.

      Of course the fact that in America the prison system is mainly a corporate commercial concern and under the rules of capitalism, prison companies have to grow and make money for their shareholders may have something to do with the numbers. More prisons, more prisoners, more money for the shareholders, AH, the beauty of capitalism, money from the misery of of our brothers and sisters, increase share price by removing people's freedom. This of course needs some sort of co-operation between the judicial system and the corporate prison system. Once again the state system flourishes under the illusion of democracy.

     For a more detailed look at the figures concerning the prison population in America click HERE.

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YOUR STONING IS SAFE IN OUR HANDS!!!

     

 Written  by Joseph Abrams Foxnews.com NEW YORK.

      Without fanfare, the United Nations this week elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged "immodest."Just days after Iran abandoned a high-profile bid for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, it began a covert campaign to claim a seat on the Commission on the Status of Women, which is "dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women," according to its website.

        Buried 2,000 words deep in a U.N. press release distributed Wednesday on the filling of "vacancies in subsidiary bodies," was the stark announcement: Iran, along with representatives from 10 other nations, was "elected by acclamation," meaning that no open vote was requested or required by any member states ― including the United States.The U.S. currently holds one of the 45 seats on the body, a position set to expire in 2012 . The U.S. Mission to the U.N. did not return requests for comment on whether it actively opposed elevating Iran to the women's commission.

       Iran's election comes just a week after one of its senior clerics declared that women who wear revealing clothing are to blame for earthquakes, a statement that created an international uproar ― but little affected their bid to become an international arbiter of women's rights. "Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes," said the respected cleric, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi.

       As word of Iran 's intention to join the women's commission came out, a group of Iranian activists circulated a petition to the U.N. asking that member states oppose its election. " Iran 's discriminatory laws demonstrate that the Islamic Republic does not believe in gender equality," reads the letter, signed by 214 activists and endorsed by over a dozen human rights bodies.

       The letter draws a dark picture of the status of women in Iran: "women lack the ability to choose their husbands, have no independent right to education after marriage, no right to divorce, no right to child custody, have no protection from violent treatment in public spaces, are restricted by quotas for women's admission at universities, and are arrested, beaten, and imprisoned for peacefully seeking change of such laws." The Commission on the Status of Women is supposed to conduct review of nations that violate women's rights, issue reports detailing their failings, and monitor their success in improving women's equality.

        Yet critics of Iran 's human rights record say the country has taken "every conceivable step" to deter women's equality. "In the past year, it has arrested and jailed mothers of peaceful civil rights protesters," wrote three prominent democracy and human rights activists in an op-ed published online Tuesday by Foreign Policy Magazine. "It has charged women who were seeking equality in the social sphere ― as wives, daughters and mothers ― with threatening national security, subjecting many to hours of harrowing interrogation. Its prison guards have beaten, tortured, sexually assaulted and raped female and male civil rights protesters."

         Iran's elevation to the commission comes as a black eye just days after the U.S. helped lead a successful effort to keep Iran off the Human Rights Council, which is already dominated by nations that are judged by human rights advocates as chronic violators of essential freedoms. The current membership of the women's commission is little different. Though it touts itself as "the principal global policy-making body" on women's rights, the makeup of the commission is mostly determined by geography and its membership is a hodge-podge of some human rights advocates (including the U.S. , Japan , and Germany ) and other nations with stark histories of rights violations.

        The number of seats on the commission is based on the number of countries in a region, no matter how small their populations or how scant their respect for rights. The commission is currently made up of 13 members from Africa, 11 from Asia, nine from Latin America and the Caribbean, eight from Western Europe and North America, and four from Eastern Europe . During this round of "elections," which were not competitive and in which no real votes were cast, two seats opened up for the Asian bloc for the 2011-2015 period. Only two nations put forward candidates to fill empty spots ― Iran and Thailand . As at most such commissions in the U.N., backroom deals determined who would gain new seats at the women's rights body.

         The activists' letter sent to the U.N. Tuesday argued that it would be better if the Asian countries proffered only one candidate, instead of elevating Iran to the commission."We, a group of gender-equality activists, believe that for the sake of women's rights globally, an empty seat for the Asia group on (the commission) is much preferable to Iran 's membership. We are writing to alert you to the highly negative ramifications of Iran ’s membership in this international body." A spokeswoman for the U.N.'s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which oversees the commission, did not return phone calls or e-mails seeking comment. When its term begins in 2011, Iran will be joined by 10 other countries: Belgium , the Democratic Republic of the Congo , Estonia , Georgia , Jamaica , Iran , Liberia , the Netherlands , Spain , Thailand and Zimbabwe .

 

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