Free the Slaves (video)

Wisdom Quarterly (Green Fest LA, Oct. 29, 2011), FreeTheSlaves.net

Together we can end it: 1320 19th St. NW Ste. 600, Washington, DC 20036, (202) 775-7480.

Now that Demi Moore is divorcing a philandering Ashton Kutcher, who will bring attention to child sex trafficking and the plight of underage prostitutes in the US? Who will stop the beatings of unpaid laborers? Who will get rights for domestic help treated worse than pets?

Jessica Gardiner answers questions and admires newborn. "Our mission is simple: We liberate modern slaves around the world then help them build their lives as human beings" (WQ/Seven).

Slavery goes far deeper than girls being forced to be molested to profit pimps and impoverished madams in secret brothels, who frequently trick parents into selling their children into indentured servitude or a better future -- never realizing what that means.

How to do something about it: info@freetheslaves.net

Impersonal economic forces ruin lives, but so do the very personal choices of white slavers, purchasers, money launderers, and capitalists with the next best thing to gold: free disposable labor. Most of us are "wage slaves," but at least we get wages and can act as if we were free. Imagine losing even those two perks.

Talking about an incomprehensible topic sometimes means just pointing at pictures. Gardiner grieves while producer Harold Linde fields questions (WQ/Seven).

Free The Slaves occupied a booth across from John Perkins -- the former self-described "economic hitman" for the US military-industrial complex -- at this weekend's Green Fest. Twin ghosts, beautiful young ladies with gaunt and haunted faces called attention to a taboo topic. An oversized picture book by Lisa Kristine. FTS

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Success in solving the problem feels good, so celebrate!

Higgs Boson, Selling Out, Sex (video)

(Fermi Lab) scientist Don Lincoln describes the nature of the Higgs boson. Several large experimental groups are hot on the trail of this elusive subatomic particle ,which is thought to explain the origins of particle mass.

Katy Perry "sold her soul" (traded in her ideals for material success) after a strict Christian upbringing. Her words are dubbed out of context.

(CIRvideos) New life is breathed into one of the oldest criminal enterprises -- the trafficking of humans into sexual slavery. Thousands of Eastern European women have been sold into prostitution. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova investigates this rarely documented journey at priceofsex.org.


(Huffington Post) Tons of radioactive garbage coming to US from Japanese tsunami

Neutrinos, the faster than light particles?

• VIDEO: Time traveling particles
  
• Biking through Los Angeles (CicLAvia 2011)
• Audie Cornish overtakes NPR
• Ancient Jain temple renovated in India
• Reconstructing dreams as YouTube videos
• PHOTOS: Bezeklik 1000 Buddhas Caves (Wiki)
  

Sex Slavery is Kind of Sexy (video)

I. Rony (Wisdom Quarterly)

How did sex, such a lovely thing, turn into slavery, abuse, and rape? It cannot help that so many societies are hypocritical about the subject. It is taboo to even mention. We are shame for any overt sign of lust or longing, for any lack or limitation. All that hypocrisy and shaming comes back.

There is a less savory side to trying to satisfy sensual cravings.

It comes in the form of organized sex abuse. Maybe we should rethink our attitudes, mores we contribute to by participating in mainstream media images and roles. The result of ignoring the issue is not a tragedy in Thailand (the Southeast Asian hub), Hollywood, New York, Paris, London, and Amsterdam. It is a tragedy everywhere.

It's one arena where whites are in as much jeopardy as everyone else, only we do not know it. "That's something that only happens over there," we say. Where? Where our dads go on business? It may be sexy. But imagine a world where ordinary sex were sexy.

The story is best told in pictures, but words are worth...

In England and Latin America?

In Capitalist Russia, the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?

In human-rights-loving China, the People's Republic?


But at least our children are safe.

• Is rape by police legal or just not that illegal?
• Lower testosterone comes later in life
• Tibetan monks tour NJ to teach peace, love, kindness
• VIDEO: "Occupy ISRAEL"? Massive rally in Tel Aviv
  

Legal "Slave Labor" taking US jobs (ALEC)

James Wilson, a Berrydale Forestry Camp farm squad prisoner, finishes loading collard greens on a truck at the Univ. of Florida West Florida Research and Education Facility in Jay, Florida, Feb. 7, 2011 (Meggan Haller/The New York Times).

The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor
Mike Elk and Bob Sloan, The Nation (Report, August 5, 2011)

This article is part of a Nation series exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy. John Nichols introduces the series.

The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners.

At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken, and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products... More

• 

FRESH AIR: “[Republican legislators] now hold more state legislative seats than at any time since 1928, the year that Herbert Hoover came to the presidency,” says reporter John Nichols. “They control 25 states [with] both houses of the legislature. There are also 21 states where Republicans control both houses of the legislature and the governorship. And in the backroom of politics, that’s what people really want. If you’ve got governor, state House and state Senate, you can pretty much roll through whatever legislation you want.” Nichols, a political reporter for The Nation, recently wrote the introduction and co-authored two in a series of articles about the relationship that state-based legislators have with a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC is a group that brings together state legislators and representatives of corporations to draft model bills that can then be introduced at the state level of government. An archive of ALEC documents was recently leaked to the Center for Media and Democracy. “All of those pieces oflegislation and those resolutions [in the documents] really err toward a goal, and that goal is the advancement of an agenda that seems to be dictated at almost every turn by multinational corporations,” Nichols tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “It’s to clear the way for lower taxes, less regulation, a lot of protection against lawsuits, [and] ALEC is very, very active in [the] opening up of areas via privatization for corporations to make more money, particularly in places you might not usually expect like public education.” MORE

• Plutocracy Now: A Vast Right-wing Conspiracy

ALEC: Ghostwriting the Law for Corporate America
American Association of Justice (justice.org)

The Koch Brothers, big tobacco, insurance companies, and the drug industry: all behind the shadowy corporate front group known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

On the surface, ALEC is mostly comprised of thousands of state legislators, each paying a nominal fee to attend ALEC retreats and receive model legislation. In reality, corporations pay ALEC a king’s ransom to access legislators to distribute radical legislation that puts corporate interests over American workers and consumers.

So, while the membership appears to be public sector, corporate money dominates ALEC. In fact, public sector membership dues account for only around one percent of ALEC’s annual revenues. ALEC claims to be nonpartisan, but its pro-corporate, anti-consumer mission is clear.

Read about ALEC’s hand in protecting oil companies, chemical manufacturers and Wall Street banks in AAJ’s report here: More

• AAJ Release: Report lifts veil on ALEC's pro-corporate, anti-consumer mission
• Anthony Tarricone: ALEC Ghostwriting the Law (HuffPo)
• Disappeared News: Hawaii's hidden history, slave labor
• GO FISH: How to Win Contempt and Influence People:

Legal slavery under Burma's dictatorship

uscampaignforburma.org

Elsewhere in Asia, policeman attempts to beat Tibetan Buddhist monk to assert Chinese rule (damncoolpictures.com). China is Burmese dictatorship's main support.

Why Being Forced into Military Labor Can Be a Death Sentence for Convicts in Burma

TIME.com

Yay Zoe was not yet midway through an 18-month sentence in Miektila prison in central Burma when he found himself among some 70 inmates assembled for transfer. He assumed he was destined for one of the government's many labor camps.

Authorities, however, felt he would be more useful to them elsewhere: he was bound and trucked to the country's eastern border, where he was forced to serve as a porter for soldiers fighting ethnic-minority forces.

A group of porters carry goods for Burmese soldiers in a village in Karen state (undated photo released by Free Burma Ranger/AP).

The backbreaking duty of carrying mortars and rice sacks all day with meager provisions of food and water was the least oppressive part of his ordeal. The 21-year-old said he was regularly beaten by soldiers and forced into veritable suicide missions.

On three occasions, he was ordered at gunpoint to spearhead patrols through a minefield by prodding the ground with a bamboo stick. "Whenever I touched a landmine, I was forced to dig it out with a knife. My hands trembled because I assumed I was about to die." More

• Thailand scrape past Burma
• Shan Women condemn Burma Army of using rape as war weapon
• ASEAN sensitive to world opinion on Myanmar
• Washington: another Burmese diplomat asks for political asylum
• 2nd Myanmar diplomat defects in Washington
• HRW: Myanmar torturing prisoners
• Burmese convicts "forced to serve on front"
• Rights group: Myanmar uses "convict slave labor"
• Lao PM Myanmar visit further enhances bilateral friendship, co-op
• Second Burmese Defector Was Summoned Home, Says Kyaw Win
• Burma accused of using prisoners to clear landmines
• Killer python trial: Couple guilty on all counts
• Burma's army uses convicts as "human mine sweepers" - HRW

Legal Islamic Sex Slavery?

Nonie Darwish (frontpagemag.com, June 13, 2011)

"Slut walks," such as this one in London, protest the abuse of women (AFP/Carl Court).

Russian Blondes Wanted for Islamic Sexual Slavery

When Muslim sheikhs discuss the topic of the sexual enslavement of women -- which is allowed in the Qur’an -- it sounds politically incorrect to the majority of Muslims.

They have long forgotten that slavery is a well-established institution in Islam. Saudi Arabia officially abolished slavery only in 1962, not because Islam made the Saudis do it, but because the US-backed Saudis wanted to save face after an international cry against modern slavery.

But now some Muslims are demanding its return. So Muslim spinmeisters are advocating the embarrassing, but legal, topic through the mouths of Muslim women.

A Kuwaiti woman (Salwa al-Mutair), a former candidate to the Kuwaiti parliament and called an “activist,” spoke to the Kuwait Times about the establishment of a new law permitting men to buy and sell non-Muslim girls, captured in jihad, as sexual slaves.

It is said said that this is in order to protect Muslim men against seductive sexual immorality. The Arabic Al Arabiya had more details on what Ms. Salwa al-Mutairi is advocating:

Ms. Mutairi was nice enough to put the minimum age at 15 for slave girls to be sold, whether Christian, Jew, or other. She demanded the immediate establishment of slave agencies just like maid agencies... More

Dark Muslim Brotherhood world of Huma Abedin?

Malcolm X: Our history destroyed by slavery

(AH) Malcolm X appears on the Chicago TV show "City Desk," March 17, 1963.

"My father didn't know his last name. My father got his last name from his grandfather, and his grandfather got it from his grandfather, who got it from the slavemaster. The real names of our people were destroyed during slavery. The last name of my forefathers was taken from them when they were brought to America and made slaves. And then the name of the slavemaster was given, which we refuse, we reject that name today and refuse it. I never acknowledge it whatsoever."

• The Complete Malcolm X (MalcolmXfiles.blogspot.com)

The Wisdom of Malcolm X

"We declare our right on this Earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this Earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary!" - Malcolm X

"The Ballot or The Bullet" was a speech by Malcolm X. It is about the struggle of all disenfranchised people from the example of 1950-1960's American black nationalism, the wish to have a nation where displaced blacks (who were enslaved by early Euro-Americans) can be treated fairly and equally). It was delivered on April 12, 1964 in Detroit, Michigan (Vincent Voice Library, Michigan State University).

• Transcript
• Unedited transcript

"Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention"

Marable’s Exhaustive Biography of the Civil Rights Leader
DemocracyNow.org

Events are being held today, May 19th, across the country to mark what would have been Malcolm X’s 86th birthday. Earlier this year a major new biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention was published. The book’s author, Columbia Univ. Professor Dr. Manning Marable, died at the age of 60 just days before its publication. Two decades in the making, the nearly 600-page biography is described as a re-evaluation of Malcolm X’s life, providing new insights into the circumstances of his assassination [by the American government through the FBI and the war against black America through the FBI's Cointelpro?], as well as raising questions about Malcolm X’s own autobiography. DemocracyNow! speaks with Zaheer Ali, one of the researchers who worked with Dr. Marable on the biography. "In a sense, this book is a kind of iconoclasm in that way, in that it takes Malcolm off of the pedestal to examine him as a human being struggling through these political and religious currents that he was in," says Zaheer. More

Malcolm X versus the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sex Trafficking with Ashton and Demi (video)

Moore, Kutcher: Join our crusade to end child sex trafficking

Watch the full interview with Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher on "Piers Morgan Tonight," which airs weeknights on CNN/US.

Kutcher, Moore on using social media to stop child sex trafficking Piers Morgan - CNN.com Blogs

"There's between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States today," Ashton Kutcher tells CNN's Piers Morgan. "If you don't do something to stop that -- that's when there's something wrong with you."

In their first-ever joint primetime interview, actress Demi Moore and actor Ashton Kutcher were on Thursday's "Piers Morgan Tonight."

The husband-and-wife team launched The Demi & Ashton Foundation (DNA) after a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in January.

They met a girl who had been trafficked into the United States by her pimp, who brought her into a field where she was repeatedly raped on a trash bag by 30 men. The DNA Foundation stands for the fundamental right to freedom for every person -- because it's within our DNA. More