However, Full Extent of Carnage Unknowable Because US Government Doesn’t Track Violent Crime Linked To The War On Drugs
The number of people murdered in the drug war inside the United States between 2006 and 2010 exceeds the US-troop death toll in the Iraq War since it was launched in 2003, according to a Narco News analysis of FBI crime statistics.
The US drug-war homicide tally also is nearly three times greater than the number of US soldiers killed in Afghanistan since the first shots were fired in that war in 2001, the Narco News analysis shows.
And that US drug-war murder total — nearly 5,700 people cut down on US soil over the 5-year period examined by Narco News — very likely undercounts significantly the extent of the bloodshed.
Vice President Joe Biden early this week while visiting Mexico made it clear, according tomedia reports, that “there is no possibility” that the United States would entertain the notion of ending drug prohibition, despite a growing call among Latin American leaders and citizens of those countries for a new course in the bloody drug war, one that includes a discussion of drug legalization.
Our “representatives” in Congress hand out taxpayer subsidies to profitable corporations including ADM, Cargill and Monsanto that are pocketing tens of billions in taxpayer dollars and turning subsidized crops like corn into junk food ingredients like high fructose corn syrup. It’s all the more outrageous at a time when one in three kids is overweight or obese, and obesity-related diseases like diabetes are turning into an epidemic.
Putting on the Happy Face May Not Be the Best Way to Avoid a Train Wreck
Barbara Ehrenreich author several insightful books on life in America speaks in this video lecture regarding the connection of the underlying grid of positive thinking in the financial world and how it helped to trigger the financial meltdown in 2007. In the years following up to the meltdown, no one was allowed to criticize or to point out the obvious. If they did, they were fired.
Books by Ms. Ehrenreich include: Nickel and Dimed; Bright-Sided; This Land is Their Land; Dancing in the Streets; Bait and Switch; and Blood Rites.
Better Buy that Peanut Butter Now. Next month it could cost twice as much.
Consumers should be prepared to shell out a bit more for peanut butter soon.
Another hot, dry summer in key producing states and competition from more profitable crops like cotton have significantly shrunk the U.S. peanut crop this year. The tight supply means consumers will soon pay more for yet another grocery staple.
U.S. farmers are expected to produce roughly 1.8 million tons of peanuts this year, down nearly 13 percent from last year, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Department of Agriculture. Assuming that estimate holds, it would be smallest harvest recorded since 2006.
Peanut butter producers already have plans to hike prices for peanut butter significantly in the next few weeks. Those who package nuts for snacks say they are watching their competitors to determine whether price hikes will be necessary.
The J.M. Smucker Co., which makes Jif peanut butter, plans to raise its wholesale prices 30 percent in November. Kraft Foods Co., which launched its Planters peanut butter in June, is raising prices 40 percent on Oct. 31. A spokesperson for ConAgra Foods Inc., which makes Peter Pan peanut butter, was not immediately available to comment but multiple media outlets report that the company plans to raise its prices as well.
We refer to Occupy Wall Street which began in a concrete jungle as a “grassroots movement”.
horsepower -
Horsepower is a term that was originally defined to compare the output of steam engines with the power of draft horses. It was originated by James Watt, (1736-1819) the inventor of the steam engine and the man whose name has been immortalized by the definition of Watt as a unit of power. To help sell his steam engines, Watt needed a way of rating their capabilities. The engines were replacing horses, the usual source of industrial power of the day. The typical horse, attached to a mill that grinded corn or cut wood, walked a 24 foot diameter (about 75.4 feet circumference) circle. Watt calculated that the horse pulled with a force of 180 pounds, although how he came up with the figure is not known. Watt observed that a horse typically made 144 trips around the circle in an hour, or about 2.4 per minute. This meant that the horse traveled at a speed of 180.96 feet per minute. Watt rounded off the speed to 181 feet per minute and multiplied that by the 180 pounds of force the horse pulled (181 x 180) and came up with 32,580 ft.-lbs./minute. That was rounded off to 33,000 ft.-lbs./minute, the figure we use today. Most observers familiar with horses and their capabilities estimate that Watt was a bit optimistic; few horses could maintain that effort for long.
We often hear the term used today as an indication of the power of an automobile engine. 500 horsepower, 300 horsepower, etc.
“Who else wants a permanent vacation, working and living in America’s best destination while enjoying the RV lifestyle?”
Are you looking for a new way to live, work and play? Then lose your home and job and you may find it. Are you searching for a way to escape the drudgery of your normal everyday lifestyle? Then lose your job and home and you may find it.
_______________________________________________
It’s called Workamping! Stop looking at it like you lost your job and start thinking of it as a permanent vacation.
I thought I had seen it all in terms of propaganda, but learning about workkamping promotion just raised the bar to heights I never dreamed.
But not before thanking Kathleen Wallace Peine for her great piece that appeared in today’s Dissident Voice by that title.
She is right: More Americans need to be willing to take that giant leap of faith and do the right thing.
As you may recall, the pivotal moment in the story of Huck Finn came when Huck Finn threw away the note he had written to turn in Jim, his runaway slave companion.
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell, ” he said, realizing that he was going against all that he had been taught regarding slaves as property.
As Ms. Peine points out, to be willing to do that, could very well be exactly what is required to save our soul as a nation.
There are so many fronts where the representatives of wealthy Wall Street corporations are attacking the people that it is difficult to keep up with them all. A week ago Friday on March 18, The True Food Network reported that attorneys for the Center for Food Safety (CFS) and Earthjustice filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), arguing that the agency’s recent unrestricted approval of genetically engineered (GE), “Roundup Ready” Alfalfa was unlawful. The GE crop is engineered to be immune to the herbicide glyphosate, which Monsanto markets as Roundup. USDA data show that 93% of all the alfalfa planted by farmers in the U.S. is grown without the use of any herbicides. With the full deregulation of GE alfalfa, USDA estimates that up to 23 million more pounds of toxic herbicides will be released into the environment each year.
MONSANTO I would rank among the top ten most evil and destructive corporations on the planet. Unfortunately for the world, Tom Vilsack, the man that Obama selected as his Secretary of Agriculture, is a corporate stooge for Monsanto and has been for years. In fact Vilsack is so chummy with Monsanto that he has flown on the private corporate jets more than once.
I knew that things were not going to go so well for the USA when Obama selected Vilsack as the Secretary of Agriculture–a known corporate stooge for Monsanto and I became completely convinced that we would be going down the same road that the Republicans took us for 8 years when Obama appointed Eric Holder for his Attorney General. Eric Holder has made millions getting corporate CEOs off the hook for murder. For example: Chiquita Brands and also the makers of Oxycontin.
GIANT AGRIBUSINESSES LIKE Cargill, Monsanto, Daewoo Logistics, and Chiquita Brands International not only destroy the economies in the countries that they take over, they threaten the food security of the world and destabilize the politics of entire continents. These people are no more than colonialist bullies making their almighty bottom line at the expense of the environment of the world and human life. They are in my estimation despicable and should be dismantled.
These companies come into the nations of Africa and Latin America in particular and gain the rights to farm HUGE tracts of land. They make these deals with the leadership of the nations (often a single head of the country who is himself corrupt to the bone and would sell his own mother for a dime). They make these deals with the assistance of the IMF whose structure is such (based as it is on failed conservative economic neo-liberal ideology) that no consideration whatsoever is given to the damages done to the environment or to the people who live there, the small farmers will be pushed off their lands and into the urban areas where they are often reduced to beggars, large single crops such as grain or bananas in the case of Chiquita will spread over acres and acres of land.
The greed of these corporations is limitless. To get an idea of how far they will go, look no further than Daewoo Logistics. They recently, with the assistance of the IMF, purchased over half of all the arable land of Madagascar from the corrupt president of that country. They plan to use the land to grow wheat for the people of South Korea and Palm oil for the biofuel business. As for all the jobs that they promised in return for this rape of their environment and ability to have sustainable agriculture to feed the people of Madagascar–well it turns out that is a lie as well. Most of the workers to farm this land will be imported from south Africa.
For you see, the bottom line is the god for any corporation. Nothing stands in the way of the bottom line. And as long as we have the immoral failed conservative economic neo-liberal ideology guiding globalization, it will continue in its devastating impact on the world.
Following is a video created by French journalist and film maker Marie-Monique Robin that featured on my site back in August of 2009. It is an excerpt from her documentary: The World According to Monsanto – A documentary that you won’t see on American television. The gigantic biotech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.
FROM THE QUEEN’S ARCHIVED POSTS ON MONSANTO AND GENETICALLY ENGINEERED SEEDS
I’m surprised that Michelle didn’t bitch-slap Barack into a coma when he appointed Vilsack as the Secretary of Agriculture [what with her gardening interests and all]. Maybe she did. Brain damage would certainly explain a lot of her husband’s behavior after taking office.
