Funding Sweatshops Globally
by Stephen Lendman
In July 2008, SweatFree Communities (SFC) released a report titled, "Subsidizing Sweatshops: How Our Tax Dollars Fund the Race to the Bottom, and What Cities and States Can Do" in which it studied 12 factories in nine countries that produce employee uniforms for nine major companies.
Widespread human and labor rights violations were revealed, including child labor; illegal below-poverty wages; few or no benefits; forced or unpaid overtime; hazardous working conditions; verbal, physical, and sexual abuses; forced pregnancy testing to be hired and while employed; excessive long working hours causing physical ailments, stress, and harm; denial of free expression, association, and collective bargaining rights; and elaborate schemes to commit fraud and deceive corporate auditors.
In April 2009, Subsidizing Sweatshops II followed to provide more evidence of a global problem. It tracked developments in four factories from the first report and four new ones in five countries on three continents producing uniforms for nine major firms in China, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and America.
PermalinkJerusalem – Evicted Palestinian family keeps watch near home taken by settlers
Rev. Pat McCaughan
Most days, Sharihan Hannoun and her family sit along the sidewalk on dusty white plastic chairs watching the East Jerusalem home from which they were forcibly evicted, watching as the strangers who took it over come and go.
"Today we stay in the street 65 days," said Hannoun, on October 8. "The first few nights, we slept here," recalled the 20-year-old who was a psychology student at Birzeit University in Jerusalem. That was before August 2 early morning police raids left 37 members of her extended family homeless.
Hannoun, wearing black slacks, a long-sleeved white turtleneck sweater and matching white head covering worn by Muslim women, recalled being awakened at 5 a.m. when Israeli police broke down the front door of the home owned by her parents since 1956.
"I told them we have ownership papers. They said they didn't want to see them. They said, 'it's not your house, it's our house. They put a gun to my brother's back and said for him to leave the house. He is just 10 years old," she said. "They broke everything in the house, the television, everything," she recalled. "They went to the refrigerator and ate the food. They took my brother's football and started playing with it in the yard. They said, you are Palestinians and we can do what we want with you."
A salute to Turkey, a salute to Erdogan
By Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine
The recent Turkish decision to exclude Israel from an aerial military exercise over Turkish territory is another indication that Turkey will not allow itself to be blackmailed by criminal international Zionism.
Following the decision, Zionist officials and media sought to mitigate its impact on the increasingly troubled relations with Turkey by claiming that it had little to do with the genocidal blitz which the Israeli army carried out in winter against the Gaza Strip.
However, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, and other Turkish officials have made it amply clear that the cancellation of the military drill is consistent with the feelings of the vast bulk of the Turkish masses vis-à-vis the Nazi-like atrocities in the Gaza Strip.
Deception, Spin and Lies
by Gilad Atzmon
“By way of deception thou shalt do war” - The Mossad motto
Less than a week after Ankara cancelled an air exercise with Israel, Turkey’s state-sponsored channel TRT1 broadcast "Ayrilik" ("Farewell"), a new prime-time TV show that depicts the true image of Israel’s genocidal military operation in Gaza last January.
The Israelis are not happy. "Broadcasting this series is a serious case of state-sponsored incitement. …,” said Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman this morning. “Such a series, which doesn’t even have a weak connection to reality presents the IDF's soldiers as murderers of innocent children….” I wonder whether one should remind hardliner Lieberman, who happens to be an enthusiastic ethnic cleanser and a proud Judeo supremacist racist, that the reality on the ground last January was ‘connected enough’ to establish a genocidal war crime inquiry and a crime against humanity. It left over 1400 fatal casualties. It also left thousands more injured, most of them children, women and elders. However, for once Lieberman happens to read the map. The Turkish TV-show indeed depicts the IDF’s soldiers as murderers of children women and elders for this is what Israeli soldiers are and this is exactly what Israel stands for politically, symbolically, ideologically and practically.
PEACE IMPLIES ACTION / NOT RHETORIC
Allen L Roland
Here are eight questions regarding President Obama ~ all of which were promised and have yet to be delivered. Peace implies action and Peace, without action, is a limp sail devoid of wind: President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize will get heavier and heavier until he changes rhetoric into action. There is no effective change without action. Action changes knowledge into wisdom and action always involves risk!
Gary Ruskin, Green Change, summarized eight Obama Peace promises which still remain empty rhetoric until action is taken.
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