1,000 executions coming soon

So executions will have maxed out at over 1,000 here in the U.S, according to CNN.com. Some of these involved innocent people and a large percentage are racial minorities.So look out Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, you have some competition. We have a ways to go before we reach the hundreds of thousands killed here, but as a ruthless government, we’re trying. We have concentration camps in Guantanamo Bay, our politicians, such as US national security adviser Stephen Hadley want to bring back torture and we keep fighting wars, which cost the locals large numbers of casualties (civilian as well as military).
The United States a nation of mass murderers? With our constant push to the right, it was bound to happen sooner or later. After all, Hitler was to the right.

OLD SPARKY

US Flag with Nazi Swastika at Anti-US Protest

The Holiday season is here

Black Friday: $Buy…$Buy…$Buy

Memoirs of a Drugged-Up, Sex-Crazed Yippie ---Tales from the 70's Counterculture: Drugs, Sex, Politics and Rock and Roll, takes the reader through the life of a 1970s counter-culture drug user. Mark Spies goes from casual pot smoking to habitual use of pharmaceutical narcotics and cocaine. Due to the changing sexual attitudes, Spies has several unconventional sexual encounters. The 1970s brought us the "Woodstock generation." There was a sense of idealism that developed at the beginning and died at the end of that decade. Many counter-culture books focus on the 1960s, yet there are plenty of events in the 1970s that deserve attention. Nixon's war in Vietnam and Cambodia dominated the news and affected America's youth. Nixon's war on drugs impacted the counter-culture life style. Then there was punk rock, disco, casual cocaine use and revolutions braking out around the world by 1979.With politics in the background, this book gives the reader a look at drug use and the difficult business of drug dealing. The drugs, sexual attitudes, music and politics made the 1970s what they were. Taken as a whole, this book will give some insight into the people and events of the 1970s counter-culture.

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Direct from the publisher.

President Bush tries to justify $billions more for war in Colombia

Once again President George Bush is trying to rationalize his empire building ambitions with “Plan Colombia.” As in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is trying to remake the South American country in his own image and likeness. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, the casualties are local combatants and civilians caught in the crossfire. There are U.S. advisors and military personnel on the ground in Colombia. Washington poured more than $4 billion into Colombia since 2000 and most of that is military aid.

According to Knight Ridder Newspapers, Nov. 18, 2005:

“- Declaring a key victory, U.S. drug czar John Walters on Thursday said cocaine has become more expensive and less pure on U.S. streets this year -- the first sign that billions of dollars in counter-drug aid to Colombia may be having an impact.
Walters' aides said the new data reverses three years of steadily declining cocaine prices, which had perplexed policymakers as Washington poured more than $4 billion into Colombia since 2000 as part of an effort to increase Bogota's ability to curb drug production and trafficking.”
Also according to the report:
“While a gram of cocaine cost just over $120 this April, the price rose steadily to more than $170 in September, according to the Drug Control Policy data. And cocaine purity -- another key indicator of availability -- fell 15 percent between February and September. The data showed similar trends in the price and purity of Colombian heroin reaching U.S. streets.”

Yet for this “huge victory,” if in fact it is one at all, there has been a heavy price to pay. Spike, sprayed from planes to destroy coca plants, has destroyed other crops and foliage besides. The guerrilla war, which really has little to do with the coca problem, has intensified.

According to the BBC News, 12 November 2005:

” It also has a highly stratified society where the traditionally rich families of Spanish descent have benefited from this wealth to a far greater degree than the greatest portion of the population, who are mostly of mixed race. With few avenues for social mobility, this provided a natural constituency for left-wing insurgents.
But the lucrative returns from drugs and kidnapping now dominate the rebels' agenda, and have largely replaced ideological motivations. Peace talks with the main rebel group collapsed in 2002.
At the other end of the political spectrum are right-wing paramilitary groups, who are sometimes in the pay of drug cartels and landowners, and backed by elements in the army and the police.
Efforts are under way to demobilise the organisations, which have been particularly active in the north-west where they have targeted human rights workers, peasants suspected of helping left-wing guerrillas, street children and other marginal groups.”

It also said that crime is now the main cause of death in Colombia and “The US, a key market for Colombian cocaine, has bankrolled the fight against the trade to the tune of billions of dollars. But critics say "Plan Colombia" has had little impact on the supply and price of drugs.”

So the Bush administration will soon want to spend $ billions escalating one more war we really don’t need.

The Guerrilla groups are:

FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People’s Army), the largest group, with more than 10,000 troops.

ELN (National Liberation Army) is the second largest, probably less than half the size of the FARC.


EPL, The Popular Liberation Army, a very small organization, possibly with less than 500 troops, but having ties to the Communist Party of Colombia (Marxist-Leninist).

Maoist rebels storm jail in east India, free 350 prisoners

From Contre Information:

14 Nov 2005

Hundreds of heavily armed Maoist rebels stormed a jail in eastern India, killing at least two people and freeing about 350 prisoners, including many fellow guerrillas, police said on Monday.
The rebels entered Jehanabad town in impoverished and crime-ridden Bihar state on Sunday night in small groups, cut off power and raided the prison in one of the biggest ever attacks by Maoist guerrillas, a police officer said.
The rebels, who were estimated to number 700, killed a prison guard and a member of a private army of upper caste landlords in a gunbattle with policemen.
The guerrillas also abducted at least two dozen members of the Ranvir Sena, the private army of upper caste landlords, who were jail inmates.
"It is the biggest ever attack in Bihar and it is for the first time the heart of a town was taken over by Maoists," a federal police officer, who did not want to be named, said.
The rebels, who operate in eastern and southern India, say they are fighting for the rights of landless labourers and impoverished peasants. In Bihar, they often clash with private armies of landlords. Dozens have been killed in the past decade.
The attack took place on a day when police had been deployed in other parts of Bihar for elections to the state legislature in a month-long process which ends this weekend.
"The main logic for the attack was that our forces were all deployed for the elections," federal junior Home Minister Sri Prakash Jaiswal said.

CHAOTIC SCENES AT JAIL

Residents of Jehanabad, a town of around 80,000 people, recalled a night of terror.
"I heard gunshots and explosions in the night. Then the lights went off. I have never seen anything like this," school teacher Ranjay Kumar said.
Police and witnesses said the Maoists made announcements during their night-time attack in Jehanabad, about 50 km (31 miles) south of Patna, the state capital, saying civilians should remain indoors and would not be harmed.
On Monday, the prison gates were open and people were moving in and out of the jail at will. Hundreds of curious bystanders surrounded the jail, some of them climbing trees to watch.
Supporters of the Ranvir Sena, the private army set up to defend the interests of upper caste landlords, gathered outside the jail, protesting the kidnapping of members of the group.
The Maoists have stepped up attacks in recent months. Last week, about 300 Maoists stormed a training centre for auxiliary policemen, killing five cadets, in neighbouring Jharkhand state.
India's home ministry has estimated there around about 9,300 armed Maoist rebels in the country and say they have links with Maoist insurgents in neighbouring Nepal who are fighting to overthrow the Himalayan nation's monarchy.

The World Can't Wait... Drive Out the Bush Regime!

From Revolution:




"Last July a bold call went up—to drive out the Bush regime. It put the stakes sharply: “People look at [what the government is doing] and think of Hitler—and they are right to do so. The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come. We must act now; the future is in the balance.”

Read more...

Kansas School Board trashes science standards

Upset? Who can blame him?

He’s smarter than Bob Corkins.

The new science standards for Kansas schools are one more piece of the puzzle, of an agenda designed to render public education a dead a useless institution. Recently they put a man in the position of “education commissioner,” who was a lobbyist against public funding for education. Since he had no experience for the job, he has tried to hire consultants, at the taxpayer’s expense, to tell him how to do his job. He had no experience holding any other office.
Now they have trashed our science standards and sent Kansas Schools back to the middle ages.
The new standards are highly critical of evolution and clearly favor a religious explanation for the existence of life on earth, as well as denying evolutionary changes. They include many of the arguments of the Intelligent Design school of thought.
At this point, it would be an insult to the apes to suggest we descended from them. Apes are smarter than the idiots that the fundamentalist Christian right has voted in charge of our education system.

More on Zimbabwe

Here is an excellent 2 part article on Zimbawe from
ZNet, November 04, 2005,

"Can Zimbabwe Become Africa’s Cuba?"
By Mukoma Ngugi

Ngugi has been to Zimbabwe. In his introduction he writes:

“On stage, there are two young men discussing the merits and de-merits of Zimbabwe’s Look East Policy. “These Chinese products, it is all in the packaging otherwise they are the same things we have always had” one says. And the discussion goes on to Chinese beauty products, wigs and cosmetics petrol queues, inflation, foreign currency etc. The two comedians in a downtown club in Harare were satirizing the influx of Chinese goods in Zimbabwean stores since ZANU-PF’s Look East Policy, an attempt to minimize dependence on the West, took effect. This was in July of 2005, when I was in Zimbabwe for the Zimbabwe International Book Fair where I had been invited to present a paper on Pan-Africanism and Nationalism.
A few weeks after I returned from Zimbabwe, I was invited by Allen Ruff of Madison’s WORT for a radio interview on my first book, an Africa Awareness Rally that I was helping organize, and my trip to Zimbabwe. In spite of it being made abundantly clear several times by Ruff that I am a Kenyan, one caller hoped “that it was safe for me to speak”. She was under the impression that Mugabe has secret agents in Madison, Wisconsin who are willing to assassinate a Kenyan national for speaking about Zimbabwe or at the very least monitoring the radio waves and would face the music if I was ever back in Zimbabwe. She was worried for my ability to speak freely thousands of miles from Zimbabwe. Most of the other callers asked questions that were along this vein and the other things that I had talked about such as the need for thinking about Africa not as a humanitarian case but as a continent whose resources are plundered were overshadowed by Zimbabwe.
I begin this article by giving the above seemingly inconsequential details to hint at a discrepancy between a Zimbabwe that is not doing too well, has its own share of fatal and even tragic flaws and the Zimbabwe of the Western imagination of pure murder and mayhem arbitrated by black skin. There is the Zimbabwe of land redistribution, Look East, petrol queues, Operation Clean Up, the Congo War, of ZANU-PF, the MDC, Third Way etc. Depending on race, nationality, class, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, ideology etc, this Zimbabwe will have different meanings. This is the Zimbabwe with its own sets of contradictions that I would like to term the Zimbabwe on the Ground.”

Click here for the rest of Part 1 and Part 2.

Zimbabwe’s Mugabe under attack for redistributing wealth

Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, has gone from a model of change from white to black rule, to being one of the worst dictators on the planet, if we can believe what we read in the mainstream media.
Of course we can’t, especially when a person goes from being referred to as a “president who won a United Nations monitored election” to a “Strongman, who came to power” suddenly overnight?
Mugabe kept a promise he made when he was a guerrilla leader against the Ian Smith government in the 1970s. He forcible redistributed white-owned farms among blacks. To be blunter, he took land from rich white guys and gave them to poor blacks. Ever since that time he has been relentlessly attacked in the press for being “a ruthless dictator.”
That’s not to say he is without criticism. He has pursued what he regards as a deeply moral campaign against homosexuality making "unnatural sex acts" illegal with a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. He is both a Marxist and a devout Christian.
Also, his return of land came only after his popularity dropped so low, he actually feared loosing an election in which his political party controls about 90% of Zimbabwe’s parliament.
All this was known before he redistributed land. Now he is being accused of causing drought and food shortages. That’s because in the West, our culture dictates that only rich people are smart enough to run things and poor people are supposed to be dependent on the rich ruling classes.
So a president becomes a dictator and the focus of human rights of mainstream journalism. That is to say, relentless attacks on non-capitalists and nationalists. Ignored human rights for important allies that support us.

According to the Washington Times, October 18, 2005,while at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Mugabe called both US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair "international terrorists" bent on world domination like Adolf Hitler. "Must we allow these men, the two unholy men of our millennium, who, in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini formed [an] unholy alliance, formed an alliance to attack an innocent country?" he asked rhetorically. "The voice of Mr. Bush and the voice of Mr. Blair can't decide who shall rule in Zimbabwe, who shall rule in Africa, who shall rule in Asia, who shall rule in Venezuela, who shall rule in Iran, who shall rule in Iraq," he said.
Mugabe picture

Wichita’s Koch Industries: home of the campaign financing $lush kings

Wichita’s Koch Industries: home of the campaign financing $lush kings
The Center for Public integrity has made some important observations on Wichita’s own Koch Industries and their ability to buy elections. Among the findings:
“Koch Industries (pronounced "coke") is a huge oil conglomerate controlled by brothers Charles and David Koch, two of the country's richest men and among the biggest backers of conservative and libertarian causes. With estimated revenue of about $40 billion last year, Koch is bigger than Microsoft, Merrill Lynch and AT&T.
Koch is the leading campaign contributor among oil and gas companies for the 2004 election cycle, giving $587,000 so far. Next came Valero Energy at $568,000.”

And of course as we follow Todd Tiahrt’s slush trail, we find a close nit relationship between the congressman and Koch. See The Idiot Factor: Todd Tiahrt's folly.
Nothing illegal is happening here. Koch knows the loop-holes around the law. According to the article:
“Koch has also discovered the newest trend in campaign financing, so-called 527 committees.
Named after the section of the Internal Revenue Service code under which they're organized, these political committees can raise unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. They are also allowed to claim tax-exempt status as political committees while at the same time avoiding regulation by state or federal election authorities.”