“Blood Strawberries” in Greece by Ariel Ky

by Ariel Ky
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Peacevisionary’s Blog
April 29, 2013

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

“Blood Strawberries”: A Roundup of Media Reporting on Bangladeshi Workers Being Shot by Foremen in Greece When They Demanded Back Wages

At the village of Nea Manolada, a farming area west of Athens where thousands of migrant workers are employed, there is a history of exploiting migrants, but nothing like the Greek tragedy that occurred there April 17 when 29 Bangladeshi workers were shot by three foremen with two shotguns and a handgun. A photo of one of the victims showed him with bloody bandages over his groin, which leads one to believe that these foremen were vicious.

The Persecution of Lynne Stewart by Chris Hedges

Image by gotdissent via Flickr

by Chris Hedges
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
April 22, 2013

Lynne Stewart, in the vindictive and hysterical world of the war on terror, is one of its martyrs. A 73-year-old lawyer who spent her life defending the poor, the marginalized and the despised, including blind cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, she fell afoul of the state apparatus because she dared to demand justice rather than acquiesce to state sponsored witch hunts. And now, with stage 4 cancer that has metastasized, spreading to her lymph nodes, shoulder, bones and lungs, creating a grave threat to her life, she sits in a prison cell at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, where she is serving a 10-year sentence.

The Shame of America’s Gulag by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
March 18, 2013

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.

Save Dr. King’s Dream Act – Supreme Court to Hear Case to End Voting Rights Act by Greg Palast

by Greg Palast
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.gregpalast.com
For Care2.com
February 27, 2013

Image by SEIU International via Flickr

Jim Crow is alive and well — and he has mounted a new attack on the law Martin Luther King dreamed of: the Voting Rights Act.

Today, February 27, the Supreme Court will hear a suit brought by Shelby County, Alabama, which challenges the right of the Department of Justice to review changes in voting procedure. Example: Attempts to cut the number of early voting days, to expunge “illegal alien” voters without any evidence, refusing Spanish-language ballots, have been blocked by the Department of Justice and courts because they have stopped Black and Hispanic citizens casting ballots.

Is the Catholic Church Ready for a Black Pope? by Finian Cunningham

Image by A.Currell via Flickr

by Finian Cunningham
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from PressTV
February 13, 2013

Is the Catholic Church ready for a black pope? That is the question many inside and outside the world’s largest Christian organization are asking following the surprise resignation of Pope Benedict XVI this week.

The German pontiff, formerly known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he was elected in 2005, is the first leader of the Catholic Church in 600 years to retire before death. Most of his predecessors, who trace their official lineage back nearly 2,000 years to Saint Peter, the first pope, have died while still in the top job.

White Power to the Rescue by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
January 28, 2013

Image by zen via Flickr

On a windy afternoon a few days ago I went to a depressed section of North Memphis to visit an old clapboard house that was once owned by a German immigrant named Jacob Burkle. Oral history—and oral history is all anyone has in this case since no written documents survive—holds that Burkle used his house as a stop on the underground railroad for escaped slaves in the decade before the Civil War. The house is now a small museum called Slave Haven. It has artifacts such as leg irons, iron collars and broadsheets advertising the sale of men, women and children. In the gray floor of the porch there is a trapdoor that leads to a long crawl space and a jagged hole in a brick cellar wall where fugitives could have pushed themselves down into the basement.

Noam Chomsky: Prison Industrial Complex (clip from Long Distance Revolutionary) + Mumia and The Black Panther Party

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

with Noam Chomsky

mumiathemovie·Jan 23, 2013

Long Distance Revolutionary opens NYC February 1, 2013
Opens Seattle February 22, 2013
Opens LA March 1, 2013

A Time for ‘Sublime Madness’ by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
January 21, 2013

The planet we have assaulted will convulse with fury. The senseless greed of limitless capitalist expansion will implode the global economy. The decimation of civil liberties, carried out in the name of fighting terror, will shackle us to an interconnected security and surveillance state that stretches from Moscow to Istanbul to New York. To endure what lies ahead we will have to harness the human imagination. It was the human imagination that permitted African-Americans during slavery and the Jim Crow era to transcend their physical condition.

Tavis Smiley: Vision for a New America: A Future without Poverty + Cornel West: You Don’t Play With Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dandelion Salad

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/TavisSm
Jan. 17, 2013

Image by Mr. Kris via Flickr

Tavis Smiley moderated a discussion focusing on poverty in the United States. Panelists discussed issues including the importance of education, prisons, welfare programs, the size of government, and the federal budget. The panelists generally criticized the administration for not focusing on poverty and Tavis Smiley called on President Obama to hold a “White House Conference on the Eradication of Poverty in America.”

When the War Comes Home by Jill Dalton

by Jill Dalton
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
recoveringarmybrat, Jan. 12, 2013
January 19, 2013

Image by tsweden via Flickr

YET ANOTHER MASS SHOOTING

Our country’s rocked by yet another mass shooting this time in Newtown, Connecticut.  This time a 20-year-old kid, Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, in their home then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School where he killed six adults including the principal and 20 children before killing himself.

Michael Parenti on Media, Class, Politics, Drones, Occupy

with Michael Parenti
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Michael Parenti Blog
www.michaelparenti.org
Jan. 17, 2013

Image by glennshootspeople via Flickr

MidweekPolitics·Jan 16, 2013

Michael Parenti, noted political scholar and author of The Face of Imperialism joins David to discuss the changing role of media in the political landscape, the lenses of the two party system, race, culture, and class, on media reporting, and more.

The Idol Smasher by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
December 31, 2012

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Ishmael Reed has spent the last five decades smashing idols—idols of race, idols of capitalism, celebrity idols and the idols of national virtue and greatness. His essays, novels, poems, plays, songs and cartoons routinely shatter the delusions and myths of a nation stubbornly unwilling to confront its past or understand its present. He rips open a history that saw white Europeans exterminate one race and enslave another to create the nation’s prosperity, a past that includes the violent plundering of nations around the globe—Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan among them—to show us who we have become.

The Unsilenced Voice of a ‘Long-Distance Revolutionary’ by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
December 10, 2012

Image by Prison Radio via Flickr

I am sitting in the visiting area of the SCI Mahanoy prison in Frackville, Pa., on a rainy, cold Friday morning with Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s most famous political prisoner and one of its few authentic revolutionaries. He is hunched forward on the gray plastic table, his dreadlocks cascading down the sides of his face, in a room that looks like a high school cafeteria. He is talking intently about the nature of empire, which he is currently reading voraciously about, and effective forms of resistance to tyranny throughout history. Small children, visiting their fathers or brothers, race around the floor, wail or clamber on the plastic chairs. Abu-Jamal, like the other prisoners in the room, is wearing a brown jumpsuit bearing the letters DOC—for Department of Corrections.

Why Mass Incarceration Defines Us As a Society by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Originally published at Smithsonian Magazine, December 2012 issue
November 21, 2012

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

Bryan Stevenson, the winner of the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in social justice, has taken his fight all the way to the Supreme Court

It is late in the afternoon in Montgomery. The banks of the Alabama River are largely deserted. Bryan Stevenson and I walk slowly up the cobblestones from the expanse of the river into the city. We pass through a small, gloomy tunnel beneath some railway tracks, climb a slight incline and stand at the head of Commerce Street, which runs into the heart of Alabama’s capital. The walk was one of the most notorious in the antebellum South.

Apartheid never died in South Africa. It inspired a world order upheld by force and illusion by John Pilger

Dandelion Salad

By John Pilger
Global Research
http://johnpilger.com
September 20, 2012

Image by thatmelgirl via Flickr

The murder of 34 miners by the South African police, most of them shot in the back, puts paid to the illusion of post-apartheid democracy and illuminates the new worldwide apartheid of which South Africa is both an historic and contemporary model.

In 1894, long before the infamous Afrikaans word foretold “separate development” for the majority people of South Africa, an Englishman, Cecil John Rhodes, oversaw the Glen Grey Act in what was then the Cape Colony. This was designed to force blacks from agriculture into an army of cheap labour, principally for the mining of newly discovered gold and other precious minerals.