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.

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.

Daughters of India Violated and Abused, by Graham Peebles + The ‘Genocide’ of India’s Daughters

by Graham Peebles
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
London
January 6, 2013

Image by Imagens Evangélicas via Flickr

A woman’s lot

In the ancient land of India, where female deities deeply revered, Kali and Lakshmi, Sarasvati and Parvati, are held high upon the alter of Hinduism, where each day thousands of Hindu’s ritually bathe in the Holy waters of the Ganges, cleansed within and without by the Goddess Ganga, women and girls; in the forests, cities, villages and towns, on buses and trains, in the street, the office, at school and in the home are being violated, abused, raped and trafficked into prostitution and domestic slavery.

The Arab Slave Trade In Foreign Workers Is Alive and Well by Finian Cunningham

by Finian Cunningham
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from PressTV
January 2, 2013

Image by Imagens Evangélicas via Flickr

Recent legal moves by the governments of Ethiopia, Indonesia and the Philippines to protect their nationals working in the Persian Gulf Arab states point to this harrowing fact: the Arab slave trade in foreign workers is alive and well.

Rights groups estimate that there are up to 15 million migrant workers located in the Persian Gulf Arab countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Paid pittance wages and subsisting in dirty, overcrowded dwellings, these workers provide the labour backbone of the Arab oil economies.

Prison labor booms in US as low-cost inmates bring billions

Dandelion Salad

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

RussiaToday·Dec 9, 2012

US breeds a Chinese-style inmate labor scheme on its own soil. Both state and some of the biggest private companies are now enjoying the fruits of a cheap and readily available work force, with tens of millions of dollars spent by private prisons to keep their jails full.

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

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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.

The Spread of Sacrifice Zones by David Swanson

Dandelion Salad

by David Swanson
http://warisacrime.org
June 8, 2012

Image by CWMc via Flickr

Chris Hedges‘ and Joe Sacco’s new book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, is a treasure. Hedges wrote the plain text. Sacco produced the text-heavy cartoon sections and other illustrations, which even I — not a big fan of cartoon books — found to enrich this book enormously.

Hedges and Sacco visit Pine Ridge, South Dakota, to examine the misery of the Native Americans who remain there. It’s nice to think that we’ve corrected our crimes through political correctness, and yet they continue uninterrupted — unconscionably, intolerably, tragically. Here the human stories are told, and told by those affected and by those resisting and struggling to set things right.

An Empire of Poverty: Race, Punishment, and Social Control by Andrew Gavin Marshall

by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
http://andrewgavinmarshall.com
February 26, 2012

NOTE: The following is a brief sampling of some of the concepts, ideas, issues, and events that are to be thoroughly researched and written about in two chapters of The People’s Book Project which will be funded through The People’s Grant, of which the objective is to raise $1,600 from readers and supporters. If you find the information in the following sampling of interest, please donate to the People’s Book Project and help facilitate expanded research on these and other related subjects into constructing two significant chapters for the book. For a look at what other information will be included in these chapters, see the latest information on The People’s Grant.

Slavery and the Social Construction of Race

Tomatoes of Wrath by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
Sept. 26, 2011

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

It is 6 a.m. in the parking lot outside the La Fiesta supermarket in Immokalee, Fla. Rodrigo Ortiz, a 26-year-old farmworker, waits forlornly in the half light for work in the tomato fields. White-painted school buses with logos such as “P. Cardenas Harvesting” are slowly filling with fieldworkers. Knots of men and a few women, speaking softly in Spanish and Creole, are clustered on the asphalt or seated at a few picnic tables waiting for crew leaders to herd them onto the buses, some of which will travel two hours to fields.

Finally, The Truth About the Alamo by Daniel N. White

by Daniel N. White
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
September 20, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

My, My, My.  We now have a  truthful book about the Alamo.

And somehow it seems to have escaped critical attention, particularly, to no great surprise, here in Texas. The book is Exodus from the Alamo: The Anatomy of the Last Stand Myth, by Phillip Thomas Tucker. Published in 2010 by second-tier publishers Casemate, this book has not received any reviews by any major national source, nor any attention by any of the Texas newspapers.* Hell I’d have thought that San Antonio, which although by population numbers is the US’ 9th largest city has always really been Mexico’s northernmost city, and is also where the Alamo, or what little is left of it, resides,

The Intimately Oppressed by Howard Zinn

by Howard Zinn
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted at www.greanvillepost.com, July 20, 2011
August 12, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

Chapter 6 from A People’s History of the United States.

It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.

In this invisibility they were something like black slaves (and thus slave women faced a double oppression). The biological uniqueness of women, like skin color and facial characteristics for Negroes, became a basis for treating them as inferiors. True, with women, there was something more practically important in their biology than skin color-their position as childbearers-but this was not enough to account for the general push backward for all of them in society, even those who did not bear children, or those too young or too old for that.

“Nepal girls are cheaper to buy” by Brian McAfee

by Brian McAfee
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
August 13, 2011

Image by C. Elle via Flickr

One of the most significant ongoing scourges that befalls humanity worldwide is the ongoing exploitation and sexual abuse of over two million girls and boys through sex trafficking. UNICEF estimates that two and a half million children, most of them girls, are tricked or forced into the multibillion dollar global sex industry.

Ongoing Supremacy of White Supremacy by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
April 2, 2011

Image by Cornell University Library via Flickr

In a BuzzFlash commentary dated Aug. 25, 2009. (See here)

I pointed out that the South had six principal war aims in the Civil War:

1. The preservation of the institution of African and African-American (courtesy of the slave owners and slave masters) slavery and its uninhibited expansion into the Territories of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountain region, and the Southwest.

Drawing the color line by Howard Zinn

by Howard Zinn
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted at www.greanvillepost.com
March 21, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

Chapter 2 from A People’s History of the United States.

A black American writer, J. Saunders Redding, describes the arrival of a ship in North America in the year 1619:

Sails furled, flag drooping at her rounded stern, she rode the tide in from the sea. She was a strange ship, indeed, by all accounts, a frightening ship, a ship of mystery. Whether she was trader, privateer, or man-of-war no one knows. Through her bulwarks black-mouthed cannon yawned. The flag she flew was Dutch; her crew a motley. Her port of call, an English settlement, Jamestown, in the colony of Virginia. She came, she traded, and shortly afterwards was gone. Probably no ship in modern history has carried a more portentous freight. Her cargo? Twenty slaves.

Robber Barons, Revolution, and Social Control, Part 1 by Andrew Gavin Marshall

by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
March 12, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

The Century of Social Engineering, Part 1

In Part 1 of this series, “The Century of Social Engineering,” I briefly document the economic, political and social background to the 20th century in America, by taking a brief look at the major social upheavals of the 19th century. For an excellent and detailed examination of this history, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States  (which provided much of the research for this article) is perhaps the most expansive and detailed examination. I am not attempting to serve it justice here, as there is much left out of this historically examination than there is included.