Abject Poverty or Domestic Servitude by Graham Peebles

by Graham Peebles
Writer, Dandelion Salad
London
December 23, 2013

Image by J.Maillard via International Labour Organization – ILO PHOTOS via Flickr

They work as maids, housekeepers, cleaners; they take care of children, the elderly and infirmed for wealthy and middle class families in rich and upwardly mobile nations. They are found throughout the world: in the G20 countries and the Gulf States, Latin America (where they account for 60% of internal and international migrants), and developing countries in Africa and Asia where vast numbers of poor and vulnerable live alongside the privileged few.

The Reality for Many is One of Modern Day Slavery, Imprisonment and Violence by Graham Peebles

by Graham Peebles
Writer, Dandelion Salad
London
Repost from October 5, 2013
December 19, 2013

Given the choice few people would leave their families and friends and migrate from their homeland. The tens of thousands that pay unscrupulous ‘agents’ and criminal gangs to transport them hundreds or thousands of miles (often across borders), are compelled to do so to find work and to earn money to support themselves and their loved ones at home. The Middle East and North African (MENA) countries are some of the destinations of choice for both men and women seeking work, women look for domestic work and child-care, whist employment in the construction industry, is the goal of the tens thousands of men from South East Asia living in stifling poverty.

Killed Beaten Raped: Migrant Workers are Slaves by Graham Peebles

by Graham Peebles
Writer, Dandelion Salad
London
December 6, 2013

With few opportunities at home, millions of poor, desperate men and women from South East Asia and the horn of Africa migrate annually to Saudi Arabia. Vulnerable at home and vulnerable abroad where many are enslaved and badly abused, some killed. Slavery is woven into the fabric of the psyche of the kingdom; according to Saudi scholar Ali al-Ahmed, a “culture of slavery pervades the country”[The Guardian[i]], and although banned in 1964 (when it is thought there were 30,000 slaves in the country) the barbaric practice of owning a fellow human being still exists in the form of the internationally condemned kafala sponsorship system. By tying the residency status of migrant workers to their employers, the system grants the latter total control, amounting to ownership.

Trading Women for Profit by Graham Peebles

by Graham Peebles
Writer, Dandelion Salad
London
November 9, 2013

Image by Imagens Evangélicas via Flickr

The act of buying and selling sits at the very heart of the global economy. A commercially motivated system, that P. Sainath rightly describes as “Market Fundamentalism”, in which competition and conservative uniformity are central elements. Creative independent thinking and originality are anathema to this relentless homogenous machine, which breeds conformity, crushes individuality and “Borg-like”, assimilates all into ‘The Collective’.

Abuse of Migrant Workers in MENA Countries by Graham Peebles

by Graham Peebles
Writer, Dandelion Salad
London
October 5, 2013

Image by nathangibbs via Flickr

Given the choice few people would leave their families and friends and migrate from their homeland. The tens of thousands that pay unscrupulous ‘agents’ and criminal gangs to transport them hundreds or thousands of miles (often across borders), are compelled to do so to find work and to earn money to support themselves and their loved ones at home. The Middle East and North African (MENA) countries are some of the destinations of choice for both men and women seeking work, women look for domestic work and child-care, whist employment in the construction industry, is the goal of the tens thousands of men from South East Asia living in stifling poverty.

Children and Women for Sale In India by Graham Peebles

by Graham Peebles
Writer, Dandelion Salad
London
September 4, 2013

Image by Rita Willaert via Flickr

To be born poor in our world, is to be born vulnerable and in danger of exploitation of one kind or another; to be incarnated female and poor is to greatly intensify the risks. If you are born a girl to parents of tea-pickers in Assam in North Eastern India (earning as little as US $1.50 a day) there is a good chance you will be sold to a local recruitment ‘agent’ by your loved ones for around $50, he will sell you on to a city ‘employer’ for up to $800 and into a life of abuse and suffering.

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.

Ethiopian migrants abused and unwelcome in Yemen by Graham Peebles

by Graham Peebles
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
London
December 17, 2012

Desperately seeking a future

Year on year the numbers of men, women and children leaving Ethiopia in search of work and freedom from repression in one of the Gulf States and beyond is increasing. Lured by the often hollow prospect of earning enough money to support their family, United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)[i] estimate around 85,000 men women and children, desperate and naïve, have this year, no matter the severe risks, made their way to Yemen, the hub of migration out of the Horn of Africa. In the last six years around 250,000 Ethiopians have made the dangerous journey into this very poor, deeply divided country besieged with internal problems, which has limited resources, the second highest rate of chronic child malnutrition in the world and where 45% of the population live in poverty.

The Nameless by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
January 15, 2012

The Nameless

I have to get out of here
the heat shimmers
and I know no one
Phoenix sucks

I dress in the shortest skirt I have
put on fishnet stocking
over-paint my face
look like a good presentable whore

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.

Where Have Libya’s Children Gone? by Franklin Lamb

by Franklin Lamb
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Tripoli, Libya
August 8, 2011

Image by The Stop the War Coalition via Flickr

The quality of life continues to degrade in certain areas of western Libya while public anxiety noticeably rises over missing Libyan children as the first week of an unusually stressful Ramadan passes.

The shortage of gasoline has become acute and despite government efforts to curtail price gouging, one taxi driver told this observer yesterday that while the usual price of ‘benzene’ was five liters (one gallon) for $.40 (forty US cents) he is now having to pay as much as “4 dinars for one liter of petrol!”

P. Sainath: Mass Media v. Mass Reality (must-see)

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

replaced videos Aug. 1, 2014

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

SocialJusticeNOW on May 7, 2011

Award-winning journalist P. Sainath will speak on the failure of mass media to report and analyze the widening economic inequality in India and around the world. For the past decade, Sainath has been reporting on the epidemic of farmers committing suicide in India as a result of the collapse of the rural economy.

Haiti children ‘taken from unaffected areas’

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

http://therealnews.com 

video unavailable

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As the US missionaries in Haiti are charged with kidnapping, Channel 4 News meets parents from an unaffected village there who say missionaries offered to take their children.

Channel 4 News has visited Calebasse, a village around 90 minutes away from Port-au-Prince by car.