No, not the gulag you think, outrageous as it is. I’m referring to the U.S. prison system that’s with no exaggeration about as shockingly abusive as the gulag abroad. It qualifies for that label by its size alone – more than 2.1 million as of June 2004 and growing larger by about 900 new inmates every week.

Blacks, mostly poor and disadvantaged, especially are affected. While they make up just 12.3 percent of the U.S. population, they account for half the prison population and their numbers there have grown fivefold in the last 25 years. Hispanics, also poor, account for another 15 percent.

About half of those incarcerated are there for non-violent offenses, and half of those, 500,000, are drug related. But while Blacks make up 15 percent of illicit drug users, they account for 37 percent of drug arrests, 42 percent of drug offenders in federal prison and 62 percent in state prisons. And Human Rights Watch reported in 2000 that in one third of the states 75 percent of all those imprisoned for drug-related offenses are Black.

In my home state of Illinois, they reported the number to be an astonishing 89 percent, a total exceeded by only one other state. Further, in a so-called free society, below the radar are hundreds of political prisoners, mostly people of color, there only because they represent a threat to the state for the pursuit of justice for their people they would resume if they were free.

Today the U.S. shamelessly has more people behind bars than any other nation including China with over four times our population. And things have become especially repressive against those in society least able to defend themselves, including immigrants of color and our newest demon – Muslims. The Bush administration has made a bad situation far worse taking full advantage of their fear-induced “permanent state of war” and sham “global war on terrorism” to target all those seen as a potential threat to their plan for global dominance and full control at home.

Taken as a whole, this is a national disgrace and outrage, but the effect on those targeted is pretty much below the radar, unreported and undiscussed in the mainstream. Who cares about a couple of million mostly poor, mostly people of color, including immigrants, many of whom are undocumented and have no legal rights at all, languishing behind bars out of sight and out of mind. When any of this is discussed, it’s to let the voter-eligible public know our political leaders are “tough on crime” and working to keep us safe.
sfbayview.com

Los Angeles’ policy of arresting homeless people for sitting, lying or sleeping on public sidewalks as “an unavoidable consequence of being human and homeless without shelter” violates the constitutional prohibition against cruel and punishment, a federal appeals court ruled today.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, decided in favor of six homeless persons, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. The suit challenged the city’s practice of arresting persons for violating a municipal ordinance, which states that “no person shall sit, lie or sleep in or upon any street, sidewalk or public way.”

The appeals court ruled that the manner in which the city has enforced the ordinance has criminalized “the status of homelessness by making it a crime to be homeless,” and thereby violated the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
latimes.com

Global temperatures will rise by an average of 3C due to climate change and cause catastrophic damage around the world unless governments take urgent action, according to the UK government’s chief scientist.

In a stark warning issued yesterday Sir David King said that a rise of this magnitude would cause famine and drought and threaten millions of lives.

It would also cause a worldwide drop in cereal crops of between 20 and 400m tonnes, put 400 million more people at risk of hunger, and put up to 3 billion people at risk of flooding and without access to fresh water supplies.

Few ecosystems could adapt to such a temperature change, equivalent to a level of carbon dioxide of 550 parts per million in the atmosphere, which would result in the destruction of half the world’s nature reserves and a fifth of coastal wetlands.
guardian.co.uk

“The US does not have to lead the world – it has first to join it.” He summed up his outlook: “The primary problems of the planet arise not from the poor, for whom education is the answer. They arise from the well educated – for whom self-interest is the problem.”
guardian.co.uk

…Harp magazine reported on its Web site Thursday that Demme had confirmed in an e-mail, “Neil just finished writing and recording — with no warning — a new album called ‘Living With War.’ It all happened in three days… It is a brilliant electric assault, accompanied by a 100-voice choir, on Bush and the war in Iraq… Truly mind blowing. Will be in stores soon.”
editorandpublisher.com

“Use more psychedelic drugs,” is not advice you would expect from your GP, but that is the call from an influential US medical journal to researchers.

An editorial in the Lancet says that the “demonisation of psychedelic drugs as a social evil” has stifled vital medical research that would lead to a better understanding of the brain and better treatments for conditions such as depression.

The journal’s editor Richard Horton said he was not advocating recreational drug use, but championed the benefits of researchers studying the effects of drugs such as LSD and Ecstasy by using them themselves in the lab.

“The blanket ban on psychedelic drugs enforced in many countries continues to hinder safe and controlled investigation, in a medical environment, of their potential benefits,” said the editorial, “…criminalisation of these agents has also led to an excessively cautious approach to further research into their therapeutic benefits.”

Dr Horton told Guardian Unlimited that important advances were made by researchers using psychedelic drugs on themselves, but that these studies were stifled by the post-1960s anti-drug backlash. “Our very earliest understanding of the neurochemistry of the brain came from studying LSD-like compounds. Those same researchers were also taking those drugs, not recreationally, but as experiments on themselves. This was immensely important work.”

…or the generation who trained in the 50s and 60s, this really was going to be the next big thing. Thousands of books and papers were written, but then it all went silent. My generation has never heard of it. It’s almost as if there has been an active demonisation.”
guardian.co.uk

NOGALES, Mexico – At a shelter overflowing with migrants airing their blistered feet, Francisco Ramirez nursed muscles sore from trekking through the Arizona desert – a trip that failed when his wife did not have the strength to go on.

He said the couple would rest for a few days, then try again, a plan echoed by dozens reclining on rickety bunk beds and carpets tossed on the floor after risking violent bandits and the harsh desert in unsuccessful attempts to get into the United States.

The shelter’s manager, Francisco Loureiro, said he has not seen such a rush of migrants since 1986, when the United States allowed 2.6 million illegal residents to get American citizenship.

This time, the draw is a bill before the U.S. Senate that could legalize some of the 11 million people now illegally in the United States while tightening border security. Migrants are hurrying to cross over in time to qualify for a possible guest-worker program – and before the journey becomes even harder.
azcentral.com

Corporate Agriculture’s Dirty Little Secret
Our nation’s continuing controversy surrounding its current immigration “policy” is more than just corporate agribusiness’s dirty little secret, but it also shrouds an economic iceberg that unless recognized could well rip the U.S. apart.

Ignored by our national TV and media pundits in their alarm over the influx of foreign workers, principally from Mexico, the immigration issue has both its historical roots and an abject lesson regarding what is wrong about our whole so-called “free enterprise” system.

To begin with the question needs to be asked who really are “illegal” immigrants on mostly territory that now comprises one third of the U.S. land mass and which in fact belonged to Mexico prior to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 ?

Here was land literally stolen from the Mexican people by a handful of thievish land barons in what the famous land reformer Henry George once described as “a history of greed, of perjury, of corruption, of spoliation and high-handed robbery for which it would be difficult to find a parallel.”

The long-term consequences of such action was that in the words of Ernesto Galarza, author of the classic Merchants of Labor, the Treaty left “the toilers on one side of the border, the capital and the best land on the other.”

Therefore, it is no accident that throughout U.S. history the chronic areas of rural poverty have remained the South, where the plantation system has dominated the agricultural scene, and the Southwest, where the vast tracts of productive land have remained in the hands of a privileged few through the years.

During those years these large growers have developed the mistaken notion that the nation and our government should provide them with a cheap, unorganized work force.

CARACAS, VENEZUELA – Powering ahead with stringent nationalist reforms, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela is showing multinational oil firms little mercy.

Tense relations between private firms and Mr. Chávez’s government escalated last week when the government seized fields operated by two European oil giants – France’s Total and Italy’s ENI – after the two companies snubbed government demands to convert their contracts to joint ventures with the state by April 1.

“This country does not allow itself to be blackmailed,” says energy minister Rafael Ramirez. “These two multinational companies resist adjusting to our law. Our sovereignty isn’t under negotiation.”

Sixteen companies – including Chevron and Shell – did agree to new terms giving state oil company PDVSA at least a 60 percent state stake, a success which analysts say could embolden Venezuela to demand a majority stake in more valuable projects in the country’s Orinoco heavy-oil belt. Heavy oil’s viscosity makes it more expensive to drill and refine than regular oil. However, high oil prices have attracted top companies to Venezuela’s heavy oil, which could boost the country’s reserves count to the largest in the world – ahead of Saudi Arabia.

“Chávez is in the driver’s seat because he has what everybody wants,” says Roger Tissot, energy analyst at PFC Energy consulting firm, about Venezuela’s heavy oil. “It’s not any kind of oil. It’s the oil of the future.”

But more forced contract changes could further increase investor fear and make it more difficult for US oil companies to access one of the largest long-term sources of oil left on the planet.
csmonitor.com

BOCA DEL TORO, Cuba (Reuters) – Flying over chains of sandy keys in a clattering old Soviet Mi-17 helicopter, Col. Jorge Samper declares a Cuban victory over South American drug traffickers — with no thanks to the United States.

Communist Cuba wants to cooperate with its bitter political enemy in the war on narcotics, but is getting no response from Washington, says Samper, deputy commander of the Cuban Coast Guard.

Colombian smugglers have used the hundreds of tiny secluded islands off Cuba’s long north coast as drop sites for bales of cocaine and marijuana to be picked up from the sea by speedboats for delivery to the United States.

Despite scarce resources to patrol its waters other than slow-moving Soviet-era torpedo boats, Cuba says it has the problem under control.

“The drug trafficking through Cuba, especially by sea, has been controlled. The traffickers have gone elsewhere,” Samper told foreign reporters on a tour of coastal observation posts along the north coast of eastern Cuba.
au.news.yahoo.com

Unification Church’s critics say sports projects are used to brainwash impoverished young people

t’s training time on a drizzly morning in the impoverished Brazilian suburb of Los Angeles and 18 footballers huddle in circles, exchanging passes, headers and a sporadic barrage of expletives.

For residents of this impoverished area near Campo Grande, where boggy tracks wind between wooden shacks and cows amble from street to street, it’s an ordinary Wednesday morning.

But this is no ordinary Brazilian football team. Nor is the team’s owner – the eccentric 86-year-old leader of the Unification Church, Reverend Sun Myung Moon – your run-of-the-mill chairman.

Part of a miniature football empire commanded by evangelism’s answer to Roman Abramovich, the New Hope Sports Centre (CENE) represents, say its directors, an attempt to transform Brazil’s increasingly decadent national game as well as a step along the road to world peace.

“Our plans were always that within 10 years we’d be in the top flight,” says Jose Rodrigues, the club’s marketing director, at CENE’s training centre in Los Angeles. “That means 2009 – so we have three years to really show what we can do.”

For Moon’s many critics, the team is nothing more than a bait used to draw locals into his controversial sect, offering access to education and sports to convert people from vulnerable, deprived communities.

CENE is one of two Moon-backed teams (the other is in Sao Paulo) that form the sports wing of a South American Moonie kingdom, now made up of around 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of farmland in Brazil, bought for an estimated $25m (£14m), and at least 600,000 hectares (1.5m acres) in neighbouring Paraguay.

Followers say that through this transnational corridor Moon hopes to project his ideas across the continent. “In truth, football has the power to do something which nothing else can do – create one, single belief,” says Paulo Telles, the club’s executive president and a member of Moon’s Family Association in Brazil.

Moon’s Brazilian odyssey is said to have begun in 1994 during a fishing trip to the Pantanal, one of the world’s largest wetlands, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Astonished by the area’s wildlife, he returned to begin constructing the estate which now straddles Brazil’s border with Paraguay.

The centrepiece of this ever-growing empire is the New Hope ranch, near the small town of Jardim. Here the Moonies receive followers from around the world, for visits of up to 40 days. Twelve neatly organised brick bungalows sit next to the Moonie church, a huge terracotta mansion, with the group’s logo sprouting from its roof. Foreign visitors cruise around the community in white VW vans, and during the week the area’s state school fills with children from nearby towns.
guardian.co.uk