The Roots of Inequality for Ethiopian Israelis

Lia Tarachansky (speaker) is an Israeli-Russian journalist and documentary filmmaker who previously reported for The Real News Network on Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Born in the Soviet Union, Tarachansky grew up in a settlement in the occupied West Bank.

Full Script here : http://goo.gl/yIzbm3

The US Army & recent developments (protests & laws)!

A Brief History of GI Resistance During The Vietnam War

Published on 6 Jun 2014 | As the controversy continues over the prisoner swap involving U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl, peace activist and author David Cortright recounts the history of U.S. soldiers organizing against the Vietnam War.

Hollywood, 'Woefully Out of Touch', too few women involved & exposed!

AP Photo/Reed Saxon

Onscreen and off, minorities and women are drastically underrepresented — even at a cost to ratings and box office — according to a new report, which targets talent agencies, Oscars and Emmys, among others.

A UCLA study released Wednesday slammed the entertainment industry for its persistent and dramatic underrepresentation of minorities and women onscreen and behind the scenes, with the study’s chief author telling The Hollywood Reporter in an interview that “there are a lot of industries that do a better job than Hollywood” in forging workforces that reflect the nation’s diversity.

more here >>>

100,000 overseas Filipino workers in Saudi face jail, deportation?

P2 billion reintegration fund ready for OFWs - Palace

MANILA -- The government is ready to assist Filipinos who have yet to come home from Saudi Arabia as a result of an immigration law.

An analyst, however, fears more than 100,000 overseas Filipino workers could be arrested if they are found to be working with employers other than their original visa sponsors.

Lito Soriano, a migration and recruitment consultant, said the Saudi government is bent on weeding out undocumented OFWs and other expatriates because of the so-called “Saudization.”

Citing a Commission on Overseas Filipinos data, Soriano said there are around 108,000 irregular or undocumented Filipinos in Saudi Arabia as of December 2012.

The Saudi king has yet to respond to a letter of Vice President Jejomar Binay seeking another extension of the four-month grace period given in July. The amnesty period, which allows foreign nationals to correct their statuses or return to their home countries, lapses on November 3.

Soriano said the Ministry of Labor there has already ruled out an extension. Countrywide raids are expected on November 4, he said.

“The inspection of commercial premises will begin on Monday as planned. Various arms of the ministry are ready for the inspections. The government agencies, however, will not arrest those holding relevant documents and waiting to legalize their status or be repatriated,” he said.

In an interview on radio dzRB, Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma, Jr. assured the OFWs and their families that the government is already doing what it can to help in repatriation proceedings.

He said a total of 9,000 have been given travel documents, while some 1,500 are still waiting for their clearances from the immigration office.

According to Coloma, around 4,371 OFWs have already returned home ever since the new immigration law has been implemented.

“We will be giving them all the legal, financial and other necessary assistance,” Coloma said, adding that a P2-billion reintegration fund under the Department of Labor and Employment is readily available for the Filipinos.

Otherwise, the effect of the Saudization will be minimal since some of the Filipinos have already found other jobs, he said.

source ...

Poor In India Starve As Politicians Steal $14.5 Billion Of Food

Sanjit Das/Bloomberg

52-year-old Ram Kishen with his government provided ration card in Satnapur Village, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Ram Kishen, 52, half-blind and half- starved, holds in his gnarled hands the reason for his hunger: a tattered card entitling him to subsidized rations that now serves as a symbol of India’s biggest food heist.

Kishen has had nothing from the village shop for 15 months. Yet 20 minutes’ drive from Satnapur, past bone-dry fields and tiny hamlets where children with distended bellies play, a government storage facility five football fields long bulges with wheat and rice. By law, those 57,000 tons of food are meant for Kishen and the 105 other households in Satnapur with ration books. They’re meant for some of the 350 million families living below India’s poverty line of 50 cents a day.

Instead, as much as $14.5 billion in food was looted by corrupt politicians and their criminal syndicates over the past decade in Kishen’s home state of Uttar Pradesh alone, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The theft blunted the country’s only weapon against widespread starvation -- a five-decade-oldpublic distribution system that has failed to deliver record harvests to the plates of India’s hungriest.

“This is the most mean-spirited, ruthlessly executed corruption because it hits the poorest and most vulnerable in society,” said Naresh Saxena, who, as a commissioner to the nation’sSupreme Court, monitors hunger-based programs across the country. “What I find even more shocking is the lack of willingness in trying to stop it.”

Unpunished

This scam, like many others involving politicians in India, remains unpunished. A state police force beholden to corrupt lawmakers, an underfunded federal anti-graft agency and a sluggish court system have resulted in five overlapping investigations over seven years -- and zero convictions.

India has run the world’s largest public food distribution system for the poor since the failure of two successive monsoons led to the creation of the Food Corporation of India in 1965. The government last year spent a record $13 billion buying and storing commodities such as wheat and rice, and expects that figure to grow this year.

source here  >>

HUMAN NATURE: How the media whitewash the face of capitalism.

Glossary of Major Distortions {Part One}

(NOTE: First published in 1982)

Originally: Cyrano’s Journal of Politics Media and Culture Wars

Capitalism is preferentially identified by its euphemisms: “Free Enterprise,” “market system,” “private enterprise.” “the American Way,” etc. Overt and pervasive partisanship in support of capitalism is not regarded by the American media as an ideological bias negating professional “objectivity” but rather as something akin to the serene acceptance of natural law.

Capitalism = human nature
By Patrice Greanville

THIS PROPAGANDA EQUATION is one of the oldest and most effective ideological weapons utilized in defense of capitalism. It pays off handsomely in a number of important ways. First, if capitalism is congruent with “human nature,” then the capitalist system must be the most “natural” and “logical” form of social organization, as people will have a built-in tendency to observe its basic rules. Second, “human nature,” as defined in bourgeois terms (which the press of course follows) is characterized by two significant traits:immutability and unalterable egoism.

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The first “fact” automatically discourages most efforts at seriously reforming, let alone revolutionizing, society. Why should anyone bother if in the end the stubborn intractability of human nature will render all schemes for change and improvement of social conditions worthless and utopian? It’s evident that when sufficient numbers of people are made to believe that an eternal, immutable and invincible “human nature” will time and again scuttle the best-laid plans and the costliest sacrifices for change, then most threats to the status quo will be defanged at the outset.

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The Careerists

The Greatest Crimes Against Humanity Are Perpetrated by People Just Doing Their Jobs:

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. "Positive psychologists." Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot's "the hollow men," "the stuffed men." "Shape without form, shade without colour," the poet wrote. "Paralysed force, gesture without motion."

Read more >>

AWOL from US Air Force since 1984.

Published on Jun 19, 2012 : David Hemler became disillusioned with the policies of then - US President Ronald Reagan and decided to ditch his job with Uncle Sam in exchange for a new life in a new world. For 28 years, he hid his true identity from everyone — even his family.

Mercenaries in Papua (Bahasa Indonesia/Malay)

Video dalam bahasa Indonesia/Malay:

Uploaded by malaysiakini on 3 Feb 2012 - What happens when the police and military are on the payroll of a private company that persecutes people? Violence, intimidation and even murder. Like in Papua, Indonesia. Where police are paid by Freeport Indonesia to prevent workers from demonstrating. Tempo TV's Rio Rizalino reports.

Stun gun vs Occupy DC:

Cops tase protester in pyjamas.

Uploaded by RussiaToday on 30 Jan 2012 - U.S. Park Police officer used an electronic stun gun on an Occupy DC protester. Police say he was tearing down fliers warning protesters about the ban on camping in McPherson Square. Police also said the unidentified man was charged with disorderly conduct. The arrest took place shortly after noon Sunday. It is reported that after the incident the man had a seizure, and was then refused medical treatment. A park police spokesman said the man became "aggressive and confrontational'' when officers tried to arrest him and that is why the stun gun was used.

Indonesia may stop sending maids abroad.

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on 28 Jan 2012 - After Saudi Arabia beheaded an Indonesian maid for murder last year, there was a national outcry in the East Asian nation.

Now the Indonesian government is planning to stop sending maids abroad by 2017 amid reports that several maids are enduring abuse.Currently, more than 60 Indonesian workers are currently facing the death penalty around the world.

Keep going, keep going!

Occupy movement regroups, focuses on cyberspace:

Dark side of America:

5,000 Arrested OWS:police are starting to defect to the other side

 Uploaded by MarlboroCollege on 18 Dec 2009 :

Police in Los Angeles have cleared one of the last and longest-standing 'Occupy' camps in the U.S, making 300 arrests in the process. These latest arrests bring the total across the whole 'Occupy' movement to almost 5,000, but now police are starting to defect to the other side. Our correspondent Marina Portnaya has been finding out why some people have been choosing to make history instead of making arrests. 

The whole truth of a fraction of it? Obama: euro troubles make it hard to create jobs in US.

Uploaded by EUXTV on 29 Nov 2011 - U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday showed his full support in helping the euro zone solve its current debt crisis. The American president also added that troubles in Europe make it harder "to create jobs in the US". 

'Capital roams free, Labour stay put'.

Uploaded by enqilab on 15 Nov 2011 - America's Capital roam free into China & enslaved labour in China!