An Old Debate on Rights

 

 

Human rights violations are ever common in the world. Marela is an undocumented immigrant in her 40's. She stood outside the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, NJ. on a chilly afternoon last week. She was there with protesters. They wanted to decry the nation's immigration policies and conditions inside of the center.  She said that she was at the location protesting because of her friend Evelyn Obey. Obey is a 40 year old Guatemalan and the single mother of a 12 year old, and a 6 year old. She was picked up in an immigration raid as she and nine other undocumented workers walked out of an office building that they cleaned in Newark, NJ. Her two children instantly lost their only parent. She languished in detention. This is another example of children never seeing their mother again. Obey died in jail in 2010 from according to the sign Villar had hung on her neck of “pulmonary thromboembolism, chronic bronchiolitis and emphysema and remote cardiac Ischemic Damage.’ ” “She called me two days after she was seized,” Marela told me in Spanish. “She was hysterical. She was crying. She was worried about her children. We could not visit her because we do not have legal documents. We helped her get a lawyer. Then we heard she was sick. Then we heard she died. She was buried in an unmarked grave. We did not go to her burial. We were too scared of being seized and detained.” The rally had about 4 dozen human beings. Many who came to protest were from immigrant rights groups and local churches. This shows that some consciousness exists in a nation that must confront the totalitarian corporate forces arrayed against it. Many folks wore orange jumpsuits like those worn by inmates held signs reading: “I Want My Family Together,” “No Human Being is Illegal,” and “Education not Deportation.” “The people who run that prison make money off of human misery,” said Diana Mejia, 47, an immigrant from Colombia who now has legal status, gesturing toward the old warehouse that now serves as the detention facility. As she spoke, a Catholic Worker band called the Filthy Rotten System belted out a protest song. A low-flying passenger jet, its red, green and white underbelly lights blinking in the night sky, rumbled overhead. Clergy walking amid the crowd marked the foreheads of participants with ashes to commemorate Ash Wednesday. For the record, I don't agree with Catholicism or Ash Wednesday at all from a religious standpoint. Many community groups are working to advance immigrant rights. Most human beings in prison in America never committed a crime. 11 million undocumented immigrants face the possibility of imprisonment and deportation. There have been more deportations now than the previous administrations. Families have been seized, detained, and deported in the realm of over 400,000 human beings. Children have come home from school and they have lost their mothers or fathers. Some families have been made destitute. Many detention centers have made huge profits from this reality like the  320-bed Elizabeth Detention Center, which houses only men, is run by one of the largest operators and owners of for-profit prisons in the country, Corrections Corporation of America. CCA, traded on the New York Stock Exchange, has annual revenues in excess of $1.7 billion. An average of 81,384 inmates are in its facilities on any one day. This is a greater number, the American Civil Liberties Union points out in a 2011 report, “Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration,” than that held by the states of New York and New Jersey combined. Corporate interests view education, health care, and war as a business. We have a for profit prison system. Draconian drug laws, more harsh detention policies, and the blocking immigration reform have not worked to make a better society at all. The industry makes profits when more folks are in prisons. The ACLU said that the USA increased its prison population by about 700 percent from 1970 to 2005. The Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the ACLU report notes, says that for-profit companies presently control about 18 percent of federal prisoners and 6.7 percent of all state prisoners. Private prisons account for nearly all of the new prisons built between 2000 and 2005. And nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons, according to Detention Watch Network. ICE has imprisoned about 400,000 undocumented human beings each year. The CCA has grown corporate profits. We need our common good. We need our rights and a voice. Certain corporations are unfortunately writing our laws and determining how our society is structured. It is just for us to defend the power of the poor, the sick, the weak, the vulnerable, the undocumented, the children, and the sick.  When you have new kids in foster care, because families are being deported then we have a serious problem in American society.

We know that austerity can never work to liberate us from economic issues. We know that millions of Americans have seen their take home pay being shrunk by 2 percent. The Social Security payroll tax cut of 2009 was restored. This cost workers an average amount of $850 a year, a significant wage decrease for workers on the edge of financial ruin. The pay cut is including in a government austerity agenda. This agenda is found all over the world. Austerity wants to cut government spending for social benefits and raising taxes to guarantee loan payments to banks. European governments, reactionaries, and centrists politicians like the Obama administration love austerity. Yet, there is nothing wrong with raising taxes on the super-rich at all when they pay record low taxation today. There are debates on the payroll tax and proposed cuts in federal spending including cuts to Social Security benefits. The truth is that Social Security and other benefits are not responsible for the large deficit. Social Security has $2.6 trillion in its trust fund. This is enough to adequately fund it for at least the next 25 years (according to Jack Lew). Jack Lewis was the President Barack Obama's former budget director and the new nominee for the Secretary of Treasury. Social Security should never be included in any federal budget. The reason is that the trust fund has been accumulated form the entire lifetime contributions of millions of workers via its own payroll taxes. If someone wants to reduce the benefits of older workers in order to reduce the deficit, then that is robbery of the working class. Numerous capitalist governments globally have inadequate revenue to cover costs. Now, we have this issue in the U.S. because of the outrageous military spending or over a trillion dollars on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone, tax cuts for big business including the wealthy and gigantic bailouts for the banks. The poor and working class have been harmed by the economic crisis. Millions of jobs have been lost, which reduces our tax base. Some jobs have been created, but job growth has been sluggish. The ruling class wants to have government guarantee loan and interest payments to banks. So, we have austerity. An International Monetary Fund study of 17 countries that implemented austerity plans in the last 30 years showed that alleged debt-reduction plans, aimed at reducing debt and leading to prosperity, on the whole failed to do so.  Moreover, says the IMF, “Income and employment don’t fully recover even five years after the austerity program is enacted.” (Washington Post, May 7). Since the IMF’s own study showed that its austerity policies reduce economic growth, why does it continue to dictate such measures to governments all around the globe, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and lately in southern Europe? The reason is that the IMF was instituted as a means to use debt issues as a means to further colonized the Third World human beings. Austerity policies will always please the big banks and corporations indeed. Imperialists and big capitalists want to see more profits; unions weakened, and lower labor costs. The IMF wanted to increase the power of the West over oppressed nations at the expense of labor. The austerity actions that have been occurring for 5 years in Greece has caused Greece to be in a deep economic depression. Greek workers have suffered. The Greek gross domestic product is only 70 percent of what it was before the European Union and IMF imposed austerity measures on Greece. GDP is the measure of the value of the total goods and services produced in a country. The 17 Eurozone nations that utilized severe austerity have experienced a double dip recession and have not really significantly decrease their debt. The latest official estimate of U.S. economic growth, released Jan. 30 by the Department of Commerce, has provided further proof that budgetary austerity depresses the economy. According to this report, “the just-completed fiscal cliff deal … is expected to trim anywhere from 1 to 1.7 percent from economic growth this year. With economic growth averaging 1.8 to 2.4 percent over the past three years, the impact of the just passed budget package… may bring economic growth to a standstill.” (Beforeitsnews.com, Feb 1, 2013). Laissez faire capitalism doesn't work. The world's working and poor people via higher taxes on the working class and draconian cuts in needed health and social services will not work.




The National Intelligence Council predicts a very transhuman future by 2030 for the world. This is described in their 140 page document. This work is similar to the National Science Foundation’s groundbreaking 2003 report, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance — a relatively early attempt to understand and predict how advanced biotechnologies would impact on the human experience. The NIC’s new report, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, follows in the same tradition — namely one that doesn’t ignore the potential for enhancement technologies. The recent report claims that prosthetics will be just as good as or better than organic limbs. The military wants to rely on exoskeletons as a means to help soldiers carry heavy loads. You can theoretically have psychostimulus to help soldiers have active activities for longer periods of time. The National Intelligence Council is a high level agency. It is heavily known for making National Intelligence Estimates. These estimates forecasts predicting future trends and issues of the next 15 years. These extensive reports are produced every election year and are directly delivered to the incoming President between Election Day and Inauguration Day. The newest NIC report was released on December 2012. It was entitled, "Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds." It discussed several issues like the decline of the role of America as a global policeman and the rise of non-state actors in the world politics. It mentioned the key issue of a fast paced race towards transhumanism. The aspect of human augmentation will be discussed more in the next 15 years as new technologies will allow numerous modifications. These modifications range from implants, prosthetics, powered exoskeletons, and other human augmentation enhancing innate human abilities. This plan can be used on soldiers, workers, and anyone that can afford them super human capabilities whether physical or mental. The mainstream media and the establishment advances transhumanism all of the time. Many have used transhumanism in an esoteric scene. For years, many occultists want to believe that transhumanism is some gateway into godhood or immortality. We know that one leading transhumanist philosopher Max More is a Luciferian. Max More believes in Lucifer and that the God of the Old Testament is the enemy, because he threw Lucifer out of Heaven (and he felt that Lucifer wanted to give man knowledge alone). Max believed in the false notion that Lucifer is a force for good. The richest and most powerful folks in the world will mostly have access to this high tech transhumanist technology. The National Intelligence Council said that following on this issue: "...The high cost of human augmentation means that it probably will be available in 15-20 years only to those who are able to pay. Such a situation may lead to a two-tiered society..." Some fear that some of the elite will try to make some superhumans as a product of accepting this transhumanist philosophy. This agenda is found in television, video games, etc. In the future, advances in neurosciences and future brain machine interfaces may come about more readily. There are advances even in flexible biocompatible electronics that will enable improved integration with cybernetic implants. We live in a time of class struggle. We are not just fighting against economic exploitation. We are fighting against ignorance, and despotism. Even one party that claims to be for the people is now part of the oppressor class since they break bread with the cartel capitalist co-conspirators. The state is being used as a means of the ruling class to maintain its monopoly of violence via the military, police, the national security state, etc. over human beings. Therefore, we must not advance aristocracy or oligarchy. We want have a genuine commonwealth where the common good of all human peoples is respected 100 percent.

 

 

The CISPA or the Cyber Intelligence Sharing the Protection Act is back. In 2011, they tried to enact the same policy. The bill wants to strife or destroys real personal freedom than online security. The government and corporate supporters can have unlimited power to access personal information online if the bill becomes law. This bill will ignore civil liberty protections. Security experts, academics, and other professionals have criticized CISPA as well. They called CISPA and John McCain’s SECURE IT Act measures that “allow entities who participate in relaying or receiving Internet traffic to freely monitor and redistribute those network communications” unjustifiably. The bill will increase private communications to be transferred to government agencies. There are huge vague language and lax transparency in the bill. Privacy is threatened. Innocuous online activities can be called cyber security threats. Even the cyber-attack agenda of the White House is continuing strong. President Barack Obama's 2013 State of the Union address talked about a no holds barred cyber war and he on May of 2009, he discussed cyber security. He believes that cyber threats are one of the pressing national security including economic challenges in America.  “America’s economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on cybersecurity,” he claimed. He ordered a top-to-bottom assessment. A Cyberspace Policy Review followed. He supports draconian cyber security bills. Passage threatens constitutional freedoms. His February 12th Executive Order called for "Improving Critical Infrastructure Cyber security." The order believes that since threats are growing in the world, national security challenges must be met.  The executive order reads the following words as well: “It is the policy of the United States to enhance the security and resilience of the Nation’s critical infrastructure and to maintain a cyber-environment that encourages efficiency, innovation, and economic prosperity while promoting safety, security, business confidentiality, privacy, and civil liberties...We can achieve these goals through a partnership with the owners and operators of critical infrastructure to improve cyber security information sharing and collaboratively develop and implement risk-based standards..." Now, lawmakers want to revisit CISPA. On February 14, Rep. Mike Rogers (R. MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D. MD) reintroduced it. Once in last April, it passed the House 248-168. Civil libertarian outrage gave Senators second thoughts. The bill died in committee. It is now back. The ACLU on February 13 said that CISPA fails to protect privacy. The critics of the bill believe that it will allow companies share sensitive and personal American internet data with the government including the National Security Agencies (and other military agencies). The Electronic Frontier Foundation or the EFF have criticized the CISPA. According to the EFF, "it offers broad immunities to companies (wishing) to share data with government agencies (including the private communications of users) in the name of cyber security.” Companies now share data with federal agencies including military intelligence ones like the NSA. It can allow the NSA to use information for non-cyber security reasons. In October of 2011, the President signed the secret directive of Presidential Policy Directive 20 that deals with cyberspace threats. There is broad immunity among certain entities involved in spying too. “CISPA is a dangerous bill,” said EFF. So is CISPA 2.0. It “equates cyber security with greater surveillance and information sharing.”

 

 

One of the most unreported stories in American society is the plight of black Americans. Everything in the Universe is not golden. It is disgrace that even in America; millions of human beings go hungry at all. The economic misery against Black America has been around for centuries, but it still persists in this era of terrorism. There has been little to no attention given to the high unemployment rate of African American in rural and urban communities in America. This circumstance has not radically improved since 2009. Even with a slow moving economic recovery, black participation in the labor market has been moving downward because of the negative effects of the recession. The White House has made proposals and formulate meetings about this issue for years, but no radical solution to address huge poverty that especially affects low income human beings in the USA as well. The underemployment rate is measured by the extent to which people who usually work full time can't find full time employment. These are made up of human beings who are unemployed completely and folks who work less than full time or less than 35 hours a week. This is due to human beings who have an inability to find more employment, because of economic circumstances. This underemployment rate doesn't include the millions of U.S. citizens who are institutionalized in prisons. Dr. Reginald Clark researched the unpublished reports of the underemployment rates of various ethnic groups from 2009 to the present. The rate of UNDER-employment for Hispanic Americans has DROPPED from 15% in 2009 to 12% at the end of 2012. This represents an improvement of about 20%. The rate of UNDER-employment for White Americans has DROPPED from 10% in 2009 to 8% at the end of 2012. This represents an improvement of about 20%. The rate of UNDER-employment for Asian Americans has DROPPED from 8% in 2009 to 6% at the end of 2012. This represents an improvement of about 25%. But the picture for Black Americans is in the opposite direction. The rate of UNDER-employment for Blacks has INCREASED from 16% in 2009 to 20% at the end of 2012. This represents a 25% WORSENING in the rate of Black underemployment during Obama’s first term in office from 2009 through 2012. This misery among many Black Americans is not just reflected in those statistics. At least 2 million Blacks are in prison and have trouble finding employment. Half the African Americans in prison only have nonviolent drug offenses. This corrupt tough on crime garbage has contributed to the harm of the black community. This nonsense has existed for decades. If these 2 million Black human beings were out of jail and cannot find full time work, then the Black underemployment rate would be 30 percent. The White House's job creation policies is not necessarily stimulating hiring in geographic areas where African Americans mostly reside (except in some areas). The African American unemployment rate is still at 14.3 percent.  Since 2009, hundreds of thousands of jobs from Blacks have been lost, especially full time jobs. This deals with things from family wage, home ownership, education, benefits, consumer debt, etc. When you get down to it, Obama's economic policies are heavily neo-liberal and not revolutionary. That is why according to Think Progress: "...Corporations have been the overwhelming beneficiaries of Obama’s policies. Over 88% of all the dollars obtained between 2009 and 2011, 88% of national income growth, went to corporate profits, while just 1% went to wages.” So, the high unemployment rate in the Black Community is a result of the establishment or the powers that be ignoring the employment issues in the Black community as found in urban and rural areas. It is only in February of 2013 when President Barack Obama said overtly that he acknowledged the deleterious role of the federal government's job creation policies on the severe depression in the low income African American communities. He wants to partner with cities as a means to fight this issue. Yet, he made no specific demands, except sending kids to good schools (when many of these schools are expensive), get good jobs which don't exist, and buy nice homes when there is an economic inequality issue in the USA. I will admit that this issue existed long before President Barack Obama was in the White House, so I want to make that clear. The White House is not responsible for all facets of our economic situation. For centuries, the Maafa (created by white supremacists and not all white people) caused a path of oppression or the system of white supremacy that contributes to economic injustices then and now against my black people. The only real solution is a living wage, a radical redistribution of economic and political power, real universal health care, a strong national employment plan that can benefit all Americans.

By Timothy