Slavery is still legal in the United States. Section 1 of the 13th Amendment says, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

With the US prison population reaching 2 million people - the largest incarceration rate of any industrialized nation - prison/slave labor is often more profitable than outsourcing the work to developing countries. According to this article on Alternet.org, “many prisoners… earn about $60 for an entire month of nine-hour days.” (more…)

Four veterans of the Iraq War and a supporter were arrested at the Pentagon on Sept. 9.

The charge?

They placed flyers outlining the dangers of the depleted uranium warheads that are used by the US military in the Pentagon chapel.

Depleted uranium has been linked to the mysterious disease known as “Gulf War Syndrome” that affects thousands of veterans of the so-called “first Gulf War” (the war never really stopped). (more…)

Some parents reward their kids with toys, games and cars when they do well in school. But one “cool” mom smokes a blunt with her boy.

A woman admitted to smoking marijuana daily with her 13-year-old son to reward him for completing his homework…she had been smoking marijuana with her son since he was 11, and she often gave it to him as a reward.

The boy told police that he was required to do his homework as soon as he got home from school, and then was allowed to smoke marijuana with his mother.

New age of parenting: Make your kid do homework then make him burn up brain cells and forget what he just learned.

Yahoo! News

Super skinny models need not apply for fashion shows, well at least in Madrid. Will America follow suit?

Madrid’s fashion week has turned away underweight models after protests that girls and young women were trying to copy their rail-thin looks and developing eating disorders.

Organizers say they want to project an image of beauty and health, rather than a waif-like, or heroin chic look.

Yahoo! News

How can a federal judge find race baiting Michigan Civil Rights Initiative guilty of overwhelming fraud in their anti-affirmative action collection of signatures and not stop them from being on the Nov ballot?

Somebody help me out here! I still cannot comprehend this madness.

If MCRI was serving a liberal progressive cause, I bet the judge would have sent some of them to jail for engaging in petition fraud. Racism in America is deep, and it goes beyond those robes we see in the courtroom masking as instruments of justice. Vote down the anti-affirmative action proposal in November.

When we remember 9/11, let’s not forget the African Burial Ground Project. During the 1700’s, almost 20,000 African slaves, mostly children, were buried seven blocks from where the World Trade Center (WTC) stood. In 1991, the burial grounds were rediscovered. Community pressure forced the federal government to treat the remains not just with human dignity but historical respect.

The WTC housed the office that held the records and artifacts of the African Burial Ground Project. Although some of the artifacts were lost in 9/11, including a musketball lodged in the skeletal remains of a woman’s chest, miraculously, many of the artifacts were recovered.

A testament: This history will not be forgotten.

GSA

Washington Post

Monday is the fifth anniversary of you-know-what, and to celebrate, CNN is airing it’s original footage from 09.11.01 ALL DAY LONG.

Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia (R-Cathedral City, CA) got Arnold’s attention, thanks to her ‘blood’ — “Black blood” mixed with “Latino blood” — which makes “hot” blood according Schwarzenegger.

In the U.S., college tuition has increased about 40 percent since 2000, thanks to the Bush administration. And to help, “Congress voted to cut $12 billion out of the student loan program this year, even as Congress hiked interest rates on college loans to students and parents.”

Trees now grow where African American slaves lived on the old Wye House Plantation in Maryland. Owned by a single family since the 1660’s, the site allows excavators a rare opportunity to look for the artifacts that were once used in the daily life of enslaved people. It is also the planataion that Frederick Douglass lived and worked as a child.

NYTimes

From the Detroit Free Press:

A federal judge in Detroit refused Tuesday to remove the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative from the Nov. 7 ballot, even though he said promoters “engaged in systematic voter fraud by telling voters that they were signing a petition supporting affirmative action.”

The proposal would ban the use of race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin in government and public school hiring, contracting and university admissions in Michigan.

U.S. District Judge Arthur Tarnow said he couldn’t remove the proposal from the ballot because the MCRI group targeted all voters without regard to race while gathering petition signatures. (more…)

The following news doesn’t bode well for two of the United States’ ill-conceived wars: the so-called “War on Terror” and the so-called “War on Drugs”.

From The New York Times:

Afghanistan’s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said Saturday in Kabul.

He said the increase in cultivation was fueled by the resurgence of Taliban rebels in the south, the country’s prime opium growing region. As the insurgents have stepped up their attacks, they have also encouraged and profited from the drug trade, promising protection to growers if they worked to expand their opium operations. (more…)