North Korea Prison Camps:200,000 Living as Slaves

Amnesty International suspects that the horrific concentration camps in North Korea are growing. Some 200,000 people live as slaves – enduring starvation, torture, and rape while performing hard labor.

Amplify’d from singularityhub.com

Satellite Images of North Korea Prison Camps Find 200,000 Living as Slaves

No one really knows how bad it is, but it’s much worse than I thought possible. Piecing together information from satellite images and eye witness accounts, Amnesty International suspects that the horrific concentration camps in North Korea are growing. Some 200,000 people live as slaves – enduring starvation, torture, and rape while performing hard labor. Many die every year, only to be replaced by fresh bodies. Of those that survive, few will ever be released. Deemed ‘prisoners’, the victims of North Korea’s political pogroms are interned for the smallest criticisms of the regime of Kim Jong-Il, and when they are carried away their extended families are rounded up as well. This is not genocide, it’s not a war crime, it’s an unending consequence of North Korea’s authoritarian government.

We are confronted with so many atrocities in global news that it’s hard to pierce our desensitized skin. I can’t describe the horrific conditions in the North Korean slave camps, but Jeong Kyoungil can. He was detained for years at Yodok, officially known as Kwan-li-so (reeducation center) Number 15. Inside its walls he fought frostbite from the bitter cold, starvation, endless work, and a continual stripping of his humanity. He describes how the death of fellow inmates was a joy – an opportunity – because burying these bodies earned an extra helping of food. To starving slaves such as Kyoungil, a few more bites of corn gruel was the difference between life and death. In the following video from Amnesty Internation, Kyoungil describes more of his time in Yodok, and the soul wrenching things he saw there. Read more at singularityhub.com

 

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A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges

Amplify’d from www.rollingstone.com

The People vs. Goldman Sachs

A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges

Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of The Goldman Sachs Group, is sworn in while testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Investigations Subcommittee on Capitol Hill on April 27, 2010 in Washington, DC.

They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn't leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial. Read more at www.rollingstone.com

 

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National Jukebox

Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress

Amplify’d from www.loc.gov

View Playlist National Jukebox Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives.

About the National Jukebox Read more at www.loc.gov

 

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Pot Prohibition Turns 100-Years-Old

A Centennial Anniversary That’s Hardly Worth Celebrating!!!

“Despite a century of ever-zealous enforcement and thunderous propaganda at taxpayer expense, marijuana inextricably permeates our culture. Its cultivation, commerce and use have proven ineradicable. We have tried mightily and we have failed to extirpate it. If anyone, anywhere, believes that spending more money on marijuana enforcement will drive out pot, let that person come forward and tell us plainly what it will take to make that happen, how much it will cost, and where the money will come from."!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Amplify’d from blogs.alternet.org

Pot Prohibition Turns 100-Years-Old: A Centennial Anniversary That’s Hardly Worth Celebrating

Marijuana prohibition ‘celebrates’ its centennial anniversary today. That’s right, the government’s war on cannabis consumers is now officially 100-years-old.

Self-evidently, cannabis has won.

Although many credit the passage of the federal Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 with the initiation of pot prohibition, the reality is that one hundred years ago today, Massachusetts Governor Eugene Foss signed the first statewide anti-pot prohibition into law. Following Massachusetts, over 30 states quickly followed suit — including California, Maine, Indiana and Wyoming in 1913 — leading the way for federal prohibition some two-and-a-half decades later.

Of course, cannabis use was practically non-existent in Massachusetts (as well as in most of the rest of the country) in 1911. Yet today, 100 years following the plant’s criminalization, the state boasts one of the highest rates of pot use in the nation.

Writing today in the Milford (Massachusetts) Daily News, former NORML Board Member Richard Evans, author of Massachusetts House Bill 1371, the Cannabis Regulation and Taxation Act, nails it:

“Despite a century of ever-zealous enforcement and thunderous propaganda at taxpayer expense, marijuana inextricably permeates our culture. Its cultivation, commerce and use have proven ineradicable. We have tried mightily and we have failed to extirpate it. If anyone, anywhere, believes that spending more money on marijuana enforcement will drive out pot, let that person come forward and tell us plainly what it will take to make that happen, how much it will cost, and where the money will come from.

The futility of enforcement, however, is not the urgent reason to legalize it. The reason is that prohibition has become a destructive force in our society. Read more at blogs.alternet.org

 

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