“REPORT: Gitmo Hiding Hunger Strikes Behind New Title: ‘Long-Term Non-Religious Fasts’“
REPORT: Gitmo Hiding Hunger Strikes Behind New Title: ‘Long-Term Non-Religious Fasts’
By Hayes Brown
on March 11, 2014 at 11:01 am
CREDIT: AP Photo/Charles DharapakThere will be no more hunger strikes at Guantanamo Bay, according to a new document first reported on Monday night. Not because the the detainees of the military prison are giving up on the tactic, though. Instead, the military is transitioning to referring to hunger strikes as “long-term non-religious fasts.”
The shift was first reported on the newly minted VICE News which obtained a copy of the document that contained the change, a standard operating procedure (SOP) manual innocuously titled “Medical Management of Detainees With Weight Loss.” Under the new guidelines, according to VICE, the previous liberal use of the phrase “hunger strike” had vanished. Instead, the base’s Joint Medical Group (JMG) was advised that in instances where “clinically significant weight loss” had occurred to administer force-feeding — with or without the consent of the prisoner: …
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/03/11/3387431/gitmo-hunger-strike-change/
Your Guardian Angel Songtext
- Your Guardian Angel
I will never let you fall I’ll stand up with you forever
I will never let you fall I’ll stand up with you forever
Cause you’re my, you’re my, my true love, my whole heart
Use me as you will
I will never let you fall I’ll stand up with you forever
CCHR International 280,000 babies from 0-1 year old are prescribed mind-altering psychiatric drugs. • 198,000 children 0-5 years old are taking ADHD drugs which are in
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It Takes HOW Much Water to Make Greek Yogurt?!
FBI launches investigation into a private prison so violent it is called “Gladiator School”
In what is one of the most disturbing private prison stories you’ll ever hear, a facility in Idaho run by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in under investigation by the FBI due to claims it was so violent inmates called it “Gladiator School.”
So how does a prison transform into such a place? Apparently, CCA was so eager to cut costs that it chose to understaff the facility and hand over control to prison gangs.
I’ve covered private prisons on many occasions in the past, including this CCA facility in particular. I think private prisons are one of the worst ideas possible in a democratic society.
I suggest you read some of my prior articles:
A Deep Look into the Shady World of the Private Prison Industry Idaho Dumps Private Prison Company Due to “Violence, Understaffing and Over-billing” America in 2013: Florida Football Stadium Named After a Private Prison Company America in 2013: For-Profit Prisons Get Favorable Tax Breaks
Now from the Associated Press:
BOISE, Idaho (AP) – The FBI has launched an investigation of the Corrections Corporation of America over the company’s running of an Idaho prison with a reputation so violent that inmates dubbed it “Gladiator School.”
The Nashville, Tenn.-based CCA has operated Idaho’s largest prison for more than a decade, but last year, CCA officials acknowledged it had understaffed the Idaho Correctional Center by thousands of hours in violation of the state contract. CCA also said employees falsified reports to cover up the vacancies. The announcement came after an Associated Press investigation showed CCA sometimes listed guards as working 48 hours straight to meet minimum staffing requirements.
“The FBI is investigating CCA and looking at whether various federal fraud statutes were violated and possibly other federal statutes connected with the fraud,” Olson said. “They will be working in close consultation with our office. Beyond that I can’t comment.”
The understaffing has been the subject of federal lawsuits and a contempt of court action against CCA. The ACLU sued on behalf of inmates at the Idaho Correctional Center in 2010, saying the facility was so violent that inmates called it “Gladiator School” and that understaffing contributed to the high levels of violence there.
In 2012, a Boise law firm sued on behalf of inmates contending that CCA had ceded control to prison gangs so that they could understaff the prison and save money on employee wages, and that the understaffing led to an attack by one prison gang on another group of inmates that left some of them badly injured.
The Department of Justice requested a copy of a forensic audit done for the Idaho Department of Correction earlier this year. That audit showed that CCA understaffed the prison by as much as 26,000 hours in 2012 alone; CCA is strongly contesting those findings. CCA’s Owen has said the company believes the audit overestimates the staffing issues by more than a third.
CCA’s contract with Idaho was worth about $29 million a year. In February the company agreed to pay Idaho $1 million to settle the understaffing claims.
Sound like a JP Morgan type settlement.
Full article here.
In Liberty, Michael Krieger
READ MORE HERE, PLEASE:
I READ THIS ARTICLE HERE: http://www.sott.net/article/275368-FBI-launches-investigation-into-a-private-prison-so-violent-it-is-called-Gladiator-School
Press Release — BREAKFAST GALA TO BENEFIT HOMELESS CHILDREN.
The homeless children of St. Louis County need your support, and all you have to do is come have breakfast with us!
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 From www.bbc.com – March 9, 5:46 PM
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USDA is ‘Endangering the Lives of Millions of Americans’
US plans to speed poultry slaughtering, cut inspections
Why We Need International Women’s Day
A celebration of International Women’s Day in Baghdad, Iraq. (AP Photo/Ceerwan Aziz)Today is International Women’s Day. The earliest Women’s Day celebrations were organized in the early twentieth century by commie firebrand types like Germany’s Clara Zetkin and Russia’s Alexandra Kollantai. The purpose was to bring together two great political movements, feminism and socialism, and to pay tribute women’s revolutionary potential. The March 8th date was chosen to commemorate the historic protests that took place on March 8, 1857, when female garment workers in New York City took to the streets to protest low wages and dangerous working conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 women in 1911, led to renewed activism that popularlized International Women’s Day celebrations throughout the world.
Today, the radical ardor behind the original project has cooled considerably—to the point where International Women’s Day sometimes seems like just another excuse to sell cheap pink crap. Nevertheless, in honor of the socialist spirit that motivated the original observances, I thought I’d write a post focusing on some of the economic injustices facing women around around the world today.
As it happens, this month saw the release of a new World Bank report on women in the work world. Much as I’d love to be doing a happy dance and celebrating all the advances women have made since Clara Zetkin’s day, it’s sobering to realize how little things have changed for so many women around the globe. Even in countries where women have advanced, gender economic inequality remains a serious problem.
Consider some of the report’s major findings:
• Women continue to trail behind men by every economic measure.
• Their labor force participation of women worldwide has stagnated over the past two decades, declining slightly from 57 percent to 55 percent today. Female labor force participation has sunk as low as 25 percent in the Middle East and North Africa.
• According to an ILO analysis of eighty-three countries, on average, women earn between 10 and 30 percent less than comparable men. There is no country in the earth where women have reached wage parity.
• Sexist bias and social norms continue to impose an enormous penalty on women’s economic well-being. Women worldwide spend at least twice as much time as men do on unpaid housework and care work. According to the report’s authors, close to 40 percent of people worldwide “agree that, when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to jobs than women.”
• Women’s lack of access to credit, land, and education remains serious obstacles. Though girls’ access to education is improving in many areas of the world, in sixteen countries in 2010–12, female-to-male enrollment ratios in primary education were less than 90 percent, and millions of children in those countries were not enrolled at all.
• Various forms of sex-based economic discrimination are perfectly in the vast majority of countries in the world. 128 of 143 countries had some sort of sex-based legal differentiation in 2013. In some countries, women still need their husbands’ consent to work.
How do we turn around this depressing state of affairs? While the authors of the report call for “proactive private sector leadership” as part of the solution, they understand full well that the magic of the market is not going to fix things. That’s why they also recommend that the government step in and level the playing field. Among their suggestions: that governments integrate a “gender assessment” in labor market and growth diagnostics, and that governments enact a wide range of policies that advance gender equity, from improved child care and family leave policies to more female-friendly education programs.
The report is chock-full of fascinating tidbits, including a couple that are particularly notable considering the ideological bent of the World Bank. There’s a particularly nice section about how market failures contribute to women’s unjustly limited work opportunities.
Even more interestingly, the authors of the report take pains to point out that “economic growth does not guarantee gender equality.” They note that countries including Japan, Kuwait and Qatar enjoy high levels of GDP, yet suffer from large gender wage gaps and poor records of gender equality in general. For many decades, the World Bank fetishized growth at all costs, with little concern about how that growth might be distributed. But in recent years, like its even eviler twin, the IMF, the World Bank has begun to show some concern about economic inequality.
It’s an interesting tonal shift, at least.
But more important is what hasn’t changed. A poster announcing one of the first International Women’s Day rallies, in Germany 100 years ago, decried the “prejudice and reactionary attitudes” that “have denied full civic rights to women.” Women are still fighting those very same attitudes—including the reactionary economic ideologies that harm them disproportionately, and deny them their full humanity and participation in civic life. Then as now, economic inequality was soaring, and women needed a feminism that could fight for them not only as women, but also as workers. Today, a century later, women need that kind of feminism every bit as much now as they did then. Clara Zetkin might be disappointed, but not surprised
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