The music, movies and pictures that fight for the change we need.
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Cameron, I Would Call You A Cunt - Muddy Summers and the Dirty Field Whores
“Cameron I would call you a cunt, but you lack the depth or charm”
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One killed every half hour in Mexico drug-related violence →
One person died in drug-related violence every half hour in Mexico last year, amounting to 48 executions per day on average, according to the Mexican Excelsior newspaper, a sign that the violence surrounding the country’s powerful cartels continues unabated.
A total of 12,903 were murdered in the first nine months of 2011, Excelsior and other newspapers reported, sourcing data from the country’s Attorney General’s office (link in Spanish).
Nationwide, 47,515 people have been killed since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of troops to drug hot spots, through to September 2011, the Attorney General’s Office said on Wednesday. The deaths include those involved in the drugs trade, civilians and members of security forces fighting the cartels, according to Excelsior.
The most dangerous city in the country during the first nine months of 2011 was Ciudad Juarez in Chihuahua, on the border with the United States, and the second-most dangerous was Acapulco, Guerrero, on the western coast of the country.
Source: anticapitalist
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End the Drug War Now
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A college student costs the state $8,667 per year; a prisoner costs it $45,006 a year. →
“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America - more than 6 million - than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”
Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britain - with a rate among the highest - has 153….
This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.’s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison.
That something, of course, is the war on drugs. Drug convictions went from 15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost tenfold increase. More than half of America’s federal inmates today are in prison on drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession….
Bipartisan forces have created the trend that we see. Conservatives and liberals love to sound tough on crime, and both sides agreed in the 1990s to a wide range of new federal infractions, many of them carrying mandatory sentences for time in state or federal prison. And as always in American politics, there is the money trail. Many state prisons are now run by private companies that have powerful lobbyists in state capitals. These firms can create jobs in places where steady work is rare; in many states, they have also helped create a conveyor belt of cash for prisons from treasuries to outlying counties.
Partly as a result, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education in the past 20 years. In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons vs. $5.7 billion on the UC system and state colleges. Since 1980, California has built one college campus and 21 prisons. A college student costs the state $8,667 per year; a prisoner costs it $45,006 a year.
Source: anticapitalist
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If You Vote in Elections or Sign Online Petitions, Are You Making a Difference or Wasting Your Time? →
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“Your First Amendment rights can be terminated if you’re creating a scene or whatever”
WAIT WHAT?Source: anticapitalist
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“For decades, having a decent, safe place to call home has been a cornerstone of opportunity in America – a place where we can raise our families, connect to our communities, and pursue opportunities for a better life for ourselves and our children. But as the National Low Income Housing Coalition shows with this report, for too many Americans that opportunity is out of reach, as families confront a wide gap between the cost of housing and their ability to pay for it.
And in the wake of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, that gap has only grown. We all know the devastating ef ect this crisis has had on our most vulnerable families and communities. h is was coni rmed by the results of HUD’s Worst Case Housing Needs Survey, which showed an increase of 20 percent in worst case needs between 2007 and 2009, the largest increase in the survey’s history.”
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Separate Oil & State →
Our government should not be under the influence of Big Oil.
The greatest barriers to clean energy are political, not technical—and these barriers are largely fueled by the oil industry. We know that in order to achieve a clean energy future, we have to expose and eradicate the political influence of the oil industry; we have to achieve a separation of oil & state.
Over $114 million has been paid by the oil, gas and coal industries over the last decade to buy access and influence in Congress. Although we’re not sure yet, the 111th Congress could end up being the dirtiest yet.
The next step to ending our collective addiction to oil is reducing oil’s influence over our representatives and demanding political independence from Big Oil.
Here’s what you can do:
- Write to your member of Congress to demand a Separation of Oil and State.
- Check out www.DirtyEnergyMoney.com to find out how much money your elected officials have received from the oil, gas, and coal industries.
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