Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1303

Resisting Monsanto’s Occupation of Hawaii

Aina: That Which Feeds Us

Living Ancestors (2015)

Film Review

Aina is a short documentary about the Waipa Foundation, an organization run by native Hawaiians to restore traditional farming practices to Kauai (Hawaii). The group’s primary focus is to encourage a return to traditional organic farming practices. At the moment their main goal is the taro plant, a traditional staple, by giving the poi (the underground corm of the taro plant) away free to community members. They’re also working to reduce obesity by encouraging a return to the traditional diet (fish, pork, greens and poi).

Prior to seeing the film, I had no idea the extent to which the Hawaiian islands have been “occupied” by Monsanto and other multinational corporations engaged in GMO research. One of the group’s biggest concerns is the massive amount of Roundup, a known carcinogen and neurotoxin, sprayed adjacent to schools. In one highly publicized incident, 50 children had to be hospitalized following exposure to Roundup.

The Waipa Foundation is intent on returning Kauai (Hawaii) to 100% sustainability in food and energy production. With a present population of 1.2 million, the state imports 90% of its food and energy. One hundred years ago, one million Hawaiians lived in abundance without importing anything.

 

The Prison Show

According to their Facebook page, “The Prison Show” is a live radio program airing Fridays at 9pm Central Time on KPFT FM 90.1 Houston, streaming at www.kpft.org

Ex-con and gay activist Ray Hill founded The Prison Show on Houston’s KPFT 90.1 FM in 1980. Although the target audience is inmates in Texas state and federal prisons, including death row, prisoners worldwide listen to it on-line.

The current Prison Show gang is a motley crew of ex-offenders, teachers, professors, lawyers, chaplains, activists, ex-politicos, male and female who see the error in the current prison system and the “worth in the American people lost but not forgotten still inside.”

In addition to the regular staff, counts on a number of expert guests who discuss subjects like prison health care, legal issues and the death penalty.

The Prison Show uses the first hour to discuss issues of interest to convicts. The second session is a call-in session where friends and family and addressed their loved ones behind bars.

With the largest prison population in the world (over two million), I guess it makes sense for US prisoners to have their own radio show.

Voice of America (the CIA radio station) has a great video of the KPFT studio during a Prison show broadcast at the following link (it can’t be embedded on WordPress).

http://www.voanews.com/media/video/1950618.html

Banking Scam Targets Prisoners and their Families

Leave it to the banksters to come up with new ways to gouge poor people who are forced to use their services and pay their exorbitant bank charges.

According to Al Jazeera, federal and state prisons are aiding and abetting the latest banking scam by substituting release cards for the cash they owe prisoners and immigrant detainees on their release. The funds on the pre-paid debit cards include cash confiscated at the time of incarceration, the remainder of money sent by family members and scant earnings from prison jobs.

In addition to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 17 states are using them in state prisons. Their use is even more widespread in city and county jails.

Gouging Prisoners with Astronomical Fees

Unlike consumer debit cards, prison-issued cards are unregulated and subject to exorbitant fees.  On reviewing contracts in various states and counties, journalist Amadou Diallo found banks were charging nearly $3 per withdrawal and $1.50 per balance inquiry, in addition to weekly account maintenance fees up to $2.50. Cardholders who try to close or their accounts can be charged closing fees of $30.

Diallo gives the example of one inmate who left prison with $120 – he could only use $70 of it because of the fees. Inmates with less than $30 on their cards can’t use them at all because of the closing fee.

Immigrants who are deported on release from detention centers have it even worse, as most cards don’t work outside the US.

JPMorgan Chase Exclusive Federal Prison Vendor

JPMorgan Chase is the exclusive release-card vendor in federal prisons. At state and local facilities, the cards are provided by a handful of smaller vendors such as JPay, Keefe Group, Numi Financial and Rapid Financial Solutions.

JPay also operates electronic money transfers for 25 state department of corrections agencies and 60 county jails. Families can be charged 30 percent or more on funds transferred to love ones in prison. Money orders have been eliminated as an option for sending funds at some facilities. Facilities that still allow them require families to mail the money orders to the banking vendor – not the prion or jail where inmates are held.

Serving a combined population of more than 1.4 million inmates netted JPay $50 million in revenue in 2013, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

For more information and to join the campaign to stop banks from profiting off the misfortune of prisoners, detained immigrants and their families, go to the Stop Prison Profiteering website at http://nationinside.org/campaign/StopPrisonProfiteering/

photo credit: Bad Credit History? via photopin (license)

Hillary Clinton Blatantly Violated Massachusetts Election Laws

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Husband Bill Clinton violated Massachusetts law by campaigning in front of polling booth and obstructing voters ability to enter.

OffGuardian

by Rudy Panko, from Russia Insider

Hillary Clinton sent her husband to ‘tie up loose ends’ in Boston. There’s no question that election violations occured — but nothing will be done.

It would be naive to expect anything less than sleazeball tactics from the Hillary Clinton campaign, but what they just pulled off in Massachusetts takes the sleazeball cake, topped off with an election fraud cherry just for good measure.

We’ve already documented how the Clinton machine worked its magic in Nevada and Iowa. But what happened in Massachusetts just shows how committed the Democratic Party is to defrauding American voters.

Using her husband as her surrogate election fraudster, Hillary sent Bill on a “tour” of several Boston-area polling sites. Armed with a megaphone, Bill not only campaigned for his wife directly in front of several polling places (which is a violation of Massachusetts “electioneering” laws) but also

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1967: The Year Interracial Marriage Became Legal

The Richard and Mildred Loving Documentary

BBC (2009)

Film Review

This film is about a 1967 Supreme Court case in which an interracial couple successfully challenged a Virginia law prohibiting miscegenation.

Mildred and Richard Loving legally married in Washington DC in 1958. However they were arrested and thrown in jail when they returned to their home in Central Point Virginia. The court ultimately ordered them to leave Virginia for 25 years or face a one year jail sentence.

Relocating to Washington DC, they were jailed every time they tried to visit Mildred’s family in Central Point.

In the early sixties, Mildred wrote to attorney general Robert F Kennedy, who referred the couple to the ACLU. The latter appealed the Lovings’ sentence in the Virginia Supreme Court and lost. A 1967 appeal to the US Supreme Court prevailed, effectively abolishing the anti-miscegenation laws that remained in sixteen southern states.

As late as 1947, thirty states, including California and Oregon, had laws against interracial marriage.

The documentary is in three parts – Parts 2 and 3 launch automatically.

 

Do Americans Live In A False Reality Created By Orchestrated Events?

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The headline says it all – Americans like in a fake reality dominated by orchestrated events.

Memory Hole

Paul Craig Roberts
paulcraigroberts.org

Most people who are aware and capable of thought have given up on what is called the “mainstream media.” The presstitutes have destroyed their credibility by helping Washington to lie—“Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction,” “Iranian nukes,” “Assad’s use of chemical weapons,” “Russian invasion of Ukraine,” and so forth. The “mainstream media” has also destroyed its credibility by its complete acceptance of whatever government authorities say about alleged “terrorist events,” such as 9/11 and Boston Marathon Bombing, or alleged mass shootings such as Sandy Hook and San Bernardino. Despite glaring inconsistencies, contradictions, and security failures that seem too unlikely to be believable, the “mainstream media” never asks questions or investigates. It merely reports as fact whatever authorities say.

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Britain’s Struggle to Abolish the Slave Trade

Abolition: The Struggle to Abolish Slavery in the British Colonies

By Richard S Reddie

Lion Hudson (2007)

Book Review

Reddie devotes most of his book to debunking common myths Europeans perpetuate to justify chattel slavery and the current plight of the African diaspora. First and foremost is the prevailing myth that Africa was a savage and backwards continent prior to the arrival of the first Europeans.

Prior to reading this book, I had never heard of the Nubian, Great Zimbabwe, Ghana, Songhay or Mali civilizations. Archival records suggests that Africa, not the Middle East, was the cradle of civilization. The pioneering Greek scientists Archimedes and Pythagoras both spent their youth studying in Egypt. There’s also fairly strong evidence that East Africans began producing steel before Europeans did.

Of the millions of slaves forcibly transported to the Americas, 40% ended up in Brazil, 40% in the Caribbean, 15% in Spanish territories and 5% in North America. Many Caribbean slaves were subsequently relocated from sugar plantations to North American cotton plantations.

Africans in the New World would outnumber Europeans by five to one until 1820. This population imbalance meant violent slave rebellions were a constant phenomenon.

This is the second myth Reddie debunks: that Europeans were primarily responsible for ending slavery. Citing a wealth of historical sources, he makes an ironclad case that Africans were primarily responsible for liberating themselves.

Even during the horrific Middle Passage, there was a major revolt in approximately one of every ten ships that left Africa. Reddie maintains it was mainly the fear of armed resistance that caused Europeans to terrorize their slaves with beatings, branding and mutilation.

Reddie details the bloody 1791 uprising in St Domingue (now Haiti), in which St Domingue slaves both freed themselves and won independence from France. All the new world colonies experienced frequent slave revolts, with those of Jamaica and Guyana deserving special mention for the number of Europeans killed.

Abolition! also discusses the grassroots organizing led by Quakers, evangelical Methodists and other religious groups leading to the 1807 law banning the British transatlantic slave trade. Although men such as William Wilberforce receive most of the credit, the abolition movement was mostly led by women.

The fight to end slavery altogether in British colonies would take another 27 years. Wilberforce opposed ending slavery itself as he believed slaves needed to be “properly prepared” before being granted their freedom.

McDonald’s french fries found to contain ingredients used in tank sealants, biodiesel

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Assisted suicide is supposedly illegal everywhere but Oregon, but it’s okay in 50 states if MacDonald’s feeds you life threatening industrial poisons.

YOUR PERCEPTION IS NOT REALITY

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Do you really want to know what’s in your McDonald’s french fries? Grant Imahara of Myth Busters decided to find out.

Imahara went directly to the McDonald’s processing plant, where he thankfully learned that the the fast food chain’s much loved fries indeed contained spuds. The other ingredients, however, are quite worrisome, to say the least. Included in the list of 19 ingredients are dimethylpolysiloxane, a form of silicone found in Silly Putty, tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), a petrol-based chemical, and hydrogenated soybean oil, which is a manufactured form of trans fat.

Dimethylpolysiloxane

According to “Food Babe” Vanni Hari, dimethylpolysiloxane is a chemical used in aquarium tank sealants, mold release agents and hair conditioners. In some cases, she explains, it even contains formaldehyde, a highly toxic chemical associated with brain damage, cancer, allergies and auto-immune disorders.

It’s also interesting to note that McDonald’s fries sold to U.S. customers are said to be worse…

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The Life and Loves of a She-Devil

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil

BBC (1986)

Film Review

A dramatization of Fay Weldon’s 1983 classic, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil is a satire about the sexist and exploitive nature of romantic love.

The heroine is a very ugly woman named Ruth who ingeniously manipulates her husband’s innate sexism to wreak vengeance on him and his beautiful rich mistress Mary Fisher.

Both the book and the dramatization focus on society’s use of romantic love to glamorize the vast amount of unpaid labor women perform for men and society in general.

As Weldon puts it (in the words of a Catholic priest Fisher “seduces”), “love robs women of their identity and creative selves.”

The video below comprises all four episodes in the 1986 series.

A Novel About Jim Crow

Some Sing, Some Cry

By Ntozake Shangi and Ifa Bayeza

St Martin’s Press (2010)

Book Review

Some Sing, Some Cry is a novel tracing seven generations of a fictional African American family from slavery to the election of Barack Obama. The authors are sisters and the first half of the book is based on family oral history.

The novel’s matriarch originates from on an island off the coast of South Carolina and takes the name of a prominent plantation owner who has fathered children by both her mother and herself. The family are forced off their land when Reconstruction ends, migrating to Charleston.

The first half of the book is the strongest, with its poignant depiction of family members being stripped of their newly won freedoms as Jim Crow laws ban them from most occupations. To a large extent, the plot revolves around complex prejudices within the African American community against family members with darker skin. In one instance, the plantation owner kidnaps an light-complected male child and raises him as his heir. In another a “bright-skinned” uncle passes as Irish to evade trade union rules that ban Negroes.

The novel’s main focus is the role newly freed slaves played in the development of modern American music. The reader gets the strong sense that many Mayfield family members turned to working in minstrel shows, music halls and clubs when Jim Crow laws banned them from other occupations.

The sections dealing with the great northern migration, Harlem renaissance and birth of ragtime and jazz are also quite riveting. I came away with a totally new insight into the African American origin of the dance crazes of the “roaring twenties,” eg the “Charleston” and the “Black Bottom.”

This was also my first exposure to the extreme discrimination African American soldiers faced during World War I. Unlike white troops, they weren’t issued gas masks. Forced to improvise, they covered their faces with urine soaked rags to protect themselves against mustard gas.