Former Teacher Working in Wal-Mart Hell

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By Grant Lawrence

Bodhi Thunder

A former teacher discovers what it’s like working at Wal-Mart Hell. John Olympic says the experience is terrible.

He remembers the good old days of being a teacher. But with budget cuts and mass lay-offs, Olympic lost his job.

Olympic recounts some of what he hates about working at Wal-Mart.

….But working for low pay is about as rewarding as stabbing out your own eyeballs with a stale baguette. $14 billion in profits last year bumped Walmart back on top of the Fortune 500 list, and the company keeps up those profits partly by paying associates as little as (legally) possible. Walmart wages are not only well below living wage, we’re paid significantly less than comparable jobs at other retailers.But I don’t have children or major medical expenses, so I do OK with my pathetic paycheck. But several of my coworkers support spouses or children; one just told me he relies on government support to pay his bills, including child support….

…As diverse as Walmart associates are, we have at least one thing in common: When it comes to our jobs, we have no voice. Walmart is America’s largest private employer, yet the 1 million workers who put on that red, white and blue nametag each week have zero collective bargaining power when it comes to our pay, benefits or working conditions….(source: alternet)

Olympic is also one of the lucky ones. He can work with little pay and with little or no benefits for mostly part-time. But at least he has a job.

Over 20% of Americans cannot claim to be so lucky.

Still Olympic counts as one of the underemployed.

This is a growing phenomenon. Workers highly qualified but unable to find full time work suitable for their qualifications. Besides unemployment, the future promises those highly educated, highly trained, and highly qualified a McJob.

Olympic feels like many who are forced to shop at Wal-Mart out of necessity. They can’t afford other stores or they don’t have a decent store within acceptable driving distance.

…And it’s demoralizing knowing that by working for Walmart, I’m sleeping with the enemy. Our clothing section is filled with goods sewn by Third-World sweatshop workers earning pennies per hour. The toy section brims with petroleum-based products that will just end up in landfills a few months from now. There’s the in-store McDonald’s and its high-sugar, high-fat menu. There’s nothing — not a goddamn thing — about big-box retailers that makes the world better…(source)

The future of American employment can be seen by taking a look at Wal-Mart. It is a hellish picture for the American worker. But it is a picture that is better than the alternative picture. Not having a job.

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The Collapse of America: Dying Earlier and Losing Everything

By Grant Lawrence

Bodhi Thunder

So you think things are bad?

The economy is a mess and the mass foreclosures and joblessness are called a recovery.

But we have another election that will certainly make things all right. Or so you hope.

But let’s look at how bad things actually are.

….According to studies conducted separately by Columbia University and the World Health Organization, the United States has, in only ten years, gone from the 24th to the 49th in the world rankings of life expectancy. That is, to live around 4.5 years less than the long-living Japanese or 2.2 years less than the Italians, located in the twentieth place. In 1960, U.S. citizens were in fifth place, behind Scandinavian countries and Holland and Australia. It took 40 years to lose 19 places and only 10 in fall another 25….(source: pravda)

OK, so people in this country are dying earlier and joining the ranks of the third world in life expectancy.

At least we are free and we have a great quality of life. Or so you think.

….Various statistics, similar to those of life expectancy, confirm a seemingly unstoppable deterioration of the quality of life: at the end of 2009, the National Center for Health Statistics placed the country in the position of 30th in the world in infant mortality, one of the basic parameters of development. U.S. newborns die for reasons similar to those of adults, due to an inadequate way of life, “poverty.” The number of premature born is one of the leading causes of infant mortality, and it is more than twice that of Finland.

But the bad thing is that the United Nations agrees, in general, and places the U.S. in position 33 or, the estimates of their own Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), relegates the U.S. to the 46th position in any event, behind Cuba, located around 28th place, and almost on par with Italy. In addition, all statistics or estimates for 2009 or 2010 were significantly worse than those of only one or two decades ago and, despite the global crisis being a factor, no other country has registered a decline as pronounced in indicators of quality of life.

Even after surviving the first twelve months, children and adolescents in the U.S. are not safe, according to UNICEF. Among the twenty richest countries in the world, America is the second worst in regard to child welfare. Just above the UK, the last of a league that includes the Netherlands in the first place and Italy in the eighth. At the schools, things have also gone from bad to worse: American students rank as 33rd or 27th or between OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries in terms of results in the humanities, and 22nd for science subjects. This means that to maintain leadership, there is more to it than just the prestigious Ivy League universities and the abundance of Nobel prizes, if the masses have a very poor education….(source)

The truth is that America has been destroyed by design.

It was destroyed so that the super rich could expand their empire globally. But this empire expansion has been done using the lives and the wealth of the American people.

America is falling off a cliff and another election, no matter which Republicrat wins, won’t matter.

The same policies of corporatized privatization and the inhumanity of economic globalization will continue.

America has spread its disease throughout the world. At this point, there appears to be no cure strong enough to stop it.

Indigenous Peruvians Do Something and Americans Do Nothing

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By Grant Lawrence

Bodhi Thunder

Here in the United States an oil company nearly destroyed the Gulf and people did nothing.

Sure there were a few demonstrations. But for the most part, people didn’t care enough to do something about the corporate crime.

But in Peru we have a different story.

Indigenous Peruvians tired of continual leaking of oil into their main water source took direct action.

…At noon on Sunday, October 24, thousands of people took oil giant abuse matters in their own hands after years of continual leaking crude oil affecting their health and safety. They closed the passage of vessels for the important Amazon River, at height of the Puerto Orlando community.

Indigenous Peruvians of the upper Maranon basin, Nauta district achieved what their neighbors to the north in the US have not come near doing after the world’s greatest oil spill and public health catastrophe that occurred six months ago in the Gulf of Mexico.

Five thousand Peruvians are demanding a direct dialogue, transparent, free and fair between indigenous communities and State authorities and the oil company Pluspetrol according to Indigenous Peoples and Issues Resources (IPIR)….(Source: the examiner)

But the good news is we have another election here in this country.

The results will make no difference. We will elect a government that will continue to sell out the American people to corporate interests.

In the end, this corporate/government complex will continue to engage in wars, outsource jobs, destroy social security and medicare, and threaten the planet with extinction.

But nobody cares enough to do something.

Go back to sleep.

Man Uses Enhanced Interrogation on his Girlfriend

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By Grant Lawrence

Bodhi Thunder

As we all should know, water boarding is not torture. The government and their corporate media partners have for years been calling this “enhanced interrogation”.

Now a man has been accused of water boarding his girlfriend. This man, however, was not torturing his girlfriend, if we are to believe the government and the news media.

He was simply using enhanced interrogation.

…After accusing his girlfriend of cheating on him, a Nebraska man allegedly tied the woman to a couch in their apartment and waterboarded her, according to police.Trevor Case, 22, has been charged with domestic assault, false imprisonment, and making terroristic threats in connection with the bizarre incident early Saturday morning at the Lincoln home he shared with the 22-year-old victim….(source: the smoking gun)

He must have really wanted to find out the truth about his girlfriend’s activities. He probably also was playing Barney songs really loud and not allowing his girlfriend to sleep much.

As we know this can all be very useful when trying to find out the truth.

But we also know that sleep deprivation and endless stimulation to a person’s senses is just another form of enhanced interrogation.

If this man doesn’t get thrown in jail then perhaps he can go to Iraq and Afghanistan. Wikileaks documents have recently exposed that torture, or um enhanced interrogation, is still going on there.

Oh and just in case you haven’t figured it out the story is true but my take on it is satire.

Unfortunately I have to spell it out because I find that even when I am trying to be ludicrous, people often take it seriously. This just goes to show you that much of what is presented in the managed corporate news is ludicrous but presented as serious. So I don’t blame people for being confused.

Naming Names: The CIA and Their News Organizations

Image by bloody marty mix via Flickr

By Grant Lawrence

Bodhi Thunder

Recently, I wrote about the CIAs involvement in managing US news and information.

See Also

Faking News: CIA Assets in the Newsroom

One critic took me to task for not naming names.

Well, it is not as if the CIA likes to expose their assets.

But according to a 70s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Frank Church, the CIA admitted to using assets in journalism throughout the cold war.

Also:

…John Deutch, director of Central Intelligence, appeared before Congress and said there was no need to change U.S. policy as Haass had advocated, since the CIA already had the power to use U.S. reporters as spies. Under the terms of the guidelines adopted after the Church Commission report, the CIA director retained the right to approve such recruitment if he judged it necessary, Deutch explained. Deutch received public support for his interpretation of the CIA’s prerogative from Stansfield Turner, the CIA chief in the Carter administration. Speaking to a gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Turner revealed that he had authorized the use of journalists in intelligence operations three times during his tenure as CIA director….(kate houghton–source: cpj.org)

The fact that journalists worked for the CIA is interesting. But the fact that we don’t know which journalists have worked for the CIA is not that important.

What is really important is how the CIA controls the news outlets.

Recently I listened to an interview with Paul David Pope on Coast to Coast AM with Ian Punnett.
Paul David Pope is the son of Gene Pope. Now Gene Pope is not exactly a household name but his tabloid paper certainly is. Gene Pope was the founder and owner of the National Enquirer.

In the interview, Paul David Pope said that his dad had worked for the CIA. He said that throughout Gene Pope’s journalistic career as owner of the National Enquirer, the CIA would tell Pope to sit on stories or not to publish certain stories. In exchange, the CIA would feed Pope certain stories.

Well you might think the National Enquirer was a rag and nobody would pay attention to it.

But you would be wrong.

The National Enquirer, before the net, was a major source of information for most Americans. It had tens of millions of subscribers and a great deal of second hand readership.

But the story here gets even more interesting.

Pulitzer Prize Winning Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame offers us a deeper look into the CIA’s relationship with well known and highly respected news organizations.

…Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.

The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress….(source: carl bernstein.com)

lthough we may not know which particular journalist worked for the CIA, we do know that their bosses were working with the CIA.
The relationship between the various news organizations and the CIA over the past several decades is the real story.

Bernstein would have us believe this was a past relationship.

But did the CIA give up manipulating the media and planting stories just because we are facing terrorists instead of Soviets?

That to me is nonsense.

Clearly, if the CIA was manipulating and faking the news in the past they are doing it in the present.

We just will have to discover the extent of their faking the news years from now.