what internet

ONENESS, On truth connecting us all: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7421476B2

Friday, November 11, 2011

Mayan Chant 2000

I've recently learned about Reiki and been "attuned."

A few years ago I enjoyed the Sacred-Sex list discussions on www.spiritweb.org. I was new to "Tantra," tough during my first "class" I found it was all I already did or knew of anyway.  So I joined this list to find out more about myself, spending most of my time debating issues .... Lol... One day a woman (Cathy) wrote me a private message. She had noticed my email address had the city name I was in and she was in the next town over.

Soon we were sharing our search together. I only meet who God wants me to meet, so I tend to trust and accept everyone easily. Sorta like How I'm spilling my guts out now??? Please excuse my frankness and seeming ignorance of the word "humble." Stating facts or events, sorta just as IT IS!

It turned out Cathy was a priest, and into Reiki healing and all. Not knowing a thing about it myself, she found a "free class" one day at a bookstore for us to attend. We went to it. The lecture was all about history and traditions, bla bla bla.... But I listened and listened. As he was finishing up, I decided to ask a question:  
"Have you ever taught this stuff to children?" . . . . "Sure, my 3-year old daughter Emily..... " he went on....
WOOOW, my daughter is named Emily too!!! Suddenly I was very interested. I took him for pizza across the street and arranged to have my two children "Attuned." Lol . . , they since cured their mom's stage 3 melanoma (skin cancer). ;-)

The following year this fine Dr. was in town again for his yearly Reiki seminars and classes. This time he stayed in my house and Attuned Cathy and I.

This is when I learned some "standing form" Reiki treatments. Since this time, these standing forms, very much like Qigong movements, have essentially evolved. Each time I do them I'm lead to make minor changes and adjustments, as they've become more and more powerful. I've added symbols and candles and made it into a full and detailed meditation routine (something else very new for me).  Including several chants I've heard lately: Om Prema Om, Om KaliKayai Namaha, Om Kam, Om Ram ... Oh and here's the one my Mom taught me a long time ago that I Love to use with all my meditations:

I am Light within without;
I am Light is all about;
Fill me, Free Me, Verify Me;
Seal Me, Heal Me, Glorify Me;
Until transfigured they describe me;
I Am shining like the sun;
I AM Shining like the Son.

SO Now about the physical Aztec Chant Graphic:

OK about last year, I ordered a Hammock from a store online.  I'm not sure what happened but I ended up on the phone talking to the guy at the shop. We had a nice chat about how he traveled to Mexico all the time to get these handmade hammocks. He also mentioned some other art he collected and other things he wanted to sell. A week or so later I got my hammock package in the mail; and this Aztec carving was in it too. Yes, essentially this carving was a gift from a stranger! 

It's another cool symbol for my alter with all the candles and such for my chant. Then, last month I had a visit from a very close friend, Laura www.ingodsownwords.com. We had a mystical experience together at a CWG retreat in NC long before the Tantra Class or Cathy. Laura had just come home from England http://1spirit.com/eraofpeace/ and was leaving for Germany soon with her psychic partner, Aerial. They were in town at a book conference and came to stay with me. So while they were with me I decided to show them my chant....

After I was done I was inspired to show them the Aztec carving, feeling that there was another symbol there that I could add to my chant.... Of course Aerial saw my chant there IN THE CAVING very clearly! She explained how I was transferring the power of the Gods into the waters of life for the Earth. And she pointed out the man on the alter below all the symbols of the Gods. And how the alter was on the Earth with the phallic symbols and all the rest....

Eeek... I mean what else could I say???

Recently I've wanted to learn more about it, and maybe even teach it??? The one Yoga studio I went to, seemed to feel it was too powerful for the regular student... oh well???

Maybe this would be a good place to stop... What do you feel from this?? 

Is this something to teach or share??? Would you like to trade notes or something???

Namaste
er;-x

Monday, November 07, 2011

Kindred Spirits

Kindred Spirits: Building a Resilient Community
Real Leaders are real people who have developed their own real new ideas, and they may even have to introduce some New Concepts, and create some New Terms, as we have seen here, which are not always popular to hear about, and so they do need to be explained in some depth, and these groups are very good for that, whereas emotional outbursts of raging disregard are generally not very good here, because of the limitations of email.


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Saturday, November 05, 2011

USF Health - College of Public Health - "Dean's Lecture Series"

USF Health - College of Public Health - "Dean's Lecture Series": Meredith Minkler, DrPH, MPH
Professor and Director, Department of Health and Social Behavior School of Public Health University of California at Berkeley
"In praise of Community Partners: The role of community-engaged research in promoting healthy public policy"

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Thursday, October 27, 2011

(20) NOT A CORPORATE CLONE

(20) NOT A CORPORATE CLONE: NOT A CORPORATE CLONE
by Terry Kok on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 12:39pm
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Before families were torn apart, they worked and played together. Small family owned and operated trades were the rule, not the exception. The children helped in the business of life, learning first hand how to do everything from the ground up, eventually taking over the management when the parents turned to grandparents and a new generation of children was raised to carry on the ancient traditions. If a child was drawn to something an aunt or uncle was doing, they lived and learned from that part of the family. The extended family was the basis of true community. Everyone listened to the grandparents because they knew the history, the tricks of the trade, the ups and downs of the world, the intricate details. Families did not break up. They stayed together. It was a continuity of grassroots community until corporations arrived on the scene.

The corporate world taught the opposite, that each person was on their own, separate, divided. Family businesses were looked down on as limiting and archaic relics of a primitive past. Children were raised to leave home and were cast out if they didn’t. Parents began spending their children’s inheritance. True community was branded as communism as the corporations took over and wiped small business after small business off the map. Instead of learning a trade from the elders, the kids were forced to go to school, to comply with corporate standards so that they could get a job working for the corporations. Families fell apart and community life was eventually replaced with a virtual substitute, the Internet.

I grew up during the very end of the family business era. My parents had jobs working as hired labor for other families. From birth I yearned for something already passing out of favor. When I was very young, during the 1950s, the anti-communist movement was well underway. People who tried to pool resources for mutual aid and support were turned in by their neighbors or branded as “commies” by congressional committee. The suburbs was invented and everyone was forced to go to private or government schools and punished if they didn’t. During the 1960s the corporations seized more power and control and the children who wanted to “succeed” in the world went off to college to be programmed. If you didn’t play the game you were kicked out of the house. Relatives were people you saw on holidays. If you tried to create family with your friends and restore the ancient traditions, you were branded a “dirty hippie” or a “dangerous radical”.

I graduated from high school in 1970 and married my high school sweetheart. Under pressure from my mother and my wife I attempted to go on to college, to choose a career, a place in the corporate pecking order. I also tried to get a job but found out that I had been blacklisted because, during my high school years, I had been outspoken about the downsides of the corporate system and the wars they waged over people and resources. I was branded by society as a “hippie-radical”, a throw-back to an earlier era, a communist sympathizer. I quickly found out that college life was an extension of high school programming, another 4 years in prison with the glimmer of working the rest of my life away in some sort of corporate slavery. I completed one semester and flunked out of the next so, with a couple of friends who were also branded, we opened a small business, a hippie shop. One of those partners when on to start his own shop and he is still in business to this day. He never married.

The hippie shop worked as a small business because we worked. We were successful but that brought a downside. One of my partners, his wife, and my wife decided that “success” meant that we should start acting like we were part of the corporate world. They thought we should be living the high life, going to cocktail lounges, dressing fancy, turning our backs on what had made us successful, acting like we were above our customers and pretending to be corporate whores. I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it so my wife kicked me out of the house and took our child as her own, making me pay child support. My partner and his wife started dressing and acting fancy. Within a year the business was ruined. I had to start over from scratch with no money and no support network.

To make a long story short, I was married again and again, always wanting to bootstrap a business from the grassroots up and share it with my family, restoring the ancient traditions of real community but being burned in the process. I grew several businesses only to see them destroyed from within, by wives who refused to work together as a family. I lost two more sets of children to the influence of corporate consciousness. I lost an alternative community that I co-created when my co-creators turned on me and I was threatened with having my home burned to the ground. Yet, despite the personal pain and loss, I was resilient, a born “go-getter”, a self-made human being, not a corporate clone. I still am and now, as the corporate world collapses and those jobs are rare to be found, people out of work with no skills or gumption to employ themselves, I am attempting, one last time, to find folks who wish to work together for mutual aid and support to co-create a viable alternative based on the ancient model before the whole world goes up in flames.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Investigation on chicken nuggets | UK news | The Guardian

Investigation on chicken nuggets | UK news | The Guardian: Fowl play

Fowl play

They are the ultimate 21st-century food - quick, easy and highly processed. But if you knew about the high percentage of skin, the water, and the pulped carcasses that go into some of them, would you be so keen to reach into the freezer for chicken nuggets? In a major investigation, Felicity Lawrence travels to processing plants in Britain and Thailand to uncover the disturbing truth about every kid's favourite food

The Guardian, Sunday 7 July 2002

Article history Europe is big on breasts. The Japanese prefer thighs, dark and gamey ones. Feet are a bit of a fetish in China. Gizzards go to Russia. But smooth, damp slabs of white flesh are what we British buy when we want chicken. That leaves the carcasses, and skin, mountains and mountains of it - pale, flaccid, pimply, raw, ripped off by 100,000 shift workers' hands, from Thailand to Brazil, from the Netherlands to Norfolk. The skin goes around the world for chicken nuggets.

I am watching an army of small, perfectly formed nuggets march along a conveyor belt, with manufacturer Gary Stiles, at his factory in Wiltshire. He has spent his life in the meat trade. At one end of the factory line is a pulp of half-frozen meat and skin in a giant stainless-steel hopper. Minced and mixed beyond recognition, it is being extruded through a small tube on to metal plates. These press it into pale pink nugget shapes which then trundle on down the belt. Through a dust bath of flour and seasoning they go, before being lowered under a sheet of constantly pouring batter. Then on in juddering formation through a tray of scattered breadcrumbs and into a vast vat of boiling oil for 30 seconds.

    As they emerge, workers in white coats, blue hairnets and white boots catch them, bag them in plastic, and post them back for the last rites. The belt carries them into a nitrogen tunnel to take them down to freezing and finally out into a cardboard box, labelled with his own brand Pure Organics For Georgia's Sake or Tesco organic chicken nuggets, according to the orders of the day.

    Above the roar of machinery, Stiles explains that you need some skin to keep the nuggets succulent; 15% is about right, he reckons. Mixed in that proportion with breast and dark meat, it matches what you would get if you were eating a whole bird, and he knows exactly where his comes from. Like the rest of his meat, his skin is bought from two organic farms that he knows personally, one in England, one in Wales. Unlike some manufacturers, he won't use more skin than that, and he won't use mechanically recovered meat (MRM), which is obtained by pushing the carcass through a giant teabag-like screen to produce a slurry of protein, then bound back together with polyphosphates and gums. Nor does he use other additives.

    Stiles likes to think that his nuggets, at £1.99 for 250g, are, like the beer, "reassuringly expensive". But the trouble is, once you've minced bits of a chicken to a pulp, that pulp could be anything from anywhere. With other manufacturers, sometimes it is. Recycled pet food, breasts injected with pig and cattle proteins, banned carcinogenic antibiotics - they've all been found by the authorities recently in chicken destined for processing.

    Denatured and deracinated, the chicken nugget is a symbol of the way we eat now. It is the epitome of our 21st-century system of globalised, industrial food production.

    Like much of our diet today, the nugget is processed so highly that its taste and texture depend as much on engineering and additives as on any raw ingredients, making it an easy way to disguise cheap or adulterated food. And just as the nugget's form is far removed from its contents, so we have become completely divorced from the source of those contents, from the animals that provide them and from the people who transform them. The nugget is, in fact, the product of a transnational chain so fragmented and complex that even those in the business do not fully understand how some parts of it work.

    It depends on the industrialisation of livestock, on an endless supply of uniform factory birds to fit standardised factory machines. It depends, too, on the mass migration of workers, both legal and illegal, since adding the value to it requires an equally endless supply of low-value labour.

    The rise of the nugget has been dizzying. We bought 42 million packs of them - that's £79m worth, or 21,000 tonnes - in the UK last year, just to eat at home, according to analysts Taylor Nelson Sofres. British adults also ate 73 million meals of them away from home in the same period. Children probably ate more. Served in school dining halls, fast-food outlets, at hospital bedsides, and on the tables of harassed parents, nuggets have become ubiquitous. Mass production has created a homogeneity in our diets at a time when the origins of our food are more varied than ever. If you want to know what goes into your nuggets, you need to look to the commodity markets, exchange rates and tariffs. The label is not the place to find out.

    One story earlier this year highlighted just how little we know about what lies inside the golden breadcrumb coating. When Leicestershire trading standards received a complaint from a member of the public about the quality of some nuggets, they decided to test 21 samples from 17 different shops, including the major supermarkets. In one-third of the samples, the label was misleading about the nugget's meat content. One pack of nuggets contained only 16% meat, 30% less than it claimed. (And skin, of course, counts as "meat"). The trading standards officials are unable to identify the brands involved for legal reasons. Instead, they gave a warning to the worst offender. Subsequent tests recently have shown that the manufacturer has not changed its ways. Look further back down the chain, and it becomes clear that doctoring has become routine.

    Even if the percentage of meat in a nugget looks reassuringly high, you may be surprised by what exactly counts as meat. Nugget manufacturers source their meat in various ways. Some use British chicken. Some buy high-quality meat direct from Thailand or Brazil. Some buy whatever is cheapest on the market, which is often frozen Thai and Brazilian chicken imported into the EU through Holland's ports.

    The Netherlands is the centre of the "tumbling" industry, a process in which chicken is bulked up with water and other additives. Dutch processors defrost the meat and then inject it with dozens of needles, or tumble it in giant cement-mixer-like machines, until the water is absorbed. Salted meat attracts only a fraction of the EU tariff applied to fresh meat. The tumbling helps dilute the salt to make the chicken palatable, so as well as making huge profits selling water, the processors can avoid substantial duties. Once it has been tumbled, the meat is refrozen and shipped on for further processing.

    The story gets less appetising still. One of the things that has puzzled observers of the poultry industry is how some processors manage to get so much water to stay in the chicken. Why doesn't it just flood out when it is turned into a takeaway or a ready meal or a chicken nugget? Hull trading standards officer John Sandford has spent over five years investigating. The answer he discovered was profoundly shocking.

    DNA tests specially developed by Sandford with the public analyst laboratory in Manchester enabled the English food standards agency to identify lots of water (in one case 43%) and traces of pork proteins in samples of Dutch chicken breasts labelled "halal". Six months later, Irish authorities made an even more unsettling discovery in chicken: undeclared bovine proteins. Seventeen samples from Dutch processors contained them. Some manufacturers were using a new technique - injecting so-called hydrolysed proteins. These are proteins extracted at high temperatures or by chemical hydrolysis from old animals or parts of animals which are no use for food, such as skin, feathers, hide, bone and ligaments, and rather like cosmetic collagen implants, they make the flesh swell up and retain liquid.

    These discoveries raised as many questions as they answered. What kind of cow products had been used to produce bovine proteins? If the processors were not declaring the presence of bovine proteins on the labels, could they be trusted to follow the regulations on removing certain high-risk cattle materials from the food chain? The possibility of BSE in chicken meat had raised its ugly head.

    Chicken from the Dutch processors named by the Irish authorities remains widely available in the UK. Industry sources say that some nugget manufacturers at the bottom end of the market buy tumbled Dutch chicken, although they would be unaware that some processors' meat contains bovine proteins.

    Others nuggets will be made from various bits of British chicken. Some are made from chunks of chicken breast and skin. Some are mostly skin, or skin and MRM. If tumbled meat is being used, the chicken is defrosted in microwaves before being minced into nuggets. Manufacturers can neutralise the salty taste by adding sugar in various forms, often as dextrose or lactose, and put flavour back in with chicken flavourings in the meat pulp, in the batter or in the breadcrumbs. Other additives can help restore the texture. Soya proteins are the commonest used, with gums as emulsifiers, to stop the whole mix separating out again. Phosphates also help glue up the proteins. Some nuggets are made in Britain, but increasingly nuggets are also imported ready-made from developing countries. If a manufacturer does anything to the chicken in this country, it can be legally labelled "produced in England". To get to the beginning of the nugget story, though, we must head east, to a land of chicken and cheap labour.

    The Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise near CP Towers in Bangkok is chilly, its automatic doors and air conditioning sealing it off from the blast of 40C heat outside - and the choking smog of east Asia's fastest-developing city. There is one family group sharing a tray of chicken nuggets - a Thai mother and father with a fat little boy bursting from a designer leather jacket, but the other patrons are all alone, disconnected, eating their fast food with silent efficiency. The nuggets slip down. Hot and crisp on the outside, soft and moist inside, they have that textureless, easy-on-the-jaw, flavoured "mouth feel" that children like.

    A McDonald's supplier claims the invention of the nugget in 1979. McDonald's, worried by the trend away from red meat towards "healthier" white meat, asked Keystone Foods if it could produce a boneless chicken finger food which would be in keeping with its other fast food. Keystone laboratories came up with McNuggets, little gobbets of minced, reconstituted chicken, battered and breaded.

    But it was the Vietnam war and US troops wanting R&R with familiar food which started Thailand off on its trajectory of breathtaking growth, producing food for export. The country is now one of the world's largest exporters of poultry and chicken products - $600m worth last year. Food exports are projected to grow to a staggering $25bn worth by 2007.

    KFC franchises in the UK source some of their meat for what they call chicken strips - made from pieces rather than minced chicken - direct from Thailand. Tesco has invested heavily in the country and owns the majority share of the retail arm of Thailand's leading chicken producer, Charoen Pokphand (CP).

    Grampian, supplier of fresh chicken and nuggets to all the main British supermarkets, has just closed down a factory in Scotland and ended its contract with some of its British farmers, while buying two huge factories outside Bangkok. Managing director Alistair Cox says it is very hard to compete in a world market in the UK. "The UK government puts an onerous regulatory framework around UK farms and factories, which add costs. Imports coming into the UK may not meet the same standards (although Grampian's aim is to have the same standards in its Thailand operations), but the main cost is labour, and it's cheaper over there."

    Driving north out of the sprawl of Bangkok, it takes over an hour to reach the Grampian Foods Siam factories, where 150,000 birds are killed a day and 120,000 a day can be turned into nuggets and other chicken products. Eventually, the traffic jams give way to marshy plains, criss-crossed by canals. Migrant workers, drawn from the poor rural areas in the north and east to work in the industrial belt around the capital, have built their wooden huts over the waterways, which double up as transport system and sewer.

    A powerful smell of raw meat and a procession of juggernauts loaded with blue and yellow crates of chickens, uncovered and exposed to the blistering temperatures of late morning, announce that you are close to an industrial chicken factory. A notice at the HQ main entrance says no children under 15 are allowed, while at the gate of a second factory up the road, where nuggets are made, accident figures are posted. (Thailand has the world's second-highest per capita industrial accident rate.)

    In many ways, Thai chicken factories are just like English ones - equipped with vast stainless-steel production lines to take the birds from slaughter to finished product, and fed by "crops" of chickens from large-scale intensive farms. They are inspected for hygiene and welfare standards by EU inspectors.

    It is in the lives of those who work in them that the gulf becomes apparent. Some of the 3,500 workers at Grampian Foods Siam live on the factory sites in huge dormitories under corrugated-iron roofs. Others spend hours each day travelling in from miles around. We have a rendezvous at the end of a shift with some of the workers who are bussed in the long journey from the outskirts of Bangkok to this and other chicken factories.

    The light, though not the heat, is fading as we pick our way through a dusty slum of half- finished concrete houses next to a small, open-air slaughterhouse where chickens are being killed for the domestic market. A row of windowless wooden shacks, built on a broken platform over marshland, open directly on to the six-lane highway. Old plastic supermarket bags clog the ground under the platform stilts and the smell of sewage is overpowering.

    Nine of us crowd into a small room and sit crosslegged in a circle on the floor, sharing a communal meal of noodles with slivers of pork, green leaves and papaya. This is home to Khun Neepa, who, together with half of those in the room, works at Centraco, a leading producer of frozen chicken for export to England for ready meals and nuggets. The others work for Grampian.

    We eat, then talk. Most of them are paid by the day, and earn the statutory minimum wage of 165 baht (£2.50) a day, six days a week, for a nine-hour day which includes a one-hour break. They work in two shifts, dawn till mid-afternoon or mid-afternoon into the night, depending on the orders. Overtime, which can be two or three hours a day, pays more, and they work it and days off whenever they can to send more money home. Most of them are the first of their families to go into the factories; their parents were rice farmers.

    The most labour-intensive part of the factories are the cutting rooms where it is as cold as a fridge and hundreds of workers wearing face masks and gloves cut, chop, debone and rearrange parts. This is where cheap raw animals begin their transformation into profitable "added value goods". Hygiene is very strict. The workers have to wash their hands and boards every hour. There are doctors at the sites in case there are accidents; they have all seen two or three - fingers caught in machines, knives going through nerves, that sort of thing.

    The company doesn't like to take on anyone over 40, and the supervisors are very quick to give you warnings - two and you lose seven days' work, any more after that and it's the sack. But Grampian's a good place to work, they say.

    At Centraco, Neepa has now organised a union, the first in a Thai chicken factory. Her filing cabinets are jammed in alongside her pots and pans. It's been a fight: she's been sacked and taken to court, but she won and now things are better, she says - they have clean drinking water and uniforms provided, though she doesn't see her children (a six-year-old girl and two-year-old boy) much. They live with her parents in another province.

    Khun Sril finds it harder to bear. She used to work in supermarkets and hotels but now she's 33, she has been told that she is too old and no longer attractive enough, so she is working at Centraco. It's hard when the chickens come really fast - her factory can process 190 birds a minute - and she's cut her finger a couple of times, and had to go to hospital when a knife fell on her foot. She has to spend 1,500 of the 4,300 baht she earns a month on rent for a small room without sanitation. She often goes hungry because she is sending money home to her parents in the north to look after her two children, aged two and four. She sees them once a year. Her voice trails off as she talks about them and we fall silent. The others gently make their excuses and leave: it is late, they have to be up early.

    Ricky and I are sipping fresh lime sodas in the cool of a five-star hotel in Bangkok. He is a smooth, besuited Thai executive from CP Foods who seems to think I am a broker and is rattling off sales figures in a mid-Atlantic accent: CP is the country's largest chicken exporter, producer of 2,200 tonnes of chicken breast a month for the UK; it owns 100 feedmills and processing factories in China, where labour is even cheaper; it supplies KFC in Europe, and Tesco; it owns large farms - 30,000 birds per shed, or 50,000 in two-storey houses, which meet Tesco-specification stocking densities, with chickens reared and killed on a 42-day cycle, nugget flavourings to different specifications, all hand-cut meat, battered and fried...

    I interrupt the flow to ask him about antibiotics found in Thai meat. The EU recently sent its veterinary inspectors to China and they were alarmed to find indiscriminate use of antibiotics in chicken and fish farming, including the use of drugs banned in Europe as cancer-causing. As a gesture of even-handedness, the commission tested Thai poultry, too, and was surprised to find nitrofurans and chloramphenicol residues in samples. Both are banned antibiotics in Europe. Now all Thai poultry imports to the EU are supposed to be checked. Ricky admits that the industry is anxious but argues that it is an isolated problem. He blames producers who are subcontracting, or buying in chicken from China and then relabelling it as Thai produce before selling it on, just as British factories buy in poultry from the Netherlands and relabel it as British.

    A steely grey dawn is breaking over Eastbourne, and while the windows of the smarter seaside hotels are still blank, the lights are flicking on in the seedier boarding houses in between. Outside the glazed verandah advertising banana splits, jam doughnuts and Sussex cream teas, two young men are having an argument in Russian. It is 5.35am and I am waiting alone at a bus stop on Seaside Road, next to a shop which is patriotically flying half a dozen union flags.

    Suddenly at 5.38am they appear, as if from nowhere, like apparitions, wreathed in rings of cigarette smoke. There is a quick exchange of "Buenos dias" between five or six Spanish- speaking middle-aged men, in trainers and old jeans. A man in an Afghan hat hangs back in a doorway. Two minutes later a dirty, unmarked white coach rolls up and eight or nine get on board, taking their places with a dozen others, already slumped in the old brown seats with their heavily used ashtrays, as they try to catch a last snatch of sleep.

    These are some of the foreign shift workers who are bussed each day for an hour or more between the south coast and the Grampian factory at Uckfield to kill and cut up chickens, packing pieces for Safeway, Somerfield and the Co-op, and supplying spare parts to the company's nugget factory in East Anglia.

    The coach stops several times to pick up more, and by the end there are about 50. How many nationalities, I ask? "20, no 22," someone thinks: "Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, Kosovans, Bosnians, other eastern Europeans, Iraqis, Arabs, lots of Arabs, Afghans, Pakistanis, Spanish, Portuguese, many, many foreigners, not many English." English people do not want this kind of work. "There are many, many refugees." There was a problem a while ago at the factory when "they told all the Russians and Kosovans they had to go home".

    Carmen is Spanish, 50ish, smarter than the rest in black jacket and red lipstick. She worked 15 hours yesterday, and after the bus journey back, got home at 11pm and then was up again for work at 5am. "The money is too little, £4.20 an hour, only about £160 a week, unless you do the overtime. That's good, £7 an hour, so you have to do the overtime." She pays £50 a week rent to share a room she can hardly turn round in. She saw an advert in her local Spanish paper for packers in a factory in England and it sounded good - there are no jobs for her in Spain. "But they don't tell you it's hours on the bus each way and it's very cold, so cold in there, and food is so expensive here." We are driving along narrow country lanes now where commuters' dream cottages are still dreaming. The hawthorn is in full bloom and knee-high cow parsley is a shimmer of gauze in the early morning light. "Everyone is moving, England is not England, Spain is not Spain. Everyone moving for jobs," Carmen sighs.

    We arrive at the factory, tucked in a fold of Sussex down, at 6.30am. A white double-decker bus, also packed with foreigners, lurches in behind, then come vans and more coaches.

    This scene is replayed across Britain each day: from the centre of Derby to the cluster of chicken factories owned by other companies in the Midlands, from Great Yarmouth to the Grampian production lines in East Anglia, from Exeter to the Lloyd Maunder factory in Devon where 18 nationalities work cutting and packing chicken for Sainsbury's.

    Most big manufacturers, including Grampian, insist on checks on the paperwork of foreign workers, but inevitably some slip through the net. Where manufacturers employ subcontractors to provide labour, the responsibility in law for checking that the worker is entitled to work, devolves to the agent. Many of the illegal workers have forged papers and, according to immigration officers who have spoken to the Guardian, illegal labour operated by gangmasters is a significant and growing problem in the meat-processing business, as in other sectors of the food industry. Alistair Cox, managing director of Grampian, acknowledges that it is a problem across the industry. "We use agencies but we also check all their records and welcome immigration officials into the business."

    Don Pollard has made a study of migrant labour for the T&G union. "The supermarkets are dependent on illegal labour. By definition, figures are guesstimates, but about 40% of their food suppliers' workforces are tied up with gangmasters and illegal labour."

    A different kind of illegal activity has been absorbing Sue Sonnex for the last couple of years. In 2000, three Rotherham men were found guilty of laundering £3m worth of unfit chicken and turkey, supposedly destined for tins of Spillers and Pedigree petfood, back into supplies for human consumption. Sonnex, a chief environmental health officer, has been investigating the disposal of condemned meat following the Rotherham case and thinks it represents the tip of an iceberg. During her inquiries, she uncovered chicken nuggets made almost entirely of chicken skin. The industry's problems are endemic, she says, a symptom of a system in which it makes economic sense to ship raw meat hundreds of miles and disguise it with additives so its origin becomes impossible to trace. Once you accept this sort of legal adulteration of processed food, there is no end to it; the ingredients can just as well be pet food. Respectable manufacturers suffer; rogues get away with it.

    As a nugget manufacturer, Gary Stiles thinks that we have become too disconnected from our food and disconnection has bred fear and mistrust. He was forced to remake the connection between what he made and what he fed his children when his daughter, Georgia, the Georgia of his brand name, turned out to be autistic. He and his wife started to research the link between diet and illness. He now feels that "if you put junk in, you get junk out", and he's not prepared to do that any more.

    · Workers names have been changed to protect their identities.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

There are only seven nations left in the world that are not borrowing from a Rothschild cartel bank: Iran, Syria, Algeria, North Korea, Sudan, Iceland, and Cuba. Those countries create their own money for their own people; and interest rates are low or zero. National banks that recently fell to the Rothschild cartel include: Iraq, Afghanistan, and most recently, Libya (on day 4 of the recent invasion). http://www.wearechange.org/?p=9351 Libya, the untold story. A Debt Free nation ransacked! Some believe it is about protecting civilians, others say it is about oil, but MOST are convinced intervention in Libya is ALL about Gaddafi's PLAN TO INTRODUCE THE GOLD DINAR, a single African currency made from gold, a true sharing of the wealth AND THE END of the western world trying to controlling the middle east.. "It's one of these things that you have to plan almost in secret, because as soon as you say you're going to change over from the dollar to something else, you're going to be targeted," says Ministry of Peace founder Dr James Thring. "There were two conferences on this, in 1986 and 2000, organized by Gaddafi. Everybody was interested, most countries in Africa were keen." Source: http://www.RT.com/ Titled: 'Saving the world economy from Gaddafi'


Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Wall Street’s Second Occupation: The Rise of the NYPD's Homeland Security State | | AlterNet

Wall Street’s Second Occupation: The Rise of the NYPD's Homeland Security State | | AlterNet: Tomdispatch.com / By Tom Engelhardt

Wall Street’s Second Occupation: The Rise of the NYPD's Homeland Security State

Are drones above New York City next as the police militarize Lower Manhattan?
Photo Credit: Nick Turse
These last weeks, there have been two “occupations” in lower Manhattan, one of which has been getting almost all the coverage -- that of the demonstrators camping out in Zuccotti Park. The other, in the shadows, has been hardly less massive, sustained, or in its own way impressive -- the police occupation of the Wall Street area.

On a recent visit to the park, I found the streets around the Stock Exchange barricaded and blocked off to traffic, and police everywhere in every form (in and out of uniform) -- on foot, on scooters, on motorcycles, in squad cars with lights flashing, on horses, in paddy wagons or minivans, you name it. At the park’s edge, there is a police observation tower capable of being raised and lowered hydraulically and literally hundreds of police are stationed in the vicinity. I counted more than 50 of them on just one of its sides at a moment when next to nothing was going on -- and many more can be seen almost anywhere in the Wall Street area, lolling in doorways, idling in the subway, ambling on the plazas of banks, and chatting in the middle of traffic-less streets.

This might be seen as massive overkill. After all, the New York police have already shelled out an extra $1.9 million, largely in overtime pay at a budget-cutting moment in the city. When, as on Thursday, 100 to 150 marchers suddenly headed out from Zuccotti Park to circle Chase Bank several blocks away, close to the same number of police -- some with ominous clumps of flexi-cuffs dangling from their belts -- calved off with them. It’s as if the Occupy Wall Street movement has an eternal dark shadow that follows it everywhere.

At one level, this is all mystifying. The daily crowds in the park remain remarkably, even startlingly, peaceable. (Any violence has generally been the product of police action.) On an everyday basis, a squad of 10 or 15 friendly police officers could easily handle the situation. There is, of course, another possibility suggested to me by one of the policemen loitering at the Park’s edge doing nothing in particular: “Maybe they’re peaceable because we’re here.” And here's a second possibility: as my friend Steve Fraser, author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, said to me, “This is the most important piece of real estate on the planet and they’re scared. Look how amazed we are. Imagine how they feel, especially after so many decades of seeing nothing like it.”

And then there’s a third possibility: that two quite separate universes are simply located in the vicinity of each other and of what, since September 12, 2001, we’ve been calling Ground Zero. Think of it as Ground Zero Doubled, or think of it as the militarized recent American past and the unknown, potentially inspiring American future occupying something like the same space. (You can, of course, come up with your own pairings, some far less optimistic.) In their present state, New York’s finest represent a local version of the way this country has been militarized to its bones in these last years and, since 9/11, transformed into a full-scale surveillance-intelligence-homeland-security state.

Their stakeout in Zuccotti Park is geared to extreme acts, suicide bombers, and terrorism, as well as to a conception of protest and opposition as alien and enemy-like. They are trying to herd, lock in, and possibly strangle a phenomenon that bears no relation to any of this. They are, that is, policing the wrong thing, which is why every act of pepper spraying or swing of the truncheon, every aggressive act (as in the recent eviction threat to “clean” the park) blows back on them and only increases the size and coverage of the movement.

Though much of the time they are just a few feet apart, the armed state backing that famed 1%, or Wall Street, and the unarmed protesters claiming the other 99% might as well be in two different times in two different universes connected by a Star-Trekkian wormhole and meeting only where pepper spray hits eyes.

Which means anyone visiting the Occupy Wall Street site is also watching a strange dance of phantoms. Still, we do know one thing. This massive semi-militarized force we continue to call “the police” will, in the coming years, only grow more so. After all, they know but one way to operate.

Right now, for instance, over crowds of protesters the police hover in helicopters with high-tech cameras and sensors, but in the future there can be little question that in the skies of cities like New York, the police will be operating advanced drone aircraft. Already, as Nick Turse indicates in a groundbreaking report “America’s Secret Empire of Drone Bases,” the U.S. military and the CIA are filling the global skies with missile-armed drones and the clamor for domestic drones is growing. The first attack on an American neighborhood, not one in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, or Libya, surely lurks somewhere in our future. Empires, after all, have a way of coming home to roost.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be published in November.

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