Let him among you who is without sin be the first to send a stone at her. John 8:7

Once again, an alleged representative of God, (the Almighty and All Merciful), a Brazilian Archbishop of the Catholic Church, neither almighty nor merciful, Cardoso by name and overwhelmed with knowledge of the Ways of the One, has decreed and excommunicated a nine year old girl, because she had an abortion. She became pregnant after her stepfather had raped her. The frail and delicate preteen girl could have died otherwise in giving birth. The depth of the Archbishop's heart and wisdom also revealed to him the necessity of excommunicating the team of doctors who performed the abortion. But of course, as always, a very young dead girl is preferable to the all male, supposedly chaste and sexless leaders of the Catholic Church, when even a life saving abortion is the issue. Shame on you, Cardoso!

It is reported that the Archbishop of the Catholic Church of Brazil, Archbishop Cardoso, has excommunicated a young girl of nine years of age. Apparently she had been raped by her stepfather. The sin seems to be that a team of doctors and medical staff - who have all also been excommunicated - performed an abortion. The doctors believed the procedure necessary for medical (and no doubt humanitarian) reasons such as her health, and the likelihood of a pregnancy at that age affecting her badly, possibly fatally - and that the foetus had little chance of survival. This seems a reasonable assumption. All in all a remarkable act by a person with the control of the church of a large country. This would seem to imply that young children and even babies can be

guilty of terrible sins, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, even when these are forced on them by adults. It also implies that the Bishop is hardly fit to govern a kindergarden, let alone a very large congregation. As a representative of the Almighty and All-Merciful, he seems to have fallen short in his duties somewhat. Or is it the position of the Church that a dead child is a better result than a terminated foetus that had little real chance of survival? It also seems to approve of raping children as a means of creating more Catholics. One supposes it far too much to hope for that the Bishop will himself be excommunicated by the Pope. by Tom Badillo

Let the children come to me, and do not keep them away, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.   Luke 18:16

Unprecedented View Inside the Prison-like Conditions at
High-Tech Sweatshop in China

Producing for HP, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and IBM

 

Today, the National Labor Committee (NLC) is releasing a 60-page report, High Tech Misery in China, documenting the grueling hours, low wages and draconian disciplinary measures at the Meitai factory in southern China.  The 2,000 mostly-young women workers produce keyboards and other equipment for Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and IBM.  Along with worker interviews, photographs of primitive factory and dorm conditions and extensive internal company documents were smuggled out of the factory.

Full report:   http://www.nlcnet.org/article.php?id=613

• Workers sit on hard wooden stools as 500 computer keyboards an hour move down the assembly line, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, with just two days off a month.  The workers have 1.1 seconds to snap on each key, an operation repeated 3,250 times an hour, 35,750 a day, 250,250 a week and over one million times a month.  The pace is relentless.
• Workers are paid 1/50th of a cent for each operation they complete.
• Workers cannot talk, listen to music or even lift their heads to look around.  They must "periodically trim their nails," or be fined.  Workers needing to use the bathroom must learn to hold it until there is a break.  Security guards spy on the workers, who are prohibited from putting their hands in their pockets and are searched when they leave the factory.
• All overtime is mandatory and workers are at the factory up to 87 hours a week, while earning a take-home wage of just 41 cents an hour.  Workers are being cheated of up to 19 percent of the wages due them.
• Ten to twelve workers share each overcrowded dorm room, sleeping on metal bunk beds and draping old sheets over their cubicles for privacy.  Workers bathe using small plastic buckets and must walk down several flights of stairs to fetch hot water.
• Workers are locked in the factory compound four days a week and prohibited from even taking a walk.
• For breakfast the workers receive a thin rice gruel. On Fridays they receive a small chicken leg and foot to symbolize "their improving life."
• Workers are instructed to "love the company like your home"…"continuously striving for perfection" …and to spy on and "actively monitor each other."

China provides large subsidies to its exporters.  In 2008, the U.S. trade deficit with China in advanced technology products is expected to reach $74 billion.  There are 1.4 million electronic assembly jobs left in the U.S.-paying $12.72 to $14.41 an hour-which may be lost due to China's low wages and repression of worker rights.

One Metai worker summed up the general feeling in the factory:  "I feel like I am serving a prison sentence...The factory is forever pressing down on our heads and will not tolerate even the tiniest mistake.  When working, we work continuously.  When we eat, we have to eat with lightning speed… The security guards are like policemen watching over prisoners.  We're really livestock and shouldn't be called workers."

God help us if the labor-management relations being developed in China become the new low standard for the rest of the world.  The $200 personal computer and $22.99 keyboard may seem like a great bargain.  But they come at a terrible cost.  The low wages and lack of worker rights protections in China are leading the race to the bottom in the global sweatshop economy, where there are no winners.

THE NATIONAL
LABORCOMMITTEE

More than 1,300 Palestinians, at least a third of whom were women and children, were killed in Israel's war on Gaza, which had the stated aim of preventing rocket attacks into Israel.

Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, died during the 22-day conflict.
source: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/02/20092355215224610.h...

Rolf Verleger, former chairman of the Jewish Community in Schleswig-Holstein (a German Federal State), criticizes the 'all too simple' comments of German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Israel's recent military action against the Palestinian people. To hold only Hamas responsible does not reflect the very complex historical development of the situation. He asks four questions:

1. None of his Grandparents survived the Nazi Holocaust. Did this fact give Jewish franctireurs and the Jewish Army in 1947/48 the right to expel hundreds of thousands of Arabs from Israel?
2. The German Nazis expropriated the property of his Great-Grandfather in Berlin. Did this fact give the state of Israel the right to confiscate the property of the expelled Arabs?
3. All his uncles and aunts were murdered by the SS. Does this fact give the state of Israel the right to exercise a dictatorial occupation for the last 40 years over the Palestinian people?
4. His Grandma Hannah was shot, because she went to her hair-dresser without wearing the "Judenstern" ( a yellow star to mark Jewish People. It had to be put visibly on the clothes). Does this fact give the State of Israel the right to starve and bombard the people in Gaza?

"In general terms", he asks, "does the fact that the European Jews were the victim of a great wrong, give the state of Israel the right, before God and humanity, to wrong others? This is the real question. And here, Mrs. Merkel is oversimplifying. Israel is not always right."

He also compares the blockade of Gaza with the blockade of Sarajevo in 1990, and adds, "the leaders who did that then were punished as war criminals in The Hague."

"Judaism once was 'the religion of acting charity'. When I say that today, no one is going to believe me."

(Excerpt of an interview given on Deutschlandfunk, 12/29, 2008)

See also:

• The Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis
• Israeli settler abuse compared to pre-holocaust Europe

Willie McBride by Eric Bogle

1.
Well, how do you do, Private William McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
I've been walking all day, and I'm nearly done.
And I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916,
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Chorus:
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did the play the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sound "The Last Post" in chorus?
Did the pipes play "The Flowers of the Forest"?

2.
And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that loyal heart are you always nineteen?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Forever enshrined behind some glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?

3.
The sun's shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that's still No Man's Land
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man.
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

4.
And I can't help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you "The Cause?"
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

All the President's Nazis (Real and Imagined):
 
An Open Letter to Bush

By Larisa Alexandrovna
Dear Mr. Bush,
19/01/08 "Huffington Post" -- 15/05/08 -- -- Your speech on the Knesset floor today was not only a disgrace; it was nothing short of treachery. Worse still, your exploitation of the Holocaust in a country carved out of the wounds of that very crime, in order to strike a low blow at American citizens whose politics differs from your own is unforgivable and unpardonable. Let me remind you, Mr. Bush, of your words today:
"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," Bush said at Israel's 60th anniversary celebration in Jerusalem.

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said in remarks to Israel's parliament, the Knesset. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Well Mr. Bush, the only thing this comment lacked was a mirror and some historical facts. You want to discuss the crimes of Nazis against my family and millions of other families in Europe during World War II? Let me revive a favorite phrase of yours: Bring. It. On!
continue on InformationClearingHouse.info ►

 

The Jerusalem Post broke the news this morning: George Bush intends to attack Iran in his final months in office. 

"The official claimed that a senior member of the president's entourage, which concluded a trip to Israel last week, said during a closed meeting that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action was called for."

(read more...►)

Congress has the power to stop him. There is a resolution already in the Senate called S. Res. 356. It's a straightforward and simple resolution that says, "A resolution affirming that any offensive military action taken against Iran must be explicitly approved by Congress before such action may be initiated."

Tell your Senator to support and fight for S. Res 356:

http://www.TrueMajority.org/dontbombiran

Today's story is just the latest to discuss the increasingly belligerent rhetoric of the Bush administration towards Iran. Just last week, President Bush compared anyone who seeks to negotiate with Iran to those who appeased the Nazis prior to World War II.

We only have a few months until our long national nightmare of the Bush Administration comes to an end.  But, it is abundantly clear that they intend on going out with a bang. It's time for the Congress to embrace its role as a co-equal branch of government and stop them before it is too late.