North Carolina still the only state to compensate victims of forced sterilization
By Noel Brinkerhoff and Steve Straehley | AllGov | November 11, 2014
North Carolina has begun to do something no other state in the nation has attempted: Pay victims of forced sterilization.
The state is attempting to right a 20th century wrong when that state and others mandated that tens of thousands of Americans have their reproductive rights stripped from them in the name of public policy.
California only recently passed a law banning the practice after an investigation showed that female inmates in the state prison system continued to be sterilized. That state accounted for about a third of all U.S. forced sterilizations.
Thirty-two states participated in forced sterilizations from early in the century until 1974. These controversial programs left at least 65,000 citizens with their tubes tied, uteri removed or vasa deferentia severed.
“Still others came under the scalpel of private doctors, and this second group makes the calculations difficult—65,000 represents only the number of sterilizations where there was municipal paperwork,” Ted Scheinman reported for Pacific Standard.
People were sterilized under programs inspired by eugenics as a way to “cleanse” society of poverty and those with mental or physical defects, or who had merely been the victims of horrible crimes, like daughters raped by their fathers.
“They did take our God-given right away from us,” said Elaine Riddick, one of the few survivors of the program. “They did tamper, or play with our reproductive rights. These are things you just can’t cover up, or you just can’t let go of. These are things that are going to haunt us for the rest of our lives.”
North Carolina became the first—and still only—state in 2013 to pass legislation that demands financial compensation to sterilization victims. It did specify that victims had to be alive on June 30, 2013 to be compensated, according to The Daily Tarheel.
Checks of $20,000 will be awarded to at least 220 survivors to begin with. At least 768 claims have been filed with the state, but in many of the remaining cases, there is no official paperwork documenting the loss.
So far, no other state has moved to compensate its forced sterilization victims.
To Learn More:
The Price of American Eugenics (by Ted Scheinman, Pacific Standard )
Some U.S. Victims of Forced Sterilization Are About to Be Compensated — But Most Aren’t (by Payton Guion, Vice News )
Forced Sterilization Compensation begins in N.C. (by Corey Risinger, Daily Tarheel )
Decades after Prison Sterilizations Were “Banned,” State Really Does It (by Ken Broder, AllGov California)
North Carolina Agrees to Compensate Sterilized Welfare Recipients (by Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky, AllGov )
Wealth inequality in US not seen since Great Depression – study
RT | November 10, 2014
A new study has revealed that 0.01 percent of the population holds more and more of America’s wealth. The share of wealth in the hands of middle class families has tumbled to levels not seen since before the Wall Street Crash in 1929.
A research paper from the London School of Economics shows previous estimates have seriously underestimated the amount of wealth controlled by the very rich in the US. Authors Saez and Gabriel Zuchman, have used a greater variety of sources, including the effect of things like property tax and tax avoidance strategies.
The researchers used the bottom 90 percent of families as a measure of middle class wealth. They found that in the late 1920’s, just before the Wall Street Crash, the bottom 90 percent controlled 16 percent of America’s wealth.
This share rose steadily from the beginning of the great depression until the end of the Second World War, due to a collapse in wealth of the richest households, and continued to rise after World War Two as the middle class wealth grew on a par with national wealth.
The middle class also saw rising rates of home ownership during this period and by the early 1980s the share of wealth owned by the middle class was reckoned at 36 percent, roughly four times what the top 0.1 percent controlled.
But since the early 1980’s the net worth of the US middle class has collapsed, due to a sluggish growth in middle class incomes but mainly because of soaring debt, including mortgages.
Meanwhile the fortunes of the very rich have grown. 16,000 families make up 0.01 percent of households in America, and are worth an average $371 million. They control 11.2 percent of total US wealth, which is a similar share to that seen back in 1916.
But even coming slightly down the spectrum, the top 0.1 percent, consisting of 160,000 families, hasn’t done nearly as well and holds 22 percent of US wealth – a bit less than their 1929 peak. This is the same share as the bottom 90 percent.
The authors also sound the alarm over how these huge fortunes were amassed. Although some young families have grown rich through entrepreneurial activity, such as billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, many are rich through fortunes they have inherited.
Healthy girl confiscated from parents who smoked pot, given to murderous foster mother
Police State USA | November 5, 2014
ROUND ROCK, TX — A little girl was confiscated from her loving parents because they smoked marijuana, and given away to a foster mother who put her into a coma and killed her. Alexandria “Alex” Hill, age 2, succumbed to her injuries after being “thrown to the ground.”
“We never hurt our daughter. She was never sick, she was never in the hospital, and she never had any issues until she went into state care,” said the girl’s father, Joshua Hill, to KVUE.
Alex was seized by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Service (TDFPS) after her parents were accused of smoking marijuana while the girl slept. She was taken into state custody in November 2012.
Mr. Hill said that she was put into more than one dangerous foster home.
“She would come to visitation with bruises on her, and mold and mildew in her bag,” Mr. Hill told KVUE. “It got to a point where I actually told CPS that they would have to have me arrested because I wouldn’t let her go back.”
The girl’s final home was with Sherill Small, a foster care contractor in Rockdale, Texas. The TDFPS trusted Ms. Small enough to take custody of multiple children displaced by the agency.
On the evening of July 29th, 2013, Mr. Hill got an urgent call to come to the local hospital. When he got there, he found that Alex was in a coma. The girl had suffered traumatic head injuries after being thrown to the ground. She was also bruised on her buttocks, arm, and chin, and had so much hair ripped out that she was “nearly bald.” Alex died 2 days later.
“I was blown away to find out she was in a coma,” Hill told KXAN. “That’s not what you expect, especially when your child is in state custody for ‘safety,’ and now they’re suffering more injuries and more harm than they ever have in their entire life before that.”
Mr. Hill was 4 months away from getting his daughter returned to his custody.
This tragic case illustrates a widespread injustice perpetrated regularly in the United States in the name of child welfare. Healthy, happy children are commonly stolen from loving families who have never once caused them harm. Once in the care of the state, they are traumatized by familial separation, forcibly drugged, and placed into questionable situations with complete strangers.
As was the case for Alex and her family, the state intervention comes without a trial, without a conviction, and without due process for the parents. The state’s accusation of “neglect” (a loosely defined term) can result in armed agents of the state forcibly entering a home to abduct the child — ostensibly for his or her “safety.”
* * * * *
FOLLOW-UP:
Sherill Small was charged with the murder of Alex Hill. In November 2014, she was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Although she claimed that she “does not shake babies,” a jury found the evidence against Mrs. Small to be overwhelming.
Alex’s mother, Mary Sweeney, has chronicled updates on the case on a Facebook page, “Justice 4 Alex Hill.”
The Texas DFPS was not found to be at fault for placing Alex in the home of Sherill Small. After numerous complaints statewide, and ten Texas children killed in state care in 2013, the Office of the Inspector General became involved, and found that the meddling bureaucracy was often dishonest and reckless in its placement of children.
Although new rules imposed in 2014 make it more difficult to be a foster parent, the agency itself remains dangerously powerful and unaccountable when it comes to snatching children. In 2013, over 30,000 children in Texas spent time in foster care — many for absurd reasons such as parents using marijuana. A major overhaul of child welfare agencies is needed in Texas and across the country.
For the Bottom 90% of Americans, Financial Security is Slipping Away
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | October 23, 2014
No matter how you look at it, the economic picture for most of America is not good.
From too much debt to not enough savings to shrinking incomes, the vast majority of Americans are confronted with erosion of their financial security.
A new economic study (pdf) from the National Bureau of Economic Research paints a bleak outlook for 90% of the country. This great mass once enjoyed a growing share of the nation’s wealth from before the Great Depression until the 1980s, according to researchers Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. The share of the wealth for that group peaked at 35% in the mid-1980s. By 2012, that share had dropped to 23%.
Saddled with growing amounts of mortgage, consumer credit and student debt, the 90% has had little in the way of extra money to put into savings, Saez and Zucman wrote. In fact, the savings rate by those in the lower 90% is about zero. By comparison, the top 1% of families put aside about 35% of their income. The authors say that income inequality will increase as long as the middle-class savings rate remains low.
Another report, from the liberal Center for American Progress, offered up another double whammy of fiscal troubles for Americans: declining income and growing expenses. It reported that the median income of all families dropped 8% from 2000 to 2012.
Meanwhile, the costs of sending kids to college and paying for health care and child care have soared. Higher education expenses have represented the biggest increase, jumping 62% from 2000 to 2012. Health care and child care went up 21% and 24%, respectively.
To Learn More:
Exploding Wealth Inequality in the United States (by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, Washington Center for Equitable Growth)
Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data (by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, National Bureau of Economic Research) (pdf)
The Middle-Class Squeeze (Center for American Progress)
U.S. Income Inequality Reaches Record Extreme (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
Upset about the Richest 1%? The Top .000003% Own $25 Trillion (by David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
Obama’s Ebola Czar Thinks There’s Too Many People in Africa
Administration hires another overpopulation fanatic
By Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars | October 21, 2014
President Barack Obama’s new ‘Ebola Czar’ Ron Klain is an enthusiastic advocate of population control who thinks that there are too many people in Africa.
Klain’s role in overseeing the United States’ response to a virus that has killed thousands of Africans and threatens to infect up to 10,000 a week by December 1st is somewhat disconcerting given his views on overpopulation.
In a recent interview, Klain said the top leadership issue challenging the world today was “how to deal with the continuing growing population in the world” including “burgeoning populations in Africa and Asia.”
Critics have attacked Obama’s decision to appoint Klain as a political smokescreen, pointing out that the former Chief of Staff to Al Gore has no medical experience or expertise.
Although Klain is by no means championing Ebola as a means of reducing world population, other prominent individuals have done precisely that – most notably award-winning Texas scientist Dr. Erik Pianka, the UT professor who in 2006 advocated the use of weaponized airborne Ebola as a means of wiping out nine tenths of the earth’s population to save the planet from humanity’s wrath.
The Obama administration’s link to authoritarian ideas about population control was firmly established back in 2009 when it was revealed that White House science czar John P. Holdren had co-authored a 1977 book in which he advocated the formation of a “planetary regime” that would use a “global police force” to enforce totalitarian measures of population control, including forced abortions, mass sterilization programs conducted via the food and water supply, as well as mandatory bodily implants that would prevent couples from having children.
Many on the left continue to embrace hysteria about overpopulation, but the figures just don’t back up the hype.
The UN Population Division’s own figures show that by 2020, population is set to stabilize and then drop dramatically after 2050. In reality, underpopulation is going to be the real long term issue.
As the Economist reported, “Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places— such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India—that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate.”
Epitaph for Eric Holder: ‘Guilty!’
By Brett Redmayne-Titley | Press TV | October 5, 2014
“I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.” – Pol Pot (Dictator of Cambodia, 1963-1981)
Similarly, on Monday, Sept 15, 2014, Department of Justice (DoJ) leader, Eric Holder, announced a new set of US programs designed to increase America’s internal ability to spy and report on its own citizens.
Not content to merely spy on US phones, internet services, bank accounts, safe deposit boxes, medical records, library records and facial recognition without a warrant, United States Attorney General (USAG) Holder has combined his Justice Dept. with the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Counter Terrorism Center to train selected Americans in every city and town to spy and report on any persons who are deemed to be potentially subversive.
During Mr. Holder’s term the wide brush of “Terrorism” has grown broader than at any time in US history.
Six years hence, we are, now, all terrorists.
1-The Charges
Unfortunately, some time must elapse before history will pronounce final judgment on Attorney General Eric Holder. The full breadth of his six-year tenure of aiding and abetting national American endemic criminal corruption, when the dust of short-term memory settles, will show clearly the obvious: Mr. Holder is guilty. Guilty of the highest crime of all: the degradation of what little remained of America’s already declining morality.
American justice died long ago.
On the heels of creating his new East German style, Stasi-esque domestic spy network, Mr. Holder has now, damage done, announced his resignation. The punch-line to this political joke was the satirical announcement the next day of his accepting a $77-million per annum payback/job as Chief Compliance Officer for uber- banking criminals, JP Morgan Chase. This may yet come true.
Who better to hire than an accomplice, like Holder, with a proven, long-term track record of subordinating criminal behavior?
Considering Holder’s rap-sheet; a wise choice indeed.
The main stream press dutifully sing his praises while ignoring the consummation of his multiple bastardizations of actual justice. Hidden from view, the history of Eric Holder, USAG, shows him to be the typical self-promoting puppet who had an epiphany along his career path, that selling his morals, and his office, to the highest bidder was the true American path to political success. Gospel indeed.
Certainly, the other puppet in the White House, and the one on the Supreme Court bench, were model examples of the successful gains of devout personal hypocrisy.
2-The Crimes
Holder started on a personal drive up the road to financial success as soon as he graduated from Columbia Law School in 1976, going straight to work for the Dept. of Justice. In 1988 President Reagan appointed him as a Superior Court judge for the District of Columbia, where he served for five years.
Holder soon had his chance to “buy-in” to better judicial appointments/connections thanks to his rubbing elbows with one of the most greasy and morally bankrupt US presidents in generations.
In a White House where everything was for sale, from overnight stays and ambassadorships to presidential pardons, then President William Jefferson, “Slick Willie,” Clinton appointed, in 1993, Eric Holder as US Attorney for Washington DC, the plum of the only ninety-three US district positions. Reportedly this office was also for sale. Next, in 1997, Clinton appointed him Deputy Attorney General where he served until 2001.
Here, Holder learned quickly the value of administrative corruption culminating in the pardon of Marc Rich, fugitive criminal billionaire oil broker who had flaunted US v. Iran sanctions and an oil embargo.
Deflecting criticism of his pardon, Clinton credited Holder for his council in convincing him to pardon Rich. Sucking up to power would remain Holder’s M.O. for years to come.
During the Bush administration, Eric Holder worked at a DC law firm whose main clients included Merck Pharmaceuticals and UBS bank.
He was an early backer of candidate Barack Obama in 2008 and a major, and apparently successful, fundraising bundler for the future President.
When President Obama took office, he appointed Holder US Attorney General.
For a price. The mortita? Campaign contributions.
In his book Extortion, author Peter Schweizer details how President Obama leveraged to Holder his position as AG and the positions of Associate Attorney General to the other people who would head his Justice Dept, Thomas Perrelli, Karol Mason, and Tony West.
Schweizer writes, ‘For the first time, at least half a dozen senior positions were occupied by individuals who had been campaign bundlers (fund raisers) for a presidential candidate.”
The six-year chronology of Holder, as chief steward of the flame of justice, shows him to be more criminal than cop. His crimes fall into several categories, but follow a common, pervasive theme: allowing the wealthy the privilege to go completely unpunished for alleged and admitted criminal behavior.
Similar to the “indulgences” sold in the past by Kings and Popes, Holder offered a modern “get-out-of-jail-free” card, seemingly upon request.
Like the Mark Rich pardon, HSBC was given a pass from their admitted involvement in the largest gun running and drug money laundering scheme in US history.
Similarly, not a single member of the fraudulent financial industry guilty of causing the 2007-08 global collapse has ever been prosecuted. For good reason: The national banking criminals bought off Holder’s Justice Dept. for pennies on the dollar; the mere cost of doing business in the USA.
Bank of America and Wells Fargo used the fraud of “Robo-signing” machines to have Marshalls across America evict hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, illegally stealing their property.
Holder’s response: Force a settlement on the nation’s home owners of a paltry $2,000 for each stolen home and then indemnify the same criminal banks from further legal action by the defrauded home owners.
Nice.
When former New Jersey US senator, Jon Corzine, ripped off his company’s, MF Global, account holders for $1.6 billion, salvation for his crime was only a phone call away.
Law firm for MF Global, Covington & Burlington, who Holder had worked for, evidently used its influence with its former sibling since Holder assigned as prosecutor, Tony West, who had worked for Morrison & Foerester, the firm that was handling MF Global’s assets at the same time. So, of course, Corzine and the $1.6 billion were never indicted.
That kind of loyalty can indeed get one a $77-million pay day.
In his Sept. 15 announcement of the further evisceration of US constitutional protections and its new spy network, Holder showcased the depth of the problem. “We must never lose sight of what violent extremists fear the most…” said Holder with a somber face.
“Our unwavering respect for equality, civil rights, and civil liberties; and our enduring commitment to justice, democracy, and the rule of law.”
Of course the head of US “justice” failed to point out his further personal exemptions to his statement.
Having prosecuted, interrogated, and intimidated more journalists than any other USAG, Holder gave special treatment to the Associated Press (AP), then Fox News and New York Times reporters James Rosen, and James Risen. When Rolling Stone Magazine released the dirt on America’s “Knight-of-the-Empire”, General David Petraeus, investigator Michael Hasting’s out-of- control car strangely exploded one hundred feet before hitting a tree at one-hundred-and-forty mile per hour.
There was no investigation of this tragic “traffic accident.”
Whistleblowers who dared use the facts, like CIA agent John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Thomas Drake were among the many truth-tellers in Holder’s gun-sights, despite his protestations of “unwavering respect for equality, civil rights, and civil liberties.”
Free speech and freedom of the press were once on that list. AP President and CEO, Gary Pruitt, described the DOJ’s actions more accurately as a, “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
The extra-judicial killing of innocent Americans was a unique machination of Holder’s reign. While his boss had his weekly Tuesday, “Kill Meetings,” Holder avoided at all costs his own John Yoo moment of having to embarrass himself nationally by torturing the English language and rule of law sufficiently, under oath and before congress, to justify his president’s wanton killing of innocents with US drones.
When White House blood lust developed a taste for American blood, Holder was quite willing to go along with the blowing-to-bits of Anwar al-Awlaki and his equally innocent sixteen-year-old son, Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki, who was born in Denver, Co.
But Holder’s willingness to kill his own citizens was not limited to foreign shores. Documents reveal that Holder knew of and supported an FBI report and plan to assassinate, using a high powered rifle, the leaders of the Houston, TX Occupy movement. Although the plan was not completed, this likely had to do with Holder razing to the ground every one of the scores of Occupy camps across America in one forty-eight hour, carefully orchestrated, national police mobilization on Feb 4th and 5th, 2012.
Holder killed the hope of Occupy instead.
Of course, as US Attorney General, Holder was above his own laws. Questions regarding the “Fast and Furious” drug dealing, gun running, money laundering, DoJ fiasco follow Holder to this day and remain unanswered.
When the main Mexican drug kingpin wanted, at least, for questioning, Manuel Celis-Acosta, was taken into custody twice by the Justice Dept, both times the DoJ released him without charges.
Holder’s silence, in refusing to testify or provide thousands of congressionally subpoenaed records of Obama Government gun running, earned him a 2012 Contempt of Congress from the US House of Representatives.
The joke continued, however, as the DoJ was, of course, the agency tasked with punishing their leader’s crimes.
3-Closing Statement
Indeed history will take this mere overview of the conflicts of interest that brought US jurisprudence to its knees before the power of money, and judge Eric Holder most harshly. But of these crimes cumulatively, the damage inflicted rises to a more monstrous crime, indeed a felony, of genocidal proportions.
Thanks to Holder’s national example the bar of justice, and its advertised availability for purchase, are now so low as to be barbaric. The world sees this clearly everyday across the globe of the attempted US empire. Americans are predictably exceptional, i.e., oblivious, to this easy observation of global hegemonic inhumanity.
And, in the Homeland?
Recently, sixteen-year-old Ethan Couch decided he was entitled to get really drunk and drive his father’s company’s brand new Ford F-350 Super Cab into a family of four working on a stalled car on the side of the country Texas road.
Young master Couch was also a pill head, as toxicology showed 0.24% blood alcohol level and valium present.
All four died and many of his truck’s passengers sustained life-long critical injuries.
But, Couch also had a rich Texas daddy who hired a rich Texas lawyer who had convenient connections with a getting-richer-all-the-time Texas State District Judge, Jean Boyd.
The privileged parents, arguing that their vehicular murderer son was the sad product of their affluence, and therefore, poor parenting, hired an attorney that brought on a psychologist to say Couch was “a product of wealth” and was accustomed to getting “whatever he wanted.”
Because he was so affluent and accustomed to never having consequences, the attorney argued that he should get therapy as opposed to jail. Soul-less Judge Jean Boyd who was of course influenced to appreciate this highly selective argument gave multi-murderer, Ethan Couch, again, what he wanted. The judge punished the spoiled brat, and spawn of endemic American greed, with a suspended sentence and $450,000 stay in an ultra-posh “Hope by the Sea,” rehabilitation center in San Juan Capistrano, Ca.
So was born a new felony criminal defense strategy, only possible in an increasingly immoral country: the defense of “Afflu-enza.”
Six dead: Four-hundred-and-fifty grand.
Cool.
Robert H. Richards IV is a member of the DuPont family, great-grandson of chemical tycoon Irenee du Pont, and rich. He is also a sick and twisted example of rich entitlement. Mr. Richards was arrested for two counts of second-degree child rape in 2009, two felonies that carry a 10-year mandatory jail sentence. He raped his three year old daughter. He was convicted. But that meant nothing in Eric Holder’s model of a new America.
The 47-year-old pedophile then enlisted one of the most high-priced law firms in the state, which helped him reach a plea deal of one count of fourth-degree rape.
Fourth-degree rape doesn’t require a mandatory minimum sentence, so Richards accepted the deal and admit to sexually assaulting his infant daughter between 2005 and 2007.
Regardless of the courtroom confession of raping a three year old girl, Delaware Superior Court Judge, Jan Jurden, ruled that Richards “will not fare well” in prison due to his sad, unfortunate life of affluence; this being odd that a Judge would somehow miss the point of mandatory incarceration.
So the Judge, Jan Jurden, applied the legal precedents set by the chief justice of the land, Eric Holder, and decided that this rich criminal would learn the error of his ways more effectively in a different posh rehab center for other rich criminals instead of, like all other rapists, prison.
While taking a lie detector test in April of 2010, Richards admitted to also sexually abusing his son in December of 2005 when the boy was just 19-month-old and continuing the abuse for roughly two years.
But with recidivism of child sex offenders running only about ninety percent who return to jail, Judge Jan Jurden’s decision of a suspended sentence and rehabilitation will be tested soon.
Three years old!
4-Guilty
Yes. Guilty as charged. On all counts.
Morality in America is now directly proportional to money and, preferably, power.
America has lost its way in every facet of normal society, most importantly in the application of justice.
America’s nationalist politicians are corrupt, its sports heroes cheaters, and its drug addled celebrities adored for sage wisdom.
And the man who should be the bastion of fair, consistent, constitutional US justice, is a crook.
So, thanks to the corruption of the national US example of justice, US Attorney General Eric Holder, the bar of justice is now so low that three year old girls are fair game for rich rapists and US kings and princes can kill with impunity, albeit for a price.
Indeed. Pol Pot, the Cambodian tyrant and authoritarian hypocrite that brought his people the “Killing Fields,” where the bodies of the older generations were dumped in favor of the reeducation of the young, made no apologies. His barbarism was so extreme that the recently post-war Vietnamese had to invade and stop it.
But the kind of barbarism that will purge its society in Cambodia starts with a methodical decent from real justice, through child rapists to wanton killers, and finally to full societal atrocity.
Thanks to USAG Holder, America’s direction has become terminal.
Throughout this entire maddening decent, the condition of destructive and deteriorating justice is tolerated, always, as “normal.”
Guilty, Mr. Holder. Guilty of making the morally unconscionable and American inhumanity to man, normal.
When a society becomes endemically corrupt it is then a good idea for its corrupt government to keep a watchful eye reporting on absolutely everyone.
Guilty!
Disparaging the Poor
By DANIEL RAVENTOS and JULIE WARK | CounterPunch | September 12, 2014
A bunch of academic pundits and media cognoscenti inform us that among the causes of a person’s becoming unemployed is a yen for job-change because he or she opts for a certain “work-related opportunity cost” so as to “optimise utility function”. Renouncing jargon, others claim the unemployed are loafers. Or The Economist informs us that “the recession this time is behaving weirdly”. All this sophistry and waffle, plus a whole lot more ill-intentioned pronouncements are supposed to “explain” unemployment and hence poverty. Naturally, the three-time Pulitzer winner Thomas Friedman has dreamed up a fantastic solution: all those “muscled out of the workforce should start charging hourly for everything, from cars to drills”. Does anyone want to rent my patch under the bridge? To his credit though, “muscled out” at least hints that leaving the workforce might not have been voluntary. Then there are a lot more horse-feathers flapping around in the hot air expelled by other prodigies who, blithely or maliciously ignoring social context and, in particular, political economy, proclaim that unemployment is about free-loading spongers. This subject is nearly as entertaining as Disneyland for anyone who thinks it’s fun to badmouth less fortunate human beings: “skivers” (as opposed to “strivers”), “wedded to welfare” (single mums), “welfare queen” (hinting at some kind of secret opulence), “misfits”, “free-riders”, “parasites”, “spongers”, “loafers”, “feral underclass”, and the latter-day Rip Van Winkle prone to “sleeping off a life on benefits”, dreamed up by George Osborne. Lurking beneath these labels is the insinuation that members of the said “underclass” are mentally handicapped, violent and criminal. It’s all their fault. They are a threat to the strivers. Owen Jones calls it the “demonization of the working class”, although it must be remembered that many members of this class are excluded from working.
Some more fortunate people are said to belong to a “middle class”, which is so fuzzy in conceptual terms that nobody’s sure exactly what it is. Then there is the group of rich people who, we are told, deserve to be rich, no questions asked. These two latter categories are filled by supposedly hard-working, ambitious, smart and successful people. Yet, despite the best efforts of our most zealous opinion makers – frequently bosom buddies of these Übermenschen – most people actually subscribe to the old saying that behind every fortune there is a crime (or few) and that, in most cases, a few easily-substantiated facts rather tarnish the Merit Theory of Wealth. The correlations tend to be wealth-corruption, wealth-tax-fraud, wealth-inheritance, wealth-robbery and, very often, a little scratching below the surface of things shows a combination of them all. They tend to go together. Otherwise there’d be no need for tax havens.
The rich and their satellites love to put down and revile poor people who depend on welfare payments, carelessly or cynically overlooking the fact that, historically speaking or very recently, their wealth has a lot to do with the poverty of their fellow men and women. The original meanings of the word “charity” are esteem or affection (from the Latin nominative caritas). The implied respect for other humans in this term is now twisted into contempt. And “contemptible” people, the ones we look down on, must be punished, as we know from the history of colonialism, racism, sexism and all the ideologies that have always depended on having somebody to trample on. People receiving any kind of public benefits are clear targets as privatisation tightens its insatiable grip on just about everything: land, water, forests, minerals, indigenous knowledge and the structure of life itself in genetic resources, along with public services such as health care, education, transport, and water and sewerage services, not to mention people-commodities traded in human trafficking, sex slavery, child labour, surrogate motherhood, the baby and child market, and organ sales. The plunderers who are taking over and filling bank vaults with the riches they are appropriating from this common wealth are not going to look kindly on people asking for any form of welfare benefits from “their” institutions. So they malign and punish the poor while they have a field day (in other people’s fields).
In Catalonia, former President Jordi Pujol, founding chairman of today’s ruling conservative party CiU, has recently admitted to very major tax fraud over thirty years. Today’s CiU president, Artur Mas, commented when Pujol was stripped of his titles, that this caused him “great pain”. But he doesn’t feel great pain for the poor. He prefers to cause it. Shortly after coming to power, Mas, considering that the measly welfare benefits paid by the Generalitat (Catalan Government) were too generous, went on the offensive and embarked on monitoring procedures that cost more than the original welfare benefits. (Here we’d like to point out that our criticism of any self-appointed father of conservative Catalan nationalism does not imply the slightest opposition to the mass-based “Process” claiming Catalonia’s democratic right to decide by voting on 9 November for or against independence although – in contrast with Scotland and its vote on 18 September – this right to decide is denied by the Spanish Government).
John Ward, a Tory councillor for Medway who, more emphatic than Mas and Co., was apparently aiming at a nice sound-bite in 2008 when he lambasted “professional spongers” who “breed for greed”, and called for “compulsory sterilisation of all those who have a second, (or third, or whatever) child while living off state handouts.” He was suspended, but not without spawning Internet forums of people who wondered whether he had merely dared to put into words what a lot of upright citizens privately thought. Sterilising the poor isn’t exactly a new idea, and it has had some illustrious proponents who used a collegiate guise to say the same thing. One such enthusiast was Thomas Nixon Carver, professor of Political Economy at Harvard (1902 – 1935), well-known “Republican Brain Truster” and President of the American Economic Association. He was very keen to wield the neutering knife. The Daily Washington Merry-Go-Round reports Point 2 of his economic plan of 1936 as reading, “Reduction of the supply of labor by sterilization of the palpably unfit; […] Marriage would be barred until the parties could afford to buy and operate an automobile”. By “palpably unfit” he meant people earning less than $1,800 per year, which is to say half the population of the United States at the time. Castratio plebis, to put it mildly.
The eugenics movement in the US took off after Sir Francis Galton (1822 – 1911) studied Britain’s upper classes and concluded that their genetic makeup was superior. Early eugenics fans believed in the innate superiority of Nordic, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples and called for the forcible sterilisation of the poor disabled and “immoral”. The movement was generously funded by such august establishments as the Carnegie Institution and Rockefeller Foundation. Some US states (with California in the lead in terms of numbers) sterilised “imbeciles” over much of the twentieth century, a total of over 62,000 individuals and especially women (61% by 1961), and Virginia’s sterilisation law was in force until 1974. By 1928 the leading universities were teaching some 376 eugenics courses. This is not a thing of the past, however. In 2013, one of Australia’s most destructive people, billionaire mining heiress Gina Reinhart, called for sterilisation of the “underclasses”. Income inequality, she says, is caused by differences in intelligence and any couple earning less than $100,000 per year should be forcibly sterilised, while higher earners should have ten or twelve children.
Now, some people might be tempted to think after the Pujol revelations in Catalonia (and other scandals featuring many more crooked paragons of society in the Kingdom of Spain and around the world, not least heads of the IMF) that this man is “immoral” and “palpably unfit” to hold any responsible job and that the country might have been better off if this father of seven (most with greedy fingers in one or other very greasy pork barrel) had been sterilised. But what people really want is change. In Spain the groundswell of support for grassroots political movements like Podemos and Guanyem Barcelona (We’re Going to Win Barcelona [City Council]), which is fast being emulated all over the country, is bringing together people from all walks of life at very sizeable meetings in the city’s streets and squares where the main themes of the day are justice, transparency, political ethics, real human rights in all spheres of life, to sum up very schematically. It’s not difficult to deduce that Pujol did Guanyem Barcelona a big favour. Suddenly, old-fashioned Catalan politics looks very rancid. People want sweeping change that extends to the structures of power. And it’s all about political economy. In 2012, it was estimated that 30% of the population of Catalonia was at risk of social exclusion. Things have only got worse since then. The Kingdom of Spain has the second highest child poverty rate – after Romania – in Europe: 21%. The growing rage among the population where youth unemployment stands at more than 55% is so great that, nowadays, only a lunatic would dare to propose the sterilisation solution. Everyone knows that the “immoral”, “palpably unfit” (and “imbeciles” too because, after all, imbecility is often inseparable from arrogance) are clustered in the privileged 1%. However, their wombs and testicles are safe because, what with the burgeoning growth of new, inclusive political formations, people have better things to think about, in particular their basic rights.
All over Spain, Basic Income is gaining ground (with more or less clarity) as part of the election programme of political parties including Bildu, IU-ICV, Anova, Equo and Podemos (heir of the 15M Occupy Movement, clearest exponent of what a universal Basic Income is and implies, and garnering astonishing electoral results that are cracking the foundations of the basically two-party power-share between the “socialist” PSOE and right-wing PP). Largely thanks to Podemos, no doubt, Basic Income is an increasingly widespread subject of discussion and, like any other radical social proposal, is gathering scores of “friends” and “enemies”. There is increasing awareness that the most basic human right, on which all the rest depend, is the right to exist and, for that to be possible, everybody must have an income above the poverty line. This, in a nutshell, is an unconditional, universal basic income for every single citizen and resident in the country. It is no longer seen as “utopian” or “hare-brained” as the well-to-do and their cronies have claimed in the past. More and more people understand that this guarantee is necessary for a truly democratic society. The obstacles faced by Basic Income have been political, just as they were (or are, depending on the place) in the cases of universal suffrage, paid holidays, and the rights to strike, to abortion and to same-sex marriage. Basic Income embodies no logical or empirical (financial) impossibility. It is an objective aspiration which, almost certainly, won’t enjoy universal support. In politics one must choose, and this is especially true of political economy.
The “idea” of mutilating people’s reproductive organs on the basis of cruel judgements by a few palpably unfit individuals merits adjectives that are much more withering than “utopian”. But conjuring them up is just a pastime. The really important, lapidary statement is Thomas Paine’s observation in Agrarian Justice that people don’t want charity; they want justice. And they have begun to claim precisely this.
Daniel Raventós is a lecturer in Economics at the University of Barcelona and author inter alia of Basic Income: The Material Conditions of Freedom (Pluto Press, 2007). He is on the editorial board of the international political review Sin Permiso
Julie Wark is an advisory board member of the international political review Sin Permiso. Her last book is The Human Rights Manifesto (Zero Books, 2013).
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Book Summary
The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food
Lies Are Unbekoming | January 20, 2026
Soybeans generate approximately $80 million annually in mandatory producer assessments alone, funding a marketing apparatus that has transformed an industrial commodity into one of America’s most trusted “health foods.” The campaign succeeded. Soy milk lines supermarket shelves beside dairy. Soy protein fortifies everything from infant formula to energy bars. Vegetarians rely on tofu and tempeh as dietary staples. Doctors recommend soy to menopausal women. School lunch programs serve soy-based meat substitutes to children. An estimated 60 percent of processed foods contain soy derivatives. The premise underlying this proliferation—that Asians have thrived on soy for millennia and that modern science validates its health benefits—has been repeated so often it functions as established fact.
Kaayla T. Daniel’s The Whole Soy Story dismantles this premise through systematic examination of the scientific literature. The book documents that traditional Asian soy consumption averaged roughly one tablespoon daily, consumed as fermented condiments after processing methods that neutralized inherent toxins—a pattern bearing no resemblance to American consumption of industrially processed soy protein isolate, soy flour, and soy oil. Daniel catalogs the antinutrients that survive modern processing (protease inhibitors, phytates, lectins, saponins), the toxic compounds created by industrial methods (nitrosamines, lysinoalanine, hexane residues), and the heavy metals concentrated in soy products (manganese, aluminum, fluoride, cadmium). She traces the mechanisms by which soy isoflavones—plant estrogens present at pharmacologically significant levels—disrupt thyroid function, impair fertility, and interact with hormone-sensitive cancers. The evidence emerges from peer-reviewed journals, FDA documents, and industry sources themselves.
The stakes extend beyond individual dietary choices. Infants fed soy formula receive isoflavone doses equivalent to several birth control pills daily, with blood concentrations 13,000 to 22,000 times higher than their natural estrogen levels. Soy protein isolate—the ingredient in formula, protein bars, and thousands of products—has never received GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status; its only pre-1960s use was as an industrial paper sealant. Two senior FDA scientists formally protested their own agency’s approval of soy health claims, citing evidence of thyroid damage and reproductive harm. The Honolulu Heart Program found that men consuming tofu twice weekly showed accelerated brain aging and increased dementia. These findings have not penetrated public awareness because the institutions responsible for consumer protection have been compromised by the industry they regulate. The Whole Soy Story presents the evidence that has been systematically excluded from mainstream health messaging, enabling readers to evaluate for themselves what the soy industry prefers they never learn. … continue
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