Tag Archives: cattle

PPJPC Statement of solidarity in support of foreign-born workers

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The Pikes Peak Peace and Justice Commission (PPJPC) condemns the US Immigration & Naturalization Service (ICE-INS) for its Dec. 12 raids at multiple US facilities of the Swift & Co. that racially targetted Hispanic workers for arrest at their place of work. Over 1250 Hispanic workers were rounded up as if they were cattle and not human beings with rights and feelings. Families have been torn asunder, US-born children are being forced to leave for countries they have never known, and an atmosphere of racial intolerance and hatred is being promoted within our communities. This is not the proper role for our government and governmental agencies to be playing.

This raid comes in the context of a president whose foreign and domestic policies are increasing coming under fire for illegally promoting warfare, torture, and military occupations of other countries. It comes also in the context of an increasingly hostile use of laws against other minority groups within the US, such as Arabs and Muslims of varying nationalities, that also has undermined the basis of having a national culture respectful of all of our residents, whether citizens or not.

We at the Colorado Springs PPJPC, are unalterably opposed to reducing certain cultural groups within the US to second class residents subject to abusive, selective, and descriminatory application of US laws. We object to citizens being denounced in block, by federal agencies who allege before trials or convictions, that residents of one ethnic background are guilty as a group of criminal activity, such as “ID theft.” We object to the policy of holding immigrants looking for work in our country subject to criminal prosecution for trying to support their families as best as they can. Most come from countries where the US government has for decades intervened in a hostile and destructive manner. In short, we object and condemn the US government for further persecuting poverty stricken workers looking for a better life in what is a nation of previous immigrants. We condemn the Swift & Co INS raids.

May it also be pointed out, that in the case of Hispanic workers, the overwhelming majority of them are of indigenous Native American background, no matter that they currently speak Spanish as first tongue. To those Anglo-american citizens who shout at these foreign workers that they are breaking the law, and that they should be thrown in jail and never set foot again on Anglo terrain, the PPJPC hopes that they can examine their consciences, examine their souls, and open their hearts to having a more charitable attitude towards others.

Those immigrants with Native American blood were here first before Anglo ancestors chose it upon themselves to ‘illegally’ immigrate to the US shores, often murdering Native Americans and stealing their land and properties. Much of the US territory where Hispanics are now being racially profiled, was land peviously stolen from Mexico by war. It is utter hypocrisy for one racial and language group to call the US borders ‘their’ territory, and theirs alone.

Further, the PPJPC rejects the increased militarization of the US Southern Border, most underlined by the efforts to build a giant impenetrable wall there. This construction runs counter to the desires of the people most effected, citizens of both nations living on both sides of this border. Further, we reject the US govenment support for abusive regimes throughout Latin America. We reject the US war against the people of Colombia, and we reject the US’s imposition of repressive governments across Central America. All these actions create conditions of misery, and a need for people to flee their native lands.

Most of all, we reject the US governmental support to the repressive Mexican government, military, and police. Mexico is the country from which most of the undocumented workers were fleeing when they were caught up in the Greeley Colorado raids of the Swift & Co meat processing facilities. The PPJPC calls on our American government to dismantle US military schools of torture that train members of the repressive Mexican military, stop supporting Mexican government repression in Oaxaca and esewhere in that country, and demand that the Mexican and US governments seek justice for those murdered, tortured, and disappeared in Oaxaca, and elsewhere within Mexico.

The PPJPC, too, is concerned about National Security. But attacking immigrants and foreign nationals on US terrirtory is not the way to make our country more secure.

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Saying grace

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Is grace recited before meals anymore? It seems the bigger the dinner, the more preparation or participation that goes into the repast, the greater is the sense that something is missing if we omit the prayer to dive into our food. A private reflection might be payed during the erstwhile silent moment but a word spoken of spiritual thanks seems no longer apropos in this secular thinking child’s age. Religiosity abounds still of course, but it is separated less from state and education than from the other aspects of daily life with which it also conflicts, such as buying and selling, lending and consuming, trading upon the disadvantage of others. End of the lineI too wonder if giving thanks for our abundance need be directed to God or divine provenance in appreciation of our predatory advantage, before a meal or after. For myself I have found a better occasion.

Driving on the highway every once in awhile I encounter a cattle truck, the trailer sides simple sheet metal grates behind which one can see the fur of livestock. You can only see the bodies standing steadily at the edge in semi darkness and apparent silence. I search to catch their eyes but the metal bands seem positioned to obscure our visibility or more probably theirs.

I used to entertain fantasies of derailing their voyage, stopping the driver to offer the animals a reprieve, however futile. But we’ve got a pretty principled meat processing company on our side of town, and I have come to accept the inevitability that mankind wants to domesticate some mammals to eat them.

When you see those large cattle trucks in non-rural areas, there’s little question as to where they are going. It is rare that cattle would be traded between ranches, or taken to the veterinarian, or sent to a State Fair to be exhibited as 4-H pets, or being put to pasture, as happens to horses no longer either. As much as you would like to think otherwise, the cattle in those trailers are being delivered to the slaughterhouse. When you see the unfortunate cows, they are only hours -perhaps minutes- from the ramp which leads to the aboitoir, to a violent ignoble death at the hands of a harried production line.

I remember reading about traditions surrounding the slaughter of pigs. The human-like cries of pigs have always wreaked psychic damage on the men who have to kill them. Some farming villages have ceremonies to ritualize the process. In many cases, a single person is given the responsibility of dealing the fatal blow. The Kosher tradition of food purity comes not from concern for regulating the quality of a meat source, but insuring rather that the animal was properly killed. Again, not by public health standards but spiritual.

When I find myself passing a truck carrying cows or domestic buffalo to their demise, I try to linger beside the trailer for a moment, long enough to give a thought to the beings inside. But I lack for what to say. To hope that their death will be as painless as possible, to pray for their understanding, to give thanks for their stoic, if involuntary, contribution, to thank them.

The Pigs love their new cattle prods, they do

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Long time ago, I once did a psych rotation at Terrell State Hospital in Texas. The big question posed for us students by our teachers, was whether or not it was right for administration to be using a cattle prod on a patient that was gutteral, scatalogical, and aggressive? I was the lonesome minority of one amongst the teachers and students that said that it was absolutely disgraceful to be doing this.

The big argument for using it at Terrell, was that this was supposedly more humane than allowing the patient to wallow in his own shit. My the great claims for electricity through the years! Always in vogue. But in my youthful innocence, I thought then, that it was just the particular regional backwardness of where I was at (Texas), and that this debate was a vestigal remains of a former primitive psychiatry along with the use of ‘insulin therapy’ and ‘hydrotherapy’. Alas, but one can see today that ‘hydrotherapy’ is now back in vogue with the likes of Dick Cheney, Ricardo Sanchez, Alberto Gonzalez, and Donald Rumsfield runnning the wards. And so is the cattle prod. They now call it The Taser, and it has become the fascistmindeds’ favorite tool of torture, both at home and abroad.

An Alternet article looks at The killers’ alternative to guns

Afghanistan, where cowardly US military is deliberately murdering children

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Every week now, it seems that the US puppet president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is ‘investigating’ another tragic ‘accidental bombing of civilians. He demands that these ‘accidents’ stop. But these are not accidents, and Karzai knows this well, as every other Afghan must now know it well, too. An accident occurs once or twice, but an intentional strategy of targeting civilians becomes constant, as have become the US bombings of Afghan civilians in the more remote regions of that country.
 
The strategy is ‘to destroy the sea that the guerrilla fighter must swim in’, as it was once explained in the Vietnam War era, years ago. In short, the quickest, easiest way to combat the enemy, is simply to target his wife and family, including the kids. So the cowardly US-led NATO army of occupation in Afghanistan, is systematically doing that instead of engaging the enemy on the ground, where politically dangerous casualties might occur. Bomb the Afghan women and children in their homes from up high, if there is even the remotest military resistance to US forces in their general neighborhood.

This is the same strategy that the US government formerly used in SE Asia, some 35 to 45 years previously. It is the same strategy that the NAZIs used when they pushed into East Europe against the Russians during the Second World War. In their pathway, they razed to the ground villages, towns, and even entire cities. It is even the same strategy that Mafia gangsters use against their opponents. It is the same strategy that the US fed Colombian death squads use, too. They go into villages with chain saws, and cut people up before their own family members. Basically, this is government sponsored terrorism against civilians, and the US is committing internationally recognized war crimes by targeting civilians instead of the armed combatants they face. The strategy, is to target the families of combatants, and not those who might actually be able to inflict return casualties upon the invading and occupying, barbarian armed forces.

see Hamid Karzai orders investigation

We expect this cowardice from the cowardly US military commanders and chiefs, like Dubya and Dick Cheney, Donald and Alberto, who all get great glee out of torturing US-held POWs. And we expect it from the US grunts, too. They mainly just want to get out alive, and don’t much care who gets hurt, as long as it is not themselves. Innocent children bombed as they play, or as they sleep? Well who cares? Not the uniformed soldier cowards, nor their leaders. They are much like the Israeli troops, another cowardly group of soldiers, that distributed hundreds of thousands of cluster bombes in the last 3 days of their Lebanon vacation. Early Christmas for the children? Well the uniformed forces of occupying armies don’t care. They are simply cowards who want to get back home whole, and they will follow cowardly orders, from cowardly leaders.

But what of the press? The press barely even reports Afghanistan these days to US readers. And when they do, they cowardly hide away the nature of what they are reporting on. To the US press, the Afghanistan fighting is a NATO conflict, and they will report whole articles without even once using the letters, ‘US’ or ‘USA’! Let’s keep our jobs, and let’s keep the whole Afghanistan issue away from the American public, who are too cowardly to actually think about what they are doing to that poor country.

And what about the US peaceniks’? They are cowardly, too. 99% of them vote for the Democratic Party, and talking about Afghanistan is too embarrasing to the top party hacks. So, shhhhhh….. Keep quiet. The recent AFSC tour of their ‘Eyes Wide Open’ exhibit was basically a ‘Mouths Tightly Closed’ exhibit of their AFSC political cowardice when it comes to Afghanistan. They should remember and be ashamed of this, when the Quaker leaders are inside the voter booths pushing the levers for the Democratic Party candidates. They could have put boots out for the US soldiers killed in Afghanistan. But they didn’t. They could have placed out shoes of Afghani civilians killed by US and allied troops, but they didn’t.

But the other liberal peaceniks from the other liberal churches are equally as cowardly. When was the last time one saw a sign saying, Get Out of Afghanistan Now? All the talk is of Iraq instead. The liberal megawebsite, commondreams, carries bumperstickers calling for Get out of Iraq, No war with Iran, and even No War with Syria. But Get Out of Afghanistan? Not a chance! More political cowardness. It would push the Democratic Party hacks too hard. Yet our country is now deliberately bombing civilian children in that country, and doing it routinely, too.

It is political cowardice to bomb huts full of empoverished women and children noncombatants, rather than fight on the ground below against the men. But that’s what an imperialist army is full of. They are full of cowards who want to kill people like they are playing some video game back in the suburbs at home. But it, too, is cowardly for the US Peace Movement not to demand that our government get its troops out of Afghanistan with the same force we demand it get out of Iraq. We are betraying the children of that country, who are being slaughtered down like cattle. Yes, we have a cowardly antiwar movement in the US that wants only to concentrate on ‘Iraq’, and getting their cowardly Democratic Party leaders elected to office once again. Let’s hope that liberals can grow some backbone, and start opposing this war, too. Otherwise, the peace crowd is just as bad as ‘our troops’, who mainly want to kill from afar and from up high, with no possilbe repercussions to their cowardly, uniformed selves. Those that don’t mind killing innocent children, just so that they can claim a high ‘enemy’ body count.

One Cow

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Thinking about our food supply,
specifically the masses of cattle
in feed lots and dairy stalls,
enduring our degrading stewardship
in silent anonymity.
 
Thinking about how we’ve been
breeding the ideal domestic cow
through cloning, thinking that
there may perhaps be by now
only one cow.
 
Is it possible the collective conscious
of a same cloned individual
works something like the minds of twins,
not so strangely, as one?
 
I awoke from a dream of this cow.

Hussein’s Kangeroo Court Time- days when law is littered

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In the last couple of decades, the US Empire has developed a fondness for using show trials following its own violations of international law. The cardinal foundation of international law is that one nation does not have the right to militarily attack another. And of course we know, that the US has violated this maxim time after time. In fact, no other nation can even come close to the US’s sorry record on this account. I believe that even the Hungarians would certainly agree with this statement.

Our citizenry has become so numbed to the sheer number of times that our government continually violates this Principal Number One of international law, that the overwhelming majority of the US feels that it is not incongruent for our leaders to preach constantly about democracy, human rights, and basic humanity to others. In reality, violating the law, while preaching it, is the the central tenet of the advocation of a constant world war that both parties now are in total agreement on. American elites think by giving their constant world war a fancy name, the so-called ‘war on terrorism’, that that somehow absolves them from obeying the central tenets of international law itself. International law is seen as a nuisance,that needs to be buried in a grave somewhere along with those POWs murdered by US troops. If we recall right, the Germans at the height of their Third Reich did away entirely with courts and law, and just loaded their supposed enemies into cattle cars headed for concentration camps to be exterminated. Death penalty, no law. Period.

So one can see easily that elites in general, have little or no respect for the law they often preach to others. Law is seen merely as a codification of their own power, and outside of that, law is simply discarded when inconvenient to the powerful. Which leads to an most cogent recent example of that. I refer to the dismissal of the head judge of the kangeroo court ‘trying’ Saddam Hussein. He was seen as too polite to the guy the Pentagon is getting ready to execute, so they just said “you are terminated.” Our servile corporate press basically just treated the incident as if it was entirely normal and legal! This, much as they had already done with the unusual news of how Milosevic conveniently died, right smack in dab of when he was becoming an indelicate nuisance to American elites. Heck, who cared? Clinton and Wesley Clark maybe? They were going to execute him anyway, so why bother with completiing the trial. But Milosevic thought he was being poisoned. And I don’t find that a bizarre paranoia on his part at all.

So let’s ask another question on our minds right now. Is Osama alive or not? Does anybody really think that it has already been anything other than shoot now, and try him later? But even that seems to be too much for the top dogs to do in obeying some structure of law! How inconvenient a ‘trial’ in a kangeroo court would be for Rumsfield, say. So, Osama’s dead already, IMO. His body buried away in rubble. Only the illusion that he is still alive has lived. The Pentagon finds that illusion necessary to justify themselves for sure, but a show trial? No way. Osama was killed quite some time back it appears. He is dead, and only Pentagon prop-op resusrrects him from time to time. The US is judge, jury, and executioner, and then lies about the whole thing.

Our political bosses now state, over and over, that our government is beyond all legalities, and I think that is something we poltiical Americans need to thoroughly understand. After all, where is the legality of calling for a ‘constant war’ as they do? It’s time that Americans see their elites for what they really are, and not just follow them along as far as the Germans and Japanese once did with their elite misleadership gone wild. Of course most Americans will say that ‘our’ government is not anywhere near as barbarous as our WW2 opponents were. Oh yeah? Well I’m still thinking about how the US suffocated to death in metal containers, POWs ‘our’ troops captured as they successfully invaded Afghanistan. How is that different from the actions of the Nazis with sending their opponents away to the ovens? It’s time to quite dillydallying around thinking that we are dealing with ‘decent folk’ like ourselves when we deal with our elites. They are not like that at all. They hardly even consider their own poor folk human, let alone the rest of the world.

Something we should contemplate, as our government moves toward the possible use of nuclear weaponry against Iran in the coming days, is that they no longer feel the need to obey ANY laws even as they demand that we obey them all. They have legalized for themselves, murder, mayhem, and torture. Before they just did it to The Others in the shadows. Our elites have no plans to turn back from the road they have chosen to move upon. They are just making too damn much money for them to do otherwise. Hussein, long time servant of the US in his war upon Iran, did not understand where our US elites were heading. His fate for his misunderstanding will be? Well, it will most likely be death by Kangeroo Court ala Milosevic. And that is what passes for legality these days. International law has been trashed, and can be found only as litter in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti.

Mad Cow is here

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Ground cow disease
A third U.S. cow has now been found to have Mad Cow Disease. The refrain remains the same. Have no fear, no part of this infected cow ever found its way into the food supply.
 
Great. But where did that cow come from? Specifically, where did that cow get its BSE? Does it grow on trees? Does it generate itself spontaneously?

No, it is hereditary. Or it is aquired through the ingestion of infected animal parts. In this case they are saying that the animal was old enough to have been fed infected animals before such rendered parts were banned. Maybe. First of all that is to admit that the feeding of rendered mammals to other herbivors was risky behavior, something they have resisted admitting, and second, there’s nothing to say that this third cow got BSE previous to the feed restriction.

What we do know is that the American system of testing only a sampling of livestock is still woefully inadequate compared to everywhere else in the world. When some American ranchers offered to do a more stringent testing themselves in order for their beef to qualify for the japanese market, the U.S. government forbid the ranchers to do it.

It’s as if FDA officials are very nervous that wider tests will find that Mad Cow Desease is prevalent in this country.

In Britain and in Europe, every single cow is tested for BSE. In the U.S. we test less than 1%. In fact, the FDA recently increased the scope of its tests twentyfold, still under 1% of all cattle slaughtered, and as a result discovered BSE in this third cow. Now they want to scale the tests back again because, well, better to let them explain it. Makes sense right? The FDA is not nervous for the American people obviously, they’re nervous for the meat industry.

Meanwhile, let’s find out what those FDA officials are feeding their children.