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BANGKOK, Thailand -- Southeast Asian sex workers, supported by the United Nations, exhibited their paintings, photographs and multimedia depicting violence, oral sex, repression under Islamic sharia law and other personal experiences.

"Here in the corner, you see a scene of a blowjob," Vanessa Ho said in an interview, pointing at a complex painting created by a sex worker named Dhivithra in Singapore.

"In the second scene, you see someone negotiating money as well as safe sex," said Ms. Ho, program coordinator of Project X, which she described as a "human rights-based organization for sex workers in Singapore."

The painting also displays "handcuffs on a pair of arms, symbolizing how the sex workers are constantly being criminalized," she said.

"You see some sex workers who just focus on money, and other sex workers keen to find love in their life. And in the bigger story here, on the [painting's] right-hand side, is of the wedding."

The solo Singaporean entry at the art exhibition was painted by a sex worker "inspired" by an older prostitute's true story.

It's not enough to point out that our political system is completely corrupted by money, including money from coal and oil and nukes and gas. Of course it is. And if we had direct democracy, polls suggest we would be investing in green energy. But saying the right thing to a pollster on a phone or in a focus group is hardly the extent of what one ought sensibly to do when the fate of the world is at stake.

Nor do we get a complete explanation by recognizing that our communications system is in bed with our political system, cooperatively pushing lies about our climate and our budget (defunding wars and billionaires is not an option, so there's just no money for new ideas, sorry). Of course. But when the planet's climate is being destroyed for all future generations, most of which will therefore not exist, the only sensible course of action is to drop everything and nonviolently overthrow any system of corruption that is carrying out the destruction.

Why don't we?

Misinformation is a surface-level explanation. Why do people choose to accept obvious misinformation?

You’re strapped to a metal table, unable to move. They stick a two-foot plastic tube up your nose, then down the back of your throat into your stomach. They squirt in the liquid protein. You gag, bleed, vomit. It’s unbearably painful.

The practice of involuntary force-feeding is condemned by most medical organizations, including the AMA. It’s banned by most governments. It’s torture.

When I read about the process by which authorities are breaking the hunger strike at the Guantanamo Bay detention center — a process that’s also used regularly in U.S. federal prisons, by the way — I was struck by the utter efficiency of it. The “food” is transmitted directly from bureaucracy to digestive system, bypassing the consciousness of the individual hunger striker. The human being inhabiting this body is completely irrelevant; he only dies when we say so.

Just think about how powerful we are. Just think about how secure we are.

The president’s new choices for Commerce secretary and FCC chair underscore how far down the rabbit hole his populist conceits have tumbled. Yet the Obama rhetoric about standing up for working people against “special interests” is as profuse as ever. Would you care for a spot of Kool-Aid at the Mad Hatter’s tea party?

Of course the Republican economic program is worse, and President Romney’s policies would have been even more corporate-driven. That doesn't in the slightest make acceptable what Obama is doing. His latest high-level appointments -- boosting corporate power and shafting the public -- are despicable.

On May 1 (May Day) this past week, extremist, right wing Republicans introduces 3 versions of the anti-labor, so-called “Right-to Work” legislation, one bill directed at private industry, another at public workers and a third piece that would immediately place that legislation on the ballot for referendum. The so-called “Right-to-Work” legislation is now being pushed by right wing, pro-corporate legislators nationally in order to break the power of unions, which only now represent 9% of workers in private industry nationally. RTW would bar unions from collected dues from all represented workers, while still requiring unions to represent all workers. It would reverse previous union elections won by unions in which the entire unit had elected to be represented by unions.

YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO-- Today, at 3:15 p.m., Greg Curry and I, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, decided to end our almost month-long hunger strike. The strike commenced on April 11, the 20th anniversary of the Lucasville prison uprising. The sole purpose of our strike was to vigorously challenge the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections (ODRC) continuously denying us to have direct access to the media- that is: on-camera interviews with the media. While both death-row and non-death row prisoners in Ohio are granted on-camera access to the media, those who have been reailroaded and convicted of crimes stemming from the Lucasville Uprising have continuously been denied equal protection under the law. And though ODRC policy permits its prisoners to meet with the media to discuss their criminal cases, this policy has not been applicable to those of of convicted of riot related offenses.
On Monday, State Representative Mike Foley joined about 75 Columbus security officers, janitors, and community members for a rally outside the Motorists Mutual Insurance building downtown. Workers, faith leaders, and elected officials called on business leaders of Columbus to support the good jobs our city needs to stanch the rapidly rising poverty rate.

As the unemployment rate in Central Ohio continues to drop, concentrated poverty in our city has doubled. This is because more and more jobs in Columbus pay very low wages that trap working families in a cycle of poverty. Janitors and security officers—who clean and protect the offices of Motorists Mutual and Columbus’s Fortune 1000 companies—are among the thousands of working people in our city who can work full time and still qualify for public assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid.

War and plunder continue to rip apart great swathes of Africa. The perpetrators are known, and many have been named and exposed. The regimes on Ethiopia, Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda continue to foment covert international guerrilla wars, backed by the Pentagon, NATO and Israel, while persecuting and defrauding their own people, even (at this writing) engaged in genocide. Meanwhile, leading white apologists whitewashing war crimes and genocide in Africa continue to squeal about anyone who does not tout the racist white power establishment line they worship and profit from.

Meet Dr. Gerald Caplan, a fine example of the worst kind of imperialist: one who works with the world's worst dictators, peddles the racist propaganda at home and abroad, speaks at international conferences, collects a fine salary working for the misery industry, and one who ever believes that he is a force for good, and for ethics and truth, and who, therefore, is never, ever to be challenged by anyone.

“Everywhere near the building, the stench of death was overpowering. Men in surgical masks sprayed disinfectant in the air.”

We move from tragedy to tragedy with hellish regularity.

“The scope of injuries,” Jim Yardley writes in the New York Times, “was horrifying: fractured skulls, crushed rib cages, severed livers, ruptured spleens. One survivor lost both legs. . . . A teenage girl named Sania lost her right leg. Another teenager, Anna, lost her right hand.”

This wasn’t from a bomb in Boston. It was from a collapsed building outside Dhaka, Bangladesh — another shocking sweatshop disaster, this one claiming the lives, according to the most recent count, of 385 people, with many more missing and at least 1,000 injured. Eight people, including the owner of the building, which housed five separate garment operations employing more than 3,000 people, were arrested. Workers, the Times reported, saw cracks in the walls of the building the day before it collapsed. They were told to go to work anyway.

Environmentalists of all stripes support policies to expand solar energy and wind energy, among other “renewables.” Indeed, solar and wind are viewed across the spectrum of environmental groups as a principal method for reducing carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions that are causing increasingly catastrophic climate change. Fossil fuels are the main sources of such climate change.

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