WALKING A GULF OF MEXICO BEACH

Remember the Gulf of Mexico disaster? 

Almost like the good old days compared to Fukushima, wasn't it?

However, a year later, the photos below show what you will find on the beaches today....

VIVA QADDAFI: LIBYA TRUTH

Can you imagine Western leaders going among the people like this?

 

Low quality footage of Qaddafi entourage driving throughout Tripoli. He is not behind guards or barriers; he is exposed fully to the Libyans who all stop to jump and wave as the motorcade passes. This is not the Qaddafi the media sells over here. Libyans had an incredible standard of living as you will read. Now NATO has stolen their wealth and they will face hardship.

Credits for the music:
Memory Lane by Netsky
Memory Lane vs. Happiness Happening from Mash Up Mix 2010 by The Cut Up Boys

Some of what I have found out about Libya & Muammar Al Qaddafi since the brutal, illegal invasion of Libya by Rothschild owned NATO forces.

I ask all reading this to do whatever they can to oppose the New World Order, NATO, the UN & our  corrupt politicians.

Please read Qaddafi's Green Book. Download link:

http://911-truth.net/other-books/Muammar-Qaddafi-Green-Book-Eng.pdf

The draft UN report on human rights in Libya before the NATO bombings & invasion.

http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/16session/A-HRC-16-15.pdf

Thank you to all people seeking the truth. You inspire me...

FEMALE TRAFFICKING SOARS IN IRAQ

A tribal Libyan girl, does she face the same fate as her iraqi sisters?

By Rebecca Murray

September 1, 2011

IPS News

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=104911

Al-Battaween, the red light street in Baghdad.

Credit:Rebecca Murray/IPS

BAGHDAD,

Aug 27, 2011 (IPS) ~ 

Rania was 16 years old when officials raped her during Saddam Hussein’s 1991 crackdown in Iraq’s Shia south. She says.

"My brothers were sentenced to death, 

and the price to stop this was to offer my body,"

Cast out for bringing ‘shame’ to her family, Rania ran away to Baghdad and soon fell into living and working in Baghdad’s red light district.

Prostitution and sex trafficking are epidemic in Iraq, where the violence of military occupation and sectarian strife have smashed national institutions, impoverished the population and torn apart families and neighbourhoods.

Over 100,000 civilians have been killed and an estimated 4.4 million Iraqis displaced since 2003.

Amnesty International states:

"Wars and conflicts, wherever they are fought, invariably usher in sickeningly high level of violence against women and girls."

Rania worked her way up as a sex trafficker’s deputy, collecting money from clients. She explains:

"If I had four girls, and about 200 clients a day

~ it could be about 50 clients for each one of them."

Sex costs about 100 dollars a session now, Rania says.

Many virgin teenage girls are sold for around 5,000 dollars, and trafficked to popular destinations like northern Iraq, Syria and the United Arab Emirates. Non-virgins are about half that price.

Girls who run away to escape domestic violence or forced marriage are the most vulnerable prey for men working for pimps in bus stations and taxi stands. 

Some girls are also sold into marriages by family relatives, only to be handed over to trafficking rings.

Most of Iraq’s sex traffickers are predominantly female, running squalid brothels in neighbourhoods like the decrepit Al-Battaween district in central Baghdad.

Six years ago, a raid by U.S. troops on Rania’s brothel brought her nefarious career to an abrupt end. The prostitutes were charged along with everyone else for abetting terrorism.

Imprisonment changed Rania’s life. While she served time in Baghdad’s Al-Kadimiyah lock-up ~ where more than half the female inmates serve time for prostitution ~ a local women’s support group befriended her. Today she works for them as an undercover researcher, drawing on her years of experience and connections to infiltrate brothels throughout Iraq.

Covered in black, with black, lacquered fingernails and gold bracelets, Rania says,
"I deal with all these pimps and sex traffickers. "I don’t tell them I’m an activist; I tell them I am a sex trafficker. This is the only way for me to get information. If they discover that I’m an activist I get killed."

In one harrowing experience, Rania and two other girls visited a house in Baghdad’s Al-Jihad district, where girls as young as 16 were held to cater exclusively to the U.S. military. The brothel’s owner told Rania that an Iraqi interpreter employed by the Americans served as the go-between, transporting girls to and from the U.S. airport base.

Rania’s co-workers covertly took photos of the captive teenagers with their mobile phones, but were caught. "One girl went crazy," Rania recalls. "She accused us of spying. I don’t know how we escaped," she exclaims. "We had to run away ~ barefoot!" 

 
Before the Gulf War in 1991,

Iraq enjoyed the highest female literacy rate

across the Middle East,

and more Iraqi women

were employed in skilled professions,

like medicine and education,

than in any other country in the region.

Twenty years later Iraqi women experience a very different reality. Sharia law increasingly dominates everyday life, with issues like marriage, divorce and honour crimes implemented outside of the court system, and adherence to state law.

"Many factors combined to promote the rise of sex trafficking and prostitution in the area," a Norwegian Church Aid report said last year.

"The US-led war and the chaos it has generated; 

the growing insecurity and lawlessness; 

corruption of authorities; 

the upsurge in religious extremism; 

economic hardship; marriage pressures; 

gender based violence 

and recurrent discrimination suffered by women; 

kidnappings of girls and women; 

the impunity of perpetrators of crimes, 

especially those against women; 

and the development of new technologies 

associated with the globalization of the sex industry."

The International Organization of Migration (IOM) estimates 800,000 humans are trafficked across borders annually, but statistics within Iraq are very difficult to pin down.

Although the Iraqi constitution deems trafficking illegal, there are no criminal laws that effectively prosecute offenders. Perversely, it is often the victims of trafficking and prostitution that are punished.

IOM is currently working with an inter-ministerial panel to lobby for a new reading of the revised counter-trafficking law, which has been stalled by the government since 2009.

"We have reports about trafficking both inside and out of Iraq," says senior deputy minister, Judge Asghar Al-Musawi, at the Ministry of Migration and Displacement.

"However, I admit that Iraqi government institutions are not mature enough to deal with this topic yet, as the departments are still in their growing phase."

Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the government has done little to combat the issue. "This is a phenomenon that wasn’t prevalent in 2003," says HRW researcher, Samer Muscati.

"We don’t have specific statistics. This is the first part to tackle the problem; we need to know how significant and widespread the problem is. This is something the government hasn’t been doing. It hasn’t monitored or cracked down on traffickers, and because of that there is this black hole in terms of information."

Zeina, 18, is an example of an invisible statistic.

According to the local Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), she was 13 when her grandfather sold her to a sex trafficker in Dubai for 6,000 dollars. She performed only oral sex with customers until a wealthy man paid 4,000 dollars to take her virginity for one night.

After four years of prostitution, Zeina finally escaped the United Arab Emirates and returned back to her parents in Baghdad.

She approached the authorities and took her grandfather to court.

However, Zeina has since disappeared. OWFI has learned she was sold again, this time by her mother to a sex trafficker in Erbil.

OWFI director Yanar Mohammed says her office has been threatened for their advocacy against the lucrative trafficking industry, especially reporting on an infamous brothel owner in Al-Battaween district known as Emam. 

Describes Mohammed. "In each house there are almost 45 women and it is such a chaotic scene where women get treated like a cheap meat market. You step into the house and see women being exploited sexually, even not behind closed doors. So the woman who runs these houses makes an incredible income, and has a crew around her to protect what she does."

Emam is said to enjoy close ties with the Interior Ministry, and has never had one of her four houses shut down. Despite OWFI’s expose, her operations are unaffected.

Mohammed sighs.

"Iraq has a whole generation of women who are in their teens now, whose bodies have been turned into battlefields from criminal ideologies."

(END)

MADISON AVE. DECLARES ‘MASS AFFLUENCE’ OVER

 In a deeply unequal America,

if you don’t make $200,000, 

you don’t matter.

The American middle class, concludes a new study from the ad industry’s top trade journal, has essentially become irrelevant. 

By Sam Pizzigati
August 29, 2011

Too Much

The chain-smoking ad agency account execs of Mad Men, the hit cable TV series set in the early 1960s, all want to be rich some day. But these execs, professionally, couldn’t care less about the rich. They spend their nine-to-fives marketing to average Americans, not rich ones.

Mad Men’s real-life ad agency brethren, 50 years ago, behaved the exact same way ~ for an eminently common-sense reason: In mid-20th century America, the entire U.S. economy revolved around middle class households. The vast bulk of U.S. income sat in middle class pockets.

The rich back then, for ad execs, constituted an afterthought, a niche market.

Not anymore. Madison Avenue has now come full circle. The rich no longer rate as a niche. Marketing to the rich ~ and those about to gain that status ~ has become the only game that really counts.

“Mass affluence,” as a new white paper from Ad Age, the advertising industry’s top trade journal, has just declared, “is over.”

The Mad Men 1960s America ~ where average families dominated the consumer market ~ has totally disappeared, this Ad Age New Wave of Affluence study details.

Madison Avenue has moved on ~ to where the money sits.

And that money does not sit in average American pockets. The global economic recession, Ad Age relates, has thrown “a spotlight on the yawning divide between the richest Americans and everyone else.”

Taking inflation into account, Ad Age goes on to explain, the “incomes of most American workers have remained more or less static since the 1970s,” while “the income of the rich (and the very rich) has grown exponentially.”

The top 10 percent of American households, the trade journal adds, now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, and a disproportionate share of that spending comes from the top 10’s upper reaches.

“Simply put,” sums up Ad Age’s David Hirschman, “a small plutocracy of wealthy elites drives a larger and larger share of total consumer spending and has outsize purchasing influence ~ particularly in categories such as technology, financial services, travel, automotive, apparel, and personal care.”

America as a whole, the new Ad Age study pauses to note, hasn’t quite caught up with the reality of this steep inequality. Americans still “like to believe in an egalitarian ideal of affluence” where “everyone has an equal shot” at “amassing a great fortune through dint of hard work and ingenuity.”

In actual life, the new Ad Age study points out, “the odds of someone’s worth amounting to $1 million dollars” have shrunk to “1 in 22.”

The new Ad Age white paper makes no value judgments about any of this. The ad industry’s only vested interest: following the money, because that money determines who consumes.

“As the very rich become even richer,” as Ad Age observes, “they amass greater purchasing power, creating an increasingly concentrated market for luxury goods and services as well as consumer goods overall.”

In the future, if current trends continue, no one else but the rich will essentially matter ~ to Madison Avenue.

“More than ever before,” the new Ad Age paper bluntly sums up, “the wealthiest households will be the households with significant disposable income to spend.”

On the one hand, that makes things easy for Madison Avenue. To thrive in a top-heavy America, a marketer need only zero in on the rich. On the other hand, a real challenge remains: How can savvy Madison Avenue execs identify ~ and capture the consuming loyalties of ~ people on their way to wealth?

Before the Great Recession, the Madison Avenue conventional wisdom put great stock in the $100,000 to $200,000 income demographic, a consuming universe populated largely by men and women 35 years and older.

These “aspirational” households, ad men and women figured, could afford a taste of the good life. They rated as a worthwhile advertising target.

Targeting this $100,000 to $200,000 cohort, the new Ad Age report contends, no longer makes particularly good marketing sense. These consumers don’t “feel rich” today and won’t likely “graduate into affluence later on.”

Only under-35s who make between $100,000 and $200,000, says Ad Age, will likely make that graduation. This under-35 “emerging” tier will have “a far greater chance of eventually crossing the golden threshold of $200,000 than those who achieve household income of $100,000 later in life.”

So that’s it. If you want to be a successful advertising exec in a deeply unequal America, start studying up on 20-somethings making over $100,000 a year.

The ad industry, with this new affluence report, seems to have the future all figured out. And those of us who don’t make $200,000 a year, and don’t have much chance of ever making it, what about us? No need to worry. Who needs purchasing power? We have Mad Men reruns.

Sam Pizzigati, co-editor of Inequality.Org, edits Too Much, the Institute for Policy Studies weekly on excess and inequality. Read the current Too Much issue or sign up to receive Too Much in your email inbox.