Video Clip of the Day

Amy Goodman appears with Chris Matthews on "Hardball"

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She talks about the failure of the media in it's coverage of the runup to the Iraq war.

It started one day in the early '90s, when a white van stopped him in front of the Fruit Stand grocery store in Hastings and asked if he needed work. He did. But as soon as he met Evans he knew he had found trouble. Evans was mean in a way that made Goodman feel suddenly aware of how far out of town they were. There was no phone. Chain link and barbed wired surrounded the property. The crew leaders looked hardened, "like they just come out of prison." The field workers called them henchmen.

One of them gave him a pair of bloodstained work boots.

"He said 'These belong to the last guy who ran. If I catch you trying to get down that road, you're going to answer to me too.' " [read the rest...]

I don't really understand how this story has stayed so far under the radar. According to this article, 1000 migrant farm workers have been freed from slavery -- yes, SLAVERY -- in Florida in the past 13 years.

Did someone forget to tell Florida farmers that slavery's end was one of the outcomes to the Civil War?

The Ronald Evans case was one of the most evil and egregious. From the Coalition of Immokalee Workers:

Ron Evans recruited homeless U.S. citizens from shelters across the Southeast, including New Orleans, Tampa, and Miami, with promises of good jobs and housing. At Palatka, FL and Newton Grove, NC area labor camps, the Evans' deducted rent, food, crack cocaine and alcohol from workers' pay, holding them "perpetually indebted" in what the DOJ called "a form of servitude morally and legally reprehensible." The Palatka labor camp was surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, with a No Trespassing sign. The CIW and a Miami-based homeless outreach organization (Touching Miami with Love) began the investigation and reported the case to federal authorities in 2003. In Florida, Ron Evans worked for grower Frank Johns. Johns was 2004 Chairman of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, the powerful lobbying arm of the Florida agricultural industry. As of 2007, he remained the Chairman of the FFVA's Budget and Finance Committee.

The Palm Beach Post has done a remarkable series of reports on the slavery problem in Florida. I highly recommend it.

They slip across the Mexican border at great peril, cross the country in the dark hollows of vans, stay silent as they are "bought" and "sold" in fruit groves and rest stops dotting the American landscape.

A destitute minority in a wealthy, well-fed society, they are packed like prisoners into unfit housing, ferried to work in unsafe vehicles and compelled to labor long hours -- under fake names and numbers -- for substandard wages.

Enslaved by debt from the very moment they arrive, they contribute mightily to Florida's $62 billion agricultural industry, yet they earn little in return.

1,000 slaves freed in 13 years is not a small problem. It's organized crime intended to enrich the wealthy plantation owners of the 21st century by exploiting immigrants and the poor.

"The richest, most powerful people in the state are benefiting from this," says Rob Williams, director of the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project, a legal advocacy group in Florida. "They don't want it to change."

No wonder they oppose immigration reform.

Ron Evans is now serving a 30-year federal prison sentence, thankfully. It is at least the beginning of justice for such brutal and inhuman behavior.

Slavery. In 2010. It boggles the mind, and lights a fire of deep anger in me.

For more information, pictures and stories about this, visit http://ciw-online.org/

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Amy Goodman interviews Stacie Ritter, whose twin daughters are being denied coverage by CIGNA for the followup care they need from the side-effects of cancer treatment:

STACIE RITTER: Hi. Thank you, Amy. Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Hi, Stacie. Tell us your story.

STACIE RITTER: Well, it’s a rather long one, so I’ll try to make it as brief as I can.

Our issues with insurance companies have been going on now for quite a while. It didn’t start with CIGNA, though, until April Fool’s Day of 2008. That’s when my husband’s employer switched insurers to CIGNA, which, again, as far as healthcare is concerned, you don’t have a choice. When your employer switches insurers, you get what they give you. And unfortunately, we were given CIGNA.

My girls are cancer survivors. They had pituitary and hypothalamus gland damage as a result of chemo and total body radiation to treat their cancer as part of the stem cell transplant that they had when they were four years old. And a lot of times when a child has that issue, they end up on growth hormone. Many years later, once the oncologist notices a—like a plateau in their growth, which mine did back in 2005, so she referred us to an endocrinologist at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, and he monitored them. And they didn’t start growth hormone until 2007. So that was two years of monitoring to make sure, you know, that it wasn’t just a little lax in their growth and that it was really a damaged pituitary and hypothalamus.

And once they started the growth hormone under our previous insurer, which was Aetna, they did very, very well. And so, our doctors said, well, then, that’s—their positive response to the medication is proof that it was damaged, then, the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. So that was great, so we’ll continue to do this until their bones start to fuse and they no longer need growth hormone.

But unfortunately, CIGNA does not feel the same way that our previous insurer and our world-renowned expert doctor felt. So they claim to have had two endocrinologists look at our case, and both of their endocrinologists deemed that my girls just suffer from idiopathic short stature, which means short stature of unknown origin. But quite to the contrary, we know the origin. We have lots of documentation and proof of the origin.

AMY GOODMAN: And that was—you say that was the radiation that they were exposed to to deal with their rare cancer.

STACIE RITTER: Yes. And chemotherapies, too, are very toxic, and also depends on the child’s age at the time, and even the sex has a lot to do with it. So, the younger the child, especially under five, which mine were—they were four at the time—and the sex—females tend to suffer more damage than males for some reason from the total body radiation. Not all children with cancer have these kind of late-term effects. It’s only children who have had radiation to the brain area, which mine did.

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I know we'd all like to think there are ways to protect our privacy online, but there really aren't any - at least, any we have access to. And as long as Congress is too afraid of seeming "soft on terror," it's unlikely that legislation protecting our privacy will be passed. From Democracy Now!:

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Josh. Explain what they’re doing in Iran and then how the same technology is being used here.

JOSH SILVER: Well, yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Iranian government had secured this system from a German and Finnish company that will look through everything, both land line telephones, mobile telephones, email, websites, looking for keywords and actually monitoring the entire traffic going through one chokepoint in Iran. It’s been disputed by the European company, but the validity of the report seems solid.

What’s scary about this is that this technology that monitors everything that goes through the internet is something that works, it’s readily available, and there’s no legislation in the United States that prevents the US government from employing it. And that’s what’s really the cautionary tale here.

AMY GOODMAN: Your report is called “Deep Packet Inspection: The End of the Internet as We Know It.” Why does it threaten the internet, overall?

JOSH SILVER: Well, the problem is, is that, you know, if you look back to the 1930s, when telephone service became ubiquitous around the United States, lawmakers realized then that there was this new communications infrastructure and there needed to be consumer protections so that the government and others could not unlawfully or unethically monitor and listen in to the private conversations of American citizens. They established laws that prevented that from happening. In those laws, it made it so that the government requires a legitimate warrant, issued by a judge, that lets them do such monitoring.

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Amy Goodman is one of the best interviewers in the country. Today, Howard Zinn speaks to the uses of history and how it applies to the "War on Terrorism".

You can download the program (about 1 hour long) here.

Howard Zinn's brilliant book "People's History of the United States" should be on your reading list.

Penn & Teller: The Patriot Act is Bullshit

Penn & Teller have a weekly show on Showtime called "BullShit". Every week they debunk some commonly held cultural myth. I haven't watched that show, but our friend David did and thought we should see it.

Download | play -WMP

Download | play -Real Audio

Amy Goodman makes an apperance.

Penn: The lawmakers didn't even read the law before they passed it!

Penn & Teller cuts through the crap and tell America the truth behind the Patriot Act. It's is a funny but damning video. It last about 17 minutes and it's worth the time.

Warning: This video contains some nudity, sexuality and profanity.

Thanks for the video David. We are also experiencing a ton of downloads so we are working on getting more servers up to handle the load.