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The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released its annual data on compensation levels by industry (Tables 6.2D, 6.3D, and 6.6D here). The data show that the pay advantage enjoyed by federal civilian workers over private-sector workers continues to expand. The George W. Bush years were very lucrative for federal workers. In 2000, the average compensation (wages and benefits) of federal workers was 66 percent higher than the average compensation in the U.S. private sector. The new data show that average federal compensation is now more than double the average in the private sector. Figure 1 looks at average wages. In...

"Aaron Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for World Net Daily, writes today: The lawyer of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor at the center of the current national race controversy, was a mentor of both Barack and Michelle Obama and served on the president’s black advisory council.

Note: The following text is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary _______________________________________________ For Immediate Release June 2, 2009 NATIONAL CARIBBEAN-AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH, 2009 - - - - - - - BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA A PROCLAMATION Caribbean Americans have made lasting contributions to our Nation's culture and history, and the month of June has been set aside to honor their cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and social diversity. Generations of immigrants have preserved the traditions of their homelands, and these traditions have defined our Nation's identity. Caribbean Americans bring a...

Charleston was in ruins. The peninsula was nearly deserted, the fine houses empty, the streets littered with the debris of fighting and the ash of fires that had burned out weeks before. The Southern gentility was long gone, their cause lost. In the weeks after the Civil War ended, it was, some said, "a city of the dead." On a Monday morning that spring, nearly 10,000 former slaves marched onto the grounds of the old Washington Race Course, where wealthy Charleston planters and socialites had gathered in old times. During the final year of the war, the track had been...

"....This technology is about to be used, albeit in a more subtle fashion, against American citizens in a highly classified and covert operation to mind control and manipulate the entire population into ‘compliance’ with our New World order overlords. The technology will utilize a combination of HAARP transmitters, GWEN towers, microwave cell phone towers, and the soon-to-be-mandatory High Definition Digital TV that will enter your home via: a) cable, b) satellite, c) HD TVs, or d) those oh-so-easy-to-obtain “digital converter boxes” that the government is so anxious to help you obtain and underwrite most of the cost on your...

Maybe it's just me, but I find federal legislation titled "The GIVE Act" and "The SERVE Act" downright creepy. Even more troubling: the $6 billion price tag on these bipartisan bills to expand government-funded national service efforts. Volunteerism is a wonderful thing, which is why millions of Americans do it every day without a cent of taxpayer money. But the volunteerism packages on the Hill are less about promoting effective charity than about creating make-work, permanent bureaucracies and left-wing slush funds. The House passed the "Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act" -- or the GIVE Act -- last week. The...

<p>Obama promised during the campaign to create a Socialist National Civilian Security Force similar to what they have in other Marxist regimes. Yesterday, the US House took the first step in organizing Dear Leader's dream youth service corp.</p> <p>German youth praising Hitler.</p>

Following overwhelming House passage last week, the Senate tonight voted 74 to 14 on a procedural move that essentially guarantees a major expansion of a national service corps, a cornerstone of volunteerism that dates back to the era of President Kennedy. It’s akin to a call to arms by President Obama, who has harkened back to those early days to demand giving back by those who voted for him. In fact, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the senior Democrat from Massachusetts whose battle with brain cancer has oft kept him absent from the Senate these days, appeared on the floor to...

HOT off the press! The Congressional Budget Office just released the cost estimates for S. 277 Serve America Act.(Senate’s version of HR 1388, Give Act) CBO estimates S 277 would cost over $6.1 billion dollars over the 2010-2014 period. Programs funded under National Community Service Act of 1990 (NCSA) and the Domestic Volunteer Service Act of 1973 (DVSA) received appropriations of $1.1 billion for fiscal year 2009, including $200 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009...otherwise known as the PORKULUS/SPENDULUS Bill that passed that NO ONE in Congress read. Just lovely. Taxpayers would fund international...

Remember this? (see video at link) Obama's vision of a domestic security force "just as strong, just as well funded as our military" ( and presumbly loyal to him personally) just got a lot closer. The House of representatives has just passed HR 1388 otherwise known as the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education (GIVE) Act. This reauthorizes through 2014 the National and Community Service Act of 1990 and the Domestic Volunteer Service Act of 1973, acts that originally, among other programs, funded the AmeriCorps and the National Senior Service Corps. However, it not only reauthorizes the programs, but also includes...

HR 1388, will hit the House floor on Tuesday.It is called the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act (The Give Act.) The House is scheduled to Rule this week. Sponsored by Democrat Representative Carolyn McCarthy (NY), Education and Labor Committee. The objective is to reauthorize and reform the national service laws. Democrat Rep. McCarthy is sponsoring the bill with 25 co-sponsors, ALL Democrats, including Charlie Rangel. Need I say more.

(T)he Arkansas General Assembly rejected a congratulatory resolution for Barack Obama because it contained divisive language describing our country as founded by “slave owners”: (snip) WHEREAS, a nation founded by slave owners and seared by civil war and generations of racial strife made a leap in the march toward equality and delivered a smashing electoral college victory to the forty-seven year-old first-term senator from Illinois, who forged a broad, multi-racial and multi-ethnic coalition;

President-elect Obama was seen at the Lincoln Memorial today. This, coupled with the fact that tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day, presents a bit of irony. Lincoln was a tyrant. Yes, you heard me correctly. We all know the revisionist history version that is drilled in us every year in the public school system - the government-funded Orwellian brainwash system: Honest Abe who saved the Union and Freed the Slaves. Too bad none of it is true. Good ol’ Abe was fairly ambivalent about the whole slavery thing for most of his career. However, during the presidential debate he said...

… The trafficking of children for domestic labor in the U.S. is an extension of an illegal but common practice in Africa. Families in remote villages send their daughters to work in cities for extra money and the opportunity to escape a dead-end life. Some girls work for free on the understanding that they will at least be better fed in the home of their employer. The custom has led to the spread of trafficking, as well-to-do Africans accustomed to employing children immigrate to the U.S. Around one-third of the estimated 10,000 forced laborers in the United States are servants...

EDITOR'S NOTE — In Africa, children of the poor are commodities, often traded like cows or donkeys by adults who value their labor. This story on child maids is the third in an occasional series on the exploitation of African children. Each story stands on its own. IRVINE, Calif. (AP) — Late at night, the neighbors saw a little girl at the kitchen sink of the house next door. They watched through their window as the child rinsed plates under the open faucet. She wasn't much taller than the counter and the soapy water swallowed her slender arms. To put...

Late at night, the neighbors saw a little girl at the kitchen sink of the house next door... Shyima was 10 when a wealthy Egyptian couple brought her from a poor village in northern Egypt to work in their California home. She awoke before dawn and often worked past midnight to iron their clothes, mop the marble floors and dust the family's crystal. She earned $45 a month working up to 20 hours a day. She had no breaks during the day and no days off...

The concept of child workers or slaves is nothing new to Islamic countries such as Yemen, Egypt, and in parts of Africa. Some of these children have to work because of poor economic conditions, others are forced to work and many are beaten to work harder. They are basically treated no better than slaves. Now American Muslims are once again bringing part of the Islamic culture here.

The Wars of the Barbary PiratesEssential Histories #66Osprey Introduction Most Americans are unaware that, as a young republic, their nation fought a war with the Barbary pirates, the North African corsairs who plied the waters of the Mediterranean at the turn of the 19th century in search of ships to loot and men to enslave. This is perhaps not surprising, for the wars were conducted on a small scale, over a short period of time, and at a considerable distance from American shores. They were, moreover, the product of one of the most inglorious – even degrading – episodes in...

"The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by...

Benin official offers apology for nation's role in slavery MOBILE, Ala. (AP) -- An official of the Republic of Benin has offered an apology to students at a Mobile school for his country's participation in the slave trade. In 1859, Benin, on Africa's west coast, sold 116 slaves to a Mobile sailor aboard a ship called the Clotilde - the last slave ship to arrive in America. Slavery was still legal in the United States at that time, but importing slaves was not. Simon Pierre Adovelande apologized Tuesday to the students at the Mobile County Training School. Thirty of...

NBC is abusing small children by using them for a "social experiment" and profit on a show airing on Wednesday's at 9 EDT/ 8 CDT beginning June 25 called "The Baby Borrowers" . On the program teenagers pretend to be the parents of babies by substituting for the babies' real parents. Dr. Jan Hunt director of the Natural Child Project says: "As a parent, child psychologist and family counselor, I am deeply concerned about the premise of your new show "The Baby Borrowers," and for the present and future emotional health of the babies and young children whose lives will...

There are 5,000 child prostitutes living in the UK - and over three-quarters of them are girls, according to a new report. The report, by Save The Children, criticises the Government for "not doing enough to respond to the plight of children in this inhumane situation". But Bill Bell, Save the Children's head of protection, says child slavery is still a major problem today. "There are still millions of children in both rich and poor countries who are being forced to lead slave-like lives under horrific conditions of humiliation and abuse," he said. He called on world leaders to "act...

Arab women had more rights at the time of the Romans than they have today. At that time, in fact, their capacity to conduct their own economic affairs was recognised, which is not true in Saudi Arabia today. This is maintained by a female Saudi scholar, Hatoon al-Fassi, in a book entitled "Women In Pre-Islamic Arabia", Barred from teaching at King Saud University in 2001, the scholar has examined the situation of Nabataea, a kingdom that at the beginning of the Christian era included parts of modern-day Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and had its capital in Petra. "We now...

Skyra is a runaway Mauritanian slave. Her earliest childhood memories are of fetching water, tending animals and cooking and cleaning. "I was tied up all night and all day. They only untied me so I could do my chores. In the end I could barely move my limbs." She never earnt a single penny. "All those years," she told me, "and I don't even own a goat". Mohamed could not tell me his surname or his age. As a slave he didn't own the right to either. But in a candlelit shack in the sandy outskirts of the capital, Nouakchott,...

The case echoes last year's scandal involving brick kilns Police in China have rescued 33 mentally disabled men who were forced to work as slaves at a building site, Chinese media report. The men were said to have been discovered in a filthy 30sq m (320sq ft) room in Hulan, a city in the north-eastern province of Heilongjiang. At least three people were detained, suspected of keeping the slaves. College students reportedly saw a man jump to his death from a seventh-floor window, and raised the alarm. Last year, one man was sentenced to death and 28 others were...

A few weeks ago, I wrote slightly disobligingly about Jay Lefkowitz, the man who holds the new congressionally mandated post of U.S. special envoy for human rights in North Korea. The North Korean state does not recognize the concept of human rights and considers every one of its citizens to be the property of the ruling family, so Lefkowitz’s job is admittedly an extremely difficult one, but I tried to call attention to the way in which he (in his rather slender annual report to Congress), and the administration in general, had gone somewhat quiet on the subject of North...

(BEIJING) - Chinese police freed four men found to be working as virtual slaves in a brink kiln in a case similar to one which shook the country last year, but lost three of them while trying to send them home, a report said on Friday. The four were free in late December in the northern province of Hebei, which surrounds Beijing, and had been working in appalling conditions at the kiln for up to a year, the China Youth Daily said. Some were suspected of being mentally disabled, and at least one was totally illiterate, knew neither his name...

A rice variety that made many a colonial plantation owner rich was brought to the United States from West Africa, according to preliminary genetic research. The finding suggests that African slaves are responsible for nearly every facet of one of the first rice varieties grown in the U.S., as well as one of the most lucrative crops in early American history. "Not only did they bring the technology, the how-to, they brought the cultivar," said Anna McClung, a genetic researcher with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Stuttgart, Arkansas. West Africans had been growing varieties of rice for several thousand...

Harry Potter and "the Death of God" - by Michael D. O'Brien Special to LifeSiteNews.com Editor's Note: LifeSiteNews.com, the news service which first put online the letter signed by Cardinal Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict XVI - against the Harry Potter books, is proud to present Michael O'Brien's latest essay on the Potter series.  The author, North America's foremost Potter critic, has written many articles that analyze in detail the Harry Potter novels. Here he reflects on the significance of the series as a whole. Well, July 21st has come and gone and the world is muggling onward. The date,...

This week Mattel recalled nearly two million Chinese-made toys over concerns they contain excessive levels of lead paint and loose parts. Dirt-cheap labour and a massive expansion in capacity means China makes more than three-quarters of the world's toys, with an export value in excess of £7 billion. But increasingly, there is evidence of inadequate safety standards, poor quality control and slave labour. Here, in an extract from his book about the toy industry, Eric Clark reveals the real cost of cheap toys from China. Behind high fences, sprawling factory compounds stretch mile after dusty, depressing mile along the congested...

(Taiyuan, China) - Two months after the scandal first broke that brick factories in China had enslaved people to work, another 359 people have been rescued from slavery in Shanxi province, officials said Monday. Among those freed from working as slaves in illegal brick factories were 15 child workers and 121 mentally handicapped workers. That brings the total of number of people rescued from slavery since early June to 1,340, of those 367 have been mentally handicapped. People, including children as young as 8-years-old, were kidnapped into slavery with promises of well paying factory jobs. However, they were sold instead...

Commentary: The Red State-Slave State Connection is all too Real Commentary: The Red State-Slave State Connection is all too Real Date: Tuesday, November 16, 2004 By: Last week while I was up at Harvard University meeting with black columnists from around the country, including several of my BlackAmericaWeb.com colleagues, Michael Dawson took me to school with his map that shows the overlap between Republican red states and the old Confederacy and slave-friendly territories. Dawson is a professor of government and Afro-American studies who specializes in the ways that race and politics intersect. I was sold. His map spoke to the...

The Fear Factor July 30, 2007 While fear itself is not always the product of irrationality, once experienced it tends to lead away from reason, especially if the experience is extreme in duration or intensity. When people are fearful they tend to be willing to irrationally surrender their rights. Thus, fear is a threat to rational liberty. The psychology of fear is an essential component of those who would have us believe we must increasingly rely on the elite who manage the apparatus of the central government. The statement “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little...

Nature Has not been kind to Gao Zhou Zhou - though not as cruel as other human beings. Her back is bent and bowed; her legs fold uselessly beneath her. She gets around using a homemade skateboard. Her arms, legs and face are very, very dirty. She doesn't know her age - she looks perhaps 15 - and she cannot remember her real parents. But she knows the pain of life on the streets of Beijing. 'When I first came here they beat me so hard I nearly died. They beat me and they beat me,' she says. It was...

The kiln owner in the case, the son of a Communist Party official, 'got off too easy,' one victim's father says. BEIJING — Family and friends reacted with anger Wednesday after the owner of a kiln operated with slaves who were beaten and forced to work long days was sentenced to nine years in prison even as two aides received far harsher punishment. Kiln owner Wang Bingbing, the son of a local Communist Party official, was convicted Tuesday of unlawful detention for the use of slave laborers at his brick kiln in Shanxi province. The supervisor of his plant, Zhao...

BEIJING: Six men who worked as enforcers in brick kilns said they were ordered to beat "lazy" workers, who were forced to labor up to 18 hours a day, state media reported. The men were the latest to go on trial over China's slave labor scandal, which erupted last month after hundreds of parents complained that their children were being forced to work in brick kilns in Henan, Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces. The six men said Friday that kiln foreman Heng Tinghan had ordered them to supervise the workers and beat "lazy" ones, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The...

Excerpt - LAS VEGAS -- Three men enslaved more than 20 members of a Chinese acrobatic team, feeding them little, paying them next to nothing to perform and confiscating their passports and visas, US authorities said. A woman who worked as an interpreter for China Star Acrobats escaped late last month and contacted authorities, the FBI said. She told police she and 20 teammates -- including five teens ages 14 to 17 -- were being held against their will. Social workers interviewed 14 of them Friday, according to a criminal complaint. "They literally hugged the investigators when they arrived," said...

"Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves!" go the stirring words that open China's national anthem. But shocking images of men and children padlocked and brutalized in stifling brickworks have shown that even in this officially socialist nation, where workers are supposed to rule, slavery has secured a niche in the galloping market economy. If, nearly six decades after the communist revolution, China can sustain even small-scale slavery, what of other parts of Asia where forced labor has deep roots that have long defied rights campaigns? Observers of workers trapped in forced labor say economic growth does not necessarily spell...

A few hundred dollars doesn't seem to go far these days. Yet the $300 you just forked out for that coveted pair of shoes or handbag could also be the "cost" of the slave that helped make them. For that is the average price of a human life in the booming global slave trade, according to Dr Kevin Bales, president of the Free The Slaves advocacy group. In the 21st century, where trade unions and human rights groups are active around the world, it is easy to shrug off the millennia-old practice of coerced, unpaid labour as a shrinking trade,...

RUZHOU, China — Up from the countryside and desperate for work, 16-year-old Chen Chenggong jumped at the well-paying factory job offered by a man who approached him at the train station. Within hours, he was bundled into a minivan with 12 others and taken to a brick yard where they were fed little, beaten often and forced to haul loads for 20 hours daily without pay. As for the recruiter, he never saw the man again. "I hope they are shot," Chen said Wednesday of his former tormentors, his face, arms, legs and torso mottled with sores where the guards'...

BEIJING - An unfolding national scandal on the large-scale abuse of child laborers in China's brick-kiln industry raises questions on the adequacy of planned labor laws that are supposed to take on sweatshops and protect workers' rights. The first signs of the scandal surfaced early this month when local newspapers carried a staggering photograph of a group of migrant workers freed after more than a year of slave labor in a brick kiln in central China. By the standards of the Chinese state-sanctioned press, which frowns on sensationalism, the photograph was more than shocking - it showed people who were...

Few police are seen at bustling Zhengzhou train station in central China, where people traffickers are believed to have abducted young boys and others for use as slave laborers at brick kilns. There is no shortage of tough-looking men approaching passengers with offers of work and accommodation, offers that frequently turn out to be a ruse to entrap people into forced labor. Uneducated and grindingly poor, China's 200 million migrant workers are among the most vulnerable to exploitation by phony job offers, and they are easily picked out by the animal feed or fertilizer bags they carry as improvised luggage....

Child slaves found in China's brick factories By Richard Spencer in Beijing Last Updated: 2:10am BST 16/06/2007 Hundreds of Chinese children have been kidnapped and forced to work as slaves in brutal conditions. President Hu Jintao and the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, have intervened to call for urgent efforts to trace hundreds more boys and young men who are still feared missing despite raids on brick factories across north and central areas of the country. The reports of children being abducted, locked in factories for years, beaten, left untreated for severe burns and, in some cases, killed spread this week...

Police rescue further 220 slave workers in N China www.chinaview.cn 2007-06-15 16:15:02 HONGTONG, Shanxi, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Police in north China on Friday announced they had rescued a further 220 slave workers from brick kilns and other illegal workplaces, such as small iron and coal mines. The rescues of the workers, all in Shanxi Province, brings the total number of slave workers reported freed in China to 468 in the last month. They include Thursday's widely reported rescue of 31 people who had been freed on May 27 by the police from a brick kiln in Hongtong, a county...

More than 200 people, including 29 children, have been rescued after working as "slaves" in brick kilns in central China, state media reports. Tens of thousands of police moved in on the kilns in Henan province, arresting 120 people, Xinhua news agency said. They acted after media reports claimed that children were being forced to work in kilns in neighbouring Shanxi province, Xinhua said. Photos of distraught parents were also published. Xinhua said that, following the reports of child labour, some 35,000 police were despatched to the 7,500 kilns in Henan. They reportedly rescued 217 people, including 29 children. Xinhua...

A millionaire couple accused of keeping two Indonesian women as slaves in their luxurious Long Island home and abusing them for years have been indicted on federal slavery charges. The women, prosecutors said, were subjected to beatings, had scalding water thrown on them and were forced to repeatedly climb stairs as punishment for perceived misdeeds. In one case, prosecutors said, one of the women was forced to eat 25 hot chili peppers at one time. One of the women also told authorities they were forced to sleep on mats in the kitchen and were fed so little, they had to...

CRUEL L.I. SLAVE MASTERS - MILLIONAIRE DUO BRUTALIZED HELP AT MANSION: FEDS By STEFANIE COHEN, KIERAN CROWLEY and KATE SHEEHY nypost.com May 16, 2007 -- A "monstrous" millionaire couple from Long Island's Gold Coast kept two Indonesian women as slaves for five years in their tony estate-turned-house of horrors - until one victim was found wandering the street half-naked this week muttering, "Master," authorities said yesterday. Varsha Mahender Sabhnani and her husband, Mahender Murliddhar Sabhnani - perfume moguls from the mega-rich community of Muttontown - were hauled into federal court yesterday to face charges including beating, cutting and scalding one...

London's 'white slaves' By Caroline Davies Last Updated: 2:05am BST 05/04/2007 As Britain commemorates the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, new research traces the stories of the first batch of slaves sent to the colonies in America - not black Africans but white children from London. A new book, White Cargo, tells how children as young as 10 were swept off the city's streets and sent with convicts to work in America several months before the first shipment of African captives arrived in 1619. Authors Don Jordan and Michael Walsh say hundreds of homeless children were...

Who were the slaves? Millions of Africans, who were forcibly transported overseas over a period of about 450 years from the middle of the 15th Century. WHAT IS A QUICK GUIDE? Quick guides are concise explanations of topics or issues in the news. More Quick Guides The enslavement of people from west Africa by British, European and African traders, and their mass transportation to the Americas was known as the transatlantic Slave Trade. A similar slave trade, conducted by Arab and African traders over roughly the same period, saw millions of others transported from the continent's east coast and...

On a plantation just outside the Jamaican capital, Kingston, we watched workers with long machetes slice down towering stalks of sugar cane with industrial precision. Sugar is still harvested by hand, when it is too wet for machines The crop is only harvested by hand on modern plantations when it rains and today there is a steady drizzle. Usually machines do the graft. But for more than 300 years until the early 19th century the machines were African slaves. Men, women and children were overworked and brutalised. Cruelty and torture meant as many as a third of all slaves...