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By far, prostitution is the leading form of human trafficking in America, accounting for nearly half of it. The rest shows up in domestic service, agriculture, sweatshops, factories, restaurant and hotel work, and various other types of human exploitation. It persists for lack of regulation, work condition monitoring, and a growing demand for cheap labor and plentiful sex enabling unscrupulous scoundrels and criminal networks to exploit powerless people, including children, for profit.
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) states that the average entry prostitution age is from 12 - 14, and a congressional finding estimated that up to 300,000 children are at risk at any time. In addition, the lack of safe and legal migration facilitates trafficking, and few societal protections are available for victims. The profiteers take full advantage.
Water as Commodity or Commons?
Attracting many thousands from around the world, the World Water Council's (WWC) fifth World Water Forum (WWF) was billed as "the world's biggest ever water-related event." Yet it was one of the year's least reported stories because of vocal opposition to its privatization agenda that will make water available only to those who can afford the exorbitant cost. As part of the commons, clean water is a human right, not a commodity to be exploited for profit.
In her book Water Wars, Vandana Shiva says:
"Water is a commons because it is the ecological basis of all life and because its sustainability and equitable allocation depends on cooperation among community members."
Author Maude Barlow adds:
"You cannot trade or sell a human right or deny it to someone on the basis of an inability to pay."
WWF participants plan to do just that by charging prices unaffordable to billions.
Lesbian and Gay Standpoint Films
Writer James Joseph Dean examines them from 1980 - 2000, "focus(ing) on lesbian and gay characters' lives from the point of view of a lesbian and gay subculture." Throughout this period, Hollywood began normalizing homosexuality images, but "almost always isolate(d) the gay and lesbian from a larger lesbian and gay subculture" and continued to portray heterosexuality "as the normative identity of the majority." As human beings, Dean argues that society must afford gays and lesbians normal and equal recognition and tolerance.
Final Comments
The Project Censored team has made PC a national treasure, dedicated to media democracy in a free and open society. As guardians of power, today's dominant media system is in crisis because it's bottom-line driven, unresponsive to public needs, and concerned only about the interests of wealth and power.
As a result, fiction substitutes for fact. News is carefully filtered, dissent marginalized and denigrated, and supporting the powerful substitutes for full and accurate reporting. The fallout has imperial wars called liberating ones. Civil liberties are suppressed for our own good. Washington has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street, and patriotism means supporting militarism, violence as a way of life, global dominance, lawlessness, torture, and an Orwellian society in which "war is peace, freedom is slavery, (and) ignorance is strength."
Democracy requires a free, open, vibrant, and diverse media, elements totally absent under our corporate-driven system. PC holds it accountable by revealing what it suppresses.
Support Project Censored and the Media Freedom Foundation (MFF) that works closely with PC. Read Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008 - 09, and follow PC daily at projectcensored.org and MFF at mediafreedominternational.org. They're our best hope to restore freedom in a healthy and functioning democracy, something very much absent in today's corporate-dominated America.
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