Please read Erika Morningstar! OCCUPY!

Erika Morningstar

My Name is Journey Mani Wanji Zephier. I am 11 years old.
My Dad is Chief Blue Star Eagle, Ihanktonwan Dakota Nation.
I want to have a Kid to Kid talk, with all the Children in our World.
We have to WAKE UP! STAND UP!
I know if you are like me, You know things are really messed up on Earth right now.
This is OUR world, we will inherit this mess that the greedy grown-ups are making.
Look at what is happening to our food, Mother Earth can grow enough food to feed all the starving kids on Earth,
But Monsanto and big Corporations are making farmers grow crops that don't make seeds,
so people have to buy their seeds to grow more food.
And GMO's make people sick, some of them are poison,
I saw a video of kids in India who get rashes and sick from just walking through GMO soybeans to school.

And I'm only 11, but I get what taxes are.
How come I have to pay tax on my candy at the store,
but big companies like Exxon pay not taxes, or got big refunds?
And How come big companies like Exxon are allowed to pollute the Earth with oil and chemicals?
Greed is making companies cut down all our trees and rainforests,
it's making them dig up all the gold and gifts from the Earth and destroy the land,
it's making them create GMO crops that makes farmers not able to save seeds,
and are destrying all the natural crops and plants on the planet.
Greed is making millions of kids starve to death,
and making Nations go to war to fight over oil and resources.
I don't own video games, because I know that kids in poor nations,
are paid almost nothing to build them, and they have to work all day,
and cannot go to school. ANd, They teach us how to KILL. For fun and points. That is just plain wrong.

How come big companies are making it illegal for farmers to grow organic food and livestock?
Corporations like Tyson make big farms where they treat the animals bad, like keeping chickens in the dark and poop their whole life.
And then we are supposed to eat that?
I was taught that animals are sacred, too. If we have to eat them, we treat them with love, and pray for their Spirit,
we don't torture them and then eat it, that is bad medicine, that goes into our bodies.
I am sad that our planet is really in trouble, we are tearing apart Mother Earth,
and she is the only planet we have. I can feel the Earth crying when I listen.
CHILDREN OF THE EARTH, STAND UP!

Tell the grown-ups, they are ruining our planet and then leaving it for US to fix.
Go out and make your signs, protest at your school, stand up with your friends for OUR future.
The police cannot arrest 700 kids who are standing there like they will the teenagers.
We are the voice of the 7th Generation in Native American prophecy.
That means WE ARE THE CHANGE, we are the ones who will save the Earth and make a time of peace.
That means something to me.
You may not hear me. You may just want to play video games that kill people on the TV for fun.
But that is what the big companies and corporations and military WANTS you to do.
They WAnt you to be asleep.
WAKE UP!
PLEASE!!!!! If we do not stop the grown-ups, there will be nothing left for us.
WAKE UP, PLEEEEAAASE!

WE are the CHANGE.
We can do this with LOVE. Make your Voices heard. STAND UP!
Grown-ups want us to belive we have no power. That is a LIE.
We are awake, and if you are like me, you KNOW you came to Earth to CHANGE THINGS.
Become a warrior. A warrior for the Earth. A Warrior of LOVE and truth.
We are all one. I know that is truth. We are One with the Earth.
Become a Warrior of Love. STAND UP!

 

Camila Batmanghelidjh: Caring costs – but so do riots

These rioters feel they don't actually belong to the community. For years, they’ve felt cut adrift from society.  Shops looted, cars and buildings burnt out, young adults in hoods on the rampage.

London has woken up to street violence, and the usual narratives have emerged – punish those responsible for the violence because they are "opportunist criminals" and "disgusting thieves". The slightly more intellectually curious might blame the trouble on poor police relations or lack of policing.

Related articles

• Riots spread north as London cools
• Manchester endures night of rioting
• Fire 'disaster' for music industry
• Three held over Facebook riot bid
• Man in 60s seriously hurt in riot
• Shot man dies after Croydon riot
• CCTV bid to identify riot suspects
• Police consider use of plastic bullets
• Residents vent anger at Boris Johnson
• London's shops close early amid riot fears
• Hackney town hall evacuated
• England game cancelled amid London riots
• Owner of looted shop slams police
• Police pledge to reclaim Liverpool streets
• Riots 'hammer blow' to small firms
• Birmingham rioters 'a greedy crowd'
• Clean-up begins in riot hit cities
• A dead man, a crucial question: should police have shot Mark Duggan?
• Livelihoods destroyed as looters roam streets
• Greggs delivery driver assaulted
• 'Mindless violence' spreads to Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham
• Cameron and Boris scramble to be first home from holiday
• Paul Vallely: Shades of 1980s riots, but there have been big changes since then
• Police must show there is no bias against black people
• Brixton Commander apologises for failing to tackle 'war zone'
• Getting into the mindset of a mob mentality
• Leading article: The lessons to be drawn from mindless violence
• Search the news archive for more stories

My own view is that the police in this country do an impressive job and unjustly carry the consequences of a much wider social dysfunction. Before you take a breath of sarcasm thinking "here she goes, excusing the criminals with some sob story", I want to begin by stating two things. First, violence and looting can never be justified. Second, for those of us working at street level, we're not surprised by these events. 

Twitter and Facebook have kept the perverse momentum going, transmitting invitations such as: "Bare shops are gonna get smashed up. So come, get some (free stuff!!!!) F... the feds we will send them back with OUR riot! Dead the ends and colour war for now. So If you see a brother... SALUTE! If you see a fed... SHOOT!" 

If this is a war, the enemy, on the face of it, are the "lawless", the defenders are the law-abiding. An absence of morality can easily be found in the rioters and looters. How, we ask, could they attack their own community with such disregard? But the young people would reply "easily", because they feel they don't actually belong to the community. Community, they would say, has nothing to offer them. Instead, for years they have experienced themselves cut adrift from civil society's legitimate structures. Society relies on collaborative behaviour; individuals are held accountable because belonging brings personal benefit. Fear or shame of being alienated keeps most of us pro-social.

Working at street level in London, over a number of years, many of us have been concerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules. The individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best. The drug economy facilitates a parallel subculture with the drug dealer producing more fiscally efficient solutions than the social care agencies who are too under-resourced to compete.

The insidious flourishing of anti-establishment attitudes is paradoxically helped by the establishment. It grows when a child is dragged by their mother to social services screaming for help and security guards remove both; or in the shiny academies which, quietly, rid themselves of the most disturbed kids. Walk into the mental hospitals and there is nothing for the patients to do except peel the wallpaper. Go to the youth centre and you will find the staff have locked themselves up in the office because disturbed young men are dominating the space with their violent dogs. Walk on the estate stairwells with your baby in a buggy manoeuvring past the condoms, the needles, into the lift where the best outcome is that you will survive the urine stench and the worst is that you will be raped. The border police arrive at the neighbour's door to grab an "over-stayer" and his kids are screaming. British children with no legal papers have mothers surviving through prostitution and still there's not enough food on the table. 

It's not one occasional attack on dignity, it's a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped. Savagery is a possibility within us all. Some of us have been lucky enough not to have to call upon it for survival; others, exhausted from failure, can justify resorting to it. 

Our leaders still speak about how protecting the community is vital. The trouble is, the deal has gone sour. The community has selected who is worthy of help and who is not. In this false moral economy where the poor are described as dysfunctional, the community fails. One dimension of this failure is being acted out in the riots; the lawlessness is, suddenly, there for all to see. Less visible is the perverse insidious violence delivered through legitimate societal structures. Check out the price of failing to care. 

I got a call yesterday morning. The kids gave me a run-down of what had happened in Brixton. A street party had been invaded by a group of young men out to grab. A few years ago, the kids who called me would have joined in, because they had nothing to lose. One had been permanently excluded from six schools. When he first arrived at Kids Company he cared so little that he would smash his head into a pane of glass and bite his own flesh off with rage. He'd think nothing of hurting others. After intensive social care and support he walked away when the riots began because he held more value in his membership of a community that has embraced him than a community that demanded his dark side. 

It costs money to care. But it also costs money to clear up riots, savagery and antisocial behaviour. I leave it to you to do the financial and moral sums.

Camila Batmanghelidjh is founder of the charities The Place To Be and Kids Company

Cutting Kids’ Health Care Will Make Deficits Bigger: David Sirota

Posted on Jun 2, 2011

"It requires us to take the longer view of our deficit challenges, to see certain expenditures as investments in future savings and to remember that adage about “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

By David Sirota

In the name of curtailing deficits, politicians across the country are hacking away at programs that aim to make children healthier. In Congress, for example, House Republicans are spearheading a budget that eviscerates funding for food assistance and effectively defunds the wildly successful Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Similarly, from Texas to California, state lawmakers are chopping children’s health programs in the face of budget shortfalls. In all these initiatives, the rhetorical leitmotif is “fiscal responsibility.”

Like clockwork, this has set off the now-standard ideological debate over values, with liberals arguing that it’s immoral to deny health care to today’s kids and conservatives countering that it’s even more immoral to saddle the next generation with debt. But as highlighted by a new National Bureau of Economic Research report, both sides are ignoring the most important non-ideological fact: Any so-called “deficit reduction” plan that cuts child health programs is almost certain to increase deficits.

The NBER study compared British and American illness rates, controlling for both demographic differences and risk factors like smoking and drinking. It found that (a) we have “much higher” childhood illness rates than our British counterparts, (b) the transmission rate of childhood illnesses into poor health in adults is greater in America than in Britain, and therefore (c) “the origins of poorer adult health among older Americans compared to the English traces back right into the childhood years.” 

In other words, America’s broken private health care system allows kids’ medical afflictions to become far worse in adulthood than they become in Britain—a nation with a government-sponsored universal health care system. 

Remembering that experts say diabetes alone could be a $3 trillion health-cost time bomb in the United States, the NBER study’s underlying message should be clear: If we reduce our country’s minimal efforts to make kids healthier, we will be all but guaranteeing even more deficit-exploding medical problems down the line. 

Those problems, of course, are often more expensive to therapeutically treat in adults than to pre-emptively address in kids. That means any short-term savings achieved by cuts to children’s health care will likely be wiped out by much bigger costs as those less-healthy kids enter adulthood. And don’t forget: Those additional marginal costs are everyone’s concern because they often end up being paid by Medicare (aka taxpayers). 

The NBER study is quick to point out that access to children’s health insurance—universal in Britain, but not in America—may not be the “primary” factor in the discrepancy between our two nations’ health stats. However, it’s possible that health services for pregnant women are acutely involved. 

It’s also possible the results reflect not just differences in health services, but also larger incongruities in everything from food safety regulation to consumer products safety laws to environmental protection. This would suggest that it’s not only ignorant for self-described deficit hawks to cut children’s health programs, but also absurd for them to cite deficits as reason to cut enforcement of public-interest laws.

As obvious as these lessons may seem, appreciating their significance requires a serious attitudinal shift in America. It requires us to take the longer view of our deficit challenges, to see certain expenditures as investments in future savings and to remember that adage about “cutting off your nose to spite your face.” Because while we certainly can get the deficit under control, we cannot achieve such a goal by denying kids health care. 

Doing that will spite the whole country—and make the budget picture far worse.

David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book “Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.