LET US IN! Keep Big Money out of Government.

George Washington did not want to have political parties. He thought they would become divisive and corrupt and fail to
represent the will of the people. Well, that was before BIG MEDIA got involved. Owned by massive conglomerates, the
"news" is no longer objective and in-depth, but carries out the
message of its biggest owners.

The environment and the economic welfare of the American
people is in dire jeopardy, yet squabbling on one side and
cowardice on the other, have created leadership that will not
take a moral stand.

I hope to change all that. I encourage every ordinary, sensible,
thoughtful person to run for office- local, PTO, state level- it doesn't matter. Petitions won't create change. Demonstrations will be censored by the mainstream media. LET US IN!

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Children Near Starvation in Congo

Kinshasa Journal/N Y Times

For Congo Children, Food Today Means None Tomorrow

Gwenn Dubourthoumieu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Protesters faced off with the police in Kinshasa after the deeply flawed presidential election in November. But the intense mass demonstrations many expected proved difficult to sustain, in part because of the daily struggle to survive.

By ADAM NOSSITER

Published: January 2, 2012

KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — Today, the big children will eat, Cynthia, 15, and Guellor, 13. Tomorrow, it will be the turn of the little ones, Bénédicte, Josiane and Manassé, 3, 6, and 9.

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Of course, the small ones will fuss. “Yes, sure, they ask for food, but we don’t have any,” said their mother, Ghislaine Berbok, a police officer who earns $50 a month. There will have been a little bread for them at breakfast, but nothing more.
“At night they will be weak,” she said. “Sure, they complain. But there is nothing we can do.”
The Berboks are practicing a Kinshasa family ritual almost as common here as corrugated metal roofs and dirt streets: the “power cut,” as residents in this capital of some 10 million have ironically christened it. On some days, some children eat, others do not. On other days, all the children eat, and the adults do not. Or vice versa.
The term “power cut” — in French, délestage — is meant to evoke another unloved routine of city life: the rolling blackouts that hit first one neighborhood, then another.
Délestage is universally used in French-speaking Africa to describe these state-decreed power cutoffs, but when applied to rationing food it illustrates a stark survival calculus, one the head of a household must painfully impose on the rest. And unlike the blackouts, it is not merely a temporary unpleasantness mandated from on high.
“If today we eat, tomorrow we’ll drink tea,” said Dieudonné Nsala, a father of five who earns $60 a month as an administrator at the Education Ministry. Rent is $120 a month; the numbers, Mr. Nsala pointed out, simply do not add up. Are there days when his children do not eat? “Of course!” Mr. Nsala answered, puzzled at the question. “It can be two days a week,” he said.