The Self-Censorship of the US Mass Media

Self-Censorship of the U.S. Mass Media
May 6, 2000

It was an axiom of old-time journalism that the mass media must at least assume to stand for popular causes.
The reporters, announcers, and anchormen…pretend to speak for the people; and the public that read, listen, or watch them expect and believe that they are receiving this service.
And this expectation and confidence have given almost a century of American journalism an illusion of unassailable correctness.

However, the recent poll of 206 reporters and 81 news executives – 150 from local news outlets and 137 from national news organizations- conducted by prestigious research center shows quite different and sometimes opposite results.

Here are some details:

1. There is general agreement about the extent of self-censorship and its principal causes. Market pressures – manifested when newsworthy stories are avoided because they are too boring or complicated – are seen as the most common factor because of lack of average person’s appeal.
2. Significant percentages of respondents report that the stories, which may conflict with organizational interests, or hurt the financial interests of news organization or its parent company, or affect adversarial interests of the advertisers, are not pursued but ignored. Typically, the journalists do not decide on their own to avoid newsworthy stories. More than half of them said they either get signal from their bosses to avoid such stories or ignore them based on how they think their bosses would react.
3. Even investigative journalists, such as the authors of 60 minute, 20-20, 48 hours and some muckrakers, are likely to avoid the impact of business pressures on editorial decisions. Full half of this group says newsworthy stories are often or sometimes ignored because they conflict with the economic interests of a news organization.
4. About one-third of local reporters and 15 percent of those in the national media say that they have soften the tone of a news story on behalf of the interests of their news organization. They were told to drop the story because it was dull or overly complicated, but one-quarter of them suspect the real reason for the decision was the story could harm their company’s financial interests.
5. A majority of journalists believe that corporate owners exert at least a fair amount of influence on decisions about which stories to cover. The survey provides considerable evidence that at least for some journalists, there has been an unmistakable intrusion of commercial interests into newsroom decisions. For instance, about 20 percent local and 17 percent national reporters say they have faced criticism or pressure from their bosses after producing or writing a piece that was seen as damaging to their company’s financial interests.
6. Overall, journalists have a more pessimistic attitude toward their job performance than the poll done previous year, and more local journalists report influence by corporate owners and advertisers in decisions on which stories to cover.
7. Finally, on the question of whether the media does a good job of informing the public, both local and national journalists give themselves poorer marks than last year. In 1999, a majority of journalists said that the news business did a good or excellent job of balancing journalism’s twin goal of telling the public what it wants to know and what it needs to know. Now only one third of them give the professional high mark and with majorities in both groups saying the media does only a fair job at this crucial task.

Perhaps most revolting is that significant portion of the journalists said they have avoided covering a story because it could hurt the financial interests of the news organization’s corporate owners and advertisers, and the assumption by the public of “objectivity” in reporting has been severely compromised
There is an absurd and unacceptable degree of concentration of economic, cultural, and political power into so few hands of media owners who influence on what the public should or need to know...

What does it mean to say we have freedom of speech in democratic society?
Many of us think free speech is a right enjoyed by everyone in our society. In fact, it does not exist as an abstract right. There is no such thing as a freedom as detached from the socio-economic reality in which it might find a place.
Speech is a form of interpersonal behavior. This means it occurs in a social context, in homes, workplaces, schools, before live audiences or vast publics via print and electronic media.
Speech is intended to reach the minds of others. Some kinds of speech are actively propagated before mass audience when the contents are sanctioned officially by the state power and promoted by the wealthy corporate owners, and others are systematically excluded and ignored when the story goes against the interests of the powerful and rich institutions.
In sum, freedom and power are not always antithetical, but frequently symbiotic
.
One of the basic rules of self-censorship is that you do not report news without official confirmation. Thus, for example, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of growing economic woes, the media do not question the Wall Street actions or White House policies until the recession is well under way, because the reporting may cause panic in the stock market.
In addition, the media decline to cover the significant affairs of state that inform the public and slide into the content that entertains frivolous, petulant and pie-in-the-sky dream.

How are the journalists in South Korean mass media?
Are they a bunch of:
1. Docile lapdogs that sit idly on the politician’s lap enjoying a siesta,
2. Sycophant pussycats that curl up with a whimper,
3. Howling wolves that go after vigorously for their meal?

You are what you eat

You are what you eat
July 16 2001

“Quod me nutrit me destruit.” Latin tattooed on the stomach of Actress Angelina Jolia, “ What nourishes me destroys me.”

In the month of July when the dog days of summer kick in, most American families are out in their back patio, at the beach, or in the resort mountain, gathering around the barbecue grills to scarf down the huge amount of junk food…hot dogs, hamburgers, and drumsticks that animals were raised, processed, flavored, and packaged through the cruel and immoral practices of industrial ranching.

July is declared “Hot Dog Month” by the US meat industry and every summer Americans wash down more than 5 billion hot dogs with trillion gallons of soda.
On any given day in the US, one in four adult Americans visits a fast food restaurant like McDonald, Burger King, Taco Bells or Pizza Huts and greasy fat food has become a national dish that makes them obese, sick, and invalid in various form of diseases.
Particularly, obesity becomes normal among the young and the poor in dot-com America where one in four all Americans under the age nineteen and half of all poor black women are obese and overweight.

It was a received wisdom that Americans are perhaps most health, diet, and shape-conscious of any people in the history of the world and very sensitive to the treatment of animals. (Americans demonize Koreans often for their voracious appetite in canine food)
On the contrary, almost all Americans will be overweight within a few generations if obesity is left unchecked that causes diabetes followed by kidney failure, heart attack, and stroke.
As in an early 1900 novel “ Jungle”, Upton Sinclair described such a horrible condition in the meat packing industry in Chicago (Theodore Roosevelt, then-President, on hearing about it during his breakfast, threw sausages out of the window in the White House), the industrial ranching today for pigs, cows, and poultry farm inflicts an unimaginable and inhumane cruelties on the animals in the pursuit of profit and efficiency.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than a quarter of the American population suffers a bout of food poisoning each year and about 200,000 people are sickened by a food borne disease every day.
In the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) study, 78 percent of the ground beef contained microbes, pathogenic bacterium, that are spread primarily by fecal material…that is, you are most likely to eat shit when you enjoy a Happy Meal at McDonald’s.
For many poor American consumers of the fast food, hot dogs or hamburgers are not a health hazard but a cheap, convenient and efficient intake of saturated fat, sodium and cholesterol, and in corporate America, the only group that benefit from people being fat are the companies of clothes, food, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, and HMO (Hospital Management Organization).

Obesity, particularly among the young and the poor, is epidemic in the inner-city communities where one of every four hamburgers are sold by McDonald’s, with the market formula that promotes gimmick of “supersizing”, Big MaC, Quarter Pounder, 42 ounce Coke with free refills, and supersize order of french fries.
It is well known that the fast food companies are targeting specifically children through playground, toys, videos, and movies, and kids always bring another customers, their parents or grandparents.
Now Burger King made contract with the school in Colorado to place an ad in the hallways and on the side of its school bus.
The junk food outlets thrive on the poor neighborhood where the indigents are in need of cheap meals for a quick bite before hurrying for their second job.

On the other hand, reports of cruelty to animals through improper livestock production and slaughter practices have reached its apex when the PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) challenged McDonald’s, not so much for serving unhealthy and contaminated meat but for being party to a system of cruelty, and McDonald’s and Burger King agreed to buy meat only from suppliers who promise minimum humane treatment of livestock.
The three fast food giants, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Tricon Global Restaurants (the owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC) now operate about sixty thousands outlets worldwide with the enormous purchasing clout that influence heavily on the modus operandi of livestock farms, slaughterhouse, and meat packing factory.

The industrial handling of livestock in America smacks of the corporate culture in Wall Street…efficiency, centralization, uniformity, throughput, control, animal instinct on profit.
In hog farm, thousand pigs are crammed inside the barns living all day on slatted floors above piles of their own waste, discharging toxic ammonia.
According to the PETA video, workers smash pig’s head against the floor to kill them and the farm manager beat pigs to death with metal gate rods and hammers.
Until 1997, three-quarters of the cattle in America were fed with livestock waste, dead cats, and dogs, in which practice were responsible for a widespread outbreak of BSE, known as mad cow disease.
Chicken producers often withhold food from animals for days at a time to increase egg production.

Meanwhile, the United States now has the highest obesity rate of any industrialized nation in the world and obesity is second only to smoking as a cause of mortality in the US, that export its obesity along with Marlboro and Camel to the world through the companies like Philip Morris and McDonald’s, that is, globalization of fat junk food, obesity, a melange of diseases, and eventual death.
The junk food chains were always an avant-garde of American neo-colonialism in conjunction with Hollywood movies, pop songs, and blondie hair, changing the eating habit of native people, as if a bunch of Christian missionaries sneaked into the Asian and African nations on an espionage assignment in an early colonial era.
Instead of dispatching American GIs for gunship diplomacy, the US government actively engages in helping out US fast food corporations to obtain overseas franchise businesses.

As the foot-and-mouth disease in Europe is affecting the sales of hamburgers all across the continent, people around the world should seriously consider returning to their native food and, once and for all, shunning the invasion of junk food that harms and destroys the national health.
Choice is yours: you wanna be a 200-pound chubby boy or a 500-pound human gorilla that suffocates in ones own fat?
You wanna be dependent on insulin injections lifetime, end up in the CCU (Cardiac Care Unit) connected to a ganglia of life-supporting tubes, and succumb to an early death in an oversized coffin?
You decide, because stupid is what stupid does and you are what you eat.

The World Cup Folly

The World Cup Folly
June 7, 2002

The South Koreans are on the warpath in the World Soccer Field that has given them, once in a lifetime, the leveled stage to face their half-a-century neo-colonial master, USA, on June 10th, and their maddening euphoria after the first winning over not-so-good Poland team indicates that the South Koreans would definitely show up in the street en masse no matter what the outcome would bring them out either chauvinistic banzai or “kill-the-bastard” riot.

The game of the World Cup, as the Olympics, is supposed to promote international good will and global humanity that eventually give rise to bring togetherness among human species and peace among many nation-states.
However, the international sport events have been at the mercy of political distortion and commercial exploitation that the contesting field becomes a world bazaar for a melange of Machiavellian politicians, international hucksters, princely nabobs, redneck hooligans, and blockhead yahoos.
Moreover, most of the sport teams evolved into the denigrating marketing mechanism in the global community capitalizing on their stars and brands in cahoots with advertisers and commercial media.

To add an insult to the Olympian spirit, the media tends to project the blatant chauvinism by focusing on a star player of the host country team an excessive athletic superiority over other countries and by stimulating the viewers to gang up against the opposition team.
The hackneyed politicians are not an exception…As the Senegalese president joined his people in the street for the celebration after an unexpected victory, thick-skinned DJ Kim, “the commander-in-corruption” of the Republic of Korea, has made a cameo appearance with the Korean team shaking hands and chatting with them, forgetting that his favorite son is rotting in the gaol.

The sport events generally provide drama and excitement while remaining politically passive and trivial as the audience are merely participating as the shouting spectators.
However, the whole shebang of good will and global humanity fall apart when the competition is either between historical enemies as in Korea and Japan, or between neo-colonial bondage as in Korea and the US,
History reveals vividly that Koreans hate and/or envy Japanese and Uncle Sam, and Koreans are more than happy or jubilant to beat up these teams on equal term, because Koreans are quite sure that no other avenue exists for them to humiliate these countries in toto.

If the World Cup event is a path to the spirit of global togetherness and eventually a possible venue for the world peace, then it wouldn’t be a bad idea that Hulk Hogan should convene the World Wrestlemania for the match between arch enemies around the world to settle the disputes without shedding a drop of blood: George the Superpower vs. Saddam the Muslim, Hindu the Guru vs. Pakis the Jihad, Ariel the War Criminal vs. Arafat the Bomber, DJ Kim the Corrupt vs. JI Kim the Pygmy, and so on.
If George wins over Saddam in the televised match worldwide, Uncle Sam gets all the oil fields in Iraq, and in reverse score, Saddam gets just a promise from George that Uncle Sam would leave him alone, not waking him up with F 16s in the middle of night.

On the Kashmir conflict, if Indian guru headbutts to knock Pakis down, all Muslims in India would leave for Pakistan, and if Pakis got Hindu under chokehold to surrender, Hindu would stop the nuclear saber rattling against Pakis.
If Ariel the War Criminal beats Arafat up to the pulp, Arafat the Bomber would take all his people bundle together and jump into the Mediterranean Sea so that the Jews could dance in the religious discotheque at the Wailing Wall without bothering about the suicide bombers. In reverse case, the Palestinians gets independent state surrounded by barbed wire, the IDF military checkpoints, and video surveillance for life.
Finally, DJ Kim gets an assurance from the Pygmy no more threat of the military invasion, and if the Pigmy wins, the North Koreans receive all the food wastes the Southern brothers and sisters throw in the garbage pits for the humanitarian aid.

Would it be a far-fetched suggestion? Then listen to the following shoptalk among the British soccer fans. They appear to be cool-headed folks to see the Game from the completely different angle, unlike a pack of rowdy, hoarse, bad-mannered, beer-swilling, flag-waving, and ‘patriotic’ spectators.

Here is an article by David Hayes about a London pub conversation between four friends on the eve of the soccer World Cup 2002.

Philippe: What is the World Cup about? Money, pure and simple.
This is a beanfest for global corporations. The statistics on sponsorship, advertising, and merchandising are staggering. The top fifteen sponsors—McDonalds, Budweiser, NTT, Gillette, the usual suspects—will pay FIFA, the world governing body, 375 million pounds to display their images at the tournament. Adidas is paying ten teams around 60 million pounds to wear their products. And the money is not just decoration—it has colonized the very soul of the game. Brazil is a franchise of Nike. When injuries to key players are discussed—Ronaldo in 1998, Zidane in 2002—the sponsors are in the wings, pulling the strings.
It used to be a game. It’s now a global business.

Rita: The heart of it all is still passion, the sense of belonging to something wider than yourself—a team, a cause, a country.
The focus on commercialism forgets that there are twenty-four national squads each of whom represents an epic national story for the people back home. From Slovenia to China, the smallest participating country to the largest, people will be gathered round their TV sets and radios, brought together in a spirit of intense, positive togetherness.
The game is the connective tissue of the nation. At the end, win or lose, people will have travelled together on a journey and feel differently about themselves.
It is an emotional depth charge in the imagined community.

Ali: For me it’s about globality rather than nationalism.
We hear a lot about shared national experiences, but these are often top-down, highly orchestrated events, without spontaneity, and by definition confined to a single territory.
By contrast, the World Cup is one of those rare occasions when the idea of a global citizen becomes real.
This is a world party that everyone wants to be at.
People are not limited in their allegiance—you are free to choose a country to support, to discover new heroes, to experiment with different identities.
This is the postmodern world. And this freedom extends to the participating nations—where else do you have Senegal or Turkey competing with Germany or the United States on an equal stage?
No one is privileged, the playing-field is level, only the best wins, and nobody gets killed—the essence of the World Cup is global justice!

Yolande: The World Cup is about television.
It is a mechanized spectacle, nothing more—the world reduced to the confined, static, managed dimensions of the TV set.
The event becomes an intense daily effort to capture, process, and packaged a multifarious but messy reality into a form that is easily digestible—and of course sellable—for the various domestic (meaning family and national) audiences.
It is about the impoverishing of life by television—done often with awesome expertise and sophistication, but a compound lie nevertheless.
The real ‘real thing’ is infinitely more interesting. But television can never come near it.
The game is a bogey.

Rita: the arguments of Philippe and Yolande about money and television seem very similar to mine.

Philippe: Yolande’s case is like an inversion of the French philosopher Baudrillard on the 1990-91 Gulf War—because it wasn’t seen, it didn’t happen.
My point concerns purpose and context. FIFA is in the midst of a huge financial scandal over the actions of its head, Sepp Blatter—it has lost 215 million pounds in four years. its marketing partner, ISL, collapsed, as did KirchMedia, which spent 750 million pounds to control broadcasting for the next two World Cups.
The huge sums involved here gave companies the right to influence everything—the scheduling of matches, kick-off times, merchandise, even logos on shirts.
The competing nations are only brands. The very rules of the game will be next.
The world is for sale, and the World Cup is its biggest bazaar. Without a log, you don’t exist.

Rita: this is all too cynical for my taste.
To adapt Tom Paine on Edmund Burke—you lament the plumage but forget the bird is vibrantly alive.
The World Cup is a glorious human drama and an unmatched multicultural spectacle. Football is of all games the one that, at its best, combines the technical, the aesthetic, and the emotional.
Add a big, noisy, partisan crowd and the setting is complete.
No wonder it attracts the most poetic descriptions—‘theater of dreams’, ‘the beautiful game’—which never completely curdle into cliché.
This is the ultimate stage for over five hundred beautiful athletes to display the essential skills and virtues of their sport.
All human life—ambition, joy, respect, frustration, relief, agony—is displayed on that field of green.

Ale: This is precisely why it goes broader even than intense collective emotion on the national level.
The World Cup is a shed global experience in which individuals as well as countries shift the sense of themselves, becoming part of the same mental and affective universe.
The story of Nakatsue, the isolated Japanese village hosting Cameroon is an example. People who have never met or seen a foreigner in their lives learn that the latter are not to be feared, but welcomed.
It’s about going beyond yourself, including your inherited loyalties and prejudices.
The World Cup makes this possible in countless small ways that never get near the headlines, but which accumulate to become part of the evolving consciousness.

Yolande: The opposite of cynicism is naivete. Television is the fulcrum here between money, passion and global experience—it takes the passion which properly belongs to the game and fans, packages and sells it to a world audience—and in the process degrades it into pap and formula.
It stated as a window onto the game and ends by colonizing the game itself.
Can you imagine the World Cup without television? It’s obvious that competition could not be sustained without these juicy contracts. But it’s not just influence. It’s alchemy.
Television in the age of globalization has perfected the art of fragmentary focus, of parceled highlights against musical soundtracks, of the momentarization of time, of radical individualization of meaning, one which we have come to depend on even after being disabled by it.
Television feeds the imagination only to kill it.

Rita: Money and television may make the modern World Cup possible, but what people do with it belongs to them.
What’s wrong with Philippe and Yolande’s analysis is that it imaginatively appropriates from people the intimate experience that is, despite all the corruption you can name, theirs to manage.
In other words, you are doing exactly what you claim advertising and television do.
The implication is that you shouldn’t support your own or anyone’s team, or surrender to sheer excitement of a marvelous game.
You are performing the same trick, but without their saving grace of humor or at least the semblance of affective feeling. You need a new script.

Philippe: Not guilty! What I am doing is to hold the space open for the recovery of precisely those virtues you champion.
It is the marketing people, the sponsors, the advertisers, who have made the inner life of football a hollow drum that only echoes their own conceits—there is no moment of genius, error, beauty, or farce that cannot be immediately assimilated and then exchanged for cash.
The World Cup is preeminently about the money and money is destroying the sport.
True passion or authentic emotion is never for sale. We have to go back to go forward—and it will be a hard road. But otherwise the game itself will implode on a global level as it is doing on a national.
How it will be for you?

Ali: in any case, everything changes when the first game starts.
All the chat, expectation, prediction turns to dust. The World Cup becomes the music of our lives for a whole month. That’s the beauty of it.

Philippe: In the end, the only way to go is to shut the commercials from your mind—or watch them only to deconstruct them.
And to support the team least financially compromised by the circus—Slovenia.

Rita: Retain your capacity to be enchanted, and you will find joy everywhere. And support the team of whom it was said: “Other countries have history. Uruguay has football.”

Ali: Think of it as a building block towards a real global community.
Football is increasingly the metaphorical language of the world. It is the way strangers communicate. Countries enter the world stage and be recognized.
In 2006, Vietnam, in 2020, East Timor. Welcome to the world! And support the host countries, Japan and Korea, to make their investment in the great game justified.

Yolande: The best thing is always to be at the game itself. It’s the quality of experience in front of you and around you that matters. If you can’t be there, be an information guerrilla—pick up what you can, especially from the Net. And get out and play, watch, participate.
The world is always where you are.

The Marlboro Man: a Merchant of Death

The Marlboro Man: a Merchant of Death
July 28, 2001

“The premature death by tobacco smoking has the positive effects on the countries where we make, sell, and export cigarettes.” Philip Morris Cos.

In the corporate culture, the profit motive easily overrides any other factors, like moral or social responsibility as the corporate citizen, in the process of business activities, and there is no exception for Philip Morris, giant tobacco company that boasts with the profit of $8.5 billion annually.
According to Wall Street Journal, the company told Czech government that smoking is good for the country, because in 1999 Czech government has saved about $30 million on health care, housing, and pensions due to the early deaths of many smokers in the country.

A few years ago, the company commissioned the study by research company Arthur D Little International, in which concluded that the budgetary benefits to the Czech government from duties and taxes paid by smokers, importers and cigarette companies outweighed the costs of health care significantly, in addition to the positive effects of premature deaths by smokers—savings on hospital care, housing and pension for the elderly.
The company said that the government gained over $146 million from the tobacco industry in 1999.
In another words, they said that smoking brings good things to the government ledger, an increase in revenue and a decrease in spending, the win-win situation.

In the United States, the tobacco industry suffered massive financial hemorrhage through the class action law-suits by the smokers and many State Governments won the court battles against the tobacco industry that was forced to pay billions of dollars to cover the health care costs of dying smokers.
However, in a deal the tobacco industry concluded with 40 State-attorneys general in 1997, the merchants of death were able to snatch out, among other things, the international legislative package that denied the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority to regulate tobacco export.
In order to counterbalance the financial loss in the domestic market, the cigarette companies embarked in aggressive marketing strategy heavily on foreign consumers who lack the knowledge of deadly consequence of smoking.
Riding on the wave of open market policy by the IMF and World Bank, the Philip Morris has expanded their market share to almost near monopoly on the manufacture, distribution and sales of cigarette in Czech Republic.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), tobacco will kill some 10 million people per year by 2025—7 million of them in economically poor countries.
Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds are laying groundwork for this health disaster by aggressively increasing their advertising, promotion, and influence-peddling in key international market, selling about two-thirds of their cigarettes overseas and making nearly half their profit on the foreign markets.
For example, in Africa tobacco is as much an economic and environmental issue as a health issue. Tobacco transnationals have ensured access by offering African governments shares in their companies, providing senior management positions to people closely associated with officials in power, donating to projects supported by leading political figures, giving hand-outs to influential people, and winning support through economies which have become dependent on tobacco.

In South Korea where the government has monopolized the cigarette business for more than half century, foreign cigarettes maintain almost 20 percent market share since it has opened its market to the foreign tobaccos in 1988, and from then on Korean teen smoking rates jumped from 19 percent to 30 percent in a single year.
In their market strategies, the Marlboro Man introduced a host of slick advertisements—free cigarette giveaways, sponsorships of rock concerts and sports events, promotional T-shirts—that make smoking cool and very American as in dying hair and wearing funky attires.
The Korean smokers are dazzled with the portrait of Marlboro Man, a rugged cowboy whose life is already imprinted deeply in their mind through hundreds of the Hollywood movies, and they are lured into enslavement to the new flavor of nicotine addiction that brings disease and early death.

Now the South Korean government in dire straits financially allows foreign tobacco companies to produce cigarettes through the privatization of the state-run Korea Tobacco and Ginseng Corporation.
As in Czech Republic, the US tobacco industry would eventually gobble up the entire market of Korean smokers whose culture recognizes smoking in sync with dignity, seniority, and status symbol, not with health hazard and premature death. When the health care costs of dying smokers are passed to the community, the Marlboro Man is always happy to remind Koreans that smoking is not a health threat but a boon to their economy because the early deaths by smokers save the country on patient care, housing, and pension funds.
For the merchants of death, profit over people is the be-all and end-all that account for the corporate culture in the U.S.

The hamburger helpers

The Hamburger Helpers
January 6, 2003

In his famous novel “Jungle” that ignited the moral outrage of the Americans in early 1900 and led to legislative reforms, including the creation of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Upton Sinclair vividly depicts the harrowing scenes at the slaughterhouse in Chicago where the immigrant workers toil in the merciless factory life…crushing poverty, disease, and despair.
Even then-President Theodore Roosevelt threw the sausages on his breakfast plates out through the window in the White House, after he heard about the unsanitary conditions at the abattoir.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than a quarter of the American population suffers a bout of food poisoning each year and about 200,000 people are sickened by a food borne disease every day.
In the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) study, 78 percent of the ground beef contained microbes, pathogenic bacterium, that is spread primarily by fecal material.

Globally, the “McWorld” has expanded outside the U.S. from 3,000 restaurants a decade ago to about 15,000 today in 117 countries as an avant-garde of the US foreign domination, causing the enormous impacts on teenage obesity, diabetes type II disease, and other cultural degradation.
Few meat-loving denizens of the McWorld know that a majority of the cattle in the US were fed with millions of dead cats, dogs, horses, and chickens purchased from the animal shelters and other sources (the FDA regulations allow it).

The following is a list of accident reports on the website of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 25 percent of the nation’s 150,000 meatpacking workers are injured or killed on the job each year.
It’s like an almost incarnation of what Upton Sinclair described in his novel, Jungle, that the meatpacking industry is the most dangerous work place in the United States.

You are most likely to eat shit when you enjoy a Happy Meal at McDonald’s.

Employee’s Arm amputated while cleaning meat grinder.
Legs amputated by meat blender blades
Middle finger severed by meat saw.
Finger amputated in Chitlin machine.
Arms severed by knife of meat slicing machine.
Finger amputated in sausage extruder.
Eye injured when struck by hanging hook.
Arm amputated when caught in meat tenderizer.
Cornea lacerated by bacon hook.
Finger amputated by sausage packing machine.

Employee Falls into active meat blending machine.
Committed suicide by jumping into a meat blender.
Killed when arm caught in meat grinder.
Killed when crushed by descending lid of machine.
Hospitalized for neck laceration from flying blade.
Stabs self with 8-inch butcher knife and dies.
Injures backside jumping from platform.
Burned in tallow fire.
Crushed and killed by a blender.
Killed in fall from handrail into blender.
Decapitated by chain of hide-puller machine.
Killed when head crushed in hide-fleshing machine.
Caught and killed by gut-cooker machine.
Killed by stun gun.
Killed when he stabs his heart while boning a hog.

The English: a deaf-mute language for Koreans

The English: a deaf-mute language
December 7, 2002*

The author was on the road last month passing through the Pacific region from the bustling market places in Japan, Korea, Hongkong to the unlivable ghettoized urbanities in the Philippines. This is one of the upcoming series of the articles.Language is a living thing…

it is not just grammar, composition, syntax, or poetry and prose.
Language is also a way of thinking, the culture that the society has made language the most central attribute in daily human activity.
Therefore, when the society, especially monolingual and monocultural ones as Japanese, Korean, or Chinese, attempts to force-feed their people with the second language, English, people become bored of and tired with learning it and eventually lose interest on mastering it.

For them, English is a drab, dumb, and deaf-mute language which isn’t worth a salt in their daily life.
In their mono-lingual ambience, English language does not play any socio-cultural role in their daily life, that is, you do not need to have the facility in English to live a life, not like as in Singapore or the Philippines where English is a lingua franca, the common language widely used among different ethnic group.

In Ontario, Canada, where English and French are official state languages, few would have motivated to learn French even though the education system actively promotes it from the early school years.

In Japan and South Korea, where English is an essential subject for the every level of students to ensure their successful academic achievements, a majority of college graduates are functionally illiterate in oral or written English after the 10-year memorizing of vocabularies and grammatical rules by rote.

In Hongkong, where Chinese people until recently have lived under the British colonial rule since the Opium War, ethnic Chinese totally failed to integrate with their blue-eyed master’s language and got by without using much English, because there was no motivational reason to learn English.

On the contrary, in the Philippines Islands, where people have survived three hundred years of Spanish tyranny plus brutal fifty years of American and Japanese colonial rules, and are still languishing in poverty, the one thirds of Filipinos (25 millions) have overcome the encumbrance of accepting English as their lingua franca, becoming the third largest English speaking country in the world.
It was highly fashionable in the Philippines during the colonial era to speak in English, which later became one of three official languages spoken by the government bureaucrats and social elite and used as the language of science and culture, leaving other languages, Tagalog and Ilokano, in the peripheral sphere of the society.

The Filipinos are fully aware of the socio-economic necessity in mastering English, that is, they have to take care of their hungry stomach before they attend to the food for their culture and nationalism.
Without the excellent facility in English, they are not eligible for an overseas employment that proffers them a rare opportunity to send money for their family living in the Smokey Mountain (one of slums in Manila City).

For them, the right formula for the nationalism—--love for Filipino-ness, the preservation of the national language, etc—--is for the birds, and they trust that English fluency at least gives them an opportunity for getting them out of poverty into the middle-class…that is, an imperative socio-economic context plays a major role in learning English.

While Filipinos learn English at home and go for work abroad, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are tend to go in drove overseas to study (not to learn) English.
For example, there has been a massive increase this year in numbers of Korean students who left for the study in foreign country, and they are the ones who are deeply chagrined of non-communicative learning in foreign language.

In Toronto, Canada, where a large colony of the Korean immigrant community prospers in downtown core, these students, as soon as they unpacked their luggage, hang out together in the street, the Karaoke bar, or at the Korean restaurant, totally being oblivious about their stay in the foreign country as if they were in their native country.

Many Chinese students who study at the universities in Australia are not much different from their Korean counterparts…Chinese students sit around together themselves in the classroom as other ethnic groups do the same thing even though English can be a lingua franca among them.
They are not interested in sharing their individual culture, vision, or future with others through the vehicle of English language.

They generally tend not to seek fluency in English in earnest, but the degree, diploma or resume that warrant the seat in the elite class at home, as if Korean women make the 10,000-mile trip to deliver about 5,000 Made-in-USA babies annually for the laminated birth-certificates from Uncle Sam.In the United States, a majority of the Asian-Americans lives in their adopted homeland as the perpetual foreigners, because they do not look like the Caucasians or blacks, and they always tend to speak pidgin English even after they were off the boat dozens years ago.

In the racial semantics, the Asian Americans belong neither to white majority nor black minority and consequently are neither treated Americans nor minority.
They overwhelmingly live together in the segregated ethnic colony, do most business transaction exclusively among themselves, and converse affirmatively in their own mother tongue with each other…they live in the ethnic islands corralled by the English speaking ocean.

In Seoul, South Korea, a drove of riffraff American English teachers was making good money, swooshing around the downtown buildings day and night that accommodate the various levels of the English cram school ranging from 3 to 4-year kindergarten to an adult class.

Although the whole shebang of the President, media, teachers, and parents, hammers the importance of the English learning every day into the drowsy heads of students, there were few people in the street who have the English fluency to help direct the foreign travelers.
There is no one singularly to blame, such as schools, teachers, parents or students themselves, for not being able to belch out a single word in English when they were called upon for help by the foreigners in the street.

It is true that not all fail to overcome the encumbrance of mastering the Second Language but some pass the hurdle reaching high rung of the literary ladder becoming an English writer.
However, it is also imperative to grasp the detrimental factors of the mono-cultural environment in these ethnic societies that the English fluency can not possibly be achieved in any fashion unless they were forced to intensively immersed in, minimum 12-hours a day, the English-speaking environment for years.

It is a caveat emptor that every students, a kid or an adult, should be aware of the pitfall of the snake-oil English salesman who prattles that all become an instant English speaker if they buy his English 101 audio, video tapes, or books…a self-evident reality if we examine how long we were required to learn our mother tongue.

We learned it at our mother’s bosom while sucking her milk and later we were able to streamline it after immersing through many years of the social, cultural, and academic programming.
Like beating a dead horse, chances are your kids would hardly master the fluency in the Second Language no matter how much money and time you spend at the cram school, because there are no socio-cultural or economic factors to learn it.

The Death of Language

The Death of Language
Euphemism, Dysphemism, Polysemy, Sophistry and Sheer Lies in the Political Rhetoric
September 26, 2002

“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election." Otto von Bismarck

Since language is the most central human attribute, wrongful application of language can profoundly affect negatively on what we think of others and ourselves in the course of human life.
In his essay, “Politics and English Language”, George Orwell said that the recent political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
As one said that propaganda is to democracy as tyranny is to totalitarianism, It is becoming increasingly difficult for people to tell the truth from lie, when the main stream media, through the massive corporatization, behave as the mouthpieces of the government propaganda just parroting what their master want them to say, such as “war is peace.”

Changing the name of “War Department” in early 20th century to “Department of Defense” in the US Government was one of the linguistic obfuscation that the generals wanted to change their image from the uniformed and licensed killers to the decorated and self-defense patriots.
These obfuscation of language goes beyond a mere word to encompass entire phrases…in the Middle East conflict, where the Israeli Government is a world-class liar, one can count on almost anything what they say as being all false, partly true or false, or true but out of context.
In a world such as the Jewish hypocrisy, where words have lost all meaning, people do not need any dictionary.

For example, when the Jews shoot you, you are by definition a militant no matter whether you are 6 months old baby, 15 years old kid, or 80 years old grandpa, and when the Palestinian kids throw stones to the Israeli tanks and want to end the Israeli occupation, they are called a bunch of vicious terrorists.
One of the worst semantic games is a popular usage of an euphemistic word, “transfer”, that the Jews often but discreetly used in the past and now openly and publicly dare to use, in place of “ethnic cleansing”, describing the Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, and the mainstream media willingly accept and parrot it without any compunction. (Contrarily, the West, during the Kosovo War, used the word of “ethnic cleansing” feverishly to dehumanize Slobodan Milosevic.)

The Israeli Broadcasting Authority even has banned its editorial departments from using the term “Settlers, or Settlements” on Radio and TV, and favored the term “neighborhood” in order to depict a “colon”, housing built on land illegally seized by Israel after the 1967 War, as a legitimate suburban region adjacent to the major Jewish residential area.
And the CNN and New York Times sheepishly buckled under the Jewish pressure beginning to refer one of the Jewish Settlements near Jerusalem, Gilo, to Neighborhood…a language of polysemy, a Neighborhood to Jews and a Settlement (colon) to Arabs and media are in favor of the Jews.

Another sophistry and sheer lie in the rhetorical shenanigans are to elevate the State of Israel up to the status of “One and Only” democracy in the Middle East and to call Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as “a man of peace” by George Jr.
The Webster’s New World dictionary defines democracy as, among other things, “the principle of equality of rights, opportunity and treatment, or the practice of this principle”, and none of the words in the description applies to the practices of the Israeli government in toto, and world laughed at George whose words surprised no one, because it is a simpleton’s word only fools swallow it.

During the Gulf War in early 1990s, the Allied Forces have indiscriminately bombed the Iraqi civilian properties and killed thousands of people, one of which air raids killed over 300 men, women, and children who were hiding in a bunker.
When the press corps asked then Joint Chief of Staff and now Secretary of State, Colin Powell about the massacre, the Orwellian General blandly commented it as one of the "Collateral Damage”, an exemplary dysphemism of harsh word “civilian slaughter” and he nonchalantly blurted out; “That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in.”
For him, civilian victims of war are secondary and accompanying damage that is not overtly to be concerned about and brushed aside as enjoyable as a turkey shoot…that is, he wants to provide his audiences with more neutral and amiable feeling about the war.

George Jr. at the first presidential debate opined a brilliant (?) metaphor of a war: “the reason to start a war is to fight a war, win a war, thereby causing no more war!”… a noble and purified collection of languages by a blowhard who has never risked one’s life at the theater of war, and real wars are not metaphors but horrendous series of mass killing that he obviously predicted later: “there is no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland”, which is absolutely true.
Real wars have a beginning and an end, and even the Cold War has ended…but George Jr. said the war against terrorists has no foreseeable future to end…Americans should be prepared to sacrifice their civil rights for the sake of national security in perpetuity…as Latin maxim suggested that in time of war, the law is silent, “inter arma silent leges.”

After a successful installation of a puppet regime in Afghanistan with an ex-oil salesman who dons a Giorgio Armani mantle, it’s time for another campaign of war, “regime change” in Iraq, another dysphemistic term to describe “overthrow a sovereign government in any means”.
The casus belli is weapons of mass destruction that Iraq allegedly possesses to harm the Americans…it is as flimsy pretext as the North Korea possesses one or two atomic bombs to harm the Americans, surely “a Samson Option” that no North Koreans would remain alive under the massive thermo-nuclear attack by the one and only superman George Jr.

One of our warlord in Washington, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, testified in Congress; “I suggest that any who insist on perfect evidence are back in the 20th Century and still thinking in pre-9/11 terms”…that is, you are as old and useless as last century if you insist to have a reason to go for a war with Iraq, because we are in a perpetual war mode to achieve a goal of the global Pax-Americana dream that the friendly Iraq plays the beachhead to pass through the mirage in the oily desert in the Middle East.
The following is a Shakespearean babble delivered by Rumsfeld, who enjoys ridiculing his audience and playing his word game of disdainful charade, to a crowd of reporters in Brussels in early June, who were asking about the progress of the war on terrorism.

“The message is that there are no “knowns.”
There are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns.
That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know.
But there are also unknown unknowns.
There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well, that’s basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns.
And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns…There is another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”

“The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”…it is a masterpiece of sophistry in the word games of Washingtonian rhetoric that Shakespeare would roll over in his grave.
At any rate, how many Americans would have a literary brain to comprehend their Defense Chief’s word games?

The Coital Experiment in the Space

The Coital Experiment in the Space
February 27, 2000

I am posting this article as just light-hearted refreshment someone who generally place the sexuality in the realm of taboo in public but in private quite randy about the kinky stuffs. Someone could be a Joe-six-pack, priest monk, nun, pastor, imam, Pope or Mr. Clinton who spelunked Ms Lewinsky’s cave with a Cuban cigar.

According to a respected French science writer, U.S. and Russian astronauts have had sex in space for separate research programs under the aegis and sanction of NASA and mission control in Moscow.
The sexual experiments were necessary for the future international space station to explore how far sexual relations are possible without gravity. The cosmic couplings have taken place in 1996 between two married astronauts who have tested 10 positions in zero-gravity atmosphere and the tests were videotaped in entirety but were so sensitive that even NASA was only given a censored version that surely fetches millions of dollars in the market.
Among ten positions, only four were found possible without mechanical assistance and other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag.
Unfortunately, one of the principal findings was that classic missionary position, the most commonly used position among civilized (?) humans, is simply not possible because it is not easy to push downward in zero gravity.
I gather that they would surely have experimented on the feasibility of onanism, coitus interruptus and so forth.

Just relax a few minutes in Yoga position, place yourself in the zero gravity room with a pulchritudinous gal, and float around with pagan abandon.
Any way, life is too short, fallible, unjust, and vainglorious to gripe at each other. Isn’t it?

Let Them Eat Cake

Let Them Eat Cake
The mise-en-scene was carefully arranged in the Lotte courtyard, the bastion of Korean capitalism, where a prince regent from IMF waits somewhat embarrassed to hold court with the ringleader of the labor class KCTU. The court eunuchs from the Labor Ministry were also at hand assuring the prince that the rendezvous with the pariah would not last too long to disturb his other assignments and begging him that he shows the opulent amount of commiseration to the riffraff.
Upon his entry to the court with hat in hand, Mr. Lee, the president of KCTU, has bowed courteously with right foot forward, left foot behind, back bent, head up, lips parted and arms held out toward prince's delicate hands.
The meeting was the utmost epitome of chicanery and hypocrisy, a farcical comic drama that played by the titular head of the Wall Street robber barons and a court jester who prostitutes himself to the King, his mob, and people. They were fiddling while Seoul was burning.
Mr. Lee demands playfully that Mr. Camdessus stops to meddle in the Korean economic policy reminding him of the restructuring program has brought about massive layoffs and fire-sales of public facilities, and also requests that some of Korea's external debt be written off because IMF should assume the responsibility of the current chaos in the region.
Mr. Camdessus replies derisively that his organization has never forced the Korean government to adopt the restructuring program, and the polarization of the rich and the poor was structural problems that had existed long before IMF has intervened. However, the prince, like Marie Antoinette, would feel the pain of workers and advises Mr. Lee: "Let your people eat cake."
They both laughed profusely and departed. (Ronald Reagan, known as an amiable dunce during his presidency, suggested that school kids should eat lots of ketchup when they complained about the lack of vegetables in their lunch menu, because the ketchup is made of tomatoes.)
Are Korean Union Leaders a bunch of puppets? The executives of KCTU, the most aggressive labor organization, has become the furtive fellow traveler in DJ Kim's endeavor for the capitalistic neo-liberalism. Last Spring, Yoon Young Mo, international secretary of KCTU, laid out the union's perspective in an interview with the Reuters new service after the end of the subway strike: “ The onus is on us to come up with creative strategies to get away from a head-don collision because it would not be good for either us or the government. What the government should recognize is that union actions help douse the flames of discontent, which could to lead to eruptions that would be even more dangerous.”
It was clear from Yoon’s comments that the union is not concerned with the jobs, conditions and rights of workers but seeks to exploit the strikes and protests to demonstrate to the DJ Kim’s government that its services are required to head off any ‘dangerous eruptions’ of the working class and so Kim should reward its union executives with privileges and benefits. They seem to be oblivious about fact that the American unions had been busted so effectively since Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Mellon era through the acquiescence and backdowns in the demand of living wage.
Many would gape in disbelief that KCTU was too naïve to seek for such an idiotic meeting with the Wall Street mammon. (I think there never was such meeting in any country and it was so meaningless that the mass media around the world simply ignored it.) --I do not know who has initiated the idea of an audience with the prince. It was quite possible both court eunuchs and jesters have colluded with the conviction that the former would curry favor with the latter and the latter might have an excuse to join the tripartite committee again.
Voila, they have got their leader released from the jail and kept mum for several months about many burning issues of mass layoffs and restructuring programs.
When Kim’s government challenged the privileges of the union executives, not the worker’s rights and layoffs, the union leaders seek for the support of the rank and files who obliged blindly like a pack of lemmings.

Law and Justice

Law and Justice
July 17, 2000

1. “Obey the law!”
That is a powerful teaching, often powerful enough to overcome deep feelings of right and wrong, even to override the fundamental instinct for personal survival.
We have learned very early that we must obey “the law of the land”…it is not in our genes as human history began with an act of disobedience, if you believe in a tooth fairy like Genesis in Old Testament—the bite into the forbidden apple.

The unspoken and unexamined premise is that the law is right, and by implication, just and even moral.
However, there is clear distinction between law and justice.
Justice means the fair treatment of all human beings, the equal right of all people to freedom and property.
Take for example, an act of civil disobedience—the deliberate violation of a law for a social purpose—to achieve social justice. To violate a law for individual gain, for a private purpose, is an ordinary criminal act. Some acts fall in both categories, as in the case of a mother stealing to feed her children, or neighbors stopping the eviction of a family that has not been able to pay the rent. In either instance, the law is being disobeyed, which sets up strong emotional currents in a population that has been taught obedience from childhood.

2. Where is our obligation: to law or to justice?
The answer is given in democratic theory at its best, in the words of Jefferson and his colleagues in the Declaration of Independence.
Law is only a means as a Government is only a means. “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—these are the ends. And “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.
The Declaration of Independence try to make clear that the people of the country set up the government, to achieve the aims of equality and justice, and when a government no longer pursues those aims of equality and justice, it loses its legitimacy, it has violated its obligation to the citizens and deserves no more respect or obedience.

Life would be chaos, if we allow disobedience to law and we will have anarchy. That idea is inculcated the population of every country. The accepted phrase is “law and order.” It has a phrase that has strong appeal for most citizens, who, unless they themselves have a powerful grievance against authority, are afraid of disorder.
In the 1960s, a student at Harvard Law School addressed parents and alumni with these words: “The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might. And the republic is in danger. Yes! Danger from within and without. We need law and order! Without law and order, our nation cannot survive.”
There was prolonged applause. When the applause died down, the student quietly told his listeners: “These words were spoken in 1932 by Adolph Hitler.

Surely, peace, stability, and order are desirable. Chaos and violence are not. Nevertheless, stability and order are not the only desirable conditions of social life. There is also justice.
Absolute obedience to law may bring order temporarily, but it may not bring justice. And when it does not, those treated unjustly may protest, may rebel, may cause disorder. There have been a plethora of rebellions, revolution, coup de tat, and violent demonstrations in order to achieve justice in violation of laws.
The law may serve justice, as when it forbids rape and murder or requires a school to admit all students regardless of race or nationality. However, when it protects the rich and punishes the poor, then law and justice are opposed to one another.
The orthodox notion is that law and order are inseparable. Nevertheless, absolute obedience to all laws will violate justice and eventually lead to enormous disorder. Hitler, calling for law and order, threw Europe into the hellish disorder of war.
Every nation uses the power of law to keep its population obedient and to mobilize acquiescent armies, threatening punishment for those who refuse. Thus, the law that inside each nation creates conscript armies leads to the unspeakable disorder of war, to the bloody chaos of the battlefield, and to international turmoil.

3. Rule of Men vs. Rule of Law
Many believe that modern era of laws like the Magna Carta, the American Constitution, and Napoleonic Code, replaced the arbitrary rule of men with the impartial rule of law.
The rule of law claimed to be impersonal, neutral, apply equally to all, and therefore, democratic. However, what was done before—exploiting the poor, sending the young to war, and putting troublesome people in dungeons—is still done, except that no longer seems to be the arbitrary action of the feudal lords or the kings; it now has the authority of neutral and impersonal law.

The law appears impersonal. It is on paper, and who can trace it back to what men? And because it has the look of neutrality, its injustices are made legitimate. It was not easy to hold onto the “divine right” of kings—everyone could see that kings and queens were human beings. A code of law is more easily deified than a flesh and blood ruler. Under the rule of men, the oppressor was identifiable, and so peasant rebels, hunt down the lords, slaves killed plantation owners, and revolutionaries assassinated monarchs.
In the era of corporate bureaucracies and the rule of law, the enemy is elusive and unidentifiable.
In John Steinbeck’s depression-era novel, The Grapes of Wrath, a farmer having his land taken away from him confronts the tractor driver who is knocking down his house. He aims a gun at him, but is confused when the driver tells him that he takes his orders from a banker in Oklahoma City, who takes his order from a banker in New York. The farmer cries out: “Then who can I shoot?”

The rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law.
It allocates wealth and poverty (through taxes and appropriations) but in such complicated and indirect ways as to leave the victims bewildered and confused to remain ignorant about it. The greatest wealth and largest fortunes are acquired legally, aided by the laws of contract and property, enforced in the courts by friendly judges, handled by shrewd corporation lawyers, figured out by well-paid accountants.
Wall Street financiers in 21-century are mere epigones compared with their mighty forebears of robber barons who flourished during the post-Civil War era. The federal government gave out pro bono freebooting railroad capitalists millions of acres of land untrammeled and untaxed, under the guise that they would build up the country for the benefit of all people. Carnegie becomes iron-master, Rockefeller enters oil trade, House of Morgan controls banking sector.

4. Equal Justice under Law
It is just a crock to claim that the rule of law has replaced the rule of man. It is still men who enact the laws, who sit on the bench and interpret them, who occupy the White House or the Governor’s mansion, and have the job of enforcing them. These men have enormous powers of discretion.
Modern system of the rule of law is something like roulette. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. But as in roulette, in the end you almost always lose. In roulette, the results are fixed by the structure of the wheel, the laws of mathematical probability, and the rules of the house. In society, the rich and strong get what they want by the law of contract, the rules of the market, and the power of the authorities to change the rules or violate them at will.

How can this be? Didn’t the modern era bring us democracy? Who drew up the Constitution? Wasn’t it all of us, getting together to draw up the rules by which we would live, a social contract? Doesn’t the Preamble of the Constitution start with the words: “We, the People, in order to…etc., etc.,”?
In fact, the Constitution was still a document drawn up by rich men, merchants, and slaveowners who wanted a bit of political democracy, but had no sympathy for economic democracy. It was designed to set up a rule of law, which would efficiently prevent rebellion by dissatisfied elements in the population like Shay’s Rebellion.

Equal justice under law is the slogan one sees on the marble pillars of the courthouse. And there is nothing in the words of the Constitution or the laws to indicate that anyone gets special treatment. They look as if they apply to everyone.
Still the system of laws must keep up the appearance of fairness in order to maintain its standing in the eyes of the citizenry and to provide safety valves by which the discontented can let off steam.

5. The trial of Socrates and Civil Disobedience
The idea of obligation to laws and to government remains powerful, as we are intimidated by the word patriotism and afraid to be called unpatriotic.
The obligation that people feel to one another goes back to the very beginning of human history, as a natural spontaneous act in human relation. However, obligation to government is not natural and it must be taught to every generation.
Who can teach this lesson of obligation with more authority than the great Plato can?

In Plato’s dialogue, Crito, Socrates in prison and facing death for speaking his mind to the young, is urged by his friend Crito to escape. Socrates refuses, arguing that he must obey the decision of the state.
Plato has Socrates saying (we have no way of knowing if these are Socrates’ words or if Plato is putting his favorite ideas into Socrates mouth, for Plato wrote this dialogue decades after Socrates’ death, Socrates had left no writings of his own, we have no transcript or court records, and of his many disciples there have survived only the writings of Plato and Xenophon.): “ In war, and in the court of justice, and everywhere, you must do whatever your state and your country tell you to do, or you must persuade them that their commands are unjust.”
On the contrary, it is curious that Socrates—according to Plato in his dialogue, The Apology—was willing to disobey the authorities by preaching as he chose, by telling the young what he saw as the truth, even if that meant going against the laws of Athens. Yet, when he was sentenced to death, and by a divided jury—the vote was 281 to 220—he meekly accepted the verdict, saying he owed Athens, obedience to its laws, giving that puny 56 percent majority vote an absolute right to take his life.

Plato is enticing us to confuse the country with the government, and in Xenophone’s memorabilia, Socrates was not democratic in formulating his theory of government ruled neither by the few nor the many, but by the one who knows and called the ruler as shepherd of the people, because a shepherd must see that his sheeps are safe and fed.
It would be reasonable to believe that the good shepherd does indeed see that his flock is safe and fed, but the ultimate purpose of the shepherd is to shear the sheep for their wool and eventually to sell them for mutton. The herd is destined for the meat market, and the sheep are not consulted by the shepherd when he decides their time has come.
The lessons the Greeks drew from the shepherd analogy is that the sheep cannot trust their shepherd however benevolent he claims his purpose to be.

It seems that idea of owing, of obligation, is strongly felt by almost everyone.
Patriotism assumes that the earth is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate, the manifestation of conceit, arrogance and egotism. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, stronger, and more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in an attempt to impose his superiority upon all others.
Even, symbols of patriotism—flag, the national anthem—become objects of worship, and those who refuse to worship are treated as heretics.
If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one’s country, one’s fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles.
In his famous Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau said; a common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, captains, corporals, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.

Justice For All

Justice for All?
A reality check for the judicial process in the United States
July 4, 2000

1. Bill of Rights
It has been a received wisdom that the United States is a nation where Bill of Rights guarantee the equal protection of the laws regardless of color, race, or religion.
A Bill of Rights on paper comforts people and it is good to have a Bill of Rights. They are useful as standards and rhetorical purposes, but it is disastrous to depend on them.
Historically, the government of the United States did not adopt the Bill of Rights in 1791 with much enthusiasm, but a political tool to quiet down critics of the Constitution. It was expanded after the Civil War, with the passage of 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments, and after a hundred years later, every American presidents, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican violated his pledge to uphold the Constitution, by failing to enforce those Amendments and the Supreme Court interpreted them so as to make them useless.

The First Amendment says, among other things: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” In 1798, Congress passed a law abridging the freedom of speech and the press. It was the Sedition Act of 1798, and it provided jail sentences for people who criticized the government and many writers were imprisoned. They appealed to the court.
Americans learned in junior high school about checks and balances and how if Congress passes a law violating the Constitution, they are very lucky to have the Supreme Court to check that and declare the law null and void.
Well, the members of the Supreme Court, apparently having skipped junior high school, or perhaps understanding that the phrase “check and balances” is just intended to satisfy school children, did not declare the Sedition Act null and void. Not at all. They said it was constitutional.
Again in 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act, providing heavy sentences for those criticizing the First World War.

The guarantees of the Bill of Rights have little meaning as long as the society remains in deep schism between the haves and the have-nots. The rights of equal protection under the laws depend on having the resources to use them.
The right to legal counsel is different for rich and poor. The right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures is different for a family living in a mansion and another living in a housing project, or out on the street.
In the real world, the fate of human beings is decided every day not by the courts, but out of court, in the streets, in the workplace, by whoever has the wealth and power.

2. Racial disparities in the criminal justice system
A recent study issued by a coalition of civil rights organization in the United States finds that minorities in America face discriminatory treatment at every stage of the judicial process, from arrest to incarceration. They encounter intensive and unfair targeting by police and other law enforcement officials, racially biased charging and plea bargaining decisions by prosecutors and discriminatory sentencing by judges.

DWB is popular acronym for Driving While Black, for example on interstate 95 in Maryland, it is common practice of the police to stop and search 70 percent of black drivers, while only 17 percent of overall drivers are blacks (racial profiling and police brutality).

In California, a white felony defendant with no prior criminal record stood a good chance of having the charge reduced to a misdemeanor or infraction compared to little chance for a similarly situated black or Hispanic.

Racial discrimination is more dramatic in juvenile justice system when minority and white youth were charged with the same offenses, black youth with no criminal record were six times more likely to be incarcerated than white youth with similar backgrounds.

There are 2 million Americans incarcerated in Fed, State penitentiaries, and local jails as of now, and 70 percent of inmates belongs to black and Hispanic group while comprising substantially less than one third of the US population.
In 16 states, if you are convicted of a felony—even if you get out of prison—you are disenfranchised for life, that is, you can’t vote until you drop dead.

When a Joe Blow steals just a candy bar (retail price: one dollar) from a grocery store, it buys him 16 years in prison.
When businesses steal millions from Joe Blows, they get a token punishment.
Richard Pryor once said that in our country, justice means “just us” regular folks who end up in the slammer and not “them”, the people who called the shots.
Last April, a Texas jury recommended that Kenneth Payne, 29, spends 16 years in jail for stealing a Snickers bar from a Tyler grocery store in Texas, because he was on parole for felony at that time. Still the guy was a petty thief—he stole cookies and candy bars.
When a female prosecutor was asked how she could justify 16 years for the theft of a Snickers bar, her response was: the candy bar he stole was a King size.

Comparing Mr. Payne’s plight to those of recidivist corporate criminals like Exxon, Royal Caribbean, Rockwell International, Warner Lambert, Teledyne and United Technologies truly deserving of the corporate death penalty get away with slap-on-the-list fines after being convicted of a crime that cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars.
In 1886, the Supreme Court essentially made corporation bulletproof…the Court decreed abruptly in a case brought by a railroad company that a corporation is a “person” with the same constitutional protections that every citizens have, including the right to free speech, which in turn has been interpreted as the right of the wealthy, the powerful and the corporate to buy politicians.
The corporation was transformed into a superhuman creature of the law, a corporate citizen that is superior to people, since it has civil rights with no civil responsibilities; it is legally obligated to be selfish; it cannot be thrown in jail; it can deduct from its tax bill from any fines it gets for wrongdoing; and it can live forever.

3. Immigrant’s nightmare
There has been a flurry of immigration prosecutions under Clinton administration based on 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and immigration Responsibility Act (14,000 cases in 1998).
Last year, a US federal judge ordered the release of a 37-year-old electrical engineer from Egypt who has been jailed for more than three years in solitary confinement.
Imagine that you have been confined to a “hole” for three years without knowing why you are in the slammer in the United States, soi-disant democratic country!
The Immigration and naturalization Service (INS) prosecuted him on the basis of secret evidence allegedly linking him to a terrorist organization. The judge denounced the use of secret evidence that never revealed to either the defendant or his lawyers and recommended that he be granted political asylum.
Recently declassified evidence from the immigration hearing described the source of the “secret evidence” against him as a “friendly foreign intelligence service”, and the judge’s advocacy for the political asylum was based on the very real danger that the Egyptian government was that source, if he were deported.
In a related development, another US district judge ordered the release of 31-year-old Palestinian immigrant who had been held for one and half years in New Jersey county jail while the INS sought his deportation. His case also was linked to the secret evidence that the defendant and his lawyers are not permitted to examine in order to fight the accusation.
How can a defendant dispute the charges without knowing what the evidences are?

The Congress had passed another draconian law in 1996 that authorized the establishment of a new court whose sole purpose is to hear cases in which the government, basing itself on secret, classified evidence, seeks to deport aliens accused of engaging in terrorist activity.
Both of these Acts violate the basic right to due process as outlined in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Sixth Amendment also prohibits the government from using secret evidence in criminal proceedings against both citizens and non-citizens. Virtually every case in which the INS has used secret evidence involves a Muslim or Arab.

4. Inequity in Death Penalty
Last January, the Governor has imposed a moratorium on executions in Illinois, after the state almost put to death of 13 innocent men among 56 death row inmates.
Governor George Ryan, who was a longtime proponent of capital punishment as a Republican, said recently that if he doesn’t have 100 percent guarantee the system will be flawless, he can’t go ahead to execute any one while he remains in office.
A national survey in February this year found support for the death penalty at 66 percent, its lowest level in 19 years, and the legislature in New Hampshire voted to abolish capital punishment, the first state to pass such a bill since the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in 1976 (the Governor vetoed the bill).

There have been total executions of 650 men and women in the United States since 1976 and as of June 29 this year, 52 convicts were put to death while 3600 people including 43 women on death row nationwide. Currently, 38 states allow the death penalty and it is permitted under federal and military law.
The methods of execution and numbers executed by that methods are electrocution (146), firing squad (2), gas chamber (11), hanging (3), and lethal injection (488).
The majority of executions are administered by lethal injection, which is touted as a more humane method than other methods, however it is not the clinical and painless process claimed by the proponent.
The state of Texas tops the executions with 223 until now and is scheduled to kill an average of one man every week through November Presidential election, when its Governor, George W, Bush seeks for the presidency (he has executed 135 inmates up to now, one execution in every two weeks, since he became the governor).

Amnesty International cites that blacks make up just 12 percent of the population, but 42 percent of the condemned prisoners, and while victims of murder are equally divided between black and white, 82 percent of those executed since 1977 were convicted of the murder of a white person.
According to a recent study, a black defendant in Philadelphia is four times more likely to receive a death sentence than a white defendant and eight times as many blacks than whites have been sentenced to death in that city since the death penalty was reintroduced in Pennsylvania state in 1978.
In the Southern states, many black prospective jurors are routinely removed from the jury pool by prosecutors during jury selection, which violates a 1986 Supreme Court ruling that jurors can only be removed for “race neutral” reasons.

Internationally, the United States is only advanced country in advanced Western countries, both in law and practice, retains the death penalty, and is one of only a handful of nations worldwide that permits the execution of juvenile offenders.
A recent article in the Economist notes that 80 percent of the executions in the world in 1998 were carried out in China (1,067), Congo (100), the US (68), and Iran (66), and the US total may reach 100 this year.
Since 1990, only five countries—Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen—are known to have imposed the death penalty against the juvenile offenders.
Currently, there are 74 inmates who allegedly committed crimes as juvenile, 2 percent of the death row total and 25 of those are in Texas jails.
The paradigm case of the juvenile offender on death row is that two-third of all the juvenile death row inmates is a minority.
In addition, more than 30 people suffering from mental retardation have been executed in US, even though the Supreme Court has ruled in 1986 that execution of the “insane” is unconstitutional.
Convention on the Rights of Child which the US has signed in 1995 stipulated that capital punishment shall not be imposed for offenses committed by people under the ages of 18, and the US is the only country in the world other than Somalia to have not ratified this Convention.

5. Judicial errors and inadequate legal defense
Since 1976, at least 75 people have been released from death row, after determination that they had been wrongly convicted. This means for every seven executions one condemned prisoner has been freed, and since 1972, about one percent of those on death row has later been found innocent and many of these prisoners have come within hours of execution.

The study conducted by a team of lawyers and criminologists from Columbia University in New York showed that in the 4,578 capital cases between 1973 and 1995, 68 percent—nearly 7 out of every 10—of convictions was reversed in its death verdict in the national level.
Death sentences can be reviewed at three levels—direct review by a state high court, post-conviction appeal to a state court, and habeas corpus petition to a federal court. Of the 4,578 cases included in the study, 1,885, or 41 percent, were thrown out at the state direct review level by the same judges who imposed the death sentence in the first place, because of glaring errors that “seriously undermined the reliability of the outcome or otherwise harmed the defendant”.
In the federal appeal level, Clinton administration has severely restricted up to one year for the rights of death row inmates to appeal their sentences under the provision of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

In death penalty cases of Texas state where far more executions (223) of any other states in the US, many of 135 executions under Bush have been compromised by unreliable evidence, disbarred or suspended defense attorneys, meager defense efforts during sentencing and dubious psychiatric testimony, according to the report by Chicago Tribune in June.
In 43, or about one third of the capital cases, the defendants were represented at trial or at the initial appeal by a lawyer who had previously been, would later be, disciplined, and many attorneys failed to show up for trials, lying to defendants and judge, fell sleep during the proceedings speeding through cases in order to please judges.
Despite of these problems, defendants are rarely given new trial by the Court of Criminal Appeals, dominated by right-wing judges. Since 1995 when Bush took office, the court has only granted eight new trials and six new sentences, while upholding 270 death sentences.

It is obviously the poor who suffer most from incompetent defense. Unable to pay for their own attorney, they are often assigned inexperienced lawyers who have neither the time nor the desire to research their case. The overloaded judges are often more interested in getting the trial over with than in determining the guilt or innocence of the defendant, so he assigns court-appointed lawyers based on personal relations and expediency rather than the quality of the lawyer. These attorneys are low-paid, forcing them either to work extensive hours or cut the time they give to each case and many high-powered ones like Johnny Cochran who defended O J Simpson refuse to defend court-appointed cases.

6. Lock’em up and Throw the Key out!
It is a popular wisdom that capital punishment deters crimes and it provides relief to the families of murder victims.
The government tries to shape public opinion saying that the death penalty carries the official message which killing is an appropriate and effective response to killing. However, it contributes to desensitizing the public to violence promoting public tolerance for “eye for an eye”.
And there is no evidence that the state-sanctioned killing is a deterrent to crime and even strong advocate for the execution no long advances the deterrent factor as a serious argument.
As for the victims relief, the study suggest that, considering the high rate of flawed sentences, the drive to impose the death penalty was driven more by the ambitions of overzealous prosecutors than by concern for families of homicide victims.
The Chicago Tribune report found that many of the executions under Bush were based on the purchased testimony from unreliable sources through the corrupt, cowboy prosecutors…twenty-three cases involved the use of jailhouse informants, who often receive compensation for their testimony that renders a special treatment or leniency for their own sentences and sometimes involves monetary remuneration.

The US media tells people that things have never been better in America. And indeed, from the point of view of some 20 percent of population, this is true: the stock market is setting records, profits are high, America is held up as the model of profit-making efficiency and entrepreneurship by every compradors in the world.
Then, why, under conditions of such apparent economic success, does the state feel the continued need to poison, gas, electrocute, hang, and shoot people?
The most basic reason is the staggering level of inequality in the United States.
Graphs representing the gap between rich and poor, on the one hand, and the application of the death penalty, on the other, would show the same sharp incline in parallel.
The overwhelming majority of those on death row—black, Hispanic, and white—are poor and uneducated and if they had million dollars, like O.J.Simpson, they wouldn’t be where they are today.

The recourse to capital punishment is a symptom of social failure. American society is incapable of educating and training its citizens for productive lives, of stamping out disease, of putting a decent roof over the heads of millions, of providing a healthy and safe environment, but it is ever so effective at locking people up (two millions) and dreaming up inventive ways of putting them to death.
Those who zealously champion the expansion of prisons, police and death penalty are inevitably vociferous supporters of the status quo where in America everybody is given “opportunity” to get the pie in the sky and the poor deserve to suffer from its defective genes,--the epitome of the callous indifference to the suffering of their fellow citizens.
The police has to break the rules because the system could not protect society from the demons who were rising from under, and the gangs use more deadly forces because they can’t take chances in pursuing their goals.
American society has gotten to the point where people become less and less shocked by any kind of violence and they sanction the myth of violent solutions (incarceration and death penalty) as the only and ultimate solution, even though their system may send innocent people to the death chamber.

"I live a life by hour": Rupert Murdoch

“I live a life by hour”
January 28, 2003

In his 1967 book, “Where do we go from here?”, the late black civil right leader, Martin Luther King lamented: “when the constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was 60 percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is 50 percent of a person.”

In addition, blacks were generally categorized in four groups by the density of darkness in their skin: Negro, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon (mustee).
Negro: a dark-skinned black.
Mulatto: an offspring between a black and a white.
Quadroon: a person 1/4 black ancestry, that is, the offspring of a mulatto and a white.
Octoroon (mustee): a person 1/8 black ancestry, the offspring of a quadroon and a white.

In another word, the Black American was not a full person and the density of swarthiness played a significant role in their social status that determined the comfort of life.

There were another sub-group human species in the US, called the Native Indians, whose properties were decimated and lives were corralled in “reservations” by the Founding Fathers of the US.

The US President Ted Roosevelt said publicly: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe 9 out of 10 are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely in the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indians.”
History shows clearly that the US Governments have failed make good on the treaties that they promised to the Native American Indians whose population shrank from 12 million to 2 million, and they are invisible anywhere in the US except in the pigsty called “the Indian Reserve”.

In the meantime, there were very rich people in the US at the expense of those above people, and now this “Equestrian Club”, one percent of the US population, hold over 40 percent of total US wealth.
Their greed knows no bound, they demand more showers of subsidies, tax cuts, and freebies from the public coffer and they almost and always got what they want.
When people complain about the inequality and mistreatment in comparison with the affluent one percent Americans, their President scolds them: “it is a class warfare.”

In this environment, who wants to die prematurely or says goodbye happily to the loved ones, if you belong to the “Equestrian Club”?
You would love to count your life by hours and hate to see the hours tick by

One of them is the Chairman of News Corp. (Fox TV and other media outlet in US, Australia and HongKong): a Jewish media baron Rupert Murdoch recently was married to a young (more younger than half of his 70-years age) Chinese girl, Wendy Deng (an anchorwoman at Star TV in Hongkong) and fathered a baby from her, after dumping his wife of almost half-a-century marriage.

The following is an exchange between television personality Charlie Rose and Rupert Murdoch that was transcribed by Amy Wallace, a senior writer at Los Angeles Magazine.
Mr. Murdoch appeared to be extremely unhappy about his aging process that deprives his boundless opportunity to exploit other lesser mortals, dismissing the universal reality that every mortal perishes eventually.

Charlie Rose: March 11, you will be seventy.
Rupert Murdoch: Pretty soon.

Rose: How do you feel about that?
Murdoch: Pretty bad. I have lived for 613,000 hours. 201,000 of them were in childhood, youth, and thoroughly sort of inadequate education.

That leaves 412,000. You take a third of that for sleep and rest. So I’m down to 275,000 hours. I take out a month for holidays, at least half a weekend, family time, evenings, etc., and you are down to at the very maximum a couple hundred thousand hours I’ve been at work.

And then I go.
What have I done? How much time have I wasted in endless meetings with no decisions? Industry conference? Company conferences? Studying over long reports? Yeah, I guess I have wasted at least half my life.

So that gets me down to perhaps 100,000 useful hours.
Pretty bad figures.
So if I am pretty healthy and have a normal life expectancy—I am a bit optimistic—I’ve got another 175,000 hours to go, of which maybe I can spend 75,000 productively at work. All right? Or 70,000, say.

One of his media outlets, Fox TV, has been flooding their screen day and night with war-mongering rhetoric and power politics that fans flames of war against the so-called “axis of evil” nations, and the boss is lamenting in his jeremiad that his days are numbered in such a short hours that he wouldn’t be able to achieve his goal—a perpetual war that brings the profit.

He seemed to wish not only to live an endless life, but also to believe that he is somewhat entitled, like a child, to have a longer life because he is rich, powerful, and just married to a young chick.
What makes his mega-ego occupy his teeny brain full of extra-terrestrial fantasy?
Is his life more worth a grain of salt than the poor black’s, Native Indian’s, Joe Blow’s, or the Abudullah’s in Middle East?

The final comfort is that death makes us all equals no matter whether you count your life by years, hours, minutes, or seconds. The trouble is that Mr. Murdoch will never accept this basic formula of life until he takes his last breath and goes away, desperately holding all his money tight in his trembling hands, like a rapacious Jewish Wall Street banker.

By the way, have you ever thought, like Mr. Murdoch, that your life should be counted by hours not by years?

Driving While Chink (2)

DWC: Driving While Chink (Chinese + South Korean) Part II
May 5, 2000

Last January, I have written an article about a pack of despicable South Koreans from Seoul who were caught red handed while they were sneaking through the porous Canada-US border, and their compatriots living legally in the region were frequently harassed by US INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) agents and other police authorities in the vicinity of the border randomly pulled over to check their ID simply because they have an oriental complexion.

Frequency of the harassment has been aggravated after a boatload of Chinese modern-day coolies has arrived at the shore of the Pacific region in pursuit of pie in the American sky, and since then, the border control has been intensified to catch the organized gangs of smugglers from Hong Kong.

As once a whore, always a whore, the INS has caught another batch of smuggling ring in the elaborate sting operation, and this time the ring was organized and coordinated with the friendly association between Chinese-Canadians and Korean-Canadians.
The ringleader of this smuggler group was a South Korean named Tong (Thomas) Choe in Toronto Canada who was assisted by his friend, named Hyo Young Park in Winnipeg Canada.
A Chinese-Canadian, who lives in Toronto and has family of pianist wife and college-bound three daughters, was functioned as mule to carry the Chinese migrants through the Detroit airport with the help of his two daughters who speak in English fluently.

In the sting operation, the INS agents have posed as corrupt and willing co-conspirators to provide the US entry visa to the ringleader in return for $250,000US, and Mr. Choe and Park were busted in the motel room at the Detroit Airport while handing over the cash and 400 Chinese pass ports for visa stamp to the hands of INS agents. (They would be in the clink for 15 to 25 years with the fine of $500,000 when convicted).
Three Chinese mules were bailed out immediately (they must have a good attorney and lots of money) and ordered to remain in Detroit area.

According to the South Korean government, there have been over 1,000 South Korean criminals at large worldwide and most of them were hiding in the North American region.
Whenever the stories of human smugglers appear in the Canadian or US news media, Orientals, whether Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, or some Filipino, are Chinks in toto, becoming the target of derision and hatred.
Truly, victims in this situation are surely Japanese people who most of other Chinks hate so much, because no Japs attempt to smuggle into any country.
The trouble is that most of South Korean news media would not voluntarily report the stories of ugly Korean immigrants, and that’s why their chutzpah thrives on with abandon and in perpetuity.




Driving While Chink
January 27, 2000

In the United States, DWI, DWA, DWB, DWM, and other abbreviatory form of the word or phrase are widely used to emphasize and call to attention to the general public and I would like to coin another contracted form of DWC (C+K) in order for the South Koreans to grasp what’s going on here, the Land of Oz.

DWI: Driving While Intoxicated – well known among many beer-guzzling fellas and it does not warrant further explanation.
DWA: Driving While Arab – during the Millennium hoopla, the US government including ‘Adolph’ Jiuliani administration in NY city drummed up the possible terrorist attack in the region and encouraged American citizens to rat on any suspicious activities of strangers and they were on the war path to arrest aliens especially with Arab complexion until the business community complained that the excessive fear-mongering may pour the cold water over the consumer spending.
DWB: Driving While Black – for average South Koreans, DWB appears to be foreign and hard to swallow, but the predicament that many Black Americans have to face in daily basis is prevalent in every corner of the white neighborhood where any colored man driving expensive car like BMW, LEXUS, or Mercedes Benz have the higher chance of being pulled over by the cops with absolutely no reason whatsoever except the driver is black.
DWM: Driving While Mexican – recently, Immigration and Naturalization Service in the US Government has engaged in massive campaign to interdict hundreds of Central American wetbacks who attempt to cross the Mexican-US border, and many Mexican-descent Americans are randomly stopped by the Border Patrol from INS in the Southern Texas towns. Among them are judges, mayors, councilmen, and even Border Patrol agents themselves whose appearance resembles dark skin or vehicles hold multiple occupants.
DWC (C+K): Driving While Chink (Chinese and Korean) – there has been an onslaught of illegal refugees arriving at the Pacific side of Canada and US from mainland China, the human cargo that takes months journey in decrepit vessels or containers where many human life perishes. When they arrive in American territory, they were hustled into the detention camp like a pack of runaway cattles and immediately proceeded for the deportation order. On the other hand, when they call Canadian port of entry, they were given foods, health inspection, and released to the community group while their claims take due process and they are free to roam or cross the US border to disappear into the din of China Town in New York City.
As far as the South Koreans are concerned, they have the luxury of flying trans-oceanic journey on Boeing 747 due to the visa exemption program between S.Korean and Canadian government.
However, when they try to cross the border to join their compatriots in Queens in NY City, they are on the same boat with Chinese refugee claimants. The Korean chutzpah has no place in the smuggling operation that they would be jam packed like sardines under the truck bed, rickety boat or narrow bunk bed in the Recreational Vehicles.
Due to the exponential growth of the smuggling operations, many Asian-Americans and Canadians who travel across the border are subjected to be inspected more frequently and in some cases harassed by INS agents who judge them as Chink no matter who they are Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, or Filipinos.
The US embassy in Seoul reported that the visa rejection rate in South Korea is down from 15 percent in 1997 to 10 percent that is well above the 3 percent rejection rate, in which visa exemption program might be considered for the South Koreans. I wonder why the proud South Koreans are not dare to request the reciprocity in visa requirement to the US government, as their neighboring Japanese travelers are entertained with the visa exemption. Would it be too far-fetched to think that 4.3 million, 10 percent of South Korean population, may end up hiding in the Korean colonies in the United States if they were given the visa exemption?

I would like to introduce a despicable news story from Toronto Star in January 26 2000 that 10 South Koreans including two minors were caught in illegal border crossing scheme masterminded by another Korean resident in the US and paid $30,000US in fee. Shame on you, South Koreans!

Two South Korean youths have been returned to Canada after allegedly being among 10 who snuck into the United States at Niagara Falls hidden under hydraulically operated beds in a recreational vehicle.
“It was something we don’t normally see here,” said Mike McLaughlin, U.S. immigration’s assistant director for investigations in the Buffalo district.
Ten South Koreans, ranging in age from 13 to 37, hid in the hollow bottoms of twin beds in the back of the vehicle as it entered at the Whirlpool Bridge in Niagara Falls about 5 a.m. Sunday, U.S. court documents said.
Two youths, two men and six women had arrived at Pearson International Airport late Saturday night and got into the RV with New York license plates, driven by another Korean, McLaughlin said.
Tow members of the group later told officials they were charged $3,000 for the illegal entry and trip to New York, court documents said.
At the border, U.S. officials closely examined the beds, which had metal bases, but could find no proof anyone was under them. They allowed the driver, who had a Korean passport and U.S. alien registration card, to enter.
U.S. agents secretly followed him. He halted at a truck stop on the New York Thruway about 80 kilometers east of Buffalo. Their agents saw two women walking with him to a coffee counter, the documents said.
They arrested the trio and found the rest in the back of the van. All 10 passengers had Korean passports and none spoke English, the court document said.
Kyung Chol Shin is charged with alien smuggling. Two juveniles, 13 and 16, were not charged.
Joo Hyun Kim, Kyung Hee Lee, Sun Young Lee, Ki Bbeum Yang, Dal Jae Mun and Ji Young Kim pleaded guilty to attempting to enter the United States illegally. They were sentenced to time served and were to be returned to Canada today.
Hey Ran Jung and Huan Mook Lee are charged with entering the country without an inspection and attempted illegal entry.
Immigration Canada spokesperson Giovanni Gatti said officials here had been informed of the arrests. She could not discuss specifics about the cases.