Tag: slavery

Senators Propose To Head Off ‘Automatic’ Draft Registration by Repealing Selective Service

On May 14th, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rand Paul (R-KY), and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)  reintroduced the Selective Service Repeal Act, S. 4537).

This bill already has the endorsement of dozens of peace and antiwar groups, draft resisters, religious organizations, antiwar feminists, and civil libertarians.

This bipartisan bill to abolish the Selective Service System (SSS) and end preparations for a military draft has been proposed in each session of Congress since 2019, but has yet to get a hearing or a floor vote in either the House or Senate.

The timing of this bill is more critical than ever: Unless Congress takes action before December 18, 2026, the SSS will start collecting data from other Federal agencies to try to register potential draftees “automatically”. The White House is currently reviewing regulations to implement that change in the draft law, which was buried in the annual defense (sic) bill enacted in December 2025.

The garbage-in, garbage-out process of automated and involuntary registration won’t produce a list that’s complete, accurate, or fit for the purpose of reliably and provably delivering induction orders. But it will allow war planners to continue to pretend that a draft is available as a fallback, so they don’t have to consider whether enough Americans will fight the wars they are planning, even if they prove bloodier than expected. And it will produce a list that’s vulnerable to misuse and weaponization.

“If a war is worth fighting, Congress will vote to declare it and people will volunteer”, Sen. Paul said in in reintroducing the Selective Service Repeal Act. According to Sen. Wyden, “The Selective Service is an outdated program that costs millions of taxpayer dollars to prepare for a military draft that Americans don’t want or need. There is no need to replicate the same draft that sent two million unwilling young men to war 50 years ago.”

The attempt at “automatic” draft registration will inevitably be a fiasco. The only way to head it off is to end draft registration entirely. That won’t happen unless Congress feels public pressure — soon.

In the past, the  Selective Service Repeal Act has received significant bipartisan support in the House, but as of now it’s been reintroduced only in the Senate in the current Congress. Opponents of the draft should push their Representatives to sponsor a House version as soon as possible.

The Selective Service Repeal Act is unlikely to be enacted as a standalone bill, especially in the current Congress. It probably stands a chance of approval only if it is included in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2027. So it’s critical to find members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees who will introduce the Selective Service Repeal Act as an amendment to the NDAA, while the NDAA is still in committee.

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“Digital Enslavement” Is A Subtle Weapon Of Social Subordination And Global Control

In a recent Buddhist retreat in Lima, Peru, about 200 participants were urged to abstain for the three-day retreat from our enslavement screens, “smart” phones, computers and television.

Difficult to say how many really followed the advice, but many did.

What was amazing is that during the first day, ignoring constant phone notifications was not easy for the many. But consciously resisting it made it easier. And the following days, we were hardly thinking of them anymore. The days were filled with meditation and different types of spiritual exercises… the digital age was peacefully removed into a corner.

Unfortunately, after the retreat, the hide-out corner became lively again and took up again most of our attention, in “angst” of what we may have missed during the highly divine retreat. Spirituality must have gradually evaporated again… and what we call “reality” kicked in.

Interestingly, what we call “reality” is a fake, indoctrinated reality. Over years we were told that technical advances, or as the World Economic Forum (WEF’s) Great Reset calls it, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is a concept describing how emerging technologies are blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds. It fundamentally alters how we live, work, and relate to one another.

Sending messages, videos, and silly jokes, rather than talking to each other, interchanging with physically presence. Along with this brainwashing propaganda, we were drugged with the belief that working from home is full of advantages. It is an outright lie.

These “work-from-home” benefits are geared to separate us from one another so that physical interaction is avoided, making us more manipulable, controllable and dispensable, capable of being replaced by robots, and eventually by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

And mind you, the 4IR was illegally approved by the United Nations (UN). There was a not-well-known Cooperation Agreement signed between the WEF and the UN in Geneva in June 2019 that established an unequivocal link between the UN (created by 51 nations (today 193 member nations) in October 1945 in San Francisco) and the world’s by far richest NGO, the WEF, established in Geneva Switzerland.

The UN was created to guarantee peace in the world, to make sure that no more wars, especially World Wars (WW), that would ravage planet earth. That principle is anchored in the UN Charter. The WEF is owned and run by BlackRock, the world’s largest financial asset manager, controlling together with Vanguard, an interchangeable partner, and StateStreet, a close associate, some 25 to 30 trillion US dollars equivalent in assets, controlling literally every sector of vital industries and services, like energy, food, transport, health but also of the world’s weapon industrial complex. It is a blatant contradiction to the UN Charter. The UN is controlled by financial behemoths, with powers way beyond BlackRock.

The 4IR is, therefore, not a human-friendly program. It is a global control mechanism, that could be right out of Orwell’s “1984” – but way more complex, dangerous and deadly.

Unlike previous revolutions, 4IR is not just about smart machines and systems; it is characterized by a lightning-fast convergence of diverse technologies. The WEF highlights several core pillars:

  • Digital: Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and blockchain.
  • Physical: Autonomous vehicles, 3D printing (additive manufacturing), and advanced materials.
  • Biological: Gene editing (CRISPR), synthetic biology, and neurotechnology.

CRISPR stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” It is a technology that research scientists use to selectively modify the DNA of living organisms including humans.

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UK State Green Energy Project Refuses to Rule Out Use of Slave Labour

The left-wing Labour Party government in Britain has refused to confirm that it is not using slave labour in its publicly owned green energy project, despite having passed a law last year committing to do so.

The push in the UK to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and replace them with supposedly cleaner forms of energy may be coming with a hefty human toll, with it being unclear if the state-funded Great British Energy (GBE) project is using forced labour in places like China to prop up its so-called renewable sector.

Following pressure from campaigners, after initially baulking at the idea of banning slavery from its key green initiative, the Labour government adopted legislation last year committing GB Energy to ensure its “supply chains are free of forced labour” as it seeks to build a “new energy infrastructure using ethical supply chains.”

However, this week, the government appeared to admit the reality that it is nearly impossible to guarantee that any large-scale purchases of solar panels and other green products are free from slave labour, given the dominance that Communist China has over the industry.

A government spokesman said, per the Daily Mail, that GB Energy has “strict procurement controls in place” for solar panels, but admitted that it could not make any guarantees, only saying that the measures will look to root out forced labour from supply chains “as far as possible”.

The tacit admission of continued reliance on slavery sparked backlash, with Britain’s independent anti-slavery commissioner, Eleanor Lyons, saying: “The race to net zero should never come at the expense of people forced to produce goods in horrendous conditions, working endless hours and under constant surveillance.

“The Government promised taxpayers their money would not fund products linked to forced labour. They should not abandon that commitment.”

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IDF warns of severe personnel shortages, last window to solve crisis with legislation

The Israel Defense Forces on Sunday warned of a steadily worsening shortage of combat soldiers in the standing military, high burnout among troops, and fears that the reserve army could “collapse” if necessary legislation is not advanced by the government.

According to the IDF, a bill being advanced by the government that would ostensibly increase military conscription in the Haredi community, but ultimately enshrine blanket exemptions from military service, will not provide an adequate solution to the military’s personnel needs in the short term.

The coalition’s draft exemption bill is widely seen as legally iffy and loophole-laden and has generated intense resistance even among members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. The government has been working on advancing it despite repeated warnings from the IDF that it needs more troops.

If the bill is passed, and even if all its recruitment targets are met, only several hundred additional Haredi combat soldiers are expected to enlist per year, which the military has said would not answer its current needs.

The military has repeatedly warned that it is currently short some 12,000 standing army soldiers, a gap that it said would only expand due to the shortening of mandatory service at the start of 2027, unless the government passes legislation addressing the personnel shortages.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir has several times urged the government to again extend mandatory military service for men to 36 months, after it was shortened to 30 months in August 2024. The government has so far refused to approve this move.

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For-Profit Immigrant Detention Centers Exploiting Prison Labor With $1 Per Day Wages

As President Donald Trump continues his mass detention and deportation agenda and expands the use of privately owned immigrant prisons, with more than 60,000 people detained across the country, the profits of private contractors like the GEO Group and CoreCivic are skyrocketing—and a new report by a government watchdog reveals one method the multibillion-dollar firms have of extracting profits from detainees.

Public Citizen researcher Douglas Pasternak wrote in a report released Wednesday that approximately 50% of immigrants who are detained for more than a few days end up in the government’s so-called Voluntary Work Program (VWP), earning just $1 per day—12.5 cents per hour—while they keep the detention centers running.

At facilities like Adelanto Detention Center in Adelanto, California, run by the GEO Group, and CoreCivic’s Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, detainees work as many as 14 hours in a day for just $1—cooking, cleaning, performing maintenance work, and completing other labor essential to the facilities’ operations—and in many cases are forced to use their meager wages only at commissaries also run by the corporations.

“This entire $1-a-day pay scheme is economically unjustifiable, fundamentally unfair, and morally reprehensible,” said Pasternak in a statement.

The companies are notorious for price gouging, forcing the so-called “voluntary worker” to work full-time for 11 days to afford a tube of Sensodyne toothpaste—priced at $11.02 at Stewart Detention Center, compared to just $5.20 on Amazon.

“At these rates, it may take a detainee more than three days of work to purchase a can of tuna fish or more than two days of work to purchase a bar of soap,” said Public Citizen.

The business model has saved the contractors millions of dollars and allowed them to reap massive profits.

Former CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger made $7.2 million in compensation last year before retiring, and the company’s profits grew from $68.9 million in 2024 to $116.5 million last year. Both CoreCivic and the GEO Group reported well over $2 billion in revenue in 2025.

When it was sued over its use of the VWP in Washington State, the GEO Group testified that it would have had to pay 85 full-time employees at the state’s minimum wage—$17.13 per hour—if it hadn’t used the labor of detainees. Hiring workers would have cost the company over $3 million per year, but instead the GEO Group spent just over $22,000 paying imprisoned immigrants $1 per hour.

“The private contractors running immigrant detention centers are pocketing millions of dollars in profits as tens of thousands of detainees struggle to afford to purchase a bar of soap or a tube of toothpaste,” said Pasternak. “The dichotomy between the contractors’ profits and the detainees’ pay is outrageous.”

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Milton Friedman’s All-Volunteer Military

Milton Friedman was one of the most influential leaders of the libertarian and classical liberal movement in the second half of the 20th century. A staunch advocate for applying free-market principles to government policy, he served as Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago from 1946 until his retirement in 1980.

In 1976, Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics—during the time your columnist was an undergraduate at the university. Many of his students became known as the “Chicago Boys,” who helped introduce free-market reforms across Chile and much of Latin America. Today, President Javier Milei of Argentina stands as one of their prominent intellectual heirs.

A prolific writer, Friedman often collaborated with his wife, Rose, whom he met as a graduate student in economics at Chicago in the 1930s. Together they produced two of his most influential books:

1. Capitalism and Freedom (1962); and
2. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (1980), which was later adapted into a popular PBS television series.

Both works championed the idea that voluntary exchange and market mechanisms could deliver public services more effectively than government mandates—including areas such as education (charter schools) and national defense.

Proposing an All-Volunteer Army

Friedman’s most impactful public policy achievement was his long campaign for an all-volunteer military. He argued that instead of conscripting young men, the government should hire willing volunteers at market wages. While the Navy, Marines, and Air Force had always relied on volunteers, the threat of being drafted into the Army often drove young men to enlist in those other branches.

Friedman maintained there was no moral or practical justification for the draft. He viewed it as inequitable, arbitrary, and deeply intrusive—interfering with young men’s freedom to shape their own lives. Economically, he believed it was ultimately more expensive than a volunteer force that paid competitive wages.

In 1971, Congress held hearings on the transition to an all-volunteer force. Friedman testified in favor. Opposing him was General William Westmoreland, former commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam (1964–1968), who had a distinguished record including combat heroism in World War II, graduation from the Army War College, and an MBA from Harvard. During a break, Westmoreland approached Friedman and asked, “How would you like to be defended by mercenaries?”

Friedman’s swift reply: “Better than being defended by slaves!”

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EV Pollution: Converting the World to EVs Would Be an Environmental Disaster

In 2024, President Biden said he wanted 56% of all new cars sold in the United States to be electric vehicles by 2032. California Governor Gavin Newsom similarly mandated that 35% of new 2026 model cars sold in the state be zero-emissions vehicles, rising to 68% in 2030 and 100% in 2035.

The European Union announced in 2023 that, from 2035 onward, all new cars coming onto the market could not emit any CO2. The United Kingdom similarly announced a 2030 ban on the sale of new diesel and petrol cars.

The reaction from the U.S. auto industry was blunt. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation said it “will take a miracle” for all states following California’s rules to reach 100% new zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035.

They are correct. The environmental impact would be devastating. The people claiming to save the world with electric cars could end up destroying it.

Replacing every vehicle on Earth with an EV, all 1.5 to 1.6 billion of them, would be effectively impossible. There are not enough minerals to manufacture all of the batteries required. In addition, there is not enough global processing capacity, and such a transition would require incredible amounts of labor. Many of these minerals are already being mined by children and by workers laboring under hazardous and toxic conditions that amount to modern slavery.

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It’s Time For Reparations For Taxpayers Forced To Pay Reparations

Reparations have become quite popular among the “white guilt” liberal set who insist the rest of us pay for crimes 21st century Americans did not commit. The redistribution of wealth schemes driven by identity politics are popping up in leftist-led cities across the country. They seem to be making critical race theory charlatans and professional race-baiters a lot of money while sowing more division and discrimination.

How about reparations for taxpayers forced to pay unjust reparations?    

Take Evanston, Illinois, for example. The Chicago suburb teeming with self-loathing, wealthy white liberals and misplaced Big 10 football and basketball teams in 2019 became the first U.S. city to launch a reparations program. The city of some 75,000 souls has committed $20 million to the cause of assuaging its guilt for past transgressions of segregating and redlining black residents. 

The money is supposed to compensate today’s black residents for past racial injustice. The recipients were not enslaved nor are they necessarily victims of discrimination. But they get a hefty check, regardless. 

‘Incredible’

In its latest round of redistribution with one-sided representation, Evanston announced in February that it will be issuing $25,000 individual payments to 44 people, according to the city’s Reparations Committee. The money, Fox News reported, comes from $276,588 in Evanston’s real estate transfer tax, a collection from the sale of property in the college town. The city also levies a tax on cannabis sales, although that revenue stream reportedly hasn’t been sufficient to meet the reparations wish list.

City leaders would also like to strap a tax on Delta-8 THC products —  weed lite, if you will — to keep the reparations train rolling. 

Last June, the Reparations Committee announced it had doled out a total of $6.36 million “to ancestors and direct descendants of the Black Evanston community,” the Evanston Roundtable reported. 

At the time, Tashiek Kerr, assistant to the city manager, (not to be confused with the assistant to the regional manager), said Evanston officials had met with “116 out of 126 residents in the direct descendants group,” the newspaper reported. “These residents are related to Black Evanston residents who lived in Evanston from 1919 through 1969.” 

A total of nearly $3 million was disbursed to those residents, with another 135 recipients sharing $3.5 million, all black applicants who claim to have faced discriminatory housing practices. The payments are supposed to be used for housing assistance — mortgage payments, down payments, home repairs and the like. 

The committee’s chairwoman, Robin Rue Simmons, described the funding totals as “incredible.” The audience burst into applause, the Roundtable reported. 

Here’s the phrase that pays: 

“However, recipients in the next round are wondering when it will be their turn. Rue Simmons said it is undetermined due to funding,” according to the newspaper. 

And so it goes with the history of reparation proposals and plans. Like all leftist money grabs, it’s never enough. (*See the expansion of welfare, affirmative action, the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977”, etc.) 

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How the Slaveholding Founders Really Felt About Slavery

The Declaration of Independence accused the king and Parliament of Great Britain of “exciting domestic insurrections” among the half-million people enslaved in the American colonies. This was a reference to the November 1775 proclamation by Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, that he would free “all indentured servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to rebels)” who were “able and willing to bear arms” against the American revolutionaries.

Today’s readers often consider it hypocritical that the Founders denounced Britain for offering black Americans the same freedom for which they were themselves fighting. Some of the revolutionary era’s readers thought the same thing. In 1776, the London writer John Lind published a pamphlet responding line by line to the Declaration, and in it he ridiculed the patriots: “Is it for them to complain of the offer of freedom held out to these wretched beings? of the offer of reinstating them in that equality which, in this very paper, is declared to be the gift of God to all?“

What Lind overlooked was that Americans did not deny that it was self-contradictory for them to hold slaves while proclaiming liberty to be every person’s birthright. On the contrary, their embarrassment over that inconsistency had been particularly glaring when Virginians drafted their Declaration of Rights in June 1776. Thomas Jefferson went even further, admitting that slaves were justified in violently rebelling against their oppressors. The thought that God’s “justice cannot sleep forever” made him “tremble,” he said.

But the real story of the “domestic insurrections” passage is more complicated than modern readers typically realize. The best point to begin understanding it is October 1769, when a poor man named Samuel Howell approached Jefferson, then a 26-year-old lawyer practicing in Williamsburg, to ask for help in defending his freedom against the claim that he was a slave.

Howell’s great-grandfather was a black man who’d had a baby girl with a white woman. Under Virginia laws of that time, the daughter was bound to servitude until the age of 31, and during those years, she gave birth to Howell’s mother. She, too, was enslaved until the age of 31, and during that time, she gave birth to Howell himself. The owner of Howell’s mother and grandmother, thinking that Virginia law also rendered Howell a slave until the age of 31, then sold him.

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Revealed: Greens hopeful who is calling for the UK to pay slavery reparations is a descendant of slave traders

A Green Party candidate pushing Britain to pay trillions of pounds in slavery reparations is descended from a Nigerian royal family that traded slaves.

Antoinette Fernandez is the ‘reparations officer’ for the party’s Global Majority Greens group which campaigns for ‘racial and environmental justice’.

However, she is also the daughter of a billionaire oil baron who was one of Africa’s richest men.

The local election candidate has campaigned for British taxpayers to pay reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and said that politicians who oppose it ‘show an appalling arrogance’.

Ms Fernandez – who is standing for Zack Polanski’s party in London – is the daughter of the Queen Mother of Lagos and is given the title ‘princess’ in the Nigerian press.

Her mother is Abiola Dosunmu and her father is Antonio Deinde Fernandez, a late business magnate and UN ambassador who is said to have made his fortune in oil, gas and mining and had a reported net worth of $8.7billion (£6.5billion) when he died in 2015.

Through her mother, the Green politician is a descendant of the Obas (kings) of Lagos, some of whom historians describe as ‘major’ slave traders that made ‘lucrative commissions from slave deals’.

One of Ms Fernandez’s ancient relatives personally owned 1,400 slaves and another even brought back slaves that had been sent to Brazil to build houses in Lagos, according to one historian.

The campaigner’s family accrued wealth through the slave trade which they used to purchase ‘velvet clothes, royal umbrellas, hats and stylish robes’, the account adds.

On Monday the Conservatives and Reform UK rounded on Ms Fernandez, branding her the ‘ultimate hypocrite’ for demanding hard-up Britons shell out for reparations.

But the Green Party said that reporting Ms Fernandez’s lineage is ‘racist’ and a ‘bad-faith attempt to undermine the case for reparative justice’.

Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and then spent millions of pounds – billions in today’s money – and thousands of sailors’ lives putting an end to the practice worldwide.

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