A list of this week’s guests on This is Hell immediately follows the articles.

Mexico peyote site suffers onslaught of tourists, mining “Pity the peyote, the legendary cactus whose hallucinogenic powers inspired gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson and an entire generation of hippies. This ground-hugging native of Mexico’s northern desert is in danger of disappearing, a victim of psychedelic tourism, silver mining and greenhouse tomatoes. … Consuming peyote is legal in San Luis Potosi, a curious loophole that for decades has drawn thousands of druggies to the desert. As long as no one tries to take the cactus home that would be trafficking and could lead to 10 years or more in prison they’re free to make as many psychedelic trips as they want. Copley News Service (12/9/07)

How America Lost the War on Drugs The author, Ben Wallace-Wells, is a guest on the week’s This is Hell, he writes, “At the headquarters of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington, staffers tacked up a poster with photographs of sixteen of its most wanted men, cartel leaders from across the Andes. Solemnly, ceremoniously, a staffer took a red magic marker and drew an X over Escobar’s portrait. ‘We felt like it was one down, fifteen to go,’ recalls John Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control ­office. ‘There was this feeling that if we got all sixteen, it’s not like the whole thing would be over, but that was a big part of how we would go about winning the War on Drugs.’ … This is the story of how that momentary success turned into one of the most sustained and costly defeats the United States has ever suffered. It is the story of how the most powerful country on Earth, sensing a piñata, swung to hit it and missed.” The Rolling Stone (11/27/07) And yet, another conference on drugs. America, Intoxicated: Conference Tackles Disasters of the Drug War “As of year-end 2006, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported that American jails and prisons held a record-breaking 2,258,983 men and women, and that one in 31 adults are now under some form of correctional supervision. Analysis of the report, released last week by The Sentencing Project revealed that, since 1980, there has been a 1,200 percent increase in the number of people incarcerated for the possession or sale of illicit substances, from 41,100 to at least 532,400 today. At nearly double the rate of men, the number of women in prison has increased by 812 percent in that same time period. In October, the Marijuana Policy Project also reported that marijuana arrests exceeded nearly 830,000 in the same year, resulting in one pot-related arrest every 38 seconds.” AlterNet (12/11/07)

Hear Voices? It May Be an Ad “New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman’s voice right in her ear asking, “Who’s there? Who’s there?” She looked around to find no one in her immediate surroundings. Then the voice said, “It’s not your imagination.” Indeed it isn’t. It’s an ad for “Paranormal State,” a ghost-themed series premiering on A&E this week. The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an “audio spotlight” from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium. The technology, ideal for museums and libraries or environments that require a quiet atmosphere for isolated audio slideshows, has rarely been used on such a scale before. For random passersby and residents who have to walk unwittingly through the area where the voice will penetrate their inner peace, it’s another story.” Ad Age (12/10/07)

Bottled Water Boycotts “From San Francisco to New York to Paris, city governments, high-class restaurants, schools, and religious groups are ditching bottled water in favor of what comes out of the faucet. With people no longer content to pay 1,000 times as much for bottled water, a product no better than water from the tap, a backlash against bottled water is growing.” Earth Policy Institute (12/9/07)

Dioxin report details deception “With the state’s complicity, Dow Chemical Co. has delayed cleanup and misled the public about the dangers of dioxin it dumped decades ago into rivers downstream of its Midland plant, Environmental Protection Agency officials charged in a confidential August internal report. The memo, obtained by the Free Press, also said Dow impeded state efforts to force a cleanup, concealed data and studies, tried to keep documents confidential that should have been made public and insisted on negotiating cleanup details with Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s office, rather than staff of the state Department of Environmental Quality.” Freep (12/7/07)

Canada: Gov’t Urged to Rein in Mining Sector “Canadian mining companies continue to come under scrutiny from civil society organisations for international human rights violations and environmental damage that critics say the Canadian government has done little to check. Canada is a leader in the global mining industry, with almost 60 percent of the world’s listed exploration and mining companies. The government supports some foreign mining activity through Export Development Canada, a federal agency. ‘The situation is pretty grim,’ Joan Kuyek of Mining Watch Canada told IPS. ‘The mining companies are engaging in predatory activities. The laws and regulations don’t stop violations of human rights or protect the environment. There needs to be immediate regulation of mining companies.’” Inter Press Service (12/7/07)

The American Dream is Alive and Well … in Finland! “But new research suggests the United States’ much-ballyhooed upward mobility is a myth, and one that’s slipping further from reality with each new generation. On average, younger Americans are not doing better than their parents did, it’s harder to move up the economic ladder in the United States than it is in a number of other wealthy countries, and a person in today’s work force is as likely to experience downward mobility as he or she is to move up. Moreover, the single greatest predictor of how much an American will earn is how much their parents make. In short, the United States, contrary to popular belief, is not a true meritocracy, and the American worker is getting a bum deal, the worst of both worlds. Not only is a significant portion of the middle class hanging on by the narrowest of threads, not only do fewer working people have secure retirements to look forward to, not only are nearly one in seven Americans uninsured, but working people also enjoy less opportunity to pull themselves up by their bootstraps than those in a number of other advanced economies.” AlterNet (12/11/07

How Bush became a government unto himself’ “President Bush doesn’t like to veto laws,” Abrams began. “He doesn’t have to. Since he took office, he’s been attaching conditions to laws already passed by Congress, allowing him to essentially disobey the will of Congress and dramatically expand his own power.” Bush has issued 1100 signing statements – almost twice as many as all previous presidents put together – often completely reversing the intended effect of legislation. For example, when Congress voted overwhelmingly to ban torture, Bush announced that this would “make it clear to the world that this government does not torture.” Two weeks later, he added a signing statement to the bill that allowed him to ignore it.” MSNBC (12/12/07)

Victim: Gang-Rape Cover-Up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR “A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident. Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” ABC News (12/10/07)

Children are targets of Nigerian witch hunt “Evangelical pastors are helping to create a terrible new campaign of violence against young Nigerians. Children and babies branded as evil are being abused, abandoned and even murdered while the preachers make money out of the fear of their parents and their communities.” The Guardian (12/9/07)

Malaysia: Internal Security Act Flung at Peaceful Protestors An old fear, not felt since the dictatorial Mahathir Mohamad retired as prime minister in 2003, has returned – fear of arrest without trial and indefinite incarceration without being charged. Inter Press Service (1212/07)

The Unholy Trinity: Death Squads, Disappearances and Torture – From Latin America to Iraq “Like rendition, disappearances can’t be carried out without a synchronized, sophisticated, and increasingly transnational infrastructure, which, back in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States was instrumental in creating. In fact, it was in Latin America that the CIA and U.S. military intelligence agents, working closely with local allies, first helped put into place the unholy trinity of government-sponsored terrorism now on display in Iraq and elsewhere: death squads, disappearances, and torture.” TomDispatch.com (12/11/07)

After Clashes, Fear of War on Congo’s Edge “A major confrontation between the Congolese Army and a renegade general is plunging the country back toward war, threatening to undermine the fledgling democratic state and set off a new regional conflict on a scale not seen here in years. The battle between government troops and the rebel general, Laurent Nkunda, turns on many of the same issues that caused Congo’s civil war, which supposedly ended in 2003. It was Africa’s deadliest modern war, fueled by the ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis, which had led to the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Another factor was the quest to control Congo’s unusually rich endowment of minerals and farmland, especially here in North Kivu Province.” New York Times (12/13/07)

Notes
There are many more articles posted at This is Hell’s Headlines from Hell and it is updated during the week.

This will be the last If you knew… of the year. Thanks to everyone for their support over the year.

This Week on This is Hell
On Saturday, December 15th, beginning at 9 AM (central), on WNUR 89.3 FM Evanston/Chicago, broadcasts a live new four hour show that can be listened to live online via WNUR’s web site.

This week’s guests include:

This week’s irregular correspondents include:

For the most recent in rebel uprisings, read Alfonzo Torrez’s The Rebel Communiqué, from across the pond, Isaac Oommen’s East is East.
and for the newest news, Nathan Coe’s Labor News Roundup,
which has articles on Victory Secrets’ slavery secret, Florida farm workers’ near slavery, National Labor Relations Board anti-labor bias, Russian labor’s reemergence, Ukrainian boss blamed for miners’ deaths and Noam Chomsky.

If you knew… is posted as an article on Fridays and is occasionally posted as a blog on weekdays. There is an archive of over 400 blogs that were posted over the last two years. Any comments, suggestions, critiques or leads to articles, are welcomed. ‘If You Knew…’ will soon be announcing some changes, in coordination with the This is Hell website.