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U.S. SENATE VOTES FOR HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE

By Carroll Cox

Move over China, Sudan and Iraq.

You have company in the field of human rights abuses.

Granted, the U.S. way of crushing human dignity is more subtle. Less Bloody. But just as effective, in a drawn-out sort of way, at extinguishing hope and pride and self respect --that special spark that has made possible all human progress and that lives and flourishes only in free societies.

52 U.S. Senators believe that the bottom-feeding sucker fish is more important than human beings.

Every Democratic senator except two "North Dakota's Kent Conrad and Oregon's Ron Wyden" voted to kill an amendment introduced by Oregon Senator Gordon Smith that would have released water withheld by the government to 1,500 parched farms in the Klamath Basin along the California/Oregon border.

Three Republicans that broke ranks and joined the Democrats sealed the thirsty fate of Klamath's once productive farms and communities.

They are Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Rhode Island's Lincoln Chaffee and Illinois' Peter Fitzgerald.

Earlier this year the U.S. Government once again demonstrated its stepped-up propensity in recent times to relegate human beings to a level not only a little "lower than the angels," but also a lot lower than bugs, toads and birds. We have become a throwaway society and it seems to be getting easier all the time for our beloved feds to throw out people and entire cultures that they misguidedly think they don't need any more.

Our government 'needed' the Klamath farmers in 1909 when they persuaded the pioneer settlers to work the Klamath Basin and make it bloom with food for America. As its part of the bargain, the federal government underwrote the water project that made the production possible and signed the contract for water rights that formed a major portion of the farms' value.

Earlier this year the government broke the contract and consigned the farms, the families and their livelihoods and culture to oblivion, based on a junk science opinion from the Fish and Wildlife Service that the questionably endangered sucker fish might need some more water.

Argh..hhh! Only in America.

Even China places a higher value on its family farmers.

As Shakespeare wrote........"you take my life when you take the means whereby I live."

The sucker-supporting senators' those comfortable, pontificating parasites who fret in the abstract about cultures and environments and who live in luxury off the labor of others who build and plant, battle nature and get dirty -- must be very proud of themselves.

Welcome to the new brand of human rights abuse ... Made in the U.S.A.

"What's next? The San Joaquin Valley? Imperial Valley?"

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