Wednesday, October 15, 2008

ACORN And Google Earth

The Google Earth product has an embedded layer that shows "places of interest." Usually they are the usual tourist spots, but leave it to our friends at Google to turn even this into a political statement. A places of interest flag near New Orleans looks like this:



The little flag reads, "Every Human Has Right."

When selected, the unsuspecting google user get hit with the following Marxist rhetoric.

Freedom from Want
Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family.” Article 22 guarantees the right to social security. Article 23 affirms the right to work, as well as to “equal pay for equal work” and “just and favourable remuneration.
Sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Stephen Bradberry
Living Wage Advocate and Director of New Orleans ACORN — United States
Stephen Bradberry is the head organizer of Louisiana ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN has been active in communities of color for more than 30 years. Bradberry has served in low and moderate-income neighborhoods in Louisiana for more than a decade. His chapter of the national community group, ACORN, has more than 10,000 member families and works specifically in the area of Living Wages, Environmental Justice and Voting rights.

At ACORN, Bradberry has worked extensively on issues of environmental and financial justice. He directs a staff of community organizers who go door to door throughout the state of Louisiana to mobilize residents to work for social change. Under his direction, the organization ran an 18 month campaign to turn the City of New Orleans planning process 180 degrees from turning the lower ninth ward into wetlands to being a pilot neighborhood for the rebuilding process.


Google has two other "Human Rights" special interest flags in North America. One for Lucas Benitez.

Labor Rights Activist for Farmers — Mexico
By educating and organizing fellow migrant farmworkers, Lucas Benitez helped secure the first wage increase for tomato pickers in 20 years, exposed and stopped two slavery rings, and launched a Labor Action Rights program that collected nearly $100,000 in back wages. He organized a successful boycott of the fast-food chain Taco Bell, called off in 2005 when the company agreed to address the wages and working conditions of farmworkers in the Florida tomato industry.

"Human rights are universal, and if we as farmworkers are to one day indeed enjoy equal rights, the same rights all other workers in this country are guaranteed, this agreement must only be a beginning," Benitez said when announcing the end of the boycott. "To make those rights truly universal, other leaders of the fast-food industry and the supermarket industry must join us on this path toward social responsibility."

The other is for Craig Kielburger in Toronto, who says "We've globalized technology; we've globalized commerce, we've globalized culture," says Kielburger. "We haven't globalized compassion; it's the one that's left."

There are no Human Rights flags in Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea. But there are two for Israel.

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