They are used, and become the fodder for experimentation, exploitation, maiming and death at the hands of governments, pharmaceutical companies, chemical companies, agri-business, as well as other assorted corporate bloodsuckers.

In the name of providing for their families they go into holes deep underground and they suffer the hell of the darkness and dust to live out their lives coughing and hacking until their lungs give out. Or, they die underground as a result of the callousness of corporations wishing to maximize profits while minimizing safety implementation.

These men and women not only fight the poisons underground; they also fight the poisons administered by uncaring corporations, as well as an even more unfeeling government. A government bought and controlled by the conglomerates whose only concern is the bottom line; and death is nothing more than a blip on the profit and loss screen.

Men and women sell their plasma twice a week to buy a pack of cigarettes, or a bottle of muscatel, or a crack rock. Or from behind the concrete walls and barbed wire of the nation’s private prisons they sell their bodies -- and minds -- for experimentation, to gather a few dollars for spending at the company store.

So too, within the confines of the psychiatric wards of this country they become guinea pigs, spinning within the wheel of Big Pharma. The entire Third World becomes a testing ground for genetically engineered food, while the multi-national chemical companies douse the land and inhabitants with “new test products.”

Within the confines of hidden, top-secret installations around the globe, tests on human subjects -- from torture to physiological degradation -- occurs in the name of National Security, medical research, or some new and arcane acronym just coined by the Department of Homeland Terror and its corporate cohorts.

We witness the social experimentation of dispersal of the entire minority population of the City of New Orleans. A deliberate, planned form of social genocide. One can only wonder what other forms of racial obliteration Bush & Company have in store.

Corporate America becomes positively orgasmic witnessing the death and destruction occurring in that large experimental laboratory that is Iraq. New weapons, new and agonizing ways to die, and the largest group of captive specimens on which to try out all of the newest torture devices.

The corporate bloodsuckers have become more emboldened, they have now been given license to experiment openly, as it were. Not since the Tuskegee “experiment,” in which the United States government for 40 years infected whole generations of black Americans with syphilis, has such a large government sanctioned lab been opened up.

The Environmental Protection Agency has given carte blanche license to Corporate America to once again experiment openly on American citizens. Pesticide testing on human subjects.

It’s always the poor, isn’t it? Or the feeble, the infirm, incarcerated, homeless or other so-called ‘dregs of society.’

For the families of 60 children in Duval County, Florida, their remuneration will consist of children’ clothes, a camcorder and $970. All they need do for this government/corporate largesse is eat, sleep and breathe a steady diet of pesticide. Which rhymes with homicide, genocide and suicide.

From the coalmines of West Virginia to the farm fields of Florida and elsewhere, Bush & Company can murder with impunity. Not content with slaughtering men. women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan, George W. now wants to decimate those he sees as ‘undesirables’ in this country.

Encouraged by his successes in New Orleans he is ready to cleanse the country of the less fortunate. Like the mad doctors and exterminators of the Nazi regime, Bush is embarking on his own purification program.

What have we come to in this country people? Where is the outrage? Why aren’t we storming the Bastille -- as it were -- and readying the guillotine? We are cowards, one and all; by virtue of our silence we are co-conspirators in the deaths of the innocents.

You can contact Frank Pitz at fpitz76@hotmail.com.