Articles
Articles
The Sun Dance
Mark Kodama: It was the summer of 1876. The great white father was demanding that we sell our land to them – land that was not ours to sell – and then move to the reservation – where only hardships and starvation awaited us. The buffalo was dying fast as white hunters shot them on the plain, taking only their skins and leaving their carcasses to rot on the plains. ... The prophet Sitting Bull called for us to resist. He called for us to meet in council. He called for a sun dance. There they would offer themselves to the creator. There the creator through the buffalo would provide answers to them. ... Plains Indians – the Sioux, the Cheyenne and the Arapaho — answered Sitting Bull’s call in great number joining his Hunkpapa Lakota at his camp near the Wolf Mountains...
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May 21, 2019, 11:08am
Articles
A Route 66 Road Trip Through Indigenous Homelands
Shoshi Parks: I’m seeking out the histories and communities that existed before Route 66 and that survive still today. ... The wind is so powerful on top of the mesa that even hours after I’ve returned to the valley below, I’ll be wiping its ancient sand from the cracks and crevices of my skin. In the Keres language, this is Haak’u, New Mexico’s Pueblo of Acoma, a sky city perched on a 300-foot bluff, some 7,000 feet above sea level—the oldest community in the United States. ... Although there is no running water or electricity, around 50 people live on the mesa year-round in brick homes—some covered in wattle and daub, others in adobe—just as their ancestors have since at least the 12th century. ... Beyond the pueblo is a 156-square-mile territory of mammoth stone formations and cottonwood trees that road trippers traveling Route 66 have been visiting since the 1950s...
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May 14, 2019, 3:04pm
Articles
BRI Forum Points to Tectonic Shift in Geopolitical Power
James ONeill: The second BRI Forum was held in Beijing from 21st to 27th of April 2019. It was intended by 5000 delegates from 150 countries, including 40 heads of government and representatives of 90 international organisations. ... the scheme has captured the attention, imagination and support of more than 150 countries. There are two major elements: a land-based road, rail and optic fibre network throughout Asia and extending to Europe, and a maritime series of routes linking China to Europe, Africa, and Latin America ... As Andre Vltchek says, “nothing outrages the West more than the prospect of losing absolute control of the world.” ... The United States has for decades sought to prevent a political, strategic and military partnership developing between Russia and China. They fail to see that it is their policies and actions that provide a major impetus for Sino-Russian cooperation. .... The fact that 152 nations have joined the BRI from every region of the world is evidence that the majority of the world’s nations see the BRI as a better alternative then the bullying, financial destruction, invasions and occupations employed by the United States to maintain their hegemonic view of the world...
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May 7, 2019, 3:47pm
Articles
A hundred years ago, May Day was a very big deal
Lloyd Alter: May Day used to be a happy celebration of spring and fertility. Now it is almost completely ignored. What happened? ... Everywhere people "went a-Maying" by going into the woods and bringing back leaf, bough, and blossom to decorate their persons, homes, and loved ones with green garlands. Outside theater was performed with characters like "Jack-in-the-Green" and the "Queen of the May." Trees were planted. Maypoles were erected. Dances were danced. Music was played. Drinks were drunk, and love was made. Winter was over, spring had sprung. ... Really, everyone was having such a good time, but once the industrial revolution took hold, it got harder for people to take the day off work, and the long hours made a thing such as May Day impossible for most workers. ... But the day was still important for workers, and labor unions were pushing the Eight Hour Movement...
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May 1, 2019, 2:50pm
Articles
Ignorance and Russophobia
Gordon Duff: The roots of Russophobia run deep in the US. They go much further than censored or slanted media or political gameplaying in Washington. What has to, or at least should be accepted is that Russophobia is a belief system, just like a religion, but with no spiritual nature, no holy prophets but resembling the worst of religion. Russophobia is a religion of hate that no one understand or will acknowledge the root cause of. ... We’re going to show how a powerful group, called the China Lobby, financed by massive American military aid, intended to fund Chaing Kai Shek’s fake war against Japan, bought Washington, “lock stock and barrel,” and began blaming Russia for the world’s ills. ... A similar “blame Russia” effort went on when the US “lost Vietnam” to Ho Chi Minh. ... This cabal, now certainly a Deep State organization, were unleashed on Democratic President Harry Truman, they brought Eisenhower into the presidency, quite possibly eliminated the Kennedy brothers, rigged two Nixon elections, and have dominated American politics, with some exceptions, since their inception....
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Apr 28, 2019, 3:19pm
Articles
Frontiersmen vs. Wusses
Linh Dinh: Smaller than California and settled for millennia, how can Vietnam even have a frontier?! But that’s what the Central Highlands were until very recently. ... For four months now, I’ve been living in the Central Highlands, in Ea Kly, a merely functional town with no attractions to speak of. ... Vietnam is still far behind the West in the flight from nature and against it, but this is to its advantage, I believe, for its people still retain the essentials to endure whatever comes next. ... Vietnamese understand perfectly that power underpins all human relations, so they act accordingly. There’s a proverb, “The smart eat men, the stupid are eaten,” so life’s first aim is to avoid being devoured. ... Though it has been the most aggressive nation for over a century, the United States insists on defining its domineering streak, war profiteering or even sadism as selfless benevolence...
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Apr 21, 2019, 3:10pm
Articles
You Elected Them to Write New Laws. They're Letting Corporations Do It Instead.
Rob O'Dell and Nick Penzenstadler: Each year, state lawmakers across the U.S. introduce thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks. ... Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called “model” bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them. ... USA TODAY and the Arizona Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law. ... Model bills passed into law have made it harder for injured consumers to sue corporations. They’ve called for taxes on sugar-laden drinks. They’ve limited access to abortion and restricted the rights of protesters. ... Models are drafted with deceptive titles and descriptions to disguise their true intent. The Asbestos Transparency Act didn’t help people exposed to asbestos. It was written by corporations who wanted to make it harder for victims to recoup money...
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Apr 5, 2019, 3:46pm
Articles
Dire streets: Roadways and broken promises on the Navajo Nation
Amy Linn and Alysa Landry: SANOSTEE, N.M. — Sharon Begay knows this road by heart. ... The 43-year-old mother of two has spent a lifetime memorizing the jagged surface and thuggish boulders that define Indian Service Route 5010. Locals just call it “the road” and gauge distances with landmarks: windmills, S-curves, a water tower covered with graffiti that once served as the town’s main source of gossip. ... It’s an unpaved byway in the Sanostee Chapter of the Navajo Nation that feeds a network of unnamed dirt roads, serving hundreds of families in the shadows of the Chuska Mountains. Generations of Begay’s family have herded sheep along this road; as a child she traveled it by horseback, alongside her father. ... The federal government and its Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) have historically failed to furnish even the most basic infrastructure necessary to operate local schools. Among the most obvious failures: federal agencies refused to construct roads that would allow children to ride a bus to schools near their home...
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Apr 2, 2019, 10:39am
Articles
The woman in search of Indian Country’s missing
Jessica Lussenhop: When authorities fail families, Lissa Yellowbird-Chase steps in. ... On a blazing hot day in late July, Lissa Yellowbird-Chase drove her black SUV, license plate “SEARCH,” to a muddy landing on Lake Sakakawea. It was a remote entrance to the water on the northern edge of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota — not much more than a rickety dock at the end of an uneven gravel road. ... Hitched to the back of Yellowbird-Chase’s truck was a 14-foot boat with a half-broken motor and a set of fishing sonar. ... Nine months earlier, in the autumn of 2017, a young mother of five named Olivia Kerri Lone Bear vanished from New Town, a tiny oil-boom city on the Fort Berthold Reservation. ... Yellowbird-Chase joined the effort along with the Sahnish Scouts, a group she founded in 2015 to search and recover missing people in Indian Country — though she had been doing the work on her own since about 2011...
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Mar 28, 2019, 12:52pm
Articles
Honoring Frances Perkins, the 'Mother' of Social Security
Max Richtman: In the iconic photo of Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act of 1935, the dignitaries crowded around the president stare intently at the legislation on his desk. Only one looks directly into the camera. She is the woman without whom we likely would not have Social Security today: Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins ... coaxed, cajoled, and practically willed the program into being, undaunted by formidable obstacles (including the question of its very constitutionality). ... "I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen,” Perkins said. ... One of the programs Perkins insisted upon was social insurance for American retirees, many who were literally living in poor houses across the country. ... In addition to Social Security, Perkins successfully advocated for minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and restrictions on child labor. Ironically, her only unrealized policy goal was universal health care...
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Mar 27, 2019, 3:49pm
Articles
Epifanio Camacho: a Militant Farmworker Brushed Out of History
Tanya Golash-Boza – Michael Golash: Cesar Chavez is perhaps best known for his role in the 1965-1970 Delano grape strike and boycott and his nonviolent tactics in those protests. ... Although Chavez insisted on nonviolence, there was dissent within the National Farmworkers Association as some workers believed more militant tactics were necessary. One of these workers was Epifanio Camacho. ... Camacho developed a revolutionary consciousness through his struggles. He eventually joined the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and began to organize workers in McFarland and other towns in the Central Valley to join the PLP and to become communists. Chavez continued to work with politicians and to organize consumer boycotts to make changes to the existing system...
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Mar 25, 2019, 12:03pm
Articles
Water Protector Scales Water Well-Drilling Rig
Rivera Sun: Water Protector Buck Johnston of Taos, New Mexico pulled off a daring 4-day direct action at the top of a multistory well drilling rig this week. On March 14th, accompanied by a small action support team, he scaled the equipment and hooked into the top of the multi-story tower with a climbing harness. ... On the ground, a group of citizens called Guardians of Taos Water (GOT Water) lit a ceremonial fire at the gate near the highway, lifted song and drum, and began a peaceful prayer action in support of his direct action. ... This Indigenous-led action is protesting part of a controversial water agreement that plans to drill 16-plus deep aquifer wells in order to extract large quantities of water from previously untapped deep aquifers beneath the Taos Valley Watershed ... Many feel that these deep wells are largely intended to enable development rather than meeting existing water needs...
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Mar 20, 2019, 4:23pm
Articles
The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit
Matt Taibbi: Despite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment — more than $700 billion a year — the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. It’s repelled generations of official inquiries, the latest being an audit three decades in the making, mainly by scrambling its accounting into such a mess that it may never be untangled. ... The military has become an unstoppable mechanism for hoovering up taxpayer dollars and deploying them in the most inefficient manner possible. Schools crumble, hospitals and obstetric centers close all over the country, but the armed services are filling warehouses for some programs with “1,000 years’ worth of inventory,” as one Navy logistics officer recently put it...
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Mar 18, 2019, 4:16pm
Articles
How America's Food Giants Swallowed the Family Farms
Chris McGreal, Guardian UK: Across the midwest, the rise of factory farming is destroying rural communities. And the massive corporations behind this devastation are now eyeing a post-Brexit UK market ... “In the past 20 years, where I am, independent hog farming just silently disappeared as the corporates came in” ... We’ve become poorer. Our communities are basically shattered and in more than just an economic way – in a social way too ... This collapse has in good part been driven by the rise of concentrated animal feeding operations, or Cafos. In these industrial farming units, pigs, cows and chickens are crammed by the thousand into rows of barns. Many units are semi-automated, with feeding run by computer and the animals watched by video, with periodic visits by workers who drive between several operations...
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Mar 11, 2019, 2:55pm
Articles
Living at the mercy of “La Lista”
Elizabeth Maskasky: EARLY EVERY morning, migrants from all over the world gather at El Chaparral, a plaza on the Mexican side of the Tijuana-San Diego border. A plethora of languages can be heard — many of them Indigenous, in addition to Spanish, French, English, Arabic and Russian. ... On one side of the plaza, migrants line up to put their names on La Lista (The List) — the numbering system for the increasingly notorious and illegal “metering” imposed by the U.S. on asylum seekers before they are allowed to cross the border. ... On the other side of the plaza, migrants whose numbers are close to being called gather with their luggage and their families to hear the numbers of the day. On any given day in Tijuana, an average of only 50 migrants out of the thousands who are waiting are allowed to cross the border...
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Mar 1, 2019, 3:21pm
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