Month: August 2015

by William Skink

YES! magazine has a great interview with UM professor and activist, George Price, which you can read here. His blog, Learning Earthways, has been added to the blog roll.

I like this Q/A especially:

van Gelder: It seems like there are so many issues besetting the native communities all across the country. How does a group that is so embattled take on this big question for the whole of humanity?

Price: I think, especially for land-based tribes—tribes that still have remnant parcels of their homelands reserved out of what was stolen—there’s this ancestral tie that lets them know on some level that if the fossil fuel companies have their way, they’ll take their actual source of life.

The money world that we’re forced to participate in and work for is not really the source of life. It’s kind of a distraction they have to indulge in to some degree. There’s high unemployment on reservations, but [being] unemployed for money doesn’t mean people aren’t working; they’re still doing subsistence activities: hunting, fishing, growing crops, cutting firewood. People are still connected to that and to the deep spiritual meaning of relationship to the land as caretakers of the land. They are cognizant of our interconnectedness.

The other thing that’s happening at this time is the leadership of the women, and that has its roots in the destruction of male roles by the reservation system. Tribes did have gender-based activities. That was just a norm. You find exceptions, but you have coming-of-age ceremonies that lay roles out clearly. But within that, you have these elder women now who teach people that our issues, first and foremost, are keeping our land and our water, because everything else crashes in that crazy world out there. Their society, their money, their currency and technology will someday become worthless, and everybody will only have to answer to the Earth. Especially, the tar sands are such a traumatic example of Western technological capitalist society gone wrong.

Anybody, no matter how much of a brainwashed capitalist you are, can see this from the air. You fly right to edge of the tar sands and see the beautiful boreal forest and the lakes everywhere up in that northern section, and then just miles and miles of total devastation. No life. I mean anybody with any sense that nature might be a little valuable, any sense that trees are kinda nice, looks at that and gets a message—a really strong message.

I’ve also added a link to a blog I got turned on to years ago, Rigorous Intuition. This blog covers the weirder stuff happening on this crazy rock circling the sun.

by William Skink

There was an explosion caught on camera in Yemen earlier this year that sparked speculation about whether or not the explosion was the result of a tactical nuke.

There is similar speculation about the explosion in Tianjin. When I mentioned this to one of my co-workers, he asked a pretty simple question I didn’t have a response to: why?

Maybe a not-so-subtle message to China to stop liquidating its holdings of UST’s?

As we outlined in July, from the first of the year through June, China looked to have sold somewhere around $107 billion worth of US paper. While that might have seemed like a breakneck pace back then, it was nothing compared to what would transpire in the last two weeks of August. Following the devaluation of the yuan, the PBoC found itself in the awkward position of having to intervene openly in the FX market, despite the fact that the new currency regime was supposed to represent a shift towards a more market-determined exchange rate. That intervention has come at a steep cost – around $106 billion according to Soc Gen. In other words, stabilizing the yuan in the wake of the devaluation has resulted in the sale of more than $100 billion in USTs from China’s FX reserves.

The only thing more disturbing about the thought of tactical nukes being used is that they could be deployed without corporate media reporting it. Instead the idea that tactical nukes have already been used will be left for the conspiracy theorists to discredit by merely discussing the possibility.

But why build them if not to use them? By the way, bravo military industrial complex, it was very clever to modernize our nuclear arsenal under a Democrat president who still obscenely has that Nobel Peace prize.

War is a racket, and too lucrative to ever end.

by William Skink

The smoke outside is awful. We are keeping the kids inside as much as possible, even the one who isn’t breathing air yet. But life goes on, and though Mom isn’t a smoker, right now, if she’s outside, it’s not like you can hold your breath.

If my kids were in high school playing football (which neither of them will be allowed to do) there is no way in hell I would let them play a football game in these conditions, and I’m glad to see James Conner calling out Glacier High for prioritizing a football game over the health of its teenage players.

And the Griz? Yeah, right. Smoke or no smoke, it’s game on for tomorrow’s ESPN-televised home opener.

I have a hunch, though, that brunch will be inside.

by William Skink

Democrat strategists like Stephanie Cutter are trying to cast foreign policy as a Republican base issue. Here’s how a Huffington Post piece starts out:

There’s a decent chance the 2016 presidential election will be about national security.

If that’s the case, recent spin by Democratic pundits may undercut former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign before it has much of a chance to establish itself.

“I think foreign policy is a Republican base issue, which is why you see Republicans coming out of the gate talking about it,” Democratic strategist Stephanie Cutter said on NBC’s Meet the Press on June 14. Challenged on that, she said, “It’s a Republican establishment issue, and it always has been.”

Really? The article continues:

From the rise of ISIS, to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chest-thumping, to Israel’s struggles with the Palestinians, to the nuclear negotiations with Iran, to cybersecurity, trade, China’s rise and tensions with North Korea, foreign policy has become all-consuming for the executive branch and will take up a huge chunk of the 45th president’s time and energy.

But one of the most prominent Democratic strategists in the country is ready to cede foreign policy to the Republicans about nine months before each party knows who its nominees will be. And this idea — that foreign policy and national security are topics that simply fire up the Republican base — is a theory I’ve heard repeated by multiple Democratic operatives in the past week, meaning it’s a line of spin some of the party is beginning to adopt.

If you’re interested in the plausible angles of this strategy, read the rest of the article. I’m not because the way in which the list of foreign policy issues is framed already contains enough manipulative spin to suit me fine. Let me try to pick a few things apart.

Describing Putin as “chest-thumping” ignores U.S. complicity in igniting a civil war in Ukraine. Israel’s “struggle” with Palestinians is the criminal and inhumane struggle to kill or displace every last one of them. Cyber security is for corporations, not citizens. For us citizens we get out constitutional rights violated on pretty much a daily basis by the national security state. Trade? You mean the continued corporate takeover the Obama administration is trying to facilitate with all those secret trade agreements?

Foreign policy will be difficult terrain for Democrats to navigate, so I can understand the avoidance strategy. Not avoiding it, the way Bernie Sanders did with his comments to Wolf Blitzer supporting more Saudi-led proxy wars to further atomize Middle East nation states, just leads to attack the messenger and disparage the source tantrums.

And don’t even get me started on the Neocon darling herself, Hilary Clinton.

Robert Parry, who has a website that isn’t called Counterpunch, put up a piece today, titled Will Peace Find a 2016 Advocate? In that piece he gives credit to Sanders’ opposition to the Iraq war:

Though Sen. Bernie Sanders, her [Hilary Clinton] principal challenger, also has chosen to downplay foreign policy issues in favor of economic ones, the Vermont “democratic socialist” can at least point to his prescient opposition to the Iraq War in 2002.

In a Senate floor speech, Sanders cited five reasons for voting against President George W. Bush’s war resolution: the death and destruction that would result, the dangerous precedent of “a unilateral invasion,” the damage to the war on terror, the “extremely expensive” price tag of “a war and a long-term American occupation,” and the “unintended consequences.”

On the last point, Sanders asked: “Who will govern Iraq when Saddam Hussein is removed and what role will the U.S. play in [an] ensuing civil war that could develop in that country? Will moderate governments in the region who have large Islamic fundamentalist populations be overthrown and replaced by extremists? Will the bloody conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority be exacerbated? And these are just a few of the questions that remain unanswered.”

Those were all prescient questions to ask. Now the question to ask is this: what happened to that Bernie Sanders?

I don’t have an answer. Instead, here’s more from Parry:

When Sanders has spoken about the Mideast, he has framed his comments in ways that make them acceptable to Official Washington but that ultimately make little sense. For instance, in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Sanders suggested that Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich sheikdoms replace the United States as the region’s policeman in the fight against Sunni terrorists in the Islamic State (also called ISIS).

“Saudi Arabia is the third largest military budget in the world,” Sanders said. “They’re going to have to get their hands dirty in this fight. We should be supporting, but at the end of the day this is fight over what Islam is about, the soul of Islam, we should support those countries taking on ISIS.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Sanders’s Screwy Mideast Strategy.”]

Frankly, it’s hard to believe that Sanders is that naïve. A core reality of the Mideast crisis is that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Sunni Gulf states have been the principal funders and ideological supporters of the Sunni extremists who have organized into violent jihadist movements, including Al Qaeda, its Syrian affiliate Al Nusra Front, and a hyper-violent spinoff, the Islamic State.

Vice President Joe Biden blurted out this reality at Harvard’s Kennedy School last October, when he said: “Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria … the Saudis, the emirates, etc., what were they doing? They were so determined to take down [President Bashar al-] Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.” [Quote at 53:20 of clip.]

Biden had confirmed something that was well-known in the region and inside the U.S. intelligence community, that many of these terrorist groups were supported, directly and indirectly, by elements of Saudi Arabia’s royal family and by oil-rich sheiks around the Persian Gulf who see themselves fighting a sectarian war against Iran and the Shiites. The Vice President later apologized for speaking the truth, but the cat was out of the bag.

The cat is out of the bag only for those paying attention. The task of Democratic strategists is to ensure its base pays as little attention to foreign policy as possible. They are so far doing a great job.

Right now, Bernie Sanders has a tremendous platform to speak to enthusiastic crowds of people. Despite the freakout by white progressives against BLM targeting Bernie in Seattle, the Sanders campaign reacted adeptly by diversifying staff and specifying policy. Unfortunately there is nothing similar coming from the anti-war movement because there isn’t really an anti-war movement to speak of.

Pete Talbot pushed back against that assertion with this:

“do we even have anti-war protesters anymore or have progressives conceded that ground to the military-industrial-congressional complex for good?” says Skink. Wow. I don’t know where to start, do you? Should we meet at Daines’, Zinke’s or Tester’s office with our protest signs? We could re-instate the draft. That might get a few more people out in the streets. Tell me – I’m a progressive as are many of my friends at the Jeanette Rankin Peace Center – what should we do? After you’ve answered my first question about obtaining peace in the Middle East, you can tell us progressives how to go about dismantling the military-industrial complex.

Since Pete, keeping it local, drags in the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center to our disagreement, I’ll provide an answer he can relate to his progressive friends there: speak up, and speak accurately. Write an op-ed about the crisis in Yemen and America’s role, be critical of Hillary’s role in destroying Libya, acknowledge the purposeful silence on foreign policy by Democrat strategists. Start a campaign to strip Obama of his Nobel Peace Prize.

A bunch of origami peace cranes looks pretty when displayed, but what else is the Peace Center doing? Feel good repositories of trinkets and free trade coffee is nice and all, but while that day-to-day is managed, a Democratic President has solidified and extended dangerous war powers that will be passed on to the next war criminal, Democrat or Republican, it really doesn’t matter.

By JC

I don’t get the reflexive knee-jerk reaction to articles quoted from Counterpunch. The lede to Skink’s recent post is a piece from Sam Husseini, the communications director for the Institute for Public Accuracy. Husseini’s article received widespread postings, including at dem/prog news fest, Huffington Post. The article was also posted on Consortium News, a leading indy news source. Truthdig, Smirking Chimp, Strategic-Culture, World News Beat, the Russophile, and on and on.

Counterpunch is just like any other news aggregator. They pick from a very wide selection of authors, the articles they choose to post. It’s not like Counterpunch goes out and does a lot of policy advocacy on its own. Of course Jeff St. Claire and the late Alexander Cockburn had strong opinions and a soapbox to project them from. But what’s up with the guilt by association with CounterPunch? That’s a bunch of bigoted BS.

Take a look at a list of recent articles. Are we to think that all of these authors deserve our disdain because they’ve been published at Counterpunch? A cursory overview of authors includes a wide variety of viewpoints from far left to paleoconservative and libertarian viewpoints. And those articles are published world wide in hundreds of other outlets.

Well, what about Sam (Osama) Husseini? Well, among other things he founded the website VotePact, an interesting alternative to two party elections. And as we have lots of folks in our midst who are interested in alternatives, Husseini has a very interesting approach, and we’ve been talking about fusion elections here. He has another alternative where a democrat and a republican agree (“Vote Pact”) to vote third parties of their choice instead of canceling themselves out in standard two party elections.

He’s also the communications director for the Institute for Public Accuracy which encourages the media to access a wide variety of sources:

IPA increases the reach and capacity of progressive and grassroots organizations (at no cost to them) to address public policy by getting them and their ideas into the mainstream media. IPA gains media access for those whose voices are commonly excluded or drowned out by government or corporate-backed institutions. As a national consortium of independent public-policy researchers, analysts and activists, IPA widens media exposure for progressive perspectives on many issues including the environment, human rights, foreign policy, and economic justice.

Sounds like a pretty good mission statement to me. Unless you are into suppressing independent thought outside of traditional dem/prog themes.

So what are we left with besides a snippet of how democrats are continuing to close the circle on their “big tent” and increasing their disparagement of any people who dare look beyond the accepted parameters of democratic group-think? Not much, except a view of politics from those inside the fishbowl that continue to fear that they are becoming irrelevant in a world spinning out of their control.

Withdrawing into the discomfort of traditional politics is the bane of progressivism. One might say that withdrawing into the comfort of traditional politics is what allows the rise of nationalism, and all of its despicable characteristics which are defining the American “tradition” of exceptionalism and its attendant foreign policy. A foreign policy predicated on the “father knows best” notion that only American-directed hegemony can keep the world safe for… something.

Well, I’m tired of it all. I’d rather see a multi-polar world with many elements balancing trade and security. At some point the U.S. will be forced to disengage from maintaining empire, as it will no longer be affordable, except at the barrel of a gun (the biggest one possible). Whether or not that disengagement will be comfortable or uncomfortable rests on our expectations of what a world without the U.S. as policeman can become.