Sovereignty

Reprinted from Root Force: Fighting Infrastructure and Colonialism in the Fourth World

Zapatistas A Strategic Indigenous Sovereignty Solidarity Model
Perhaps the most neglected issue in progressive discourse today is that of indigenous sovereignty. This is an inexcusable oversight, for we will never be able to create a just or sustainable world without addressing the ongoing colonialism, imperialism and genocide inherent in denying indigenous people control over their own lands and destinies.

The violation of indigenous territory and destruction of indigenous cultures is inseparable from the other injustices that confront our world. It is no coincidence that even as cultural diversity and native languages disappear at rates unheard of in the history of our species, extinction rates have reached levels unseen since the demise of the dinosaurs.

While many pressing issues confront native peoples today, control of land is central to nearly all of these struggles. Governments and multinational corporations worldwide continue to launch new assaults on indigenous territory in order to secure access to the resources that their economies need to sustain themselves. These resources are then used to secure corporate control over the rest of the world, leading to many of the other injustices that progressives routinely (and rightly) campaign against.

By opposing the infrastructure of global trade — and its disproportionate impacts on indigenous peoples — we can not only show our solidarity with struggles for indigenous sovereignty, we can also undermine the whole system that demands and enables the exploitation of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples worldwide.

Infrastructure: The First Line of Assault
The word “infrastructure” describes the physical basis of an economy — the transportation, electrical and communications networks required for the extraction and movement of resources. Specific examples of infrastructure include highways, railways, ports, dams, mines, oil and gas pipelines, power plants, power lines and telecommunications cables.

The fundamentally colonialist nature of these projects is underscored by the fact that their supposed benefits rarely flow to local communities — rather, they are intended to move resources away and into the wealthy First World. To give just one example, the power generated by a series of proposed dams in southern Mexico and Central America is meant to be integrated into a massive electric grid and then sold to the southwestern US.

By no coincidence, new infrastructure — even in North America — is overwhelmingly slated for territories of indigenous or rural peoples. These territories hold two powerful attractions for modern colonialists, just as they always have.

First of all, Earth-based cultures tend to live in highly biodiverse areas, where there are still “resources” to be exploited (intact forests for lumber; intact land above oil or minerals; intact, undammed rivers). The second advantage is just as important: If members of traditional societies can be forced off their land by highways, dams or other such projects, they instantly become a cheap work force.

The Plan Puebla Panamá (PPP), an infrastructure megaproject for Mesoamerica, is explicit in this second goal, incorporating a massive belt of maquiladoras (export-oriented sweatshops) in southern Mexico, in order to “exploit the competitive advantage” offered by the region’s crushing poverty. Likewise, the extreme poverty on Indian reservations across North America cannot be separated from the systematic destruction of traditional subsistence lifestyles, coupled with the theft of mineral or other resource wealth by multinational corporations.

The dislocation caused by these projects is culturally devastating to indigenous peoples. One of the defining characteristics of an indigenous culture is its relationship with a specific place. When removed from that place — not to mention the built-in community support structures that had existed there — indigenous people’s rates of health problems, poverty and suicide skyrocket. That’s why the Dine’ (Navajo) of Big Mountain, North America — forced to relocate to make way for cattle ranching and coal mines — have maintained for decades that “relocation is genocide.”

Finally, infrastructure projects are devastating to native lands and health, from oil spills and hydroelectric dams destroying native fisheries to uranium mines poisoning the people and land.

Yet devastating as they are, infrastructure projects are in many ways only the shock troops that facilitate the ongoing assault on indigenous lands around the globe. Once roads have been punched into indigenous territories or electric generating capacity set up, for example, the way is cleared for an unremitting flood of missionaries, logging companies, biopirates seeking genetic data and stealing traditional knowledge, and a myriad other forms of destructive one-way contact with a colonizing culture.

Infrastructure’s Wider Impacts
Beyond its effects on indigenous lands, there is another powerful reason to oppose infrastructure expansion: these projects are essential in providing colonial powers with the power that allows them to invade indigenous land in the first place.

First World countries are dependent on imports, because their domestic production simply cannot meet their disproportionate consumption rates. With resources running out and consumption increasing, this dependence will only increase in coming years. But existing infrastructure is insufficient for the massive trade volume that already exists, let alone that projected from new free trade agreements and increasing demand. That’s why expanding “international trade infrastructure” is one of the top priorities for business and political leaders throughout the hemisphere.

If we prevent these projects from being built — including domestic ones like Atlantica, Pacifica, the CANAMEX Corridor and the Corridors of the Future highway program — we cut off the global economic system’s access to the resources it needs to maintain its power. Without sufficient resources and the infrastructure to process them, the colonial powers will be forced to contract their reach.

What Does Solidarity Look Like?
The economic model underlying globalized infrastructure represents a fundamentally non-indigenous way of doing business. It is based on the premise that the land is meant to be exploited for short-term gain; an indigenous way, in contrast, emphasizes relation with the land over the long-term and into future generations.

All around the world, indigenous communities are resisting assault by these projects. They are defending their cultures against a global economy that insists that they assimilate, conform, consume — in other words, that they disappear.

Isn’t it long past time for privileged North Americans to stand up and defend the right of indigenous people to remain indigenous? It’s time for us to declare that “we want a world where many worlds fit,” where people are free to not be consumers, workers or Europeans — and then suit our actions to our words.

On April 17, 2006, Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army said,

“What we are preparing is an uprising… but one that will not end simply with putting in another [government] that is oppressing us. Rather, it will not end until we have destroyed the system that keeps us in misery; the system that wants to dispossess us of our land; the system that expels us from our country to seek work on another side; the system that wants to destroy nature; and the system that wants to kill us as we are—as Indian people, as farmers.”

On the other side of an imaginary line, we too must wage an uprising. Or maybe it’s the same uprising — because after all, the system that dispossess indigenous farmers also poisons our water and seeks to crush our own dreams of freedom and dignity.

And this is the truest meaning of solidarity: to stand united in the same struggle. To strive for our own freedom, even as we fight for the freedom of others to decide their own destinies.

Sustainability

Reprinted from Root Force: Demolishing Colonialism at its Foundation.

Destroy 7-11 Southland Corporation The current global economic system is destroying all life on this planet.

This system kills hundreds of thousands of civilians a year in wars for oil and water. It tortures millions of nonhuman animals a year in laboratories and factory farms. It destroys indigenous communities, dispossesses small farmers, enslaves workers in fields and factories, and poisons every living thing with chemicals and radiation.

We are losing cultural and biological diversity at rates unheard of in the history of our species, and despite all our efforts, these rates are only accelerating.

From global warming to genocide, the crises that confront us are not accidental — as if politicians and business leaders were somehow independently deciding to murder union organizers, pollute the seas or strip the land. Rather, these atrocities are deliberately engineered to meet the demands of an economic system that values profit over life.

Modern-Day Colonialism
First World economies are founded on colonialism; they cannot function without stealing resources from distant nations for their own benefit. That’s because the First World’s massive consumption levels demand resources in quantities that far outstrip domestic supplies. Without a steady stream of cheap labor and materials, the military and economic power of the world’s elites would collapse into ruins.

Cheap labor, of course, means forcing people into poverty and keeping them there. Cheap materials means turning living ecosystems into dams, mines and two-by-fours. It means taking resources out of the hands of locals, often at the barrel of a gun. This scenario plays out every day in every country in the world, from the Amazon Basin to the Fertile Crescent.

But the international trade that underlies this system cannot take place without infrastructure: the transportation, electrical and communications networks required for the extraction and movement of resources. Specific examples of infrastructure include highways, railways, ports, dams, mines, oil and gas pipelines, power plants, power lines and telecommunications cables.

So in addition to using force to gain access to raw materials, First World countries also push poor nations to accept new infrastructure projects, under the guise of “economic development.” When political and economic pressure fail — as they did in guaranteeing the stability of a gas-pipeline in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan — the military is dispatched to clear the way.

These globalized infrastructure projects are designed to move resources and wealth out of the Third World and into the First. For example, the power generated by a series of planned dams in Mexico and Central America is meant to be integrated into a massive electric grid and then sold to the southwestern US.

By no coincidence, such projects are overwhelmingly slated for territories of indigenous or rural peoples. These territories hold two powerful attractions for modern colonialists, just as they always have. First of all, Earth-based cultures tend to live in highly biodiverse areas, where there are still “resources” to be exploited (intact forests for lumber; intact land above oil or minerals; intact, undammed rivers). The second advantage is just as important: If members of traditional societies can be forced off their land by highways, dams or other such projects, they instantly become a cheap work force.

This is how the global economy brings us the high-tech luxuries we have grown accustomed to — along with the war, genocide and ecological devastation that dominate the headlines daily.

What Kind of Future Do We Want?
But we do not want a world where our personal comforts are bought at the price of murdered Iraqis, Colombians, or anyone, anywhere. We do not want to see our air fouled, out wilderness paved, and our global climate so unbalanced that drought, famine and extinction run rampant on a scale that makes the bloody 20th century pale in comparison.

The hard truth is, an import-dependent economy like the one we have created is fundamentally unjust and unsustainable. If we mean what we say about justice, we must shift our society away from its dependence on fossil fuels, metals, highways, airplanes, and anything that we cannot produce and process locally, without destroying the habitat in which we live.

In such a locally-based model of society, communities are more directly in control of their lives: deciding what products they wish to consume, what local environmental costs they are willing to bear, and what conditions they wish to work under. This would provide the true job security that comes from producing only that which is needed, from being in control of that production, and from keeping that production on a small, local scale.

In this system, it is no longer possible for the costs associated with a product’s manufacture to be forced upon another community. There would be no destructive mining of ore for consumption far away, or chemical plants dumping toxins in a community that would rather have clean drinking water. Since there isn’t much place in such a model for multinational corporations that are based around shipping products over vast distances, local economies would also lessen corporate control over our lives.

How Do We Get There?
This vision may seem like a long shot — but it’s a vision worth fighting for.

It is essential that we create sustainable local economies now, without waiting for some utopian future. We must rise to the challenge of reconnecting with our own bioregions, with the plants, animals and seasons of the places we live. There are as many ways to live sustainably as there are indigenous cultures that have walked this Earth.

But this is not enough. If this system is allowed to progress to its inevitable end, there will be no Earth left for future generations to inherit. And for us to work only on local sustainability — while disregarding the massive injustice that the system wreaks on humans and nonhumans around the world — would be fundamentally elitist and immoral, making a mockery of all our stated ideals.

In any case, the world’s corporate leaders will not just stand idly by while we simply choose not to purchase their products. With all the advertising and weaponry that they possess, they will seek to destroy our alternative economies as quickly as we build them.

So in addition to building a sustainable future, we must take concerted action to dismantle the colonialist global economy. The good news is, we can do this.

Due to a combination of resource depletion and increasing consumption, the First World’s dependence on imports will only worsen in coming years. But in the Americas, existing infrastructure is simply insufficient for the trade volume already coming in. That’s why expanding “international trade infrastructure” is one of the top priorities for business and political leaders throughout the hemisphere.

Prevent this expansion — shut down their planned highways, power plants, airports and dams — and we can cut off the First World’s access to the resources it needs. Faced with a resource shortage, these economies will have no choice but to scale back their industrial production and their efforts to dominate the rest of the world.

That’s the goal of the Root Force campaign: to assist and invigorate a broad-based anti-infrastructure movement capable of placing pressure on the entire global economy.

Because we know that if we strategically exploit the weaknesses of the colonialist global economy — even as we build alternatives that increasingly lessen our dependence on its corporations and machines — we will finally see the day when this entire corrupt system is no more.

Ecodefense

From “Infrastructure, the Environment and Strategic Ecodefense,” reprinted from Root Force: Demolishing Colonialism at its Foundation.

The environmental movement has a long and successful tradition of opposing new infrastructure projects such as highways, mines and power plants. In addition to the many reasons that we are used to opposing such infrastructure, another now presents itself: infrastructure is an essential precursor to all forms of industrial ecocide. Shut it down, and we shut down the whole killing machine.

As our planet’s crisis worsens and climate experts warn that we have only decades to stop all human emission of greenhouse gases, infrastructure provides a strategic target on which to focus our organizing efforts.

Direct Ecological Impacts
The word “infrastructure” describes the physical basis of an economy — the transportation, electrical and communications networks required for the extraction and movement of resources. Specific examples of infrastructure include highways, railways, ports, dams, mines, oil and gas pipelines, power plants, power lines and telecommunications cables. Until this groundwork is laid, industrial production is simply impossible.

Environmentalists are used to opposing infrastructure projects for their myriad and damaging effects on regional ecologies. These impacts are too numerous to list here, but include dams’ destruction of river ecosystems and flooding of other habitats; the inevitable toxic spills that results from petroleum extraction and transport; the air and water contamination caused by coal mining and burning; and the habitat fragmentation and destruction caused by highways and rail lines.

Genocide and Biopiracy
Infrastructure projects also facilitate increased exploitation of formerly undisturbed ecologies and surviving indigenous cultures. Once roads or power lines have been punched into these territories, the way is cleared to log, mine or otherwise exploit them, including efforts to privatize the water that all life depends and the genetic code that form its foundation.

In addition to directly dislocating indigenous people by means of land seizures and flooding, these projects also open native communities to assault by colonizing influences like missionaries and, just as importantly, state armies. Infrastructure projects form the vanguard of genocidal efforts around the world.

Beyond the importance of defending indigenous people and cultures for their own sakes, such cultures also provide the Earth’s first and often most effective line of defense. People who depend upon the land for their survival are those most likely to fight to defend it, a historical pattern that holds true to this day. It is no coincidence that when planning a new and destructive project, a government’s first action is often to remove any remaining indigenous communities from the area. Ecocide and genocide go hand in hand.

It’s also worth noting that indigenous cultures are among the primary guardians of a rapidly vanishing body of knowledge on sustainable ways of living on the Earth. If our species is to have any long-term future, this knowledge must be defended, cultivated and spread, not destroyed.

Global Warming
Infrastructure projects are among the world’s major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. This is obvious for some projects, such as oil fields, coal plants and gas pipelines. It is also well-documented that the construction of new ports and highways actually leads to increases in traffic, rather than relieving existing congestion or bottlenecks. This means that the more highways there are, the more people drive; the more airports, the more they fly; more sea ports, more shipping.

Even many so-called “alternative” energy sources are major greenhouse gas emitters. Dams in tropical regions, for example, may give off 40 times the greenhouses gas of an equivalent coal plant. Nuclear, wind, solar and other sources simply lead to massive greenhouse gas emissions earlier in the power generating process, when the uranium, copper, silicon or other critical materials are mined, manufactured and transported.

For more information, see Root Force’s fact sheet “Beyond Carbon: Derailing the Infrastructure of Global Warming.”

Enabling Unsustainable Consumption
At the heart of an anti-infrastructure ecodefense strategy, however, is the recognition that infrastructure is a primary enabler of the economic system that is killing the planet.

Mass extinction is driven by a global economic system that serves the First World. Even the most destructive trends in the Third World — from dirty industry to deforestation and poaching — are almost entirely driven by demand from the First World, coupled with attempts by some to emulate an unsustainable First World lifestyle.

It has become popular to point out that the US produces nearly a quarter of the planet’s greenhouse gases. How far would that statistic be adjusted upward if we included emissions generated in other countries to produce products for export to the US?

First World economies depend on imports to keep functioning, because they simply cannot produce enough domestically to meet their disproportionate consumption rates. This creates something of a paradox: a massive influx of new resources is needed to facilitate the continued extraction of yet more resources! Without a steady stream of cheap labor and raw materials from around the world, the lights would go out, the factories would shut down and the system would collapse.

This dependence on imports will only worsen in coming years, as resources continue to run out and consumption continues to increase. The good new is, existing infrastructure is insufficient for the trade volume already coming in. That’s why expanding “international trade infrastructure” is one of the top priorities for business and political leaders around the world. Prevent this expansion, and we are undermining the foundations of the whole system that is killing the planet.

Reform is Not Enough
The Earth will not be saved by half-measures. The point at which we could have simply reformed our industrial economy has long since passed.

Take global warming as an example: all the high-tech “alternative energies” thus far proposed depend on the smooth functioning of a highly industrial system based at its core on fossil fuels. Even our food is brought to us on a sea of oil: from the fertilizers, pesticides and machinery used on the farms to the trucks that bring the food to the stores! Then there’s the refrigeration used to keep the food fresh, and of course all the fossil fuels burned to manufacture every machine or chemical that was used in every phase of that process….

Every aspect of modern production and trade is so dependent on fossil fuels that there is simply no way to shift to a hypothetical alternative fuel, not on the time scale we’re faced with. Only a massive scaling back of our industrial society can avert climate catastrophe.

This is true with whatever measure of ecological destruction we wish to examine. We cannot have both a living planet and a global economic system based on the importation of resources.

The good news is that there are as many sustainable ways to live on this Earth as there are indigenous cultures that have ever existed. Learning these ways is a critical part of creating an ecologically sane world. In addition to derailing the runaway train of industrial civilization, we must rise to the challenge of reconnecting with our own bioregions, with the plants, animals and seasons of the places we live.

And when we have finally relearned just how much the Earth provides for those who treat it with respect, we will realize that we never needed this system at all.

rootforce

Global Warming

Reprinted from Beyond Carbon: Derailing the Infrastructure of Global Warming, by Root Force: Demolishing Colonialism at its Foundation.

rootforce Global warming has rightly been called one of the foremost challenges of our time. Almost on a weekly basis, we hear new and alarming forecasts about the world that we and our children may inhabit: drought, famine, refugees and war on a scale to make the bloody 20th century pale in comparison.

The so-called solutions put forward by politicians and industry fail to address a fundamental truth: It is not enough to scale back the emission of greenhouse gases. If these emissions are not brought to a complete halt within mere decades, we could see the extinction of 50-70 percent of all species on the planet and the permanent disruption of our climate.

Finding a way to react to such a massive task can be overwhelming. Targeting the infrastructure of trade provides a strategic, focused way to confront and potentially even prevent global warming calamity.

Infrastructure: Direct Climate Impacts
The word “infrastructure” describes the physical basis of an economy — the transportation, electrical and communications networks required for the extraction and movement of resources. Specific examples of infrastructure include highways, railways, ports, dams, mines, oil and gas pipelines, power plants, power lines and telecommunications cables. Until this groundwork is laid, industrial production is simply impossible.

These projects are among the world’s major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. This is obvious for some projects, such as oil fields, coal plants and gas pipelines. It is also well-documented that the construction of new ports and highways actually leads to increases in traffic, rather than relieving existing congestion or bottlenecks. This means that the more highways there are, the more people drive; the more airports, the more they fly; more sea ports, more shipping.

Even many so-called “alternative” energy sources are major greenhouse gas emitters. Dams in tropical regions, for example, may give off 40 times the greenhouse gases of an equivalent coal plant. Nuclear, wind, solar and other sources simply lead to massive greenhouse gas emissions earlier in the power generating process, when the uranium, copper, silicon or other critical materials are mined, manufactured and transported.

All these high-tech “alternatives” depend on the smooth functioning of a highly industrial system based at its core on fossil fuels. Even our food is brought to us on a sea of oil: from the fertilizers, pesticides and machinery used on the farms to the trucks that bring the food to the stores. Then there’s the refrigeration used to keep the food fresh, and of course all the fossil fuels burned to manufacture every machine or chemical that was used in every phase of that process….

Infrastructure: Deep Impacts
Rather than scaling back, however, the corporate-political leaders of the world are engaged in a massive effort to scale up. All around the world, they are pushing infrastructure mega-projects to increase industrial and trade capacity.

Increasing electric capacity is meant to facilitate increased production and consumption. More transport capacity is meant to facilitate the increased trade that such consumption requires. New telecommunications infrastructure is needed to coordinate it all.

Just as new roads mean more traffic, more infrastructure means more consumption. As long as the capacity for consumption keeps increasing, corporations will keep producing and people will keep consuming. We cannot shift to a different way of life while pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year into expanding the old one.

At the same time, the world’s major powers are laying plans to protect themselves against the upheavals that will inevitably result from global climate catastrophe. They are planning how to preserve their own comfort while brutally repressing civil unrest and foisting the worst effects of global warming onto the poor.

Industry’s Achilles’ Heel
There’s good news in all of this: If we can put the brakes on infrastructure expansion, we can squeeze the whole system that is driving global warming and force a massive change in direction.

First World economies (responsible for the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions) are increasingly dependent on imports to maintain their outlandish consumption levels. The ongoing combination of resource depletion and increased consumption only exacerbates this need.

But in the Americas, existing infrastructure is simply insufficient for the trade volume already coming in. That’s why expanding “international trade infrastructure” is one of the top priorities for business and political leaders throughout the hemisphere. Prevent this expansion, and we are undermining the foundations of the whole system.

We can do this. There is a long history of communities around the world shutting down planned infrastructure projects — from the airport that was never built in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico, to the decade in which virtually no new roads were built in the UK.

Without expanded industrial capacity, it will become impossible to pretend that the modern way of life can continue indefinitely. Resource shortage will create a pressure that even the warnings of indigenous elders and climate scientists across the world have been unable to produce.

Toward a Sustainable Future
Abandoning a way of life based on fossil fuels can be a frightening prospect; taking action to make this happen perhaps even more so. But if we want any kind of life for humans or nonhumans in the coming century, we must rise to this challenge.

There are as many ways to live sustainably as there are indigenous cultures that have walked this Earth. Learning these ways is a critical part of creating a post-carbon world. In addition to derailing the runaway train of fossil-fuel civilization, we must rise to the challenge of reconnecting with our own bioregions, with the plants, animals and seasons of the places we live.

And when we have finally relearned just how much the Earth provides for those who treat it with respect, we will realize that we never needed fossil fuels at all.

Imperialism

Reprinted from The Infrastructure of Imperialism: A Strategic Weakness by Root Force: Demolishing Colonialism at its Foundation.

Imperialism (n): the policy of forcefully extending a nation’s authority by territorial gain or by the establishment of economic and political dominance over other nations.

In the years since the declaration of a “War on Terrorism,” criticism has increasingly centered on the imperialistic patterns of US foreign policy. The US has been rightly accused of waging wars to secure access to critical resources like petroleum, and of propping up authoritarian regimes that assist its regional and global goals.

What has often been overlooked is the critical strategic importance of globalized infrastructure, and the way that the US and other First World nations regularly steal and murder in order to establish and protect this infrastructure. Just as importantly, preventing the expansion of this infrastructure provides a specific and effective way to hamper the Empire’s power and decrease its ability to impose violence and terror on the rest of the world.

Oil Barrels and Gun Barrels
The power of any empire is based on controlling the resources of subordinate states and cultures. In the modern day, the lifestyle of First World nations depends upon a steady stream of cheap raw materials, products and labor from poorer countries. Cheap labor, of course, means forcing people into poverty and keeping them there; cheap materials means turning living ecosystems into dams, mines and two-by-fours. If the people of these countries resist this destruction, then the armies are sent in.

But all of this control would be meaningless without infrastructure — the transportation, electrical and communications networks required for the extraction and movement of resources. Specific examples of infrastructure include highways, railways, ports, dams, mines, oil and gas pipelines, power plants, power lines and telecommunications cables. Until this groundwork is laid, resources can be neither extracted nor shipped. Iraqi or Colombian oil cannot get out of the oil fields without wells and pipelines, nor can it be exported without ports, highways, railways and the like.

Even the US invasion of Afghanistan — widely attributed to a desire to capture Osama bin Laden — has been linked to paving the way for the Trans-Afghanistan Natural Gas Pipeline. When the US decided that the Taliban was no longer a source of regional stability in 1998, US company Unocal dropped its plans for the pipeline. The plans were revived in 2002 and approved by the US-installed government of Hamid Karzai.

These globalized infrastructure projects are colonialism, plain and simple, designed to guarantee a supply of cheap materials and labor to wealthy countries at the expense of local communities. By no coincidence, they are overwhelmingly slated for territories of indigenous or subsistence peoples. Even in North America, indigenous and rural communities continue to bear the brunt of infrastructure expansion.

These territories hold two powerful attractions for modern colonialists, just as they always have. First of all, Earth-based cultures tend to live in highly biodiverse areas, where there are still “resources” to be exploited (intact forests for lumber; intact land above oil or minerals; intact, undammed rivers). The second advantage is just as important: If members of traditional societies can be forced off their land by highways, dams or other such projects, they instantly become a cheap work force.

Of course, none of the supposed benefits of these projects flow to local communities. To give just one example, the power generated by several planned dams in southern Mexico and Central America is meant to be integrated into a massive electric grid and then sold to the southwestern US.

The Empire’s Weakness
The good news is that the Empire’s very dependence on infrastructure is a critical weakness. The very fact that the US is willing to wage wars over infrastructure projects, and that governments around the world routinely resort to intense repression against communities that resist them, highlights just how critical these projects are.

With resources running out and consumption increasing, the First World’s reliance on imports is only going to keep increasing. But existing infrastructure is simply insufficient for the massive trade volume that already exists, let alone that projected from new free trade agreements and increasing demand. That’s why expanding “international trade infrastructure” is one of the top priorities for business and political leaders throughout the Americas.

The irony of the empire’s situation is that the warplanes sent to steal Iraqi oil are themselves dependent on oil. This is just as true for other critical resources like copper or steel. Without sufficient resources and the infrastructure to process them, the empire will be forced to contract its reach.

Opposing infrastructure expansion provides us with a strategic way to undermine the empire, to act in solidarity with communities fighting foreign control and to defend the communities and ecologies in our own bioregions through which these projects would pass. It provides us with a path toward our dream of a world based on local communities exercising sustainable control over their own resources, and an end to imperialist wars waged for the benefit of the rich.

Cuba declines OAS offer of Trojan Horse

Posted on June 4, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Over US objections, the Organization of American States (OAS, OEA) voted to invite Cuba back into the fold, from which it had been expelled in 1962 for hanging with Communists. Cuba’s reply? No thanks! Although Cuba’s acceptance by fellow nations was hailed a victory, Fidel Castro wrote: “It is naive to think that the good intentions of one president justifies the existence of a body that… supported… neoliberalism, drug trafficking, military bases and economic crises.”

In an essay published the day before Cuba’s official repudiation of the offer to recommit to the OAS, Fidel Castro recalled a lesson from the siege of Troy. Castro was reported widely as having called the OAS a “U.S. Trojan horse.” In reality, Castro blamed the OAS for having “opened the gates” to the Trojan horse of US post-colonial despotism.

The Trojan horse

RAFAEL Correa, president of Ecuador, currently visiting Honduras, stated the day before the OAS meeting: “I believe that the OAS has lost its raison d’être, maybe it never had a raison d’être.” The news, circulated by ANSA, adds that Correa, “prophesized ‘the demise’ of that organization given the many errors it has committed.”

He affirmed “that the countries of the American continent, given their geographic conditions, cannot all be put ‘in the same basket.’ And for that reason Ecuador proposed some months back the creation of the Organization of Latin American States.

“’It is not possible for the region’s problems to be discussed in Washington; let us construct something of our own, without countries alien to our culture, our values, and obviously including countries that were inexplicably separated from the inter-American system, and I am referring to the concrete case of Cuba… that was a tremendous shame and demonstrates the double standards that exist in international relations.’” On his arrival in Honduras, both President Zelaya and Correa stated that “The OAS must be reformed and reincorporate Cuba; if not, it will have to disappear.”

Another cable from the DPA news agency affirms:

“Cuba’s reintegration in the Organization of American States (OAS) has moved from being an issue per se of the organization’s General Assembly in Honduran San Pedro Sula, to once again being turned into an excuse for a struggle of interests that goes much further than the limits of the Caribbean island and could (once again) call hemispheric relations into question.

“The president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, made that very clear on describing the hemispheric meeting that begins this Tuesday in Honduras in quasi military terms.

“It will be,” he said, an ‘interesting battle’ in which if it is demonstrated that the OAS ‘continues being a ministry of the colonies’ that is not transformed in order ‘to subordinate itself to the will of the governments comprising it,’ it will be necessary to propose ‘leaving’ the organization and creating an alternative.”

“’Latin American countries are making Cuba the litmus test for the quality of the Obama administration’s approach to Latin America,” Julia E. Sweig, a Cuba scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The Washington Post on the eve of the Honduran meeting.”

In resisting the aggressions of the most powerful empire ever to have existed, our people fought for the other sister peoples of this continent. The OAS was an accomplice of all the crimes committed against Cuba.

At one moment or another, the totality of the countries of Latin America were victims of interventions and political and economic aggression. There is not one single one that can deny that. It is naive to believe that the good intentions of a president of the United States can justify the existence of that institution that opened the gates to the Trojan horse that backed the Summits of the Americas, neoliberalism, drug trafficking, military bases and economic crises. Ignorance, underdevelopment, economic dependence, poverty, the forced return of those who emigrate in search of work, the brain drain, and even the sophisticated weapons of organized crime were the consequences of interventions and plundering proceeding from the North. Cuba, a little country, has demonstrated that it can resist the blockade and advance in many fields, and even cooperate with other countries.

Today’s speech by the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, at the OAS General Assembly, contains principles that could go down in history. He said admirable things of his own country. I will confine myself to what he stated on Cuba.

“…In the Assembly of the Organization of American States that begins today in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, we must initiate the process of wise rectifications of old errors committed.

“We, the Latin Americans who were recently here, a couple of weeks or months ago, had a grand summit within the Rio Group in Salvador de Bahía, Brazil. There we made a commitment. The commitment, which was taken down in writing and unanimously by all of Latin America, is that in this San Pedro assembly, by majority vote or consensus, that old and worn error committed in 1962 of expelling the Cuban people from this organization would have to be amended.

“We must not go from this assembly, my dear dignitaries, without repealing the decree of that 8th meeting which sanctioned an entire people for having proclaimed socialist ideas and principles, principles now practiced in all parts of the world, including the United States and Europe (Applause). Today, principles of seeking different development alternatives are evident precisely in the change that there has been in the United States with the election of President Barack Obama…

“We cannot go from this assembly without making amends for that error and that infamy because, on the basis of this Organization of American States resolution, in existence for more than four decades, an unjust and useless blockade has been maintained against this sister people of Cuba, precisely because none of its aims have been achieved, but what it has demonstrated is that here, a few kilometers from our country, on a little island, there is a people prepared to resist and to make sacrifices for their independence and sovereignty.

“… not doing so would make us accomplices of a 1962 resolution to expel a state from the Organization of American States simple because it has other ideas, other thoughts, and proclaims principles of a different democracy. And we are not going to be accomplices of that.

“…We cannot go from this assembly without repealing what was enacted in that epoch.

“An exceptional Honduran, called in our country – and one of our national heroes – José Cecilio del Valle, the sage Valle, stated on April 17, 1826, in his famous article ‘Sovereignty and non-intervention’ – we had just proclaimed our independence from the Spanish kingdom – “’The nations of the world are independent and sovereign. Whatever its territorial extension or number of inhabitants might have been, a nation must treat others with the same treatment that it desires to receive from these. A nation does not have the right to intervene in the internal affairs of another nation.’”

With those words of Cecilio del Valle and the mention of Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Morazán, Martí, Sandino and Bolívar, he concluded his speech.

A few minutes later, at the press conference after the opening of the Assembly, he responded to questions and reiterated principles. Then he gave the floor to Daniel Ortega, who was the author of one of the most profound and well-argued papers at the OAS Assembly. At Zelaya’s invitation, Fernando Lugo, president of Paraguay, and Rigoberto Menchú also spoke, expressing themselves in terms similar to Zelaya and Daniel.

The Assembly has been debating for hours. As I am concluding this Reflection, almost at nightfall, there is still no news of the decision. It is known that Zelaya’s speech was influential. Chávez is talking with [Venezuelan Foreign Minister] Maduro and urging him to firmly maintain that no resolution can be admitted that conditions the repeal of the unjust sanction against Cuba. Never has such rebellion been seen. Without any doubt, the battle is a hard one. Many countries are dependent on the index finger of one hand of the government of the United States pointing at the Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the InterAmerican Development Bank or in any other direction for punishing rebelliousness. Having waged it is already a feat in itself on the part of the most rebellious. June 2, 2009 will be recalled by future generations.

Cuba is not an enemy of peace, nor reluctant to interchange or cooperation among countries of distinct political systems, but has been and always will be intransigent in the defense of its principles.

Fidel Castro Ruz – June 2, 2009

Anti-Zionism 4D: Defining Demonization Double Standards and Delegitimization

Posted on May 5, 2009 by Eric Verlo

The word “nutritious” defines a food quality that provides sustenance. I’ve no doubt as skepticism grows about the likely poisonous aspects of refined sugar and High Fructose Corn Syrup, the corporate sugar-water purveyors will append “satiates your subliminal impulses” to the meaning of nutritious. Who safeguards our dictionaries from authoritarians who profit from reweaving the fabric of knowledge we consider inviolate?

We expect facts to change, but it is unsettling to be robbed of the words which we count on to measure the change.

Did you think “anti-Semitic” meant prejudice against the Jews? It does, except the Zionists behind sustaining Israel want it to indemnify their unpopular endeavor too. Anti-Semitism now means opposing Israel, although the stigma implied is of course still “Jew Hater.” But the appropriation is unseemly. Crusading Evangelicals could tell you, if you oppose their bloody incursions into the lands of Islam, then you must be anti-Christian. But are you?

It would seem only fair that the victims of anti-Semitism should be entitled to define what oppresses them, but that’s not who’s wrapping themselves in its protection. Zionists (both Jewish and Christian) claim that an overwhelming percentage of World Jewry supports sustaining the US-Israel occupation of Palestine. Is it true? I wager that the far greater proportion of both Jews and non-Jews repudiate military aggression, occupation, ethnic cleansing and religious oppression. But if it were true, claims of suffering historical persecution are not grounds to be given license to persecute others.

Anti-Semitism describes real, tradition-rooted anti-Jewish sentiment. To expand its meaning disrespects the very tangible prejudice which Jews still face. Opposition to sustaining Israel is actually Anti-Zionism, which is neither for nor against Judaism. Anti-Zionism denounces another long-held prejudice: White European Man’s assertion that the Holy Land belongs to him.

Anti-Zionism is the opposition to sustaining an illegally invaded, illegally occupied, racist administration of Palestine in the name of “Zionism.” Anti-Zionism calls for “the destruction of Israel,” meaning the dissolution of the Western colonial theocracy imposed on the indigenous population of the Middle East. To oppose the sustaining of Israel is a call to exterminate Israeli apartheid. Anti-Zionism is no resurrection of the Final Solution. It means leave people be. White settlers should not assume to usurp the lands and water rights of the native Palestinians.

Zionism defender Nathan Sharansky has constructed a definition of anti-Semitism with an expanded breadth, he calls them the three Ds: Demonization, Double Standards and Delegitimization. It’s this 3D definition with which Zionists are branding UCSB professor William Robinson, himself a Jew, as an anti-Semite. Professor Robinson circulated an email among his sociology students, comparing Israel’s actions in Gaza to methods used by the Nazis, now US-Israeli lobby groups are calling for UCSB to censure him.

Sharansky’s three Ds are easily refuted because he offers no more than circular argument. Ipso Facto my eye. I reprint Sharansky’s explanation below, but first an abridgment:

Demonization: “…having [the Jewish state’s] actions blown out of all sensible proportion … can only be considered anti-Semitic.”

Double Standards: “It is anti-Semitism … when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while tried and true abusers … are ignored.”

Delegitimization: “…the denial of Israel’s right to exist is always anti-Semitic.”

Thus, if Israel considers the criticisms leveled against it to be insensible, then the criticisms are anti-Semitic; also, so long as abusive regimes persist, Israel reserves its prerogative to abuse; and, the legitimacy of Israel’s biblically ordained Manifest Destiny is never to be questioned. These are self-rationalizations which beg ridicule, but doing so would appear anti-Semitic.

Sharansky finishes: “If other peoples have a right to live securely in their homelands, then the Jewish people have a right to live securely in their homeland.” To suggest that the right of the Palestinians to live in their homeland, have been usurped by the Jewish people, most of whom knew other homelands, is apparently anti-Semitic.

Here is Nathan Sharansky’s statement to support the 3-D formula for decrying “ANTI-SEMITISM!”

I propose the following test for differentiating legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism. The 3D test, as I call it, is not a new one. It merely applies to the new anti-Semitism the same criteria that for centuries identified the different dimensions of classical anti-Semitism.

DEMONIZATION
The first D is the test of demonization.

Whether it came in the theological form of a collective accusation of deicide or in the literary depiction of Shakespeare’s Shylock, Jews were demonized for centuries as the embodiment of evil. Therefore, today we must be wary of whether the Jewish state is being demonized by having its actions blown out of all sensible proportion.

For example, the comparisons of Israelis to Nazis and of the Palestinian refugee camps to Auschwitz — comparisons heard practically every day within the “enlightened” quarters of Europe — can only be considered anti-Semitic.

Those who draw such analogies either do not know anything about Nazi Germany or, more plausibly, are deliberately trying to paint modern-day Israel as the embodiment of evil.

DOUBLE STANDARDS
The second D is the test of double standards. For thousands of years a clear sign of anti-Semitism was treating Jews differently than other peoples, from the discriminatory laws many nations enacted against them to the tendency to judge their behavior by a different yardstick.

Similarly, today we must ask whether criticism of Israel is being applied selectively. In other words, do similar policies by other governments engender the same criticism, or is there a double standard at work?

It is anti-Semitism, for instance, when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while tried and true abusers like China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria are ignored.

Likewise, it is anti-Semitism when Israel’s Magen David Adom, alone among the world’s ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross.

DELIGITIMIZATION
The third D is the test of deligitimization. In the past, anti-Semites tried to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish religion, the Jewish people, or both. Today, they are trying to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state, presenting it, among other things, as the last vestige of colonialism.

While criticism of an Israeli policy may not be anti-Semitic, the denial of Israel’s right to exist is always anti-Semitic. If other peoples have a right to live securely in their homelands, then the Jewish people have a right to live securely in their homeland.

White European genocide by poverty, war, and disease

Posted on May 5, 2009 by Tony Logan

hiv-southern-africa
The US and Europe supported Portuguese colonialism in South Africa and White South African Apartheid for centuries. Today they support genocide in the region of Southern Africa, even as they pretend to want to ‘help’. This is where the epicenter of HIV infection is allowed to continue to rage as it is coming close to infecting 30% of the population in some of the countries found there. What has The West done beyond starting off the process of disease, poverty, and warfare in this region that has now lead to this crisis?

‘The overwhelming majority of people with HIV, some 95% of the global total, live in the developing world.’ Yes, but that statement actually tells us so very little since it is principally South Africa and the countries surrounding South Africa that Apartheid infected with this disease in epidemic proportions. What we are seeing there is the equivalent of the Plague Years of Medieval Europe having been implanted by White European Apartheid States during their reign, with American and Europe now standing by with their thumbs up their asses. That is GENOCIDE.

From Iraq to Afghanistan to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime!

Posted on February 23, 2009 by Eric Verlo

A.N.S.W.E.R. has 7 Reasons to March on DC. We can borrow them!
– The war in Afghanistan is expanding and widening.
– 350,000 U.S. troops and US-paid contractors still occupy Iraq.
– Israel’s Siege of Gaza remains in place, with backing of Washington.
– Obama’s Justice Department is continuing the policy of renditions.
– Air strikes on Pakistan are killing an increasingly number of civilians.
– The real Pentagon war budget is over $1.3 trillion annually.
– More than 20 million people are now unemployed and under-employed.

7 Reasons You Should March on the Pentagon on March 21, 2009

1
The war in Afghanistan is expanding and widening. President Obama announced last week that another 17,000 troops are on their way to Afghanistan. Only 18 percent of Afghanis support this escalation and only 34 percent of the people of the United States approve of the added troops despite the president’s popularity, according to the Washington Post/ABC poll announced on February 17, 2009. This is a colonial war. The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, was not involved in the decision to add more occupying troops into his country. Rather, he was “informed of the deployments in a telephone call with Obama” on February 17, according to the Washington Post (February 18, 2009).

2
About 350,000 U.S. troops and U.S.-paid private contractors (mercenaries) still occupy Iraq. The Iraqi people want the occupation to end. Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is insisting that only two of the 14 combat brigades in Iraq exit in 2009. The war and occupation of Iraq costs $430 million each day. If the U.S. government were to end the military occupation, any and all future Iraqi governments would return to a position of political independence from the economic and political dictates of the United States. Iraq’s anti-colonial legacy has created a political reality that prohibits the country from becoming like Kuwait or Saudi Arabia–an out-and-out dependency on U.S. imperialism. That is the real reason that the U.S. government fears a complete disengagement from Iraq and an end to its military occupation.

3
Israel’s Siege of Gaza remains in place, with the full backing of Washington. The U.S. government has continued to fund Israel’s war and blockade against the people of Gaza. The Pentagon provided the funding, and technical and logistical support for the establishment of the Israeli war machine, including its massive cluster and white phosphorous bomb arsenal, and the country’s large cache of nuclear bombs.

4
The new Justice Department has announced that it will continue the policy of renditions, meaning the CIA and Pentagon will capture and kidnap individuals anywhere in the world and transfer them to other countries. “The Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.” (LA Times, Feb. 1, 2009)

5
The new administration has stepped up the air strikes that are killing an increasingly large number of Pakistani civilians. Unmanned drone bombing attacks violate Pakistani sovereignty and are creating an ocean of resentment and anger inside of Pakistan. The U.S. government has no right to carry out these drone bombing strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The people of the United States would not accept the legitimacy of other governments ordering air attacks in the United States. We must openly and loudly reject such tactics by the government that speaks in our name and spends our tax dollars for such aggression.

6
The real Pentagon war budget is over $1.3 trillion annually. This is greater than the combined total of most of the other countries in the world, including all the NATO countries, and Russia and China. Some label this “waste spending” because it spends precious resources to build exotic and high cost weapons, a new generation of nuclear weapons, and space-based war fighting capabilities, while filling the coffers of the big investors (i.e., the biggest banks) in the war corporations. Pentagon contracting is often based on guaranteed “cost-plus” contracts that reward price gouging since corporate profit is based on a fixed percentage above their expenses. Another label for this process is “extreme corruption” and theft from the public treasury.

7
More than 20 million people are now unemployed and under-employed. Nine million families are either in foreclosure or are at risk of foreclosure this year, according to the statistics just released by the government. Forty-seven million people are without health care. College tuition hikes are soaring and millions of students are at risk of being forced out of school. The people want change. They don’t want a simple tweaking of Bush’s criminal foreign policies. They want to put people’s needs before corporate greed. They want an end to wars of aggression that are wreaking havoc, death and destruction abroad, and diverting urgently needed resources in the service of semi-colonialism and Empire.

Costa Rica a prototypical Western Democracy

Posted on January 28, 2009 by Eric Verlo

PUERTO JIMINEZ, CR- Touring Costa Rica has been interesting. Considering the turmoil of Central America, it may be a shining example of a functional Capitalist Democracy. It´s got a healthy middle class and a relatively contented populace. Can it offer a lesson to its strife torn neighbors? Sure. Get rid of the Indios.

Citizens of the “Rich Coast” pride themselves on being light skinned, owing to a Spanish heritage of course. They´re the descendants of settlers, mixed some with labor imports from the Caribbean. But the indigenous people are gone. Which makes for scarce land redistribution demands.

When Columbus first came to Costa Rica, there were 400,000 inhabitants. When they saw that the Spaniards were enslaving whoever they conquered, the tribes hid in the mountains. As a result, Costa wasn´t properly subjugated like elsewhere. The Spanish didn´t want land that didn´t come with ready slave labor. But hiding didn´t save the indians. As the Spanish settled the land, the original population dwindled, to 10%, then 2% within 200 years. They are, as Randy Newman sang it: “Gone, real gone.”

There is an inspiring history to Costa Rica´s present relatively egalitarian government, and I´m going to write more about some of their laudable leaders. But I have to argue that CR smacks of US artifice. And lo, even as I cringe at the camo themed souvenir caps that remind me of the Contras, it turns out Oliver North operated his Contra army and drug smuggling operation out of an airfield in northern Costa Rica. There´s a surfing destination near there called Ollie´s Point, named after the would be filibuster himself. Those apolitical surfer fucks.

(It is hard to surpress disdain for the hard-recreating American asses despoiling CR toilet paper. I cannot bear their vibes of inutile indifference.)

So the Costa Ricans are less Central Americans than good old Americans. And that never meant Native American.

Obama delivers Bush 3rd inaugural address

Posted on January 21, 2009 by Eric Verlo

What did Barack Obama say at this morning’s inauguration that Bush hasn’t said in shorter mouthfuls?

Obama brought up the Goddamn War On Terror, without labeling it “so-called,” and aimed at the usual suspect evildoers. And he’s embraced Neoliberal Globalization like it’s cod liver oil.

Not only that, apparently America is unrepentant. Also, bring it on.

“Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. …

“We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.”

On the subject of our economy, Obama wants to sidestep the rampant corruption and lay the blame on the American people’s resistance to globalization:

“Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

Then he wants to pick fights with the Third World which dares criticize the legacy of colonialism and ongoing oppression of globalism. Pitting their meager voices against the resources of world banking:

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West – know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.

Elaborating on what help the West offers:

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow;

Can that be anything other than a plug for big agra, and the international privatization of water?

But mostly Barack Obama’s theme was Kennedy’s and Bush’s, ask not what your country can do for you, yada yada.

How dare he? Millions of us contribute our efforts, our dollars, which they are still soliciting, to put Obama in office, and he has the nerve, in his inaugural address to call upon the American people for sacrifice. It’s up to them, us, to bring change.

He’s got a paycheck now, his friends and colleagues have jobs, it’s time for them to snap to. They’ve been sent to Washington, not to tell us they’re going to be stymied, that they’ve got to compromise with the corporate right, but to say Yes We Can. And they better Goddamn do it. There is no consensus to reach on health care, or the environment, or war. Compromise with immorality is like cheating a little, or stealing a little.

What I wanted to hear from Obama, is “yes I can, yes I will, thank you America, now I’m going to deliver for you.”

Israel-USA use Hamas as shields to kill Palestinian children

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Tony Logan

wounded Palestinian child Here we go again with that typical Pentagon argument that the official enemy of the minute is supposedly hiding behind civilians. Israel shells near UN school, killing at least 30 This is what Israeli propagandists have to say about that…

‘The Israeli army said its soldiers came under fire from militants hiding in the school and responded. It accused Gaza’s Hamas rulers of “cynically” using civilians as human shields.’ What a threadbare argument for killing civilians with heavy fire, and the US government uses this excuse all the time for its Murder Incorporated policies around the globe.

How many times has the Pentagon dropped bombs on schools, mosques, and wedding parties, and then denied it or used the above excuse? More times than I can count. Israel-USA are a group of terrorists and most all of the citizens of both countries are apologists for their government’s continual use of terrorism on civilian populations.

That is what colonialism, ‘neo’ or not always leads to. We need to open our voices, increase our public visibility in our opposition to the latest US terrorism underway via a US government client state. We need to wake up and realize that we are not governed by a democracy, but rather by a corporate dictatorship that has become, Murder Incorporated. We live under the rule of State Terrorists. Barack Obama is merely a new gargoyle that heads this regime.

Putin once again to the US and Europe- ‘Fuck you, you are not going to turn Russia into a Third World rape victim!’

Posted on December 31, 2008 by Tony Logan

Russia-Ukraine gas talks collapse –like when the US tried to pull off its little con game using Georgia to bomb South Ossetia. Vladimir Putin has responded to the US and its Klan of Western European allies, that Russia will not be dragged further into the Third World by capitalist imperialism. That’s what it’s all about, too, as both the former Chinese and Russian ‘socialist’ bureaucrats were promised full partnerships in the imperialist capitalist world if only they would tag along quietly behind the US and its world allies. Instead, the Pentagon has been trying to push both countries backwards and not forwards. The USA government has been having its own way for the last three decades doing it, too.

Colonialism 101 is something that the former ‘Marxist-Leninist buffoons running China and the Soviet Union back then never learned for themselves, let alone taught to others in their pantomime of playing ‘Great Helmsmen’ cartoon roles for the world public. Both Russia and China drifted away from internationalism and solidarity with the oppressed of the poorer and exploited Third World masses of destitute laborers, and instead began to ape assholes like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in their politics. They wanted their places on the big table alongside their capitalist associates of Great Britain and the US, Germany, France, and Japan. The dummies were conned, and Putin is quite aware of that by now. Further, he understands Peak Oil is a reality, as well as Peak Gas.

In his words, ‘Cheap Energy’ is over for you guys, and now we’re not just going to sit by and let you pillage everything from our country, Russia. Sadly, our own US ‘leaders’, from Obama to Clinton to Bush to all of the schmucks up there are nothing but criminal robbers and murderers, and world war is soon in the cards if the common folk don’t begin to wise up in the US and Britain, Germany, France, and Japan quite soon. Not to mention the utter ecological destruction of our planet in the cards for all of us quite soon, too, if we continue to fail to act.

That picture is of the university in Gaza being bombed by the US… Oh, I meant Israel. Sorry….

Happy New Year.

Zebulon Pike was an Illegal Alien (In the No Hater Zone)

Posted on May 25, 2008 by Brother Jonah

posted this on Craigslist… Date: 2008-05-25, 1:31AM MDT

Just to remind people, since the Old Colorado City Territory Days celebration of colonialism and Imperialism is going on…

Young Lieutenant Pike, and his merry crew of saboteurs, spies and setup crew for the eventual Yanqui invasion, came to Colorado when it was SPANISH territory. Not that the Spanish had actually asked permission when they took over, but hey, according to the “Well, Illegal Immigration is against the Law, so the Immigrants are Felons” argument should apply equally, yes?

Pike and his crew encountered troops (the Spanish version of I.C.E., Da Fuzz, cops, whatever, but they had at least paper title to be here, and Pike didn’t) and did what any Honest, True, Red Blooded American Officer and Gentleman would do… he lied his ass off.

Said he was lost. Never mind the surveying equipments, wagonload of freshly drawn and annotated MAPS, and Native guides who knew damned well which invading force was occupying the Springs at the time. Heavens no, it’s not like a Mapping Expedition (into a foreign country no less) could possibly know where in Hell they’re located.

I wrote this just to remind all you sissy ass, titty baby fearful wannabe terrorists who have been crying and bitching and snivelling about somebody actually having a darker complexion or speaking with an accent, or in a different language, actually sharing YOUR personal universe, of which, no doubt, you racist Hate Freaks own every cubic inch…

To remind you that your own titty-baby whining arguments can be used against you as well.

If you want to live in America, learn the damn language… in this area the languages are Cheyenne, Blackfoot, Lakota, Uintah and Athapascan (Apache and Navajo), and those are just the largest language groups.

You freaks who want to impose “English ONLY” are also insisting that we of the Native Persuasion not be allowed to speak OUR languages, and even in our own homes.

Your leaders actually do say exactly that. Because (so they claim) speaking in a non-English “foreign” language like Cherokee would “hold the children back when they go to school and later when they join the Slave Labor Forces”

I should clarify that, Cherokee isn’t actually a language, it’s a dialect of Muskogeean.

Those of you who cry and snivel the longest and most fervently about “wetbacks” not speaking English well, (I’ve noticed) don’t bother to learn to actually read and write or even speak English FLUENTLY yourselves… and it’s the only language you ever learned.

I realize that you sissies will spend hours of your time debating a phantom issue, you’re very good at that game. I’m personally not going to even read your insignificant ignorant replies to this post. You’ll be screaming (figuratively speaking), Ranting, insulting, calling me a LiberalIntellectualCommiePinkoNiggerLovingFagJewBoy or whatever, and either challenging me to a fist fight (I would win) or threatening to kill me and my entire family.

I’m used to such childish threats and tantrums.

Get over it.

Location: In the No Hater Zone
it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 694154329

Israeli army evicting Palestinian orphans

Posted on April 10, 2008 by NMT

This news just in from the Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron:

“Thursday 10/4 -Update: This morning Israeli Military soldiers came to the girls orphanage, took some inventory of supplies, and announced that the girls have to be out of the orphanage by Sunday. There is no decision given yet by the Israeli High Court whether the orphanages and schools have to be closed. We will keep you posted.
-Mary Anne”

PRESS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Art Arbour, JoAnne Lingle

Hebron Orphanages Press Conference
8 April 2008

HEBRON
The Popular Committee for Supporting the Orphanages hosted a press conference, on Monday, April 7th, at the Hebron Girls Orphanage with approximately 70 attending, including independent media, internationals, and clergy. The Israeli Military has given orders to shut down the orphanages and schools run by the Islamic Charitable Society by 7 April.

The lawyer representing the Islamic Charitable Societies spoke of the invaluable work of serving 2,500 children, 240 of them orphans, aiding an additional 4,000 students and 5,000 needy families, running a dairy and 2 bakeries, a warehouse and 4 small store fronts which serve the schools and orphanages of the Hebron area. The warehouse, bakeries and the storefronts were raided on 6 March 2008. The Israeli Military confiscated food, clothing, school supplies, refrigerators and 2 buses worth $300,000.

The lawyer also spoke of how the monies donated to support the orphanages and schools are accounted for and audited by certified
public accountants and monitored by the Palestinian Authority. The books are open to audit by the Israeli Government as well. Twenty
percent of the monies donated come from the Hebron local community. The other eighty percent come from Europe and the US and Middle East countries. The Islamic Charitable Society is highly respected by locals, NGO’s, and other reputable organizations such as Catholic Charities.

During the conference Rabbi Arik Ascherman, of Rabbis for Human Rights, spoke to the press conference by speaker phone, saying that under Jewish law there must be evidence brought before the court and that there must be witnesses to that evidence. Even in the name of security, this closure is not warranted, as the Islamic Charitable Society has threatened no human life.

Members of CPT and other internationals slept at the orphanages to accompany, and to document any possible incursion by the Israeli Military; however by midnight of 7 April, the attorney for the Israeli Military had asked for an extension of time to prepare and submit to the court a full justification for the closures of the schools and orphanages.

How to win the war in Iraq

Posted on April 9, 2008 by Eric Verlo

How painful it must be for General Petraeus, or any operational commander in Iraq, to have to pretend a strategy, doomed to failure, and have it reflect poorly on you, all the while adhering to unspoken objectives. They’re not lying when they say we are winning in Iraq.

They, not we. The US is losing the lives of soldiers, is losing its shirt, and is losing the battle for hearts and minds, the world over. The prosecutors of the war, the industry, the oil interests, they’re winning.

If you’re after oil, or weapons contracts, or a steady buyer of ammunition, then you are winning in Iraq. The land is destabilized and most easily exploited. Bombs and bullets are expended and require fresh orders for more. Mission accomplished every damn day. For as long as our new bases are intended to last. Did McCain admit it could be 100 years?

If you’re after world conquest, there’s a precedent for making this work. Don’t look to colonialism, every last colony eventually reverts to its people. Even China is having difficulty staking its claim to Tibet.

Unless you apply the American Manifest Destiny model, along the lines of world empire building of ages past. You obliterate the enemy peoples, wipe them out, take their land, put the survivors in camps, to die slow certain spiritual deaths. Obliterate culture, purpose, and hope. Repopulate the stolen land with your people, and never look back. Native Americans are but shadows of their former selves, and the white European Americans own all. No dispute.

A more recent role model, still underway, with a high likelihood of success, the way things are going, is Palestine. Israel occupies more and more, drives the original peoples to death, despair or exile, and continuously resettles its own people on the ground gained.

Do we want just the oil of Iraq, stay the course.

Do we want peace? Hire Israeli advisers and kill those Muslims.

The United Nations starves the poor in Haiti

Posted on April 8, 2008 by Tony Logan

What a pathetic spectacle, the great supposed defender of all humanity, all nations, and respecter of human rights everywhere… the United Nations… has its military now defending the national palace of a US installed group of thugs in Haiti. Yes, defending these thugs against the Haitian people who are demanding food and freedom from starvation. This is what US control over the United Nations Security Council has led to. See Hungry mob attacks Haiti palace

Still, most all US liberals seem to continue to hold some sort of religious belief that the United Nations is some sort of Great and Good Daddy. Liberals have to be some of the most backward, uneducated, and misled types around. Don’ they get it? The United Nations is the grand leader of colonialism these days. Surprised? Well why on earth? That’s what destroyed the League of Nations, and it is destroying the US run United Nations, too.

Get these sorry ass United Nations troops out of Haiti, get them out of Afghanistan, and get them out of Iraq and all the other myriad places the US government leads them into occupying. The United Nations today is no solution to the problems the world faces, but is instead part of the overall problem.

This is a ‘world’ governmental body that needs to be dissolved NOW, and not reconstructed in any way even remotely close to the way the current UN is structured at this time. The UN is not now democracy in action, but imperialism, totalitarianism, and the rule of the rich over the poor in power.

Liberals get over it! You should be calling for getting the United Nations out of countries, dissolving it, and never ever supporting the damn organization. Wake up and see the new situation today, because you sure aren’t battling the old John Birch Society back in the ’50s and ’60s any more! The United Nations simply is not a human rights organization in the least, and the Catholic Church would be easier to ‘reform’ than the UN. Stop being so stupid by defending this organization.

CENTCOM is central command of what?

Posted on February 20, 2008 by Eric Verlo

Mecca in our talons As the invasion of Iraq progressed, I remember constant references to CENTCOM. Journalists would receive their briefings from CentCom, a tent in Kuwait by all appearances. I thought CentCom represented central military communications there, a safe spot behind our lines where generals could command artillery, logistics, etc.

Learning about the newly formed AFRICOM and the established EUROCOM, each beachhead assertions of US superpower control over world regions, I have to revisit US CENTRAL COMMAND for what it is, and its terribly telling dominion. Central? By the emblem I see you don’t mean the time zone. You are not talking about defense of the American Midwest. Do you really mean to refer to the Middle East, including its extended oil producing nations, as the center of your realms to command? I’d sooner concede to American ethnocentrism than to Judeo-Christian pre-occupation with Jerusalem, sooner than hold Mecca in the center cross-hairs of our bomb sights.

I’m happy to report there are currently no eager takers for Bush’s announced AFRICOM, command central for our extraction-industry ambitions on that continent.

After Bin Laden’s loudly felt complaint about the US unholy presence in Saudi Arabia, CENTCOM facilities had to be moved further from Mecca, to the crony dictator states of Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and the UAE. The US Central Command assets include many military bases and undisclosed “weapon pre-positioning sites,” six of which have been revealed to be located in Israel.

The Germans have their shepherds

Posted on February 14, 2008 by Eric Verlo

I was watching the Westminster Dog Show and learned about the most improbable breed of dog. It’s Jewish.

Anti-anti-semitic hund Would you believe it? It’s called the Canaan Dog. It’s named after the biblical lands, and it shares the mystical stewardship connection the Jews have with the Holy Land. Only they are fit to look after it.

Who knows why, or who knows if it’s really true. The Bedouin keep these dogs, as have the Druze, but because the Kelef K’naani is the official dog of Israel, the exclusive lineage, which we are informed is deserving of preservation, excludes the Arab connections like they were pariah.

(Exclusive- Do you think you might have a Canaan dog? Well you don’t. They’re that exclusive. And the Canaan Dog Rescue is only interested in saving real ones.)

In spite of the Westminster Kennel Club’s waspish ambiance, the voice-over description of the Canaan was similarly Kosher, which is what caught my attention.

Bred in Ancient Judea to be shepherds and watch dogs for the Israelites, the breed suffered a setback when the lands were overrun by the Egyptians. When the Hebrews were scattered in the Great Diaspora their dogs were left to go feral in the Negev desert. There they lived in the wild for, are you ready for this, 2000 years! When Zionism brought the Jews back to Palestine, master and faithful hound were reunited. The Canaan was re-domesticated again in the 1930s [to protect their unpopular owners from their historic rivals]. Bracketed notation mine.

Actually, an animal behavior specialist was recruited from Austria in 1934 by the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization protecting the Zionist settlements in Palestine since 1907. They needed a working dog for what would become the Unit Oketz, the Israeli K-9 special forces. Bred from the pariah dogs which attended the Bedouins, the Canaan dog, actually a Spitz, is noted for its alertness, its bark and its distrust of strangers. I’m reminded of the attack dog trained to be racist in Sam Fuller’s 1982 film White Dog, banned in the US.

Canaan, by the way, encompassed an area which covered present day Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, and parts of Lebanon and Syria. Who is dragging politics into the dog show?

World Economy 101

Posted on January 24, 2008 by Tony Logan

Here is a graph that I think illustrates world economic history quite well in a very simple way. It takes three countries and charts their portions of the world economy over 2 centuries. The three countries are the US, India, and China. See the graph Output and Outlook

Ignore the conclusion of the Harvard Professor, Greg Mankiw, as he glowingly quotes Michael Milken of the Wall Street Journal. Both these guys are American apologist buffoons who overlook the obvious about the graph they are looking at.

In 1820 India and China held almost 50% of the world’s economic output between themselves, whereas the US had less than 2% of it. But just about then the US was importing slaves ripped away from the African continent by European imperialism. As this stolen wealth in human slaves accumulated in the US and was used as labor in agricultural production, the US portion of world wealth shot up, and later not even the Civil War could brake it.

And then, European imperialism began to spread its hooks and tentacles toward India and China, where they began to colonize the 2 regions. Now you see the swing begin downward in the Chinese and Indian portions of world wealth as they were bled drier and drier by the Europeans, and in the case of the Chinese also by Japan.

It is only in the 1980’s where China, and a lesser extent India began to recover some. That was when both societies began to recuperate themselves some from the destructive effects of colonial occupation.

Since the end of WW2, the European countries and the US have had to discard colonialism and embrace neo-colonialism, where the looting of other countries is done primarily through economic structures (banks and lending institutions), and not military ones of direct occupation.

Now with the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, we see the US Empire beginning to return to using the old methods of traditional colonialism by direct military occupation to loot other countries’ wealth to enrich its own treasuries. Or at least, this seems to be the current direction where US government is now trying to implement its foreign policies.

Direct colonization by occupation troops does not have a recent history of being successful though, except in the case of the construction of the Jewish Apartheid state of Israel. The US occupation of Iraq is somewhat an extension and outgrowth of the Jewish occupation of Palestine, while the occupation of Afghanistan is more a remote fortress garrison occupation than a direct colonization attempt of any sort.

So what we have is the US Empire today directing a kind of hybrid imperialism where traditional colonialism is fused with neo-colonialism, and then again with a sort of return to the old colonial style fortess enclave structures, like the British and Portugese used to specialize in.

But now, we are off some from the theme of the simple educational graph that we linked to.

Arabic Christmas Songs

Posted on December 24, 2007 by Tony Logan

Lest any of our local Christians forget, Jesus was kind of an Arab. So in honor of that, here are some Arabic Christmas Songs brought to you courtesy of The Coptic Church.

After Tony Blair?

Posted on December 10, 2007 by Tony Logan

The whole English speaking world breathed a sigh of relief when Tony Blair finally was replaced by Gordon Brown. Gone was a toady for the US neocon Bush regime and in was….?

Well, a British Hillary Clinton perhaps? At least it was thought, that Brown would move to get British troops out of Iraq and the corporate media has tried to give the impression that this was the actual case. But is it so really?

What seems to be happening is that British troops are merely being redeployed as support platoons for the Pentagon. See AFP report Troops enter Taliban-held town as British PM visits 10/12/2007 They are being pulled out of Southern Iraq step by step, but then are being sent into Afghanistan!

There seems to be a division of labor developing, where the US does Iraq, and the British do Afghanistan. Hey! And who gets Pakistan then? Musharaf still gets last use from Bush maybe? And Jewish Israel certainly is doing their part by continuing to eagerly subjugate the Palestinians for the US and their ownselves. It’s an ethnic cleansing on a mass scale led by D.C. and the Pentagon.

What we have are new lines being drawn in the US made regional war for regime changes in the Middle East-Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan chain of Muslim countries. Gordon Brown is not retreating from Tony Blair’s melding of the British as junior partners for the US neocon imperialist game plan. Instead, he is continuing that relationship in full.

In short, after Tony Blair we get more of the same, not any real change. And that will be what we get with a Democratic Party President, too. More imperialistic colonialism so that the US-Brit governments continue to control their supply of oil. Lots of corporations are depending on them to do just that.

The Blame China pro US interventionists come to town today

Posted on October 29, 2007 by Tony Logan

The group Save Darfur comes to town with their Blame China pro-US interventionist campaign today at Colorado College. This campaign is heavily backed by the Democratic Party and is designed to take the heat off the Democrats for backing Bush’s genocide against the Iraqi people. Many people unfortunately seem to be falling for the con.

It is disgraceful that the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission is also slipping this antiChinese campaign onto its list of events to promote. Why? The Chinese are about the last nation to be blaming for all the bloodshed that European colonialism backed up by US imperialism has brought to the African continent. Instead of concentrating on the misdeeds of our own American government, some in the PPJPC seem intent on promoting US interventionism into Africa instead.

Sure, the liberal interventionists take great pains to hide their true program. They say they are trying to save lives, not trying to push US military interventionism in Sudan. But that that is not so is clear by their entire lack of any campaign to get the US out of Africa. Instead, they play the US government blame game and encourage its campaign against China.

Shame on you Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission! If there was any sort of democratic discussion and decision making inside this organization, maybe a stop could be put to this local push for US interventionism? But the organization seems totally undemocratic in structure, and little is being done to change that despite so many promises to do so.

It is time for this organization decide whether they will continue to encourage doing pro intervention work in favor of greater US involvement into African affairs, or not. It is one thing if individual members on their own bring in their signs and banners For US Intervention, but quite another when the organization as a whole encourages participation as a whole in these pro US interventionist campaigns.

US Out of Africa Now! It’s time to reign in the US military and not to call for yet more aggression against foreign countries. It’s time for the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission to stop playing dumb on the issue of US interventionism into other countries’ affairs, even when the media says it is all for a good cause.

Student Zionist group, Hillel, and Darfur

Posted on September 20, 2007 by Tony Logan

Hillel, the US’s most prominent student Zionist group, is actively pushing for US intervention against and into Sudan. On their web site which passes itself off as progressive and green, you will not find any concern for the people of Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, or Afghanistan. All these being countries currently being torn apart by US interventions into their affairs.

Instead, Hillel is all into encouraging the notion that US and British imperialism is a benign humanitarian thing for the peoples of Sudan to experience, just as so many other colonized and semi-colonized peoples have. Onward Christian and Jewish soldiers, I guess?

One local activist who is often times connected with the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission through his work at Springs Action Alliance, is now celebrating Hillel’s work over at the University of Colorado in Boulder. There some students have erected a ‘shanty town’ to ‘call attention to Darfur’. Some of these folk were Hillel sutdents for sure.

The Springs Action Alliance’s most recent newsletter called our attention to this ‘shanty town’ constructed by a few students over at the UC at Boulder. This activist is concerned about Darfur. Good. He wanted us to know about this ‘shanty town’ build for us to try to get our support for intervention into Sudan.

I guess though that this individual has forgotten about the segregated shanty towns of White Apartheid South Africa that Zionist groups like Hillel enouraged Israel and the US to accept for decades? He, and other local liberal Darfur fetishists seemingly are blind to the allies they sometimes keep, it seems. They focus on Darfur alongside at many times a rather mixed crowd, Zionists included. These Zionists of today want us to forget about Apartheid shanty towns, and to think that Muslims are putting people into shanty towns instead of Christian Whites, or Jews.

These liberals that push us to become more concerned about Darfur don’t seem to understand that we already are concerned about the violence there. We don’t need Hillel to ‘inform’ us of the problem. We don’t need the Carter Center folk either. We, too, are concerned with all the dying that is going on in that region of Sudan.

We don’t need Zionist backed construction of fake ‘shanty towns’ at UC-Boulder to prompt our interest. We are against the continued bloodshed in that sad region of Sudan, Darfur, with or without Zionists and Israel pushing the issue.

Unlike the Zionists, both Jewish and Christian in the US, we don’t primarily hold the mainly Muslim government of Sudan to be alone responsible for the killing that has occurred there. We also don’t think that an increase in US-British govenrment directed intervention is the solution to what decades of British colonialism in the region has brought about.

More Imperial directed colonialism is not the solution to problems accruing from several centuries of European colonialism, even if it comes disguised as UN or African Union intervention instead of directly Brit and American.

Hillel and Darfur? How sweet their concern for Africa certainly is. It’s just not very sincere though. Instead, it’s little more than a propaganda tool they hope to use to gain support for more Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians off more of the Palestinian’s land.

Who are they really going to fool long term here? Their concern about any killing going on in Sudan is nothing more than a distracting device, to help keep people’s attention away from Israel’s own crimes committed with the help of the US government. If they want to worry about shanty towns, then worry some about those refugee camps both Israel and the US have created all over the Middle East. Until then, their concern about shanty towns in Sudan rings a little too false to me.

AFRICOM and the US/ European drive to control Africa’s oil

Posted on March 4, 2007 by Tony Logan

The Center for International Policy has an excellent report about the newest US push to further militarize the continent of Africa and control the oil supplies located there. All of this is to be done under the propaganda cover of fighting terrorism, and through the establishment of the new African command operation center (AFRICOM) of the US military, which is already the military coordinator of US interventions into Somalia, into Chad and Sudan, and into Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, and where much of the African oil is located.

No area of Africa will actually be free from US military control when these plans are fully put into place, and antiwar activists should be pushing to oppose the expansions of US and European military organizations into the African continent now. That includes opposing the further deployments of African Union and United Nations Security Council troops as well, since these groups are not autonomous or free of Pentagon control. Not in the least.

After literally killing hundreds of millions of Africans through decades and centuries of European/ US colonialism and imperialism on the continent, the new push to control and loot African oil for the industrialized countries promises much more suffering to come to Africa in the years ahead. The real genocide that is taking place throughout Africa has been in march for a very long time through the entire continent, and can only be ended by giving the boot to the US and Europe and their imperialist armies out of the region altogether. African oil for Africans and not for imperialist based multinational oil companies backed up by the Pentagon! Stop AFRICOM now. We need to stop the genocide across the entire African continent, and that can only be done by getting our own US government’s military demobilized.

(You might want to read the entire CIP report and not just the link I provided to the summary of that report. The link to the entire PDF shown article, if you missed it, is at the bottom of the introduction itself. Very interesting material.)

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