Storm Bastille. Load Guillotine. Done.

Tax cuts for the rich. Higher deficit interest to the bankers. Less healthcare, Social Security and safety net for you. Ceaseless war for corporate imperialists, continued resource extraction for climate depopulation, and more austerity for the middle class. 21st Century oligarchs say: let the poor eat shitcake.

D’YA THINK THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW?! You already went to the polls. You elected a democrat president who served only money lenders and warmongers. You already had a democrat majority in Congress. You already called your representative. You already sent them petitions. No matter the party, rich asshole politicians will pass laws to favor the rich. EAT THE RICH is good for laughs but first you gotta catch them. The French Revolution left us a blueprint that historians have tried to distort and blur ever since. Rise up! Overrun the security citadel. Decapitate the hydra of state. This time, spare not a single Mandarin. Minus greedy sociopaths, the average human nature is good.

So-called liberal UC Berkley relaxes its academic standards to admit idiots.

Next science departments are going to invite clerics to speak, to open the dialog, as UC Berkley wants to explain, between the educated and un. Climate scientists should dialog with deniers apparently. Imagine math departments sponsoring conversations with preschoolers. What a crock to think universities need entertain a diversity of IQs.

Worse than ignorant, imbecile, or batshit crazy are political ideologues already championed by the conservative establishment.

I don’t think free speech rights protect Ann Coulter’s access to an amplification system at Sproul Plaza. Let the free market determine if what she’s got to say should be licensed by the campus population. It doesn’t have to be hate speech to merit shutting down. Ignorant bigoted sociopathic blather can be shouted down, tarred, feathered, and run out of town without anyone feeling pangs of concern for the First Amendment. The corporate media and publishing houses prop her up. The grassroots have no more obligation than to make sure Coulter’s feet are burned wherever she lands her broom. The Berkley students who invited Ann Coulter to speak need to be counseled their prospects are better with vocational school.

Modern Nat Turner insures Dallas cops cannot assail Black lives with impunity

Chris DornerWas ANYBODY going to stop the unfettered lynching of people of color in America? Did President Obama ever deliver anything more than a eulogy? Few police officers are being convicted or even indicted. Videotaped killings of black men by lawmen have become so common, those disseminating the videos are being accused of harboring fetishes. People expressing offense online are being shamed for being clicktivists, though clearly the only fuels firing public outrage are the videos. Meanwhile Black Lives Matter spokespeople have become so jaded they ridicule the efficacy of street protests. And now everyone is condemning the lone direct action taker.

The killing of any human being is terrible, but the retaliatory killings of police in Dallas could have been prevented. Not by expecting minority communities to stomach further and unending extrajudicial assassinations, but by having police curb their racism and use of lethal force. Or of course by disbanding militarized police departments. Public officials can’t even broach that conversation. Do we expect the police state to dismantle itself?

Self-styled black revolutionary Micah Xavier Johnson, a typical PTSD-hardened Afghan vet, put “suicide by cop” to the service of his embattled community and avenged the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. He didn’t shoot their actual killers, but he didn’t hit innocents either. Johnson targeted America’s systemic enforcers of inequity, hitting twelve police officers, five of whom have now died.

Let’s note those cops weren’t “protecting the first amendment rights” of a spontaneous protest of the Sterling and Castile murders, but were harassing and detering demonstrations. The officers could have chosen not to, and hopefully, their comrades in other cities, molesting other legal assemblies, may now choose to stand down, because now authoritarian bullying has come in the line of fire.

There is poetic justice for those who would decry “Blue Lives Matter”. If they’re going to pretend it, let them feel the oppressive threat of violence which black lives bear. For one evening, in a small corner of Dallas, Texas, police brutality faced a comeuppance.

For now Johnson’s act is being condemned as an atrocity, as a massacre even, though obviously his victims 1) met every standard of belligerent adversary, 2) were armed, and 3) outnumbered him. Let’s concede that Johnson is a credit to his military training. He confirms how our soldiers could so murderously rapage through our war zones against lesser equipped combatants. Johnson’s motive echoes that which provoked US atrocities overseas, seeking revenge against civilians, exacting collective punishment for deadly IEDs.

If we acknowledge the violence with which African Americans are oppressed, and the mendacity of its apologists and enablers, can we condemn violent resistance? International law accords oppressed peoples the human right to resist.

Slave rebellion leader Nat Turner is recognized today as a hero, but was exhaustively vilified in his day because he killed slave owners, indescriminate of old or young. Whites retaliated and killed many more blacks. More violence follwed from abolitionsists and Jayhawkers, all of it lamentable. But slavery didn’t end because we willed it.

Because this era’s history is written with erasers, our victors’ primary tool, Micah Johnson will probably never be praised for heroism.

Johnson will join fellow effaced cop-killer Christopher Dorner. A previous African American reservist vet who was immolated alive, killed instead of being apprehended, lest an investigation benefit from his testimony about why he could no longer bear LAPD corruption in 2013.

From Dorner’s “manifesto”, before Michael Brown, Ferguson and Baltimore:

“Those Caucasian officers who join South Bureau divisions (77th,SW,SE, an Harbor) with the sole intent to victimize minorities who are uneducated, and unaware of criminal law, civil law, and civil rights. You prefer the South bureau because a use of force/deadly force is likely and the individual you use UOF on will likely not report it. You are a high value target.

“Those Black officers in supervisory ranks and pay grades who stay in south bureau (even though you live in the valley or OC) for the sole intent of getting retribution toward subordinate caucasian officers for the pain and hostile work environment their elders inflicted on you as probationers (P-1?s) and novice P-2’s. You are a high value target.

You perpetuated the cycle of racism in the department as well. You breed a new generation of bigoted caucasian officer when you belittle them and treat them unfairly.

Mikah Johnson’s last words we only know through the spin of Dallas police, the same people who decided not to wait him out, nor to smoke him or gas him out from hiding in a public parking garage, but instead to send a robot with a bomb and M.O.V.E. his ass like every other black nationalist revolutionary.

No, you murdurous assholes, Johnson didn’t “want to kill all white people.” He wanted to kill white cops. Just like Dorner, he wasn’t a threat to the public, he was a threat to the police state. You cops ensured Mikah Johnson didn’t live to dictate “confessions” and you even obliterated his body like Osama bin Laden. Drawn and quartered essentially, to preclude memorializers being able to center on an idol to build a resistance.

You and I may grapple with what to think of Johnson’s personal rampage, but the state knew immediately his was the selfless heroism they fear most. As with bin Laden, they knew his apprehension must be terminal.

Lest I be misunderstood, I do not promote armed insurrection, sedition or murder. I cannot. But I will not condemn Micah Johnson.

I need not agrandize him either. Taken without his revolutionary ideology, Johnson was an ordinary mentally wounded veteran like many others. Homicidal vets with PTSD are at the core of our epidemic of police brutality. Our law enforcement teams are full of OIF and OEF soldiers who got their start shooting up cars at checkpoints and acting out racist genocide to their heart’s content.

It’s not a new problem, the US has always had active warzones feeding veterans into homelessness for those who couldn’t cope and filling government jobs for those who thrived. Beside policemanship, a very common job for discharged soldiers has always been the post office. Rembember the rampaging gunman problem we used to call “going postal?”

America’s racism problem may be transcended by a succession of church services, but class struggle is not a hearts and minds operation. Fascist rule and its army of the rich are not going to be wished away by militant nonviolence. That’s as likely as counting on the tooth fairy.

Worrying that acts like Johnson’s will provoke increased authoritarian repression is an expression of privilege provided by someone aclimated to a tolerable status quo, clearly a white perspective for whom black lives matter not enough.

Until all of us share the plight of the average Syrian refugee, trapped in our capitalist frontier war zones, none of us are shouldering an equitable burden of the police state.

That’s why it is more than black lives that matter. The middle class greivances of Occupy Wall Street are only a class removed from Black America’s suffering. We’re still talking about privileged Americans who support a grander racism that drives our global exploitation of all peoples.

I don’t have any faith that an arc of history bends toward justice in this corporate dark age. For my own sense of what’s right, it’s important to recognize Micah Johnson and Christopher Dorner for who they were, flawed, maybe very minor, aspiring Nat Turners, who wanted to strike against today’s slave masters and their brutal blue foremen.

Vermin Supreme you’ve been Trumped

The US-EU capitalist apparatus won’t give you health care, won’t address climate change, won’t stop fracking, won’t quit war, won’t block the TPP, won’t obey international law, won’t respect human rights, won’t own up to inequity, won’t combat racism, won’t curb corporate hegemony, and won’t engage real democracy, but IT WILL mobilize every TOOL in its arsenal to protect you from TRUMP?

350.ORG disowns Paris sans-culottes, opts for boot-counting passivist shtick, figures to storm the Bastille shoeless.


HOLY CRAP, Bill McKibben sells out the activists again, agreeing not only to cancel planned protests at the Paris Climate Conference, but distancing 350.ORG and its collaborator NGOs from real demonstrators upset at the protest ban. After leading hundreds of thousands in New York City on the World’s Largest Climate March TO NOWHERE, Bill McKibben flushes the Paris demonstrations and the climate they hoped to save with them. Nothing says silence like a streetful of shoes. Antiwar activists resorted to staging shoe die-ins at every surge of the Iraq War. The result? Crickets. We used army boots to represent mounting American war casualties. As pacifism lost popular traction, the disparing passivists cobbled larger and larger “demonstrations”. Activists came to call them exercises in BOOT-COUNTING. It’s a well-trod path, and as you might expect of shoes without wearers, they march nowhere.

WORSE BUT AS USUAL, the permit-carrying protest groups at the Paris summit immediately disowned demonstrators who threw bottles or in any manner protested the government’s edict to ban public protest in the wake of the November terrorist attacks. Activists who habitually support 350.ORG leadership were thrown under the bus as “not part of our movement”. Specifically they had violated a supposed pact which self-respecting nonprofits had signed to reject anything but impotent rule-following. While the media will continue to hand Bill McKibben a microphone, it’s time for street activists to raise their pitchforks against false grassroots leadership. There wouldn’t have been an Earth First if environmental nonprofits had put resistance before staged activism. The climate message doesn’t require their nuanced strategists. The struggle certainly doesn’t benefit from participants who think they can conscript shoes to take the streets for them.

AS TO A NONVIOLENCE PACT. Organizers of the Paris protests apparently swore an oath not to let protests escalate to resistance to police repression. It’s the same malarky nonviolence advocates demand of their adherants. AS IF Gandhi and MLK won their laurels without resorting to active resistance. Demonstrations against US national conventions have been hamstrung by simlar nonviolence pacts.

HOW ABOUT activists get a jump on the upcoming election year and propose an alternate oath for wannabe protesters, an elaboration on the St Paul Principles so to speak. At the DNC and RNC we swear to do WHATEVER IT TAKES to shut it down. Whoever can’t commit to WHATEVER IT TAKES can’t call themselves comrades. They have no business filling streets only to capitulate. They are the words of Malcolm X: “whatever it takes”. Whatever does not exclude nonviolent methods but it excludes expulsions, or you’re disowned.

The frequently cited St Paul Principles had their time and place: ST PAUL


In my circle they’re called “Saint Paul’s Principles” because my colleagues think the edicts are Catholic I guess. The St Paul Principles came from St Paul Minnesota, circa 2008, and were formally adopted by the varied groups organizing to disrupt the Republican National Convention of 2008. They’ve lived on as guiding principles for activists of all ilk. In 2011 many Occupy encampments ratified the StPP as their own code of conduct, indifferent to whether they were applicable or even beneficial. Let’s examine the well intended dogma. Do they apply universally? Are they constructive? And how did they work out for St Paul? The last one is easy. As you may remember, disruption of the 2008 RNC failed spectacularly.

The St. Paul Principles

1. Our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the plans of other groups.

2. The actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of time or space.

3. Any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement, avoiding any public or media denunciations of fellow activists and events.

4. We oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance, infiltration, disruption and violence. We agree not to assist law enforcement actions against activists and others.

It’s hard to argue against this elegant expression of solidarity. With the SPPs, the protest organizers aimed at preempting COINTELPRO style disruption from generating conflict within the movement. The implicit condemnation of violence was of state sponsored violence, not authentic barricade defense. And no snitching. The SPPs addressed the problems which were already scuttling Denver’s 2008 DNC protests. In Denver, “Recreate ’68” planners let the press infer they meant to revive the Chicago riots of 1968, prompting almost every traditional social justice group to circulate a contract which everyone was expected to sign. It was a vow of nonviolence. Organizations who refused to sign were ostracized and could expect the violent police clobbering they invited.

Essentially the SPPs aimed to unite the nonviolent and non-nonviolent activists, to ensure neither denounced the other, and that physically neither wound up caught in each other’s fights or sit-ins. Probably the chief concession was being asked of the nonviolent crowd: Please, as long as we promise not to shroud your family atmosphere and your baby strollers in tear gas, please let the Black Blocs do their thing without your repudiation. Please. We share the same goals.

Can you begin to see where such a strategy might fail to lead?

But the St Paul organizers did share the same goals. Their aim was to disrupt the RNC via a strategy they called “3S” actions. SWARM, SEIZE. STAY. It’s easy to see why three years later Occupy Wall Street was attracted to these directives. “3S” defines Occupy and another three years on, OWS activist followed the 2014 Climate March with an action called “Flood Wall Street” the instructions for which rephrased 3S aquatically.

The “movement” to which the SPPs refer shared a goal, to disrupt the RNC, by means of swarming, seizing, and staying, by whatever tactic each member group wanted. They shared a further agreement, that the city of St Paul was to be partitioned in sectors allowing groups to conduct their actions in isolation, united in time, but separated geographically so that red zone, yellow zone and green zone participants needn’t mix and find themselves out of their respective confort zones.

The groups organizing against the 2008 RNC shared one more thing in common, bound as they were to the St Paul Principles, they were all signatories to the principles.

Do the St Paul Principles apply universally?
It’s easy to see that the 2011 OWS occupations in major cities across the country shared a similar goal. It was, if perhaps more vague than to prevent a party convention, to disrupt the wheels of commerce by means of encampments; the “3S” tactic now reduced to a single verb “Occupy”. Allies such as unions and antiwar organizations, while sympathetic, cannot be said to have shared the same determinaton to disrupt. Even MoveOn with their “99% Spring”, FireDogLake with their merchandizing, and Adbusters had to relent with the revolutionary rhetoric. Eventually OWS spinoffs like Occupy Sandy Relief began to serve functions diametrically opposed to disruption. Did they expand the “movement”? Of course. But did the more inclusive “movement” outgrown the capacity for St Paul Principles to maintain its unity? Are activists bent on disruption expected to respect and support activists determined to prevent disruption?

I know it’s lovely to imagine every social justice effort as anti-authoritarian, and whether nonviolent or indulgent, each comprises a unique wing of a broad anti-government movement. If you are prepared to pretend that everyone’s aims are progressive, we share similar enough goals and we are reformists. But if some aims are revolutionary, explicitely anti-Capitalist for example like Occupy Wall Street, then reformists are counterrevolutionary. If you think reformists aren’t Capitalism’s first line of defense, even as they consider themselves activists, then you don’t know your adversaries from your allies. To imagine that activists shouldn’t address such chasms of understanding in favor of upholding popular delusion is going to get a movement nowhere.

At last year’s Climate March in NYC, the prevailing sentiment was against Capitalism. The organizers didn’t want to mouth it, but a vast number of marchers began to grasp instinctively that Capitalism has no solution for Climate Change. The anti-Capitalist movement can become “the movement” but reformists will have to understand they are obstructionists before they as individuals can be said to share the common goal.

The St Paul RNC Welcoming Committee aimed to disrupt the Republican National Convention for a WEEK. Can activist groups as they grow and transform over years and compete for membership and community resources expect that they shouldn’t be critical of one another’s missteps or aggressions even as their goals diverge?

How scalable are the St Paul Principles? Do they apply to no matter who considers themselves part of a greater “movement”. Do they apply to signatories and non-signatories alike?

Are the St Paul Principles constructive?
I would argue: Hardly. While it seems safer to segregate the Black Bloc from the civil disobedients from the family picnic crowd, you’re not going to reach critical mass with each on its own. With public dischord still in its infancy and while we have nowhere near the numbers to defend against or deter violent repression, perhaps it is only reasonable to program our street protests according to color zones, as if marches were amusement rides for protest tourism.

If you’re satisfied to lead combatants to jail and probation for mere symbolic shows of defiance, and you’re prepared to let nonviolent activists subject themselves to brutality which even when filmed will not awaken the conscience of the sociopathic oligarchs, and you’re resigned to let the masses burn themselves out with boredom given nothing to challenge their apathy, then the St Paul Principles are for you.

Pikes Peak Community College teaches climate denial to meteorology students


COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.- Overheard on FM 89.9, PPCC’s radio station: a spot for the General Meteorology Course MET-150, where students can learn about the earth’s cyclic temperature rises, how after this year warming is expected to level off, and how 99% of world scientists are dissatified with the way Climate Change is being reported in the media. Here the statistic is reinterpreted to mean: scientists agree with PPCC students and Springs radio listeners, and think our worries are overblown.

Springs mantra: Enough with COStupid

Colorado Springs City Council
Forget “I HEART COS”, our long-overdue bumpersticker is “Enough with Stupid!” If you think that’s rude and won’t win hearts and minds however pea-brained they are, this isn’t about convincing elected officials about climate change. Their positions are dictated by the coal industry that financed them. This game is called PULL THE DONKEY BY THE EARS!

The conceivability that climate change, torture, or Pope’s Catholicism isn’t.

The January 2015 Smithsonian Magazine asks “Did Civil War vets suffer from PTSD?” which seems a progressive conceit from an arbitor of the accepted version of events. I think it’s useful to ask “Does a bear shit in the woods?” by which I mean, is it conceivable to you that bears don’t shit in the woods? Because your incredulity is critical. Apparently these days, history is written not by historians but by pollsters. Today the commonplace perception of history and science prevails as the dominant verdict. Whether Climate Change is real, or whether torture is torture, depends on how the public polls. Presumably truth being what we want it to be would poll favorably too.

While the Smithsonian’s question suggests to upend institutional dogma, dragging 19th century medicine into the 21st century, it’s actually the reverse. Doctors treating veterans have always known that nearly all people exposed to combat will suffer PTSD, ancient times didn’t favor acronyms perhaps, yet today’s spin doctors want public comprehension to pivot on a question, contingent upon whether is is. Of course DO BEARS sounds more objective than BEARS DO. It also smells of the dissembling of a torture doctor. TORTURE IS.

Cost to attend NYC climate march: $$. Landing an anti-capitalism message in a capitalist magazine: priceless.

climate-march-vogue-like-shot
NEW YORK, NEW YORK- A lot of people took our picture at Sunday’s People’s Climate March, our anti-capitalist banner expressed a popular undercurrent to the greener NGO themes, although many handmade posters singled out Capitalism as the root of climate change. As the 400,000 STRONG march dispersed on 11th Avenue, Vogue Magazine photographer Peter van Agtmael captured this approximate moment for a spread on Vogue.com. Occupiers tire of the admonition “wear a suit” but it proved fruitful this weekend: my suit was interviewed by MSNBC (twice), Washington Post, Irish Times, Salon, Slate, and more, with great photos on USA Today, Vice, and CNN.

The People’s Climate March will move the United Nations if marchers push it

I heard a dispiriting conceit at yesterday’s 350.ORG whistestop rally at Denver’s Union Station to cheer climate activists bording the Amtrak Zephyr destined for the New York City #S21 People’s Climate March. This young, otherwise energetic and charismatic environmentalist told the crowd that she did not expect anything to come of the hoped-to-be-massive demonstration but would attend anyway. Ironically this was addressed to supporters who’d already decided not to join the march based I’m guessing on the same logic. Yet we cheered, chanted about the imperative to act, and applauded a successive speaker who added that if world leaders ignored this people’s march, there would follow another and another, ever larger. Hmm. I doubt it. Activism is already showing diminishing returns and drawing numbers to unsuccessful actions doesn’t help. I appreciate not wanting to seem to hold foolish expectations, but I’d rather accept defeat having believed it was not inevitable. The antiwar movement laments the election of Barack Obama because he herded the populist anti-Bush groundswell toward supporting the other corporate war party. But I blame Obama for a larger malpractice: innoculating Americans against hope. Extended generations of altruists lost their cherry to the hope-change-artist and while they wise up incrementally, I have yet to see hopefulness normalize the defeatism. This doesn’t mean that hopefuls don’t keep falling for smooth promises, but the promises are smaller, to be believable. Bill McKibben’s 350 march for example doesn’t even want to make demands, yet insists that your personal attendence will be the biggest impact you can make against climate change. And if the march doesn’t move UN leaders, come back and do it again. Until what? Until world leaders are convinced that the public is serious. Why are we not serious? Should McKibben admit that traveling to New York could be distracting activists from where their bodies really need to be, in front of coal plants, blocking pipelines, and organizing communities against fossil fuel extraction? Pressuring the UN is similarly immediate but we have to apply veritable pressure. If a march is meant to impress, even as a gesture, it must be more than a parade.

Fracked Gas – the Other Fossil Fuel

YES, Colorado Springs is so dumb, its local renewable energy fans had to rename themselves green energy advocates after they were called out for promoting NATURAL GAS! UnNatural Gas is not renewable and, guess what, it’s not green either. Of course even the Sierra Club got taken in by the natural gas frackers, and I’m not convinced 350.ORG isn’t equally soft. The upcoming People’s Climate March in New York City features among its speakers President Obama’s faux eco radical Van Jones who tours the country pitching a green jobs revolution equal parts solar panels and fracking rigs. Not only is the gas extraction process more injurious to the atmosphere than coal, on top of the unsustainable contamination of hydraulic fracturing, but “natural gas” is among the fuel reserves which scientists insist must be left untapped if Earth has any hope of mitigating climate change. Eco moderates harp about our economy needing gas as a transition fuel. Ironically the Climate Transition does not need our economy.

Will Act of God close Drake coal plant?

Colorado Springs Drake Power Plant
[FULL TEXT OF LETTER SUBMITTED TO CS INDEPENDENT MAY 14] Two years ago Colorado Springs lost 346 homes to the Waldo Canyon fire which precipitated floods expected to haunt the westside and Manitou for years to come.

The next year saw a wildfire in Black Forest that took an unprecedented 500 homes. That’s unprecedented for Colorado, although with global warming it’s certainly a portent of cataclysms to follow.

You’d think two fires in a row might have motivated city leaders to seize the chance to act on climate change, and not just symbolically. By coincidence Colorado Springs Utilities had been equivocating about whether to reinvest in an aging coal-fired power plant located in the center of town.

Imagine how we might have redeemed our city’s national reputation if Colorado Springs had announced a decision to close the Drake coal plant, prompted by wild fires to reduce the burning of fossil fuels! Instead the utilities board laid out only long term options, most to sustain Drake, and only one which included a token investment in renewable energy.

This year saw another coincidence. This is of course conjecture on my part. Seeing his two previous acts unheeded, local favorite God surprised everyone with a third fire where Colorado Springs backward thinkers would be sure to get the point. Last week the Drake coal plant itself caught fire, certainly the least expected and most poetic of global warming victims.

We’re told it’s going to take over a billion dollars to bring Drake back online. I’ve got an idea and I’m not even religious. LET’S CLOSE IT! Let’s spend that billion on a solar array or a wind farm! Naysayers should be ashamed to pretend we don’t have a plentitude of both.

It’s too late to convince the world we’re brilliant, let’s show we’re not idiots. The collective decision to act on climate change begins at home if you have a publicly owned coal-fired power plant. Communities across the world have stopped burning coal, are we with them or against them?

The Drake coal plant didn’t just spew carbon, its emissions included lots of toxins we were forced to breath. Heart disease and asthma were two measurable harms which any doctor could attribute to Drake, scrubbers or no scrubbers. The coal ash accumulating south of town is another threat altogether, of which the recent ash spill in North Carolina serves as a heartbreaking warning.

Even if we reinvest a billion in Drake, we have several months of clean air and cleaner consciences to think more clearly about it. This summer America the Beautiful Park will be the healthiest it’s been in fifty years, when the old “cloud-maker” got its start.

On the other hand, wouldn’t it be a shame not put every next penny into renewable, sustainable, healthy energy, starting with this first billion?

I’d like to think people can decide to save the environment for their own health and for their children, but if it takes an Act of God to close Drake, so be it.

Pueblo museum excises Mine Workers Union from Ludlow Massacre exhibit!


PUEBLO, COLORADO- 2014 marks one hundred years since the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. A variety of commemorations are planned before the formal anniversary on April 20. I attended one such event on Wednesday, a lecture by a CSU professor to footnote the “Children of Ludlow” exhibit at El Pueblo History Museum. I’m always excitied when attention is paid to Ludlow, a subject regularly left out of American schoolbooks, but I was disappointed to find key elements of labor history excised from the museum’s narrative. Literally. The United Mine Workers of America, the organization central to the strike, which supplied the tent city, and which even today maintains the memorial site, was mentioned only once, IN FINE PRINT! The Ludlow miners voted to strike because the mining companies refused to recognize the UMWA. Unmentioned. The horrors of the atrocity were not tempered, in their explicitness perhaps we think them enough, but there was also the apologist suggestion that some culpability belonged to the miners. I questioned one curator who admitted they were at pains to keep the story “balanced” and that the squeakiest wheel thus far has been the National Guard. Apparently the Guard is offended that its role will be misconstrued. What balance do they want, I wondered. Had they lost children in the “battlezone” too?

Children are at the heart of commemorating Ludlow and at the heart of this preversion of the massacre’s memory. Were they recklessly endangered by their parents and union organizers? Were they dragged into a battlezone? The museum seems to suggest as much, highlighting the beligerence of the miners, mischaracterizing the soldiers, and leaving the union actions largely unexplained.

First I’d like to declare how I tire of the objective irrelevance which results when academics seek the approval of government technocrats. I am also disturbed by educators who pretend blindness to subtle inferences which shape a political takeaway. To them, “remembering” Ludlow seems sufficient in itself. I can hardly see the point to remembering Ludlow unless we have discerned its lessons. Until we are remembering the LESSONS OF LUDLOW, our educators’ self-proclaimed raison d’etre will be self-fulfilling: “history will repeat itself.” This Pueblo exhibit suggests no lesson other than the exploitation of tragedy, and leaves me fearful about the Ludlow commemorations to follow. The anti-union, pro-military climate which prevails these hundred years since the massacre will make for a travesty of a remembrance unless someone with a worker’s perspective speaks up.

NOT BROUGHT TO YOU BY…
Let’s start with this exhibit, which alas has already escaped critique since September. Its full title, as evidenced in the photo above: “Black Hills Energy presents: Children of Ludlow, Life in a Battlezone, 1913-1914.”

I’ll bet curators thought it a measure of truth and reconciliation that the Ludlow presentation was sponsored by a local extraction industry business. Black Hills Energy trades not in coal but natural gas. In fact they’re among the frackers tearing up Southeastern Colorado. I think the irony more likely suggests how the UMWA’s starring role was left on the cutting room floor. There are generic mentions of “the union”, as at right, keeping a ledger of which families were assigned tents, but only in the fine print is the UMWA named as owning the ledger.

BATTLEZONES
More troubling is the skewed framing of the museum’s narrative. It begins with the subtitle, “life in a battlezone.” That’s taking a rather curious liberty don’t you think? The event we accept now as “Ludlow” became a battlezone on April 20, and the regional Coal Field War which followed was a battlezone to which both revenge-seekers and militia thronged, but the tent colonies in which 12,000 lived, 9,000 of whom were the children of the title role, were camps full of families. That they were straffed regularly by the guards makes them shooting galleries not battlegrounds.

Calling Ludlow a battlezone is like calling Sand Creek a “collision” or calling the Middle East a “conflict”. All of these mask the role of the aggressor.

I will credit the curators for offering a candid detail of horrific import. In a description of the day before the massacre, when the Greeks among the immigrants were celebrating Greek Easter, mention is made of the mounted National Guards offered this taunt: “You enjoy your roast today; we will have ours tomorrow.” No one should deny today that the events of April 20, which culminated in the torching of the tents and asphyxiation of women and children, was a premeditated act.

THE CHILDREN
Should the miners have put their children in harm’s way by defying the mining companies? How could they not? As immigrants they didn’t have nearby relatives to foster their children away from the random bullets. Also left unsaid by the display: many of the children had already been working in the mines and counted among those on strike. This was before child labor reforms.

Curiously, the exhibit did include a famous photograph of the notorious activist Mother Jones leading a childrens’ march through Trinidad. The caption explained that Jones wasn’t above using real children to advance the cause of Colorado’s coal miners.” Emphasis mine. While technically true in a modern context, it’s probably disingenuous to imply someone is using the children when a key issue of the demonstration is CHILD LABOR.

No really. Mother Jones was leading a march of children, many of them workers of the mines, for the reform of labor practices which abused children. This and subsequent campaigns eventually led to child labor laws. Is saying “Mother Jones wasn’t above using children” in any way an accurate characterization?

Compounding the inference that the Children of Ludlow were jeopardized for the cause, was the implication that the miners were combatants who contributed to the battlezone. As the displays progressed in chronological order, the first weapon on display was a rifle used by the miners. Immediately behind it was an enlarged photograph vividly depicting miners posed with two identical specimens.

Moving along the exhibit chronologically, anticipating the rising violence, the museum goers is apparently supposed to register that the strikers were firing too, if not first. Recent historical accounts have deliberated about who fired first. I think the motive is suspiciously revisionist in view of today’s dogma of nonviolence absolutism: if your protest devolves into violence, you deserve every bit of the beating you get.

Whenever it was that the miners began firing, the single militia and three guard casualties were not recorded until after the massacre took place, belying the narrative that the miners invited the massacre. Witnesses conflict about when the three union leaders were executed. I’ll give the museum credit for defying the National Guard in summarizing that among the casualties, three of the miners were “executed”.

PARITY OF WEAPONS
Students of the Ludlow accounts know that many of the miners were better riflemen than the soldiers. Many were immigrants who’d served in Bulkan wars and outmatched Colorado’s green guardsmen. That is not to suggest that the miners and their harrassers were equally armed, yet…

The only other weapon on display is a rifle of vintage used by the national guard. It shares a case with a uniform and sabre, lending it official authority. Also, the rifle is not presented as having been used at Ludlow, so it doesn’t project an aura of culpability. Missing is the machine gun depicted in the photograph of the machine gun nest which fired down upon the camp. It’s depicted with a caption about the Guard being a welcome presence. Missing too is the armored car dubbed the “Death Special”. Obviously the armor protected its operators from being hit by striking-miner bullets as it drove through the canvas encampment, straffing the tents with its mounted machine gun.

HUMANIZING THE PERP
Right after the photo of armed miners was the display at right, with a very contrived bit of spin catering to today’s military families. Although the photo shows soldiers actively aiming their gun at the camp, the caption assures us that the “Ludlow families feel relief with the arrival of National Guard”. This supposition is based on the fact that when the soldiers first arrived they were serenaded with the “Battle Cry of Freedom” and greeted with American flags. Most of the miners being immigrants, they were eager to show their patriotism, but the conclusion drawn here is a terrible mendacity. The miners and union organizers knew full well the purpose of the National Guard. They knew the strikebreaking role it played in famous strikes of the past. The miners feted the soldiers hoping to sway them from their eventual task. Protesters of all eras hold out this hope every time they face riot police.

A following paragraph suggested that by the time the massacre was committed, most of the soldiers had been mustered out and replaced with militia members and company guards. This is slight of hand. After the official inquiry, which was prompted by the public outcry, twenty National Guard soldiers were court martialed. All were acquitted. Is the Guard wanting us to believe they were acquitted because they weren’t there?

This attempt to put a friendly face on the National Guard, coupled with an abdication of effort to give the union its due, seems engineered to appeal to the average Pueblan of today, many probably related to an active-duty soldier and long since indoctrinated against evil unions. When I asked the lecturer about the omission of the UMWA, she prefaced her answer for the audience, explaining that unions of old were not like those despised today. I told her I thought failing to describe the hows and whys of the strike was a real teaching opportunity missed.

HISTORY COLORADO
It’s probably important to point out that the Ludlow presentation at the History Museum was developed with the assistance of History Colorado, which finally shuttered a contested display: a Sand Creek Massacre exhibit with a similar flavor of whitewash. Like labeling Ludlow a battlezone, History Colorado tried to typify Sand Creek as a “collision.”

Also typical of History Colorado is the propensity to address their exhibits to children. Programming for school bus visits invariably dumbs down what can be presented and I hardly think the compromise is worth it. If children ran the world, maybe Disney versions of history would suffice.

I’d like to have seen it highlighted that the Ludlow miners were mainly immigrants who were looked down upon by the residents of Colorado. If the museum audience were the “Children of Ludlow” in the extended sense, as a few descendants probably were, more of us were the children of the soldiers of Ludlow, or the citizens who cheered them on, or joined the militia or built the armored car at Rockefeller’s Pueblo factory. If we’re going to remember Ludlow, we ought to remember our role in it so we don’t do that again. It’s easy to pretend we were the martyrs. In all probability that’s who we will be if the lessons of Ludlow are discarded.

Threat of Atmel plant closure prompts city council to rescind support of solar farm, on Earth Day

COLO. SPRINGS- I told the gentleman from Atmel who trolled the city council meeting, this would be my headline: ATMEL KILLS SOLAR IN COLORADO SPRINGS. Prompted by his threat to ship Atmel jobs to Malaysia if a 0.25% utilities rate hike went into effect, the Colorado Springs City Council voted today, inauspiciously the day after Earth Day, to rescind their minuscule subsidy of a community solar farm program. Apparently Atmel is the city’s largest utilities customer, so when Atmel whines, CSU grovels. Actually their rep turns up at every discussion of renewable energy or water restrictions and he’s against everything. Colorado Springs is the coal ash belching, Fountain Creek polluting, burnt foothills, diminished community services, low-tax haven it is today thanks to Atmel and its Tea Party posse.

Working a token solar power start-up into the utility grid would result in a rate increase of 10¢ for monthly energy bill of $100, or 60¢ per $200. Semiconductor manufacturer Atmel faced a potential $6,000 increase per month, enough to jeopardize the multimillion dollar operation according them. It’s the same Powerpoint presentation they conjure when the city’s inquiring about wind turbines or scrubbers on the aging coal plant or solar or water rate hikes.

An Atmel facility in California sources its energy from solar, at a rate of 16¢ per whatever, but our local rate of 3¢ is too high for our local Atmel. He kept saying he was “for solar” but when pressed he answered “but not in Colorado Springs.” You wonder if his headquarters knows their Atmel guy is being such a regressive douche. I plan to inquire.

The vote today meant that Colorado Springs Utilities (CSU) will not implement its tariff planned for May 1st, which solar startup SUNSHARES had been counting on for its financing.

The public turnout at today’s meeting was two thirds in favor of solar power and one third against. (Measured by body weight the two sides were equal. It’s probably no surprise that environmental minded citizens know how to eat sustainably too. The two factions kept to separate sides of the room which was how I formed my size-ist observation.) The pro-solar folk represented themselves, common citizens, but those speaking against solar bore titles with advocacy groups like Americans For Prosperity, Citizens for Affordable Energy, and, get this, the Clean Energy Coalition, which bills itself as the largest advocacy network for renewable energy, but surprise, they’re against solar! Well, not one dared to say they were against solar, in fact they all prefaced their remarks with “I’m for solar, but–“. Their coordinator, noxious AFP henchman Sean Paige explained that climate science is “faith based” and in fact, resistance to fracking is also faith-based. All the anti talking points were boilerplate climate denial crap. Manufacturing solar panels pollutes (what about manufacturing fossil fuel equipment?), renewable energy costs jobs, yada yada. There was even an economics professor from Colorado College, who asserted that solar power was bad for the economy. Weird.

Of course the new slate of city councilors bought it. What has already emerged to be a cabal of mouth breathers conceived of this plan yesterday, EARTH DAY, to rescind their initial foray into solar energy, and today they entertained informed comments from the public and ignored them.

Fracking protest message at Denver 350 rally cuts through nebulous “Forward on Climate” theme


DENVER, COLORADO- Score another success for Colorado Fractivists who crashed this weekend’s climate rally with their unequivocal anti-fracking message. The February 17 event was intended to urge President Obama “Forward on Climate”, to borrow his most recent campaign vagarity, but when official speeches began, and the prefab signs were distributed, it became unclear who might be trying to co-opt whom.

Gas
The 350.ORG sponsored march, coinciding with a rally and civil disobedience in DC, called specifically for a halt to the Keystone XL Pipeline and Tar Sands extraction which climate scientists have dubbed “game over” for hopes of averting climate disaster, but the dominant signage spoke vaguely of “Climate Action” and “It’s Time to Cut Carbon” and “Big Coal Makes Us Sick”, all of which are slogans used by proponents of natural gas. 350-ORG has been raising awareness of the imperative to reduce carbon emissions, while recognizing that the groundswell driving environmentalists across the country is opposition to oil & gas hydraulic fracturing.

It’s all the same fight to reduce burning of fossil fuels, but moderate allies like the Sierra Club haven’t been prepared to denounce their new-found bed partners urging consumers to get “Beyond Coal.” To her credit, local 350-ORG coordinator Micah Parkin incorporated fractivist groups into the Feb 17 rally, but Democratic Party panderers didn’t get the memo. A representative read a letter of support from Senator Michael Bennet and was able to sneak past: “I stand with Obama” and even “in favor of US energy independence” although that’s code for oil & gas exports, dependent on construction of the XL pipeline. But when Mark Udall’s representative referred to “clean burning natural gas” the crowd booed. Even as he pleaded “we’re on your side,” the crowd wouldn’t relent, making sure his takeaway would be that fracking compounded global warming, among its other horrors.

The highlight of the rally occurred immediately afterward when the master of ceremonies, a twelve-year-old rapper and member of the Boulder based Earth Guardians, thanked Udall’s rep affably but then assured the audience that “of course there’s no such thing as clean natural gas!”


Occupy
A word about Occupy Denver’s part in Sunday’s march. Occupiers took the black-tie invitation to heart and turned up in black bloc attire with bandanas and balaclavas. OD then pushed the envelope to the consternation of parade marshals, stepping into the street at one point, blocking cars at another, in the spirit of their banner which read “ONLY DIRECT ACTION WILL STOP THE PIPELINE.”

To what end, creating friction during an event otherwise running smoothly? Who knows. The demonstration was uneventful and garnered scant media attention. Mixing it up might have helped, or not. The turnout was large but not up for a confrontation. Occupy didn’t push it.

The irony of 350-ORG supporters being upset by the antics of the Occupiers, was that behind the masks were many activists who’d actually gone to Texas to stop the XL pipeline, who’d gotten arrested, some out on $25,000 bond. How unfortunate that those troublemakers weren’t recognized from the stage. It was a real missed opportunity, this having been a rally to, um, STOP THE PIPELINE. These rowdy boring-party crashers were actually its unsung, veritable heroes. What the crowd wanted to mistake for infantile grandstanding, was really the infantile audacity that stops pipelines. Yes you get in trouble if you step off the sidewalk. Do you think the police are going to let you stop the pipeline?

Letter to Michael Moore, indelible hero, retrograde Occupy Obama supporter

Dear Michael,
I write you as a longtime, enthusiastic fan, and please pardon me if the deference and affection I’d like to convey have been overcome by my shock at your recent emails. My question may sound rhetorical, but I would really like to know: what the hell compels you to shill once again for Barack Obama? Beside the campaign pablum.

When you visited Occupys across the country, including ours in Denver, I defended you to friends who dismissed you as the usual shepherd’s crook for the Democratic Party. No no no I assured them, he gets it. But did you? We weren’t protesting eight years of Bush followed by an ineffectual Obama, we were protesting Obama and the economic system under his watch. We weren’t protesting the Democratic Party being insufficiently adversarial to the Republicans, we were protesting the corporate party system, the Democrat face being the more two-faced.

Most significantly, while our anger was vented at Wall Street, the repression we were dealt, and which dissenters continue to suffer, came directly from the agencies of President Obama.

Yet now you presume to accuse the same audience of cynicism about the election, and urge us to support Democrat Obama, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, out of fear of the Big Bad Wolf, as usual Republican.

Maybe as the election draws to a climax you’ve become privy to an unseen power struggle you need to tell us about. Because it’s at odds with your earlier giddiness with Occupy. Then your enthusiasm was unclouded by your pragmatism today.

Please do tell, because Mitt Romney seems more a sheep in wolf’s clothing to me. He’s a cartoonish straw man villain spouting wedge-issue threats to scare us crows from lighting upon the real corporate agenda. The banking kleptocracy doesn’t care about gay/women’s rights except to restrict all rights, the easier to pursue its grand thefts. If the GOP had wanted to pick a winner, I’m certain the average doctor or teacher you come across everyday would have made a more suited contender.

Could the GOP have chosen a greedier more callous thug, who didn’t pay his taxes, tainted by so much scandal that a new one emerged every day to titillate and offend? Obama had to sluff the first presidential debate because they’d chosen such an unbelievable, lame duck opponent that the ratings threatened to tank.

When the Neocon Washington Post endorsed President Obama, I knew the stooge from the ringer. The empire would be screwed without Obama to placate its victims. As Glen Ford argues, Obama may appear the lesser evil, but he’s the more effective evil. He’ll sell what arrogantly-white Romney never could: more war, austerity, privatization, fossil fuel. Without Obama, the global populace would push back.

I don’t favor a Romney win, but for another reason than you. A Romney presidency would mean another cycle of voter outrage, with MoveOn once again rallying Democrats, as if they were any different, and you probably among them.

But the election is not even going to be close. The six billion spent on this election was six billion earned by the media by pretending the polling was tied, to extort more spending by both sides. Meanwhile horseless statistician Nate Silver is vilified by television pundits because he’s calculated that surprise, Obama has a comfortable lead over his bogeyman idiot challenger.

Yes I know multitudes who support Mitt Romney. Four years ago they got nowhere with John McCain, because the juggernaut of empire was already up to full steam with Obama. I confess I didn’t know it then, and fretted a GOP win like everybody else, but it didn’t keep me from voting for Cynthia McKinney against war and climate change.

You began your letter by saying “I get it” but then assume we non-voters are motivated by apathy or weariness. You’re the one who sounds worn down. Bummer.

Yours,
Eric

Waldo Canyon concert fundraiser feted Colo. Springs self-interest & ignorance

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.- All night local speakers proclaimed: “Colorado Springs knows how to look after its own.” And doesn’t it! But I’m almost positive that it used to be, if only everywhere else, the virtue was looking out for others, not just your own.
 
The Waldo Canyon fundraiser for fire victims was titled “a community rising” and was explained as a coming together, without regard for religious or political differences, I would also add, minus humility and what would be common sense if the denominator wasn’t so debased. This was so embarrassing it hurt.

So we experienced a wildfire, part of the natural cycle of western forests, which burned a neighborhood probably built too far into a canyon, made worse, and ubiquitous right now across the Southwest, by an unnatural heatwave that portends climate change. Was any of that mentioned? NOPE.

Instead victims vowed to rebuild, as they fetishized firefighter vigilance over that ever threatening beast in the hills. Headliner Michael Martin Murphy, apparently the perpetual flame of wildfire vigil keeping, owing to his “Wildfire” hit but it was about a horse, sang a lament which listed the West’s many epic fires, appending mention of “Waldo Canyon” like a latest mining disaster. We’re supposed to prevent the fires apparently, like buying pink things to fight cancer. Wildfires aren’t tragedies except to logging interests. When Smokey the Bear cried, it was over timber that didn’t get logged. Of course national park visitors have to be reminded to exercise caution, because, the US Forestry Service jobs depend on the trees. We thought it was about Bambi’s mom, but those wildlives are managed too, with bullets, lest their populations threaten the trees.

Should people who who want to live in the forest be let to deny its nature like they shrug off global warming? And much as we gush over firemen, it’s a job. More clerks are shot at 7-11s than there are fallen heros listed on the multiple “national” monuments to firefighters.

The Waldo Canyon Fire destruction was the wrath of nature, whether owed to arson or deficient firefighting, the calamitous fire season throughout the state confirms that climate change created the perfect storm, but Jesus Springs is probably not prepared to consider the flaming villainy was an Act of God.

And where does anyone need reassurance that Colorado Springs doesn’t look after its own? We’re the no-holds-barred world street-fighting champions of supporting our workforce, standing up for our war criminal enabling ways. We’re a Support the Troops, Climate Denying, Drill Baby Drill, Charter-Schooling, God Hates Fags, No Thanks We’re Racists, God Damn apologists for Ayn Rand lowbrow cultural ignorance, and flag-waving PROUD OF IT. We don’t give a damn about burning other people’s houses, the people in them included. But when it happens to us, prayers and calls for prayers spam the internets.

We look after our own, if by our own, we mean our neighbors with homes. Colorado Springs stopped pretending to care about the homeless, it’s still piling on ordinances to criminalize poverty. If you’re homeless in Colorado Springs, you get as much compassion as people who lose their houses to our fires.

Waldo Canyon Wildfire gives Colorado Springs a front range seat to war zone movie set, says Governor Hickenlooper


COLORADO SPRINGS- Governor Hickenlooper made the remark after touring the Waldo Canyon Fire by helicopter. After touching down on the grounds of Coronado High School, cleared mid-press-conference because it fell in the freshly designated evacuation area, the governor said the wildfire resembled the movie set of a military invasion. Predictably the media clipped his observation to just “movie set”, adding the fire chief’s “epic” and “historic”. President Obama is expected to visit the disaster zone on Friday. I wonder if he’ll match our governor’s candor. He is certainly in the position to say whether our present horror is any match for the devastation unleashed by our invasions. Perhaps he can tell us the fire’s equivalency in drone strikes. Is 100 homes a week’s worth? If President Obama wanted to be partisan about it (pretending his Democratic Party was the antiwar party) he might suggest that conservative war-mongering, race-baiting, climate-denying Colorado Springs had this front range seat coming. Unless sentimentally doused in prayer-sharing reverence, our local disaster, with Governor Hickenlooper’s unedited comment, could be an empathy-learning moment.

WWII vet, age 92, finally diagnosed with PTSD why, because we care?

Sgt. Stanley Friedman, a 92 yr-old veteran of the WWII North African campaign, was finally diagnosed with PTSD. Pro bono lawyers couldn’t even verify his service records, but after sixty years of denying his claims, the VA has at last been forced to grant Friedman compensation. Is this really the result of crafty legal work, at long last, or of a PR climate now overrun by Big Pharma, whose PTSD drug market windfall needed a poster boy for the baby boomer set, the type of veteran Americans favor over those from less “good” wars?

Will the 99% Spring mean grassroots reinforcements for Occupy or MoveOn?

I’m going to think that the more mobilization of the 99% the better, no matter if it’s, ding-dong MoveOn Calling. The vast 99 are wise to the corporations and the corporate media, I think they’ll recognize when corporate organizers try to co-opt their protest. It might be bad enough that MoveOn’s nationwide “Nonviolence Teach-in” wants to defang the popular uprising, they probably imagine the public’s anger can be refocused on the usual Republican bogeymen. What’s so nefarious about MoveOn? It backs President Obama. That means even though MoveOn wants to play megaphone for the 99% and its demands, it’s actually against all of them. MoveOn Obama is against Wall Street reform, against universal healthcare, against action on climate change, against fill-in-the-blank if the people are for it! MoveOn’s centralized DC HQ, effective but decidedly not-grassy, will probably be its undoing.

Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline

DC protest against TransCanada Tar Sands Keystone XL Pipeline
Want to protest our corporate government’s determination to foist the catastrophic Keystone XL Pipeline unto our precariously climate? Here’s a great slogan: TAR SANDS = DIRTIEST OIL ON EARTH. More below:

DC protest against TransCanada Tar Sands Keystone XL Pipeline
TAR SANDS KILL, PIPELINES SPILL.

DC protest against TransCanada Tar Sands Keystone XL Pipeline
And the definitive: THE XL PIPELINE IS “GAME OVER” FOR OUR CLIMATE & COMMUNITIES.