The Agony of the Cree

The Cree have been under relentless assault since the arrival of the European colonialists in the 1500s. Now the 500 inhabitants of the Cree reserve, where many live in small, boxy prefabricated houses, are victims of a new iteration of colonial exploitation, one centered on the extraction of oil from the vast Alberta tar sands. This atrocity presages the destruction of the ecosystem on which they depend for life. If the Cree do not stop the exploiters this time, they, along with the exploiters, will die.--CH

The genocide continues.

Closer to my home, big news decades in the making.

Good lord we suck as a society!


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Dave Zirin Interview

For those who know and understand the issues in today's wide, wide world of sports, an interview with the disruptive Dave Zirin.







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Biden Redux

Big media will try like hell to put the guy in, but Joe Biden is who we thought he was.










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Willie Dixon

The prisoners were awakened at three-thirty in the morning, fed a watery bowl of grits and a tin cup of chicory coffee and herded out into the fields to pick cotton, fell trees, mill lumber and drain swampland. The men toiled a minimum of ten and as many as fourteen hours each day. In 1929, Allen Farm was an all black prison. The guards were white, many belonging to the Klan. Prisoners were whipped, beaten and sometimes shot—the dead bodies just buried in the swamp and the relatives never even notified.--JSC

A stellar piece on Willie Dixon from CounterPunch.


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The Lies We Tell Our Children

One of the earliest Vietnam War chroniclers to get his boots muddy on patrol with American grunts in 1966, French filmmaker Pierre Schoendoerffer would show a generation of war documentarians how to do it.

Vietnam vet and author Marc Levy suggests there is a better method of educating U.S. children about the Vietnam War specifically, and war in general.

Levy's website, Medic in the Green Time.


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Dribble, Dribble, Shoot!

Amen, brother Ben.

You've got many players who are obviously griping to intimidate the refs.  What else could it be when so many of the ostensibly "suspect" calls in any game are obviously correct?

Sure the refs miss some.  They're not all-seeing gods. They make a tiny fraction of what the players make and don't deserve the abuse.

I hate to gripe here, but shut up, all ye millionaires, and play the game.

Say, did you see the game winner Portland's Dame Lillard put up last night on an empty clock to down OKC and take the first round series 4-1?

No?  Well, find it on your own.  I'm tired of looking at it myself and won't post it here.


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No Ordinary Joe

Let’s be blunt: As a supposed friend of American workers, Joe Biden is a phony. And now that he’s running for president, Biden’s huge task is to hide his phoniness.--NS

Biden is my male version of Hillary--a smug fraud beholden to the fat cats in ways that, when scrutinized, should have bounced him out of politics as early as his long, long ago first term.

He, like Clinton and the rest of the corporate Dems, could be the gift to Trump that keeps on giving.

They can't impeach the Orange Bastard, or even assist in getting him arrested, so they might as well help him along to a second term, right?

Look, the wealthy corporate Dems, like the $35 million wunderkind pictured, have already gotten their well-deserved Trump tax breaks. What more do they need? (Nancy is reading her own palm and sees nothing.)

Certainly not a "radical" named Bernie ($1 million) cutting in line at the Washington feed trough like a cunning Snowball in Orwell's Animal Farm.

Hahahahahaha...

Paul Street expands and further elucidates on Joe's fraudulent DNA.


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Some Would Call it Treason

Still, time has passed and deeper reflection ensued. My platoon was part of an occupation force; nationalist resistance was understandable. I’ll never laud the Mahdi Army or their IRGC backers. But my own command, CENTCOM, was and is far from innocent.

In sum, as we compare the two military organizations, one must conclude, ultimately, that CENTCOM is at least as terrorist as the IRGC. Maybe more.

No doubt many critics will label this assessment “treasonous.” I call it “ethically consistent.”

Let history be the judge.--DS

Major Danny has evolved into one of the best dissident antiwar writers on today's scene.

Here's another Danny piece.

Here's Part 29 of his "American History for Truthdiggers." Read them all.

He first unfurled his peace flag in 2015 in this critique and memoir, when he was still on active duty and the scales were falling off his eyes.


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Real Work

I'll tell you something.  Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, the two big brains behind CounterPunch since founder Alexander Cockburn died six year ago, are putting it out there. Real shit.

Real dissident writing.  Real thinking.  No holds barred.

This weekend's material is unbelievably good, first rate, top notch and exquisitely sublime.

Man, I feel good, having published with the gents in the past, even though I've been unable to write anything worthwhile recently. I feel I'm just fucked up and can't put the words together.  I'm too scattered. My ideas come and go like birds. I have a bird brain.

I like what my old friend RP Thomas wrote to me a while back.  I turned him on to the website and the bi-annual magazine the boys put out.

Thomas said, "Most Americans will never understand" the content of CP.

How true.  The content is not your ordinary journalese. It has depth that all but a few million readers worldwide find unfathomable.

I meet people every day who have never heard of the website.  Makes me sad and angry.  How can you pretend to know anything about our political world?

You know a few who read the material?  Every pol in D.C.  It makes them queasy because it's the other side writ large.


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Fundamental

The transcript.


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A Big Risk

Here’s the thing. Trump’s supporters don’t care how bad he is. They just care that he’s assaulting the powers that be.  And the disaffected no-shows won’t show up at the polls simply because Trump is worse than the average politician.  To too many, that’s the difference between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

There may be a few math-challenged neoliberals who actually believe that going to the center is the way to win, but for most, the reason that the neoliberal establishment doesn’t adopt the obvious strategy for winning back the White House and the Senate while retaining the House is simple. They got where they are by serving the interests of the rich, the elite, and corporations.  Adopting the kind of policies that would serve the people and get no-shows off the sidelines threatens their true constituency.

If they succeed in derailing the progressive insurgency that gave Democrats a victory in the 2018 midterms, they may hold onto their seats; even if they don’t they’ll likely get a cushy job in a think tank, lobbying firm, or media outlet.  But we the people will have to risk four more years of Trump.

That is, quite literally, an existential threat.--JA

It takes an exceptional sort of dullard to think the majority of Dems want to get anything done beyond protecting their own power and wealth.

When we speak of "American Exceptionalism" then, the term includes that great throng of U.S. citizens who are exceptional in their ignorance and/or naivete.

RP Thomas: I think Trump is going to be re-elected without much problem, best hope for the Democrats is if tornadoes wipe out 80% of the trailers in the Midwest and South and they (Trump supporters) can't get to the polls.

That's pretty much my take as well, RP. 

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Trumped Up, Fucked Up

“If you’re cheering Assange’s arrest based on a U.S. extradition request, your allies in your celebration are the most extremist elements of the Trump administration, whose primary and explicit goal is to criminalize reporting on classified docs and punish [WikiLeaks] for exposing war crimes.”--GG

Julian Assange has reportedly been charged by an American Grand Jury for his role in publishing this leaked video, among others. He will apparently be extradited to the U.S. where he is expected to stand trial for doing what reporters do— publishing true information in the public interest. The New York Times and other newspapers also published the leaked documents, but have as yet not been charged. This legal maneuvering appears to be a politically motivated vendetta against Julian Assange for embarrassing the War Criminals behind the Iraq war.--RU

To be fair, it is not simply Trump who is enabling this outrage.  The entire U.S. foreign policy establishment has been clamoring for this ooze of Orwellian poison since the Iraq War was exposed by Manning and WikiLeaks a decade ago.

Obama was rabidly complicit in his failure to use the International Criminal Court to seek indictments against the war's engineers. Blathering about his unwillingness to harm the nation by seeking the truth of illegal U.S. aggression in its choice and conduct of the war, he instead chose a path that would lead to this, a full-frontal assault on the Fourth Estate.

So much for a "unity" that was never in the cards. So much for the "freedom of the press."


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Yer Outta There!

At 11-2 the Seattle Mariners are running away with it in the American West, 3.5 games ahead of the Houston Astros!

Ha ha...

The M's did fade later than usual last season, so are they prepared to win it all this year?

Daunting question for one only vaguely aware until recently that  MLB was already up and running this season.

I'm not a Mariners' fan particularly, but I enjoy baseball in the summer, which it ought to be restricted to; I hate rain outs and downpours in March and the sleet and cold of the series in November. Any club with a retractable roof, a la Seattle would seem to have an early and late-season advantage.

Portland's stadium, should the backwater burgh ever get around to building one, would need a roof and coal-stoked seating.

Houston's stadium roof seems to function to keep the flash rainstorms, brutal heat, mosquitoes, swamp moths and flying alligators out year round.

Here's my baseball confession.  I'm a fan of any team that has good pitching.  I like to watch great pitching.  I did when I was a youngster playing the game as well.

I watched one pitch after another until I struck out!


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Listen, Liberal! What Happened?

The Democratic Party, signing on to the forever crusade by the national security state in the name of humanitarian intervention, is as complicit. The Obama administration not only accelerated the sting operations in the United States against supposed terrorists but, in its foreign operations, increased the use of militarized drones, sent more troops to Afghanistan and foolishly toppled the regime of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya to create yet another failed state and safe haven for jihadists.--CH

Chris Hedges explains what happened to liberals, the sudden post-election '16 partners of neocons everywhere as their forever romance blossomed in Putin's bathroom.


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Ugh...

Oregon's women lost in the semi of the Final Four to Baylor.

Baylor, you know, nestled in that wasted city out in the hinterlands of Texas?  Waco???  Nobody chooses to live there, except aspiring doctors attending one of the nation's best medical schools!

And athletes.

Anyway, the wyminx lost similarly as the Oregon men in the Sweet 16. The Ducks went cold against Virginia.  Couldn't buy a hoop in the waning minutes of a tight game.

Same same for the wyminx.

What is it?  A Eugene curse?


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Indeed

Don't rely on fantasies.

I'm as tired of you as you are of me.

If you want the truth, or at least a plausible reality, don't read the shit.

Read this.


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Wrong?

Few Americans, however, are likely to be comfortable delegating the power of conscription to a federal government they inherently distrust. Still, paradoxically, the move toward a no-deferment, equitable lottery draft might result in a nation less prone to militarism and adventurism than the optional AVF has. Parents whose children are subject to military service, as well as young adults themselves, might prove to be canny students of foreign policy who would actively oppose the next American war. Imagine that: an engaged citizenry that holds its legislators accountable and subsequently hits the streets to oppose unnecessary and unethical war. Ironic as it may seem, more military service may actually be the only workable formula for less war. Too bad returning to a citizens’ military is as unpopular as it is unlikely.--Maj. Danny

I'm not at all convinced of this. I've heard it posited over the years, and I just don't see how it might staunch unnecessary wars. I don't see it extending freedoms.  I don't see the elites playing fair.  Little Johnnys and Sallys would find a way out.  They always do. A socialist revolt will take much, much more thought about the role of militarism in a restructured society.

I think Maj. Danny has taken a precarious step backwards here.


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Adios

It’s time to wave goodbye to a litany of absurdity that I witnessed in the institution to which I dedicated my adult life. Some peers, even friends, may call this heresy — a disgruntled former major airing dirty laundry — and maybe in some way it is. Still, what I observed in various combat units, in conversation with senior officers, and as a horrified voyeur of, and actor in, two dirty wars matters. Of that, I remain convinced.

So here’s my official goodbye to all that, to a military and a nation engaged in an Orwellian set of forever wars and to the professional foot soldiers who made so much of it all possible, while the remainder of the country worked, tweeted, shopped, and slept (in every sense of the word).--DS

Maj. (Ret.) Danny says goodbye to all of that.


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