For protesters at the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline, everywhere is downstream. A historic gathering of Native Americans from sixty tribes, including Sioux who haven’t come together since the time of Greasy Grass (Battle of Little Bighorn), has converged near Cannonball, North Dakota where Dakota Access, LLC, is set to build a pipeline to
A few years ago, as the economic crash of 2007 was sliding into our Great Recession, I wrote a satirical piece about an Orwellian government program that introduced virtual slave camps to the U.S. under the guise of easing unemployment, homelessness and debt peonage. The program was called COBRA, the Corporate-Operated Bankruptcy Recovery Act. COBRA
After Dylann Roof gunned down nine parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, people of conscience all over the United States agitated for the removal of the Confederate flag from public venues like the South Carolina state house. Governor Nikki Haley signed the bill into law, and it looked like we
The Bureau of Land Management, BLM, is a part of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Its function is to manage America’s federal public land. According to its website, it manages more than 245 million acres and 700 million acres of subsurface minerals. The BLM was formed in 1946 by merging the federal General Land
In the last couple days, I talked about ways that individuals and collectives can act to reduce the threat of climate change. This is not new information, and a lot of it is rather obvious when you think about it for a couple minutes. And yet, we go about our days changing very little. We
In Part 1, I laid out some ways we can mitigate climate change by investing radically in local food production and especially in our soil. However, not all the changes we need to make are as easy as these. This is where we get serious and talk about making the hard choices… or not. Just
Climate change is really happening. We’ve had “500 year” storms every couple months lately. People are having to relocate whole communities because of rising water and erosion. An old, radioactive military base is melting right out of the ice. Even mainstream outlets like Rolling Stone are talking about climate change. Sure, there are deniers, but the
Our infrastructure, as Hillary Clinton pointed out recently in her economic plan, is old. We’re “living off the investments that were made by our parents and grandparents’ generations,” and many of those investments are starting to show their age. The functionality of municipal sewer systems is increasingly questionable: they’re falling apart because we don’t maintain
Our two main presidential candidates (and their political tribes) have very different visions for the future of immigration in the United States. Clinton favors a path to citizenship, while the more xenophobic Trump claims he’ll build a giant wall. Both sides fail to perceive why we have a schizophrenic situation where migrant workers are simultaneously
I am posting this article on the same date as Part IV. I found that I had too much information that I wanted to share before I ended the series. This post is a continuation of Tennessee Walking Horse Abuse Condoned by Congress? Part IV. The public outcry from the criminal lawsuits against Jackie McConnell