Original Peoples

Note — I have not done this out of country thing for a long time. I used to travel when it was $10 a day, when sleepy fishing villages were villages and sleepy, when you could hitchhike to Panama from Nogales. Later days, really.
These 57 years of living have SEEN a whole lot, sometimes enough. So, saved up for honeymoon, postponed a year: in Puerto Rico for a week and then St. John Virgin Islands for another week. Of course, I am pumped up with stories, articles, poems, dirges, the whole nine yards.

The Regina Leader Post on July 3, 2014, published an article under the headline “African Leaders Award Themselves Immunity from Court of Justice”:

Peter Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic: The rights and freedoms that we celebrate on the Fourth of July are the product of vast human struggle that remains unfinished

The survivors of a South American tribe which was decimated during the 1950s and 60s are taking Paraguay’s government to court over the genocide they suffered.
The case of the hunter-gatherer Aché tribe, who roamed the hilly forests of eastern Paraguay until being brutally forced out, became notorious in the 1970s.

By the year 1897 the constitutional law was settled in Canada based upon the interpretation in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of section 109 of the Constitution Act, 1867.

On June 16, Prime Minister Stephen Harper officially approved Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline project to the Pacific coast to export tar sands oil, just days before Canada’s Supreme Court wrapped up its deliberations on the Tsilhqot’in Nation land claim. Coincidence? Or attempted arm twisting?

Over sixty five million people in the US, perhaps a fifth of our sisters and brothers, are not enjoying the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” promised when the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, 1776. They are about twenty percent of our US population. This July 4 can be an opportunity to remember them and rededicate ourselves and our country to making these promises real for all people in the US.

This week on “It’s the end of the World as We know it and I feel fine” we bring you a round up of news from the muthafrackin resistance. Starting with the shooting of three cops from the Canadian Mounted po-po and a look at its colonial history. Followed up by the FIFA world cup riots, the successful defense of Can Vies, an anarchist social space in Barcelona. And wrapping it up with the resignation of Subcomandante Marcos from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

When corporations own the news and advertisers ‘sponsor’ the shows, journalists know they are above all answerable to the company managers and allied interests who pay their salaries. The mere public, especially voices of dissent, can be treated with indifference, even contempt. Journalists have power without responsibility, and they know it.

Oregon voters in two counties voted against GMOs, against Monsanto. That’s 2 to 1 in favor of protecting organic farmers, communities, farmers and our health from pollan and seeds of the Frankenstein variety.
Vermont has signed the nation’s first GMO-labeling law, effective July 2016 (again, incremental, slide-side change — labels — but it’s something, nonetheless).