Yesterday morning at Lafayette Square across from the White House, David Bronner, president of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, locked himself into a cage in a civil disobedience protest against US policies on the cultivation of industrial-grade hemp for use in food and fibers.

Bronner notes that the US is the biggest market on Earth for industrial hemp products, and yet US farmers are cut out of the market; as a result, his company is forced to buy hemp oil from Canadian outfits to the tune of $100,000 per year. Bronner also pointed out the hypocrisy of the Obama government in that as an Illinois state senator, Obama voted twice in support of industrial hemp cultivation, but as El Presidente, he has actively interfered in the rights of states to legalize the growing of industrial hemp, including his refusal to to meet with a delegation from North Dakota, whose government — from the Governor on down — has signaled its wishes to allow its farmers to cultivate industrial hemp.

From about 8am until the DC Fire Department arrived to cut the locks and bolts holding the cage closed, Bronner harvested some of the half-dozen or so industrial-grade hemp plants he had on hand — at .06% THC, smoking it would give you nothing but a headache — sifted the seeds, and used them to demonstrate a hand-cranked seed-oil press.

(Note: Owing to currently-insoluble issues with Vimeo’s new uploading system, I’m forced to revert back to YouTube for the foreseeable future… and yeah, it kinda sucks. Apologies.)

Continue reading "La Cage Aux Chanvre" »

So, here we are two years after the massive oil spill from BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore rig which devestated ecosystems, fisheries and tourism along the US Gulf Coast. Our Exalted Boy Emperor and Nobel Laureate, Barack Drone Strike Obama, responded by sitting around saying nothing for a couple of weeks before giving a speech so empty and loaded with blue-sky platitudes about our wonderful energy future that he should’ve been wearing a cardigan.

Meanwhile, large numbers of eyeless shrimp and mutated fish are being caught by Gulf Coast fishing boats, Gulf fisheries are in deep decline, and not a single BP executive has served so much as a day of prison time for this crime.

Happy anniversary, everybody! Have some cake.

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…and for those of you with long-term memory issues — or, “looking forward”, as your average Democrat would say  — here’s a quick recap of the Gulf Coast oil disaster:

“Spill, Baby, Spill!” 04.30.10
“Climate Change?” 05.12.10
“Plugged, At Last!” 05.29.10
“Nerobama no. 2” 06.17.10

Continue reading "Happy Anniversary!" »

After a decade of observing police thuggery against protests in Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York City along with the recent police attacks on unarmed protesters at Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland, and comparing it against similar scenes I witnessed in video from Athens, Bahrain and Cairo, I can’t help but conclude that Nonviolence™ is an ideological luxury affordable only to the cushy-living white middle-class activists of the United States.

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For your further enjoyment:
Ward Churchill’s Pacifism As Pathology (pdf download).
Review of Peter Gelderloos’ How Nonviolence Protects The State, at OpEdNews.

Oakland police raid Occupy Oakland, 10.25.11, 5am:

Oakland riot police turn Occupy Oakland scene into war zone:

More video of Oakland police attack on Occupy Oakland here.

Continue reading "Nonviolence…?" »

The consensus over here on the Left is that there is a danger to the Occupy Movement far greater than any amount of pepper spray, mace, tear gas or blunt force trauma that could be dished out by various metropolitan police departments, or any amount of buffoonish insults crapped out by Fox News — and that is the danger of being co-opted by the Democratic Party in the form of its various front groups. On the upside, though, this generation of dissidents seems less likely to fall for Democratic Party snake oil, unlike their older comrades who came out of Seattle/WTO, “A16”, and the early ’00s peace movement.

The Democrats’ co-optation attempts are especially galling in the context of the latest news of the Obama re-election campaign fundraising efforts. They’re continuing the pace set during the ’08 campaign, when the Democrats first surged ahead of the GOP in the amount of campaign cash coming from Wall Street and the banksters.

Not only that, but it’s right out in the open, butt-assed naked, reported on the front page of this past Thursday’s Washington Post. The real “money shot” comes eight paragraphs deep:

Obama’s ties to Wall Street donors could complicate Democratic plans to paint Republicans as puppets of the financial industry, particularly in light of the Occupy Wall Street protests that have gone global over the past week.

“Could complicate Democratic plans”? No shit, Sherlock.

Of course, this inconvenient truth won’t stop the likes of Michael Moore, the AFL-CIO, MoveOn and the Progressive Democrats Of America from trying to weasel their way in and divert the movement’s energy down the Democratic Electoral Black Hole anyway, because that’s just the way they are — exploitive, manipulative, parasitic, amoral.

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Continue reading "Infiltrator!" »