So this week we were treated to Son of Cliven Bundy (Ammon) bringing his band of brothers up to Oregon to take a stand for freedom. The freedom, that is, to use public land as if it belongs to you and no one else. What these “patriots” are taking issue with is the jailing of these Oregonian ranchers who set fires on federal land, once to clear brush, the other time apparently to hide evidence of poaching. They were sent to jail on a relatively light sentence, released, and then ordered to return on the basis of a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years for federal arson, the latter decision handed down by a higher court.
Bundy the younger and his comrades apparently see this as the next chapter in the titanic struggle that began at old man Cliven’s ranch, when the Feds impounded his cattle until he coughed up the $1million or more he owed the People of the United States for use of their (a.k.a. our) land. So they holed up in the office of a federal bird sanctuary, toting their best firearms (you can’t spell Ammon without ammo), and hoped for the same outcome as happened with Cliven – namely, a federal climb-down. (And judging by the fact that they didn’t bring along nearly enough granola bars for a long stay, they are probably expecting that to happen right along.)
Okay, without getting into the tedious details of this incident, I want to make a couple of points. First, there’s no particular federal overreach here. If I went down to the local federal building and built a campfire in the lobby, I would be arrested and charged … and I would expect to be. That said, the federal government is in a way responsible for this ridiculous standoff by virtue of its actions … or inaction. Daddy Cliven still owes the government over a million dollars for his use of federal land. What’s more, his supporters pointed guns at federal law enforcement and paid no penalty. When you allow something like that to happen without adequate response, you encourage others to try. That’s George W. Bush logic. Even so, in this context it makes sense.
Ever wonder what would happen if these dudes were Black or Native American? Stop wondering – we already know. Ask Fred Hampton. Ask the guys who were in the standoff at Wounded Knee in the 1970s. Ask MOVE. Overwhelming force is what they get; patience is what Ammon and Cliven Bundy get. That’s called racial preference, people.
luv u,
jp
Romney in Reserve. Kind of a country swing song about Willard standing by his phone, waiting for a call from a desperate GOP chair pleading for him to jump in and save the party for 2016. Dream on, Willard, dream on.
Capitalism’s Failure. This is an issue that touches on everyone, young and old, working and unemployed or retired, poor and not-so-poor. The internal contradictions of American and, by extension, global capitalism came to a head in the crash of 2008, and we are still living in the aftermath of that disaster. Yes, the government can point to select data points that indicated a modest level of recovery, but the fact remains that an economic system that has consistently failed the vast majority of the population over the past 30 years has entered into an entirely new phase of failure. Most working Americans are toiling at the only job they can find, earning an inadequate rate of compensation. Our major cities are choked with legions of homeless people. This system is broken; it only serves the top one percent. We need to take a hard look at this, sooner rather than later.
Lindsey loves Georgie. At the kid’s table, Lindsey Graham got a little carried away over his bro-mance with ex-president and hopefully future convicted war criminal George W. Bush, saying in essence that he misses W and wishes he were still in office to handle the big-as-the-sky threat known as ISIS, which Lindsey previously said wants to “kill us all!!” Not hard to work out why Senator Graham’s poll numbers, even in a highly reactionary GOP primary race, hover somewhere between zero and zero point five. Not a majority position.
I’m here in what passes for my cabin in this rented spacecraft, editing the audio play we recorded a few days ago. We’ve also recorded a few songs, as is our tradition, to accompany the hack-job melodrama we’ll be posting in the coming weeks, so those will take some finishing. Work, work, work. I thought this trip was going to be something of a getaway, a chance of rest and relaxation, a hiatus in our otherwise hectic existence of hammer-mill squatting. Fat chance.
This is what happens in America when anything like a foreign-inspired terror attack takes place: we want to corral all Muslims and start bombing some country most of us couldn’t find on a globe with both hands. I’ve lived through many cycles of this, from the Iran hostage crisis through the first gulf war, to the embassy bombings in the late 1990s and on into the 9/11 era. I can remember a Muslim friend from Bosnia being a bit taken aback by the rhetoric and the kind of full-on nationalism pushed through the corporate media that came about after Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998. It’s times like these when Muslims – and yes, people with beards and headscarves more generally – feel compelled to start looking over their shoulders.
Not to put too fine a point on it, we are going to have to Mad Science the shit out of this thing. Mitch Macaphee is working overtime (as much as 3 hours a day) trying to adapt Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s solar power unit to the ship’s main drive. It is by no means a walk in the park for old Mitch. Good thing we brought some decent gin with us. (Though we left the rummy back at the mill.)
Much as the press is obsessing over the terrorism / not-terrorism question, this is in essence another story of the proverbial three-foot creep with a four-foot gun. That these people were prepared for some kind of attack seems clear, but what they had was not all that exotic except in the respect that there was an awful lot of it – something like 4,500 rounds of ammunition. The guns were legally acquired by someone. They’re not very hard to get, frankly, even military-style assault weapons. And as far as ammo is concerned, I am reminded of a kid I knew in my late teens, a musician, whose family maintained a sizable ammunition factory in the basement of their suburban home. I remember rehearsing some songs down there, in a small clearing between the casings, as siblings continued to add to the arsenal. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that my friend and his family had filled 4,500 rounds down there. They never shot up their workplace, but if they had, the basement armory would have been part of the news story.