This was originally in salon.com. Please note that this is a particularly long post but well worth the read.
Progressives would feel much better about themselves, their Party and their candidate if they only had to oppose, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann. That’s because the standard GOP candidate agrees with Obama on many of these issues and is even worse on these others, so progressives can feel good about themselves for supporting Obama: his right-wing opponent is a warmonger, a servant to Wall Street, a neocon, a devotee of harsh and racist criminal justice policies, etc. etc.
It is the classic lesser-of-two-evils rationale, the key being that it explicitly recognizes that both sides are “evil”: meaning it is not a Good v. Evil contest but a More Evil v. Less Evil contest. But that is not the discussion that takes place because few progressives want to acknowledge that the candidate they are supporting — again — is someone who will continue to do these evil things with their blessing. Instead, we hear only a dishonest one-sided argument that emphasizes Paul’s evils while ignoring Obama’s (progressives frequently ask: how can any progressive consider an anti-choice candidate but don’t ask themselves: how can any progressive support a child-killing, secrecy-obsessed, whistleblower-persecuting Drug Warrior?).
Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies
By Glenn Greenwald
Saturday, Dec. 31
(updated below)
As I’ve written about before, America’s election season degrades mainstream political discourse even beyond its usual lowly state. The worst attributes of our political culture — obsession with trivialities, the dominance of horserace “reporting,” and mindless partisan loyalties — become more pronounced than ever. Meanwhile, the actually consequential acts of the U.S. Government and the permanent power factions that control it — covert endless wars, consolidation of unchecked power, the rapid growth of the Surveillance State and the secrecy regime, massive inequalities in the legal system, continuous transfers of wealth from the disappearing middle class to large corporate conglomerates — drone on with even less attention paid than usual.
Because most of those policies are fully bipartisan in nature, the election season — in which only issues that bestow partisan advantage receive attention — places them even further outside the realm of mainstream debate and scrutiny. For that reason, America’s elections ironically serve to obsfuscate political reality even more than it usually is.
This would all be bad enough if “election season” were confined to a few months the way it is in most civilized countries. But in America, the fixation on presidential elections takes hold at least eighteen months before the actual election occurs, which means that more than 1/3 of a President’s term is conducted in the midst of (and is obscured by) the petty circus distractions of The Campaign. Thus, an unauthorized, potentially devastating covert war — both hot and cold — against Iran can be waged with virtually no debate, just as government control over the Internet can be inexorably advanced, because TV political shows are busy chattering away about Michele Bachmann’s latest gaffe and minute changes in Rick Perry’s polling numbers.
Global elites are confused, reactive, and sinking into the quagmire of their own making. It is noteworthy that those struggling around the world have been shown a strong sense of solidarity and are in communications across whole continents. Just as the Egyptian uprising inspired the US Occupy movement, the latter has been an inspiration for a new round of mass struggle in Egypt. What remains is to extend transnational coordination and move towards transnationally-coordinated programmes. On the other hand, the “empire of global capital” is definitely not a “paper tiger”.
Global rebellion: The coming chaos?
William I. Robinson
Santa Barbara, CA – As the crisis of global capitalism spirals out of control, the powers that be in the global system appear to be adrift and unable to propose viable solutions. From the slaughter of dozens of young protesters by the army in Egypt to the brutal repression of the Occupy movement in the United States, and the water cannons brandished by the militarised police in Chile against students and workers, states and ruling classes are unable to hold back the tide of worldwide popular rebellion and must resort to ever more generalised repression.
Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy can no longer be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. The ruling classes have lost legitimacy; we are witnessing a breakdown of ruling-class hegemony on a world scale.
To understand what is happening in this second decade of the new century we need to see the big picture in historic and structural context. Global elites had hoped and expected that the “Great Depression” that began with the mortgage crisis and the collapse of the global financial system in 2008 would be a cyclical downturn that could be resolved through state-sponsored bailouts and stimulus packages. But it has become clear that this is a structural crisis. Cyclical crises are on-going episodes in the capitalist system, occurring and about once a decade and usually last 18 months to two years. There were world recessions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the early 21st century.
In the wake of the U.C. Davis incident, much has been made about the increased militarization of local police departments, raising questions about the effectiveness of these tactics and a concern about the far-reaching authority of police to use force. However, this is hardly a new phenomenon. The increased militarization of America’s police forces can trace its origins to the black community, and like so much that is currently plaguing the criminal-justice system, it is a different so-called war that can be blamed: the war on drugs.
From War on Drugs to War on Occupy
By: Mychal Denzel Smith
The photos and description of what took place at Occupy Chapel Hill, an Occupy Wall Street offshoot in North Carolina, resemble the second tenet of the so-called PowellDoctrine. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Colin Powell said that “force, when used, should be overwhelming and disproportionate to the force used by the enemy.”
On Nov. 13 a tactical team of 25 Chapel Hill police officers equipped with assault rifles, helmets and bulletproof vests forced 13 people to the ground in handcuffs, including a reporter covering the protest, and arrested eight nonviolent and unarmed demonstrators and charged them with breaking and entering for occupying a vacant car dealership.
Later that week, there was the controversial NYPD raid on the original Occupy encampment in lower Manhattan, and more recently, a video of peaceful student protesters being pepper-sprayed on the campus of the University of California, Davis, went viral and sparked national outrage. The shocking imagery is now ingrained in the public consciousness, representing the increasingly violent response of police to these nonviolent protests.
Overwhelming and disproportionate, indeed. But what Powell was describing in 1991 was a new way of waging war, one intended as a last resort and to minimize military involvement unless absolutely necessary. What police officers at the Occupy protests were engaging in was not war.
“What was inconceivable just a year ago, even to most Marxists, is now a spectre haunting the opinion pages of the business press: the imminent destruction of much of the institutional framework of globalization and undermining of the post-1989 international order. There is growing apprehension that the crisis of the Eurozone, followed by a synchronized world recession, might return us to a 1930ish world of semi-autarchic monetary and trade blocs, crazed by nationalist ressentiments…But this is not a debate in the great industrializing society that Das Kapital describes even more accurately than Victorian Britain or New Deal America. Two hundred million Chinese factory workers, miners and construction labourers are the most dangerous class on the planet. (Just ask the State Council in Beijing.) Their full awakening from the bubble may yet determine whether or not a socialist Earth is still possible.”
Spring Confronts Winter
by Mike Davis
In great upheavals, analogies fly like shrapnel. The electrifying protests of 2011—the on-going Arab spring, the ‘hot’ Iberian and Hellenic summers, the ‘occupied’ fall in the United States—inevitably have been compared to the anni mirabiles of 1848, 1905, 1968 and 1989. Certainly some fundamental things still apply and classic patterns repeat. Tyrants tremble, chains break and palaces are stormed. Streets become magical laboratories where citizens and comrades are created, and radical ideas acquire sudden telluric power. Iskra becomes Facebook. But will this new comet of protest persist in the winter sky or is it just a brief, dazzling meteor shower? As the fates of previous journées révolutionnaires warn us, spring is the shortest of seasons, especially when the communards fight in the name of a ‘different world’ for which they have no real blueprint or even idealized image.
But perhaps that will come later. For the moment, the survival of the new social movements—the occupiers, the indignados, the small European anti-capitalist parties and the Arab new left—demands that they sink deeper roots in mass resistance to the global economic catastrophe, which in turn presupposes—let’s be honest—that the current temper for ‘horizontality’ can eventually accommodate enough disciplined ‘verticality’ to debate and enact organizing strategies. It’s a frighteningly long road just to reach the starting points of earlier attempts to build a new world. But a new generation has at least bravely initiated the journey.
Kasama is post discussions from different viewpoints and hopes to raise, as a special focus, what role the Occupations can play in building new, united, impactful movements for a radically different society. The views presented in this series are not summations by Kasama itself. They are presented here to encourage discussions from which verdicts are emerging.
This piece ends with an argument for a Red Bloc (or a Socialist Caucus) as a way of influencing the direction of the Occupations. Would this be positive, or a disaster? An assumption behind that proposal is that “socialists” somehow have common politics (that exist, for example in opposition to anarchist politics)? that could be expressed better in common within such a movement. Is that true? And if so what are those “common politics”? Or do revolutionary communists have more in common with new-born radical forces and revolutionary anarchists than they do with the various strains of organized socialists? Who are the advanced who we should be seeking to consolidate and put forward? Do they included the organized socialist currents? And if so which parts of them?
From the conclusion of this essay the author puts forward one view:
“The most basic and fundamental task facing socialists is to merge with Occupy and lead it from within. Socialist groups that insist on “intervening” in the uprising will be viewed as outsiders with little to contribute in practice to solving Occupy’s actual problems because they will be focused on winning arguments and ideological points rather than actively listening to, joining hands with and fighting alongside the vanguard of the 99% in overcoming common practical and political.
“One difficulty the socialist left faces in accomplishing this basic and fundamental task is the divisions in our ranks that serve in practice to weaken the overall socialist influence within Occupy, thereby strengthening that of the anarchists. They have their Black Bloc, but where is our Red Bloc? Where are the socialist slogans to shape and guide the uprising’s political development?”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
By Pham Binh
December 14, 2011 — Occupy is a once in a lifetime opportunity to re-merge the socialist and working-class movements and create a viable broad-based party of radicals, two prospects that have not been on the cards in the United States since the late 1960s and early 1970s. The socialist left has not begun to think through these “big picture” implications of Occupy, nor has it fully adjusted to the new tasks that Occupy’s outbreak has created for socialists. In practice, the socialist left follows Occupy’s lead rather than Occupy follow the socialist left’s lead. As a result, we struggle to keep pace with Occupy’s rapid evolution.
“Demands are a complicated question. Some feel that, given Occupy’s distance from the State, no demands should be maintained. Others feel that there are too many problems Occupy needs to address to synthesize. Yet, are they mutually contradictory?
“Can we both have demands and NOT have demands? Yes.
“Do unions or NGOs have principal demands? No, they form contracts, agreements, and agitate daily for improved living conditions. In the same way, I think we should consider demands as ‘campaigns’. Occupy should have campaigns that are focused on tactically, but, should not adopt demands. If Occupy adopts demands for itself, then, it ceases its progression towards an organizational form and simply becomes a pressure group.”
This is a moment when we need summation of the Occupation movements — what they have accomplished, what they mean, where their forces will now congeal, what now can be changed or raised or developed about their politics and unity.
Kasama is post discussions from different viewpoints and hopes to raise, as a special focus, what role the Occupations can play in building new, united, impactful movements for a radically different society.
The views presented in this series are not summations by Kasama itself. They are presented here to encourage discussions from which verdicts are emerging.
The following is a presentation given by Evan Sarmiento, an active participant in Boston’s Occupation movement, and supporter of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO/OSCL).
This is based on the discussion at a Platypus pane held at Harvard University on December 15. This post is taken from Evan’s notes, not from a transcription of the talk itself.
One of the main criticisms against SOPA is that it’s de facto “censorship,” requiring ISPs at times to prevent access to infringing sites by making efforts under order to block web browser requests for flagged domain names. The prospect of domain name system (DNS) blocking and filtering has alarmed some who believe it would be intrusive and undercut the secure structure of the Internet.
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt also echoed that sentiment. The bill would “criminalize linking and the fundamental structure of the Internet itself,” he said yesterday.
New Version Of ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ As Controversial As Ever (Analysis)
by Eriq Gardner
On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee plans to mark up and vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an important piece of legislation that’s been fostering fervent debate in recent weeks.
In advance of the markup, Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the committee, has made some tweaks in a so-called manager’s amendment, aimed at building support by attempting to clarify the bill’s main targets as foreign “rogue” websites, narrowing definitions of bad actors, limiting the private right of action that allow copyright and trademark owners to sue, and addressing concerns that anti-piracy measures could eventually denigrate the security and integrity of the Internet.
The changes are in direct reaction to criticism that has transcended political parties, and the modifications were welcomed by the entertainment industry lobby and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But the new version of SOPA still has not gone nearly far enough in narrowing its definitions and curtailing its service provider obligations to appease leading technology companies and other groups rallying against the bill.
Kasama will post discussions from a number of different viewpoints on the Occupations — what they have accomplished, what challenges their supporters face, what directions we should all consider. The views presented in this series do not represent any summation of Kasama itself — but are presented here to encourage the discussion from which verdicts are emerging.
Here is a presentation given by Kasama supporter Enaa at Harvard, in response to questions posed at a Platypus panel. This post is taken from his notes, not from a transcription of the talk itself.
by Doug Enaa
1. In light of the recent series of coordinated and spectacular evictions that have been taking place since November 15th, including violent action in campuses and elsewhere, is it fair to say that the Occupy movement has entered into a sort of “phase 2”? If so, what is the nature of this new phase of the movement’s development?
To expand: How has the occupation been forced to adapt to a changing set of conditions on the ground? What sorts of fresh difficulties do these new conditions pose for the occupiers? A moment of crisis can often be a moment of opportunity. What direction do you feel the movement should take in order to remain viable and relevant?
Let me preface my remarks by speaking to the concrete realities that Occupy Boston is facing at this moment. On Dec. 10, the Boston Police Department in a well-coordinated raid evicted the encampment. Before this occurred, the movement was attempting to figure out how we planned to survive the winter (using army tents, finding indoor spaces, etc.).
Now that dynamic has changed dramatically. One of the slogans that all tendencies of the movement have adopted is “You can’t evict an idea.”
Official troops pull out, thousands of U.S. mercenaries remain
Many things go unsaid as the U.S. announces withdrawal from Iraq.
Defeat, for example. (Bush declared victory and “Mission Accomplished” — just as armed resistance to U.S. occupation took off. The Obama regime is declaring its withdrawal now, when in fact, the U.S. is seeking to maintain influence and control through numerous neo-colonial and military channels.
On paper they say that “u.s. combat troops” have pulled out to “zero.”
5,000 mercenary troops remain on the U.S. payroll (called “contractors”). They are based in the center of Iraq’s capital Bagdad (in the vast military installation that is deceptively called “the U.S. embassy.”) Read the rest of this entry »
You are standing up to your knees in the slime of a waterlogged trench. It is the evening of 24 December 1914 and you are on the dreaded Western Front.
Stooped over, you wade across to the firing step and take over the watch. Having exchanged pleasantries, your bleary-eyed and mud-spattered colleague shuffles off towards his dug out. Despite the horrors and the hardships, your morale is high and you believe that in the New Year the nation’s army march towards a glorious victory.
But for now you stamp your feet in a vain attempt to keep warm. All is quiet when jovial voices call out from both friendly and enemy trenches. Then the men from both sides start singing carols and songs. Next come requests not to fire, and soon the unthinkable happens: you start to see the shadowy shapes of soldiers gathering together in no-man’s land laughing, joking and sharing gifts.
Many have exchanged cigarettes, the lit ends of which burn brightly in the inky darkness. Plucking up your courage, you haul yourself up and out of the trench and walk towards the foe…
The meeting of enemies as friends in no-man’s land was experienced by hundreds, if not thousands, of men on the Western Front during Christmas 1914. Today, 90 years after it occurred, the event is seen as a shining episode of sanity from among the bloody chapters of World War One – a spontaneous effort by the lower ranks to create a peace that could have blossomed were it not for the interference of generals and politicians.
In popular culture football player Tim Tebow has become a major phenomenon. As a quarterback for the Denver Broncos his team up until this past Sunday had won six consecutive games, many of them in very dramatic fashion in the final minutes of games. Part of the allure to journalists and opinion makers about Tebow is his in your face way of pronuncing his religious faith. It should be remembered that during last year’s Super Bowl that Tebow and his Mom appeared in a controversial Focus on the Family advertisement against abortion rights. At the same time an ad by a pro-choice to counter Tebow was rejected by the network carrying the Super Bowl. When someone like Tebow becomes a major phenomenon and a success at that, millions of people are watching. They are objectively being fed a political message. What does it mean when politics (even in the form of right-wing religion) enter into the realm of sports? What effect does Tebow’s open reactionary Christianity have on the political terrain and how should communists respond? How should communists relate to sports culture and how can we encourage more popular athletes to take stands on the side of the people? We need more Muhammad Ali’s and also more Dave Zirin’s. I say this as a communist and a pretty big sports fan.
The following video is a skit done on Saturday Night Live parodying Tebow’s personality and extreme faith. It has been attacked by many right wing media outlets and most recently by Pat Robertson.
The weakening of the Kim dynasty may represent an opening to Korea's people.
note by Mike Ely:
Kim Jong Il is gone. This is breaking news, and the implications of this event will not be immediately known.
Kim Jong Il has long been head of the oppressive and isolated state ruling northern Korea — locked in a seemingly permanent state of war against the southern Korean state (which was occupied by the U.S. after world war 2). The North Korean regime,which calls itself the Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK), may well be weakened by Kim’s death and by long-brewing power struggles within the North Korean ruling circles.
There is both danger and opportunity in those possibilities of instability.
Certainly the people of northern Korea and their compatriots in the southern Korea’s peninsula have every interest in helping radical changes sweep their peninsula. They deserve the freedom to make their own difficult future choices freed from the interference and domination of great powers.
At the same time, any turmoil or instability in North Korea will signal intense and self-interested interference by the United States, and by those great powers (China, Russia and Japan) that border Korea.
Over and over Korea has been invaded, occupied, colonized, brutalized, exploited and threatened by outside powers — specifically Japan and the United States during the 20th century.
“Heaven and Earth Shake with Cheers for Kim Jong-il!”
North Korea as a Religious State
by GARY LEUPP
All three countries labeled “the Axis of Evil” by President Bush in 2002 are presently religious states. Iran is of course a Shiite theocracy, while the government of formerly secularist Iraq—to the extent it has a government at all—is dominated by Shiite fundamentalists. North Korea has long practiced its state religion, Kim Il-songism.
According to North Korean scriptures, when the Great Leader Kim Il-song died in 1994, thousands of cranes descended from Heaven to fetch him, and his portrait appeared high in the firmament. Immediately villages and towns throughout the nation began to construct Towers of Eternal Life, the main one rising 93 meters over Kim’s mausoleum in Pyongyang. The Great Leader’s son, the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, took power, declining to assume the title of President. The Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea restricts that title forever to the Great Leader, whom the Dear Leader has proclaimed, “will always be with us.” The Dear Leader himself was born on Mt. Paektu, the highest mountain in Korea and Manchuria long revered by Koreans as sacred and the birthplace of their nation, in 1942. (Unbelievers say he was born in 1941 in Vyatskoye, in Siberia, in the Soviet Union.) His birth in a humble log cabin brought joy to the cosmos: a double rainbow appeared over the peak, a new star rose in the heavens, and a swallow descended to herald his birth. (Thus he is called, among other monikers, the Heaven-Descended General.) When he was 32 years old, the Workers’ Party of Korea and the people of Korea unanimously elected him their leader. When he visited Panmunjom, a fog descended to protect him from South Korean snipers, but when he was out of danger, the mist dramatically listed and glorious sunlight shone all around him. . . You get the idea.
Guantanamo's Camp X-ray -- Cheney's concentration camp is now Obama's concentration camp.
To everyone still trapped in the logic of “lesser evil” please read this article from Salon — and share with us now, early in the electoral circus, the arguments for supporting the empire’s commander in the coming inner-ruling class election contest.
Obama to sign indefinite detention bill into law
by Glenn Greenwald
In one of the least surprising developments imaginable, President Obama – after spending months threatening to veto the Levin/McCain detention bill – yesterday announced that he would instead sign it into law (this is the same individual, of course, who unequivocally vowed when seeking the Democratic nomination to support a filibuster of “any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecom[s],” only to turn around – once he had the nomination secure — and not only vote against such a filibuster, but to vote in favor of the underlying bill itself, so this is perfectly consistent with his past conduct). As a result, the final version of the Levin/McCain bill will be enshrined as law this week as part of the the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). I wrote about the primary provisions and implications of this bill last week, and won’t repeat those points here.
Every minute, 24 people in the US are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner
Nearly 1 in 5 women has been raped.
1 in 4 women and nearly 1 in 7 men have been the victim of severe physical violence from an intimate partner at some point in their lives.
Grim and very painful statistics show how brutal the relations between men and women can be in this society — and how many women are abused in the day-to-day operations of American society. And the fact that these statistics are treated as a surprise and a discover shows how much neglect and coverup accompanies abuse — and how much male right comes with protection of law, police, tradition, social-shaming and old-boy networks of many kinds.
It is worth exploring deeply how such widespread brutality (rape, beating, stalking) is tied to core intimate relations across the world — and the degree to which such widespread abuse is integral to the “normal” operatins of traditional family relations and mainstream norms of male right they embody.
“In their own words… Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not ‘remarkable,’ but as routine.”
“Troops… grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up… Charges were dropped against six of the accused Marines in the Haditha episode, one was acquitted and the last remaining case against one Marine is scheduled to go to trial next year.”
“That sense of American impunity ultimately poisoned any chance for American forces to remain in Iraq, because the Iraqis would not let them stay without being subject to Iraqi laws and courts, a condition the White House could not accept.”
As the U.S. formally withdraws from Iraq, it leaves behind an army of paid mercenaries, a country on the edge of civil war, hundreds of thousands of mourning families, and the memories of horrific war crimes.
Twenty four civilians were killed in various attacks in Haditha, in 2005, including seven women and three children. No one was punished. Evidence was supposed to have been destroyed. Now the interviews with the soldiers have been discovered and published revealing the events and mentality that murdered Iraqis that day.
These 400 pages lay bare what is usually so hidden (buried along with the bodies) . Here is the reality of U.S. occupations. Here are the actual activities of the ‘boots on the ground” in the town of Haditha — but it is an exposure of the whole larger operation in which the murder of Iraqi people was routine, accepted and “the cost of doing business.”
While the U.S. media talks of soldiers who are so routinely and deceitfully sanitized as “helping the foreign peoples” and “keeping America safe” — the interviews from Haditha reveal what is actually being done.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq was a war of unprovoked aggression, unleashed using a cynical government machinery of complete lies. Iraq was pounded into pieces using a high tech aerial “shock and awe” followed by massive foreign invasion.
Not only were the responsible war criminals Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell kept out of court and prison (why no Hague Tribunal for these war criminals?), but their criminal war policies then pursued by a new President Obama (whose main claim to fame was that he opposed the war from the beginning)! And only a few of the lowest soldiers on the ground have even faced the possibility of trial — which is itself a white wash. And their “trials” are (over and over) leading to acquittal. For those cases that become scandals, “prosecution” is the form of official whitewash.
“It has become clear to me in recent years that, in our current world of immeasurable divisions between the ruled and the rulers, the Liberal approach of nonviolent reform is a naive ideal.
“The system is created by capitalists and it requires, even requests, the forcible ‘overthrow of all existing oppressive social conditions.’”
From time to time, Kasama publishes essays we receive as applications for membership in our organized Kasama network.
by Oliver Jackson
Throughout my childhood and teenage years, before I had developed politics of my own, I was barraged with a baffling mix of propaganda and misinformation, both in vehement support of the communist idea, as well as against it.
At my public Chinese elementary school, we started each day with revolutionary poems delivered under the watchful portrait of Mao Zedong. Every afternoon, in the home of my missionary parents, I heard stories of the brutality of the communist party and Mao’s alleged murder of millions of innocent people.
At the age of 14, my family moved to Boise, Idaho, and, through the clearness of distance, I was able to begin my own analysis of the Communist Revolution in China, of Mao, and of the roles they played within China and the global Communist movement. Through closer observation and critical thought I began to develop a more whole understanding of the context in which the various accomplishments of a variety of revolutions took place, as well as of the failures and shortcomings of those same movements.
Last month ABC’s 20/20 aired a special they called “Children of the Plains,” that portrayed the Lakota Indian reservation as a place that only dealt with crime, unemployment, alcoholism, overcrowded trailers and crumbling schools.
On Monday, young Native American students from Rosebud, South Dakota released a short video that challenged the claims made by “Children of the plains.”
This was originally in salon.com. Please note that this is a particularly long post but well worth the read.
