On August 1 the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over sixty organizations, rolled out “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice,” an ambitious document described by the press as the first signs of what young black activists “really want.” It lays out six demands aimed at ending all forms of violence and injustice endured by black people; redirecting resources from prisons and the military to education, health, and safety; creating a just, democratically controlled economy; and securing black political power within a genuinely inclusive democracy. Backing the demands are forty separate proposals and thirty-four policy briefs, replete with data, context, and legislative recommendations.
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The river is a strong brown god. So declared T. S. Eliot, anyway. Some rivers, perhaps. The Mississippi, the Ohio, the Platte, certainly the Colorado. But not this river. Not Nch’I’Wana. Not the Columbia. Here in the shadow of the Rattlesnake Hills, the river is a clear as a subatomic particle, as cool as the icy hand of death, as fast as coyote sprinting at full stretch.

They call the Reach the last free-flowing run for the Columbia in the United States. The river flows. But it’s not entirely free. For 51 miles, from Priest Rapids Dam to the backwaters of McNary Reservoir at Richland, Washington, the waters of the Columbia flow unimpeded by a dam. The flow is regulated by the hydro-engineers upstream at Priest Rapids Dam. The releases of water fluctuate wildly. At peak demand, as the water is rushing through the turbines, the spills can raise the river level of Columbia by as much as 16 feet in a few hours. Still the river has a pulse, a taste of what it once was. More

“There is a time,” Mario Savio famously said just more than half a century ago, “when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.”

That’s easier said than done, but you’ve got to make a start.

Take the hideous long black Earth-poisoning and planet-baking snake that is the Bakken Pipeline. Beneath the cover of the endless presidential election season, which in Iowa started a year and a half ago, the Texas-based company Dakota Access LLC (a division of the corporation Energy Transfer Partners [ETP]) has moved methodically ahead with its plan to build this ugly, winding, and eco-cidal tube of death. The $4 billion, 1134-mile project would carry 540,000 barrels of largely fracked crude oil from North Dakota’s “Bakken oil patch” daily on a diagonal course through South Dakota, a Sioux Indian burial ground,18 Iowa counties, and a Native American reservation to Patoka, Illinois. It will link with another pipeline that will transport the black gold to terminals and refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. More