To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone complains about inequality, but nobody does anything about it. What they do is to use “inequality” as a takeoff point to project their own views on how to make society more prosperous and at the same time more equal. These views largely depend on whether they view the One Percent More

In recent years, powerful alliances of Native American nations and their rural white neighbors have stopped major resource corporations from carrying out their plans, in a common defense of the same land and water they have historically fought over. Last year, tribes and white ranchers and farmers, who had joined forces in the Cowboy Indian Alliance, blocked the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. Similar Native alliances with white farmers, ranchers, or fishers have blocked proposed oil and coal terminals in Washington and Oregon, and stopped mining plans in Montana, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. I’ve chronicled many of these alliances in my book Unlikely Alliances: Native and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands, forthcoming this spring from the University of Washington Press.

So while visiting Standing Rock for three days in early September (with Debi McNutt bringing supplies and donations from Olympia, Washington), I had to ask the question: “where are the cowboys?,” because they were nowhere to be seen. Standing Rock’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) has showcased an unprecedented degree of intertribal unity, even including tribes with their own fossil fuel development. It has also brought about an intratribal convergence, with tribal government leaders, traditional chiefs, and Indigenous activists sharing a common goal of protecting the water and sacred sites, an especially groundbreaking occurrence in the history of the Oceti Sakowin (Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota, or “Sioux”), even if they do not always agree on strategies and tactics. More

A recent article in The New York Times entitled, “The Secret History of Colombia’s Paramilitaries & The U.S. War on Drugs,” contains useful clues as to the U.S.’s true views towards the Colombian death squads and their massive war crimes and human rights abuses. [1] In short, it reveals a high-level of tolerance of, and condonation by, U.S. policy-makers for the suffering of the Colombian people at the hands of our long-time friends and allies, the right-wing paramilitaries.

The gist of the NYT story is that, beginning in 2008, the U.S. has extradited “several dozen” top paramilitary leaders, thereby helping them to evade a transitional justice process which would have held them accountable for their war crimes and crimes against humanity. They have been brought to the U.S. where they have been tried for drug-related offenses only and given cushy sentences of 10 years in prison on average. And, even more incredibly, “for some, there is a special dividend at the end of their incarceration. Though wanted by Colombian authorities, two have won permission to stay in the United States, and their families have joined them. There are more seeking the same haven, and still others are expected to follow suit.” More