I returned from my shortest trip to Haiti last week, back to DeKalb, Illinois, an agribusiness hub, hosting Nestle and Monsanto processing plants. Most cornfields have been harvested. The Cubs won the world series for the first time in 108 years. Another of Illinois’ home grown, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has an 84% likelihood of being elected the U.S. first female president in a couple of days, per the New York Times.

Meanwhile Haiti is all but forgotten. A month ago, Hurricane Matthew ripped through Haiti. News from the assessment was slow to arrive. More

On Thursday, I learned about how militarized police attacked Native Americans resisting the eco-cidal Dakota Access Pipeline on the same day the Cubs won it all. You can see film footage of the assaults here. The scenes are remarkable. You behold, in the words of filmmaker Josh Fox, “a line of peaceful water protectors in the water, up to their waists, freezing cold.” Above them stand police in riot gear, equipped with shotguns. The gendarmes blast the pipeline fighters point blank and at close range with streams of mace and pepper spray and with rubber bullets. You see a female journalist zapped while she interviews an Indigenous activist. You see a military sniper (certainly with real bullets) perched on a hill above the vicious scene.

“It was like witnessing Gandhi’s Salt March,” Fox said, “then suddenly I am watching people being maced, and I hear a pop and see that they shot Erin Schrode… How is it possible that from 10 feet away, they are shooting at peaceful protesters, journalists, bystanders, medics?” More

If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America's political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist us. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI's investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. We've published about 33,000 of Clinton's emails when she was Secretary of State. They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails, [of which] Clinton has kept about half – 30,000 -- to herself, and we've published about half.

Then there are the Podesta emails we've been publishing. [John] Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign manager, so there’s a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations. [These emails are] combined with the cover up of the Hillary Clinton emails when she was Secretary of State, [which] has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases. More