The Chris Moeller Archives

The silence of the Great White Father

The censored reaction of President Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton, to the issue of the Dakota Access Pipeline is an unconscionable act. Approximately 5,000 members of the Standing Rock Sioux and other Native American tribes have been protesting in strength, staring down guns and attack dogs, in order to protect their water and their ancestral land from an oil company called Energy Transfer Partners that's been empowered to destroy by the United States government. What would the uproar be if this oil firm wanted to pipe through Arlington National?

The same week the president goes to Asia to tell audiences there the people who elected him at home are “lazy” on environmental issues, he continues a stone-cold silence over the pipeline and the fate of Native lands. To Asian business leaders, he vowed to continue pushing for the planet-mugging trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. A provision in the deal would allow foreign companies to skirt U.S. environmental laws and regulations. Late-term president same as the early-term president.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein spent part of her week getting arrested for trespassing in an act of civil disobedience protesting alongside Sioux protestors in North Dakota.


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This is the latest must-read of the election season-- Greenwald explains the complete surrendering of responsibility on the part of the American mainstream media in appropriately critiquing the Hillary Clinton campaign. Corporate news agencies believe that any criticism of Clinton is a boost to the repugnant Donald Trump campaign. I indict Huffington Post and MSNBC, in particular, as well as a so-called “alternative” media source, Mother Jones (which doesn’t deserve to carry that historically-important name). In each case, and you can find all of this online, it's a ceaseless defense of all-things Clinton that is almost humorous. The unfiltered parroting of the campaign's talking points is most annoying, but the McCarthyite attacks on her opponents, channeling the same anti-Russian sentiment of a half-century ago, get my vote as the ugliest.

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How to explain the fact that hundreds of NFL players, alternately African-American and white, have NOT joined Colin Kaepernick in his silent protest of the nation’s anthem?

posted by CM @ 10:44 PM