At War with America

Howard Zinn has written an article summing up how he feels about about a 7 year art project by elin o’Hara slavick, where she documents all the places which the US has bombed. It includes such perennial favorites as Afghanistan, Haiti and Iraq as well as less knowns like Philadelphia and the Marshall Islands.

You can see parts of the project here.

Meanwhile, on the home front, the US has been dealing with a number of skirmishes with some of its long standing disenfranchised peoples.

First the Lakota Sioux have withdrawn from the US and declared independence. More specifically, they have withdrawn "from the constitutionally mandated treaties to become a free and independent country." They are also "alerting the Family of Nations we have now reassumed our freedom and independence with the backing of Natural, International, and United States law."

Second, do you remember that situation with New Orleans? No, not the hurricane, thousands of blacks left to die, shoving people like animals in a sports arena, shoot to kill orders on "looters" (pronounced by the US military as "Bl-aa-cks"), not allowing people to leave the city and privatizing the rescue efforts to Blackwater and Walmart because the National Guard was in Iraq.

I'm talking about the phenomenon , well documented by Greg Palast, where the thousands of black who lost their homes have been kept in prison-like trailer parks and prevented from returning to their homes so the City of New Orleans can "bring about permanent demographic change in New Orleans, aimed at preventing the return of poor and primarily black residents."

Yeah, about that....