The tax code is progressive and purposefully so. Marginal income tax rates increase with income. The more you make, the greater share of income you pay. Disagreeing with this general principle puts you to the right of a typical Republican. Among families making more than $100,000, there were also half a million tax units -- enough to replace the population of Tucson, Arizona -- that also paid no income tax. Even more surprising, 7,000 millionaires also paid no individual income tax.

Buffett Rule Rorschach: 7,000 Millionaires

Paid No Income Taxes in 2011

By Derek Thompson

The White House's new campaign banner/economic principle is the so-called "Buffett Rule," which holds that no millionaire should pay a lower effective tax rate than a typical middle class family. Sound sensible, yes? Of course it does. The tax code is progressive and purposefully so. Marginal income tax rates increase with income. The more you make, the greater share of income you pay. Disagreeing with this general principle puts you to the right of a typical Republican.

But the Buffett Rule wasn't meant to hold up to strict constructionism. "You cannot build a tax code on the principle that no millionaire, ever, should ever have an effective tax rate lower than their secretary," my Atlantic colleague Megan McArdle wrote this morning. Well, you could, she allows, but you'd have to give the IRS extralegal responsibilities to seize rich people's income beyond what they owe.

To understand why, consider the 76 million people who don't legally owe individual income taxes in 2011 (please, please note: does not include payroll, excise, state and local taxes). The vast majority of this group was poor. They didn't owe individual income taxes because they didn't owe a lot of money to start, and various exemptions, like the earned income tax credit, wiped out the rest.

But among families making more than $100,000, there were also half a million tax units -- enough to replace the population of Tucson, Arizona -- that also paid no income tax. Even more surprising, 7,000 millionaires also paid no individual income tax.

Let's focus on these 7,000 tax payers. I think they help to show why, even if the Buffett Rule is a sensible principle, it wouldn't be a commonsense law.

As Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center explained to me, there are three buckets of factors that can bring taxable income down from $1 million to zero. One is tax tricks. The IRS should crack down more. Two is relying heavily on investments. The administration can try to level taxes for earned income and investment income. Third is great misfortunes. When investments lose significant income, a house or business is destroyed (i.e. a casualty loss), or a family member gets sick and incurs high medical costs for the self-insured, all these things chop away at taxable income and eventually bring a millionaire's income taxes to zero.

"You can attribute some of those 7,000 non-tax payers to investment choices they made, like tax exempt bonds," Williams told me, "but a lot of this might be unfortunate happenstance. A tornado tore through your home, you got a very expensive form of cancer, you lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in an investment. Those aren't choices people made, they're just legal deductions under the law."

The fact that 7,000 millionaires didn't pay income tax in 2011 is a Rorschach test for the Buffett Rule. Are you outraged by the figure? Then you probably think the rule should be enshrined into law. But if you see the figure as an artifact of a complicated tax code doing its best to account for a varied and complicated country of 150 million tax units, you might not be so outraged. We can, and we should, raise taxes on millions of more Americans, and we should start with the rich, because they can afford to pay sooner. But it's best to see the Buffett Rule as a political tool designed to drive a wedge between the White House and Republicans who have written off tax increases forever.

This article available online at:



http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/buffett-rule-rorschach-7-000-millionaires-paid-no-income-taxes-in-2011/245469/

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

The politics of the vote is the politics of the knife – candidates fed by party machines, stumbling into the abyss, not realising they have made a blunder until it is too late. Did you watch that capacious mouth of yours, dear candidate? Hopefuls flounder only to perish because they misread the shrivelled tea leaves. Mitt Romney, amusing political creation that he is, is demonstrating why he is making the venerable Japanese ceremony of seppuku more attractive by the day. Not liked within his own ranks, endorsed by anti-Obama necessity, he is fast moving towards the deadly ravine. “God, this guy is a loser,” claimed an unnamed GOP strategist on Capitol Hill Blue (Sep 18). “We just lurch from one disaster to another.” Inner sniping is beginning to gather pace with tribal force, and the sounds of the cutting can be heard from across the country.

September 18, 2012

The Fast Slide of Mitt Romney

The Art of Political Suicide

by BINOY KAMPMARK

Now we will be stuck with him [Obama] for another four years because Mitt the unfit can’t get his shit together.

Anonymous GOP strategist, Capitol Hill Blue, Sep 18, 2012

Electoral suicide is a skill, mastered through the ages with a degree of diligence one can admire. Monarchical states had it right without perhaps knowing it – one doesn’t take a regime to an election for fear of finding something worse. The politics of the vote is the politics of the knife – candidates fed by party machines, stumbling into the abyss, not realising they have made a blunder until it is too late. Did you watch that capacious mouth of yours, dear candidate? Hopefuls flounder only to perish because they misread the shrivelled tea leaves.

Mitt Romney, amusing political creation that he is, is demonstrating why he is making the venerable Japanese ceremony of seppuku more attractive by the day. Not liked within his own ranks, endorsed by anti-Obama necessity, he is fast moving towards the deadly ravine. “God, this guy is a loser,” claimed an unnamed GOP strategist on Capitol Hill Blue (Sep 18). “We just lurch from one disaster to another.” Inner sniping is beginning to gather pace with tribal force, and the sounds of the cutting can be heard from across the country.

There is much one can forgive a running candidate for, provided he is blind, oblivious and lost. Romney’s spectacular effort of not caring “about 47 percent of voters” was a confession that power is something that he would wish other people to have. Yes, it wasn’t vetted with the GOP wizards and maladjusted astrologists, but shot by a hidden camera at a session where he was caught off guard. Shockingly, the professional mendacity of the GOP is starting to rust. If one is to lie, one better well be damn good at it.

The resumes of these unfortunates are, for Romney, inglorious, spanning those “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them… These are people who pay no income tax.” Electoral death, it seems, by video, is something of an entitlement.

This is, of course, to the good, if you are backing the other side, but hardly desirable for your punters, who are channelling funds into your campaign hoping for a first class finish. Romney is fast moving into the zone of caricature, the clown of political challenges. His finish may well be a fatal second.

Not that it really matters, but America’s grand aircraft carrier – Her Majesty’s Great Britain – is not particularly keen that Romney move into the White House. That’s if you believe the enthusiastic confessor Harvey Weinstein. “I witnessed [the British] Prime Minister saying to a group of people, myself included, that Mitt Romney had that unique distinction of uniting all England against him with various remarks. On behalf of my love of England, I have to support the President [Barack Obama] who is anything but making faux-pas” (Telegraph, Sep 16). One vacuous fool, it seems, about another.

One doesn’t win elections mocking very large blocs, be there the entitlement crowd, or any other set even if such comments were, in the candidate’s words, “not elegantly stated.” There is even a case at times that elections are not won by denigrating a small group of individuals, be they wrapped in disentitling clover. The Obama campaign has done no favours turning the screws on the Romney crew by taking the negative low ground, showing that they are fresh out of ideas. Romney has kindly responded by suggesting that he is one step down, a man of even lesser imagination.

His defeat is only conjecture till it takes place, as is the suggestion that an Obama victory is inevitable. Romney may sneak into the White House with sheer dumb luck, or rather, crawl in with surprising blessings. That won’t be because of the efforts of his chief strategist Stuart Stevens, who is now being blamed for not being a suitably influential, and vicious, juju man. Should Romney win, it will be one of this century’s more miraculous events.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

The current jobs crisis is not accidental; there are public policies that could be implemented — such as a federal jobs program — that would stop unemployment in its tracks. Both parties agree that this cannot be done for the same reason: high unemployment is desirable since it acts as a sledgehammer against wages, lowering them with the intent of boosting profitability for corporations. Creating this nationwide “new normal” takes time.

September 18, 2012

Let the Wealthy Pay for Their Crisis

The Job Crisis, the “Unemployable,” and the Fiscal Cliff

by SHAMUS COOKE

With the November elections right around the corner, the millions of unemployed and under-employed have little reason to care. Aside from some sparse rhetoric, neither Democrats nor Republicans have offered a solution to job creation. Most politicians seem purposefully myopic about the jobs crisis, as if a healthy dose of denial might get them through the electoral season unscathed.

In reality, the jobs crisis continues unaddressed, and threatens to get worse after the election. The post-election “fiscal cliff” of social cuts — “triggered” by Obama’s debt commission —will pull the economy below the current treading-water phase, drowning millions more workers in America in unemployment and hopelessness. In addition, two million more long-term unemployed — those lucky enough to still receive benefits — face the very likely possibility of having their benefits ended due to the trigger cuts.

But this is all part of the plan. The current jobs crisis is not accidental; there are public policies that could be implemented — such as a federal jobs program — that would stop unemployment in its tracks. Both parties agree that this cannot be done for the same reason: high unemployment is desirable since it acts as a sledgehammer against wages, lowering them with the intent of boosting profitability for corporations. Creating this nationwide “new normal” takes time.

Until corporations have an ideal environment to make super profits — aside from the short-term money printing of the Federal Reserve — unemployment will remain purposefully high. The Feds massive money-printing program — called Quantitative Easing (QE) — is a desperate move that risks super inflation, yet is deemed necessary until politicians implement the economic new normal for workers in America.

This policy is referred to as an “adjustment” period by some economists. Corporations and their puppet politicians have used the recession to start implementing the new normal of lower wages, reduced benefits, and fewer social programs on a city, state, and federal basis. In order to complete this national adjustment, expectations for working people must be drastically lowered, so that they’ll be less likely to be angry and fight against this onslaught.

This was Bill Clinton’s intention when he told the Democratic National Convention, “The old economy isn’t coming back.” Most people in America have yet to realize this, but the economic policies of the Democrats and Republicans reflect a conscious plan to push wages down and shred the safety net to fit the “new economy” standards sought by corporate America.

Because corporations only hire workers in order to make profit, businesses today are sitting on trillions of cash, waiting for a sunnier day to invest in labor. The lower the wages of workers in America, the brighter the skies for corporations’ bottom line. It is this basic economic interest driving the jobs crisis, as politicians only offer solutions that “encourage businesses to invest” rather than creating immediate solutions for working people.

But millions of people are waiting for sunnier days too. A large number are seeking to wait out the recession by returning to school and are now graduating; a record 30 percent have bachelor degrees, a number that is expected to rise. The increasing number of graduates will drive up unemployment, while those lucky enough to find jobs aren’t finding one capable of paying off their massive student loans. The trillion-dollar student loan business is yet another example of wealth transference from bottom to top: students borrow money from the wealthy, and pay them back with interest, sometimes exorbitant interest.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that there are 12.5 million people who are officially unemployed but an additional9.5 million who are “unofficially” unemployed — those who are not actively looking for work, “discouraged workers,” part-time workers who want full-time work, etc. The number is almost certainly higher. These workers are not counted in the “official” unemployment numbers, and this unofficial number is getting worse. In August 2012, 368,000 more workers joined this illustrious group by dropping out of the labor force, i.e., they gave up looking for a job and thus are no longer counted as unemployed, in this way giving Obama “positive news” since the unemployment numbers actually improved!

These workers are often referred to as “unemployable,” meaning that they are usually over fifty years of age or under 30 and are tarnished with a lack of job experience or an excess of it. Corporations can now have an abundance of workers to choose from, and are being extra picky on whom they hire, if anybody.

The new “private sector” jobs that Obama constantly brags about are much lower paying than the jobs they are replacing. According to a study performed by the National Employment Law Project, 58 percent of all new post-recession jobs come with wages below $14.00 an hour, i.e. a not a living wage.

For those millions unable to find jobs, their future lies in either dependence on family or the state, or a risky life in the informal economy, which implies the possibility of imprisonment.

The reason that many labor and community groups have not fully explained the above facts — nor protested against them — is because they are “embarrassing” to the Democrats. Labor unions have gone into pre-election hibernation, ignoring reality as they push their members to campaign for the president who is overseeing this economic “new normal.”

The still-sputtering economy is expected to grind to a halt post-election, with average working people again footing the bill. But millions of Americans are experiencing the politics of the 1%, and drawing conclusions; ever since the recession government policy has been aimed at benefiting the wealthy and corporations, while working people have only experienced layoffs, lower wages and benefits, and slashed public services. To stop this dynamic of austerity working people must unite and protest in massive numbers, like the working people of Europe.

In Portland, Oregon, such a demonstration is being planned, pre-election, by a coalition of community groups to “stop the cuts,” for debt relief, and against the above national policy of austerity for working people. By highlighting the bi-partisan nature of the attack against working people, the community organizers in Portland hope to educate the community to take action, so that working people are prioritized. Let the wealthy pay for their crisis.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com

We’ve certainly seen ignorance paraded over the last few days but it’s as much by smug progressives as anyone else. Only the most determined ignoramus would discuss 1857 in isolation from the broader context of British occupation. In form, the struggle might have been religious; in content, it embodied a long-simmering opposition to colonial rule. The Innocence of Muslims should be understood in the same fashion. This is a film produced at a time in which, across Europe and the United States, the far right has developed an Islamophobic doctrine that replicates, almost exactly, the key tropes of traditional anti-Semitism.

Ignorance on Parade

Islamophobia, Left and Right

by JEFF SPARROW

‘Koran discovered with coffee cup stain on the front cover, US marines deployed to all Starbucks franchises.’

The quip, retweeted by celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, exemplifies the belligerent incomprehension with which so many, including self-proclaimed liberals, have responded to protests against the film The Innocence of Muslims.

Rioting over a YouTube clip that offends the Muslim sky fairy? How tremendously foolish! How childish; how superstitious; how very, very silly!

Well, we’ve certainly seen ignorance paraded over the last few days but it’s as much by smug progressives as anyone else.

Consider a historical analogy.

In 1857, Bengali soldiers (known as ‘sepoys’) shot their British officers and marched upon Delhi. The Great Indian Rebellion became very violent, very quickly. The rebels massacred prisoners, including women and children; the British put down the revolt with a slaughter of unprecedented proportions.

Now, that rebellion began when the troops learned that their cartridges, designed to be torn open with their teeth, would be greased with beef and pork fat, an offence to the religious sensibilities of Hindus and Muslims alike. Had Twitter been an invention of the Victorian era, London sophisticates would, no doubt, have LOLed to each other (#sepoyrage!) about the credulity of dusky savages so worked up about a little beef tallow. Certainly, that was how the mouthpieces of the East India Company spun events: in impeccably Dawkinesque terms, they blamed ‘Hindoo prejudice’ for the descent of otherwise perfectly contented natives into rapine and slaughter.

But no serious historian today takes such apologetics seriously. Only the most determined ignoramus would discuss 1857 in isolation from the broader context of British occupation. In form, the struggle might have been religious; in content, it embodied a long-simmering opposition to colonial rule.

That’s why those who pretend the protests against The Innocence of Muslims came from nowhere merely reveal their own foolishness.

‘Today, many Americans are asking — indeed, I asked myself — how could this happen?’ said Hillary Clinton after the riots in Libya. ‘How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction? This question reflects just how complicated and, at times, how confounding the world can be.’

The echoes of George Bush’s infamous query ‘Why do they hate us when we’re so good?’ suggests nothing whatsoever has been learnt from the last decade and the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.

For this is, of course, the same Hillary Clinton who, as recently as 2009, proclaimed Mubarak, Egypt’s torturer-in-chief, and his wife, ‘friends of my family’, acknowledging a relationship that exemplified the pally connections between the US elite and every dictator and despot in the region. Mubarak might have been crossed off the Clinton Christmaas list but President Obama forges ever closer relations with the tyrants of Saudi Arabia, delivering the biggest ever arms deal in US history to fortify a reactionary and criminal government against its populace.

No, Hillary Clinton might not recall such matters. But the people of the Muslim world are considerably better informed – and that’s the context for their anger.

But what about the movie itself? Why should such a shoddy piece of amateur filmmaking become such a flashpoint?

Again, shift to a more familiar referent and the outrage becomes at once markedly less strange. The Protocols of Zion were, of course, also a bodged-up job, a childish forgery thrown together by racist cranks from the Tsarist secret service. But no-one’s surprised when Jews (and their anti-racist allies) mobilise against some fresh incarnation of that notorious document, since we all, quite correctly, recognise any new publication of the Protocols as a conscious and deliberate attempt to promote hatred.

The Innocence of Muslims should be understood in the same fashion. This is a film produced at a time in which, across Europe and the United States, the far right has developed an Islamophobic doctrine that replicates, almost exactly, the key tropes of traditional anti-Semitism.

Jews will not integrate. Jews are more fertile than Christians and are outbreeding them. Europe is becoming a province, a colony, of a Judaic entity. Europe will either be Judaicised or there will be a civil war. Most likely, Jews will resort to terrorism as part of their takeover. They are already spoiling for violence.

All of that sounds like the rantings of an old-school fascist. But replace ‘Jew’ with ‘Muslim’, and you’re left with a workaday opinion piece from any mainstream conservative paper.

The structural homology here is not accidental. Mattias Gardell notes how:

The tradition of Islamophobia is, like anti-Semitism, rooted in the medieval Christian hostility to the ‘enemies of God’, with these perceptions disseminated, expanded upon, restructured, rearticulated and reactivated in various social and political contexts, from the Turk scare in early modernity, via the colonial expansion, to the War on Terror.

Many stories told about Jews in medieval and early modern Europe were also spun around what were then termed Moors, Saracens or Red Jews: Muslims were devil-worshipping, sexually deviant, man-eating monsters; Muslims ritually defamed the cross and consumed the blood of ceremonially slaughtered Christian children in blasphemous communions. Church art portrayed Mohammed as the Antichrist, and Muslims as horned devils, Christ-killers, dogs or a hybrid race of dog-men. Lars Vilks – the Swedish artist who depicted Mohammed as a dog – may claim originality, but the dog motif goes back hundreds of years and is as old as the Judensau (the medieval depiction of Jews in obscene contact with a sow).

Elsewhere, the journalist Colm Ó Broin has produced a neat demonstration of the relationship between the old hate and the new hate, with a close comparison of the writings of the notorious Islamophobe Robert Spencer on Muslims alongside the propaganda of Julius Streicher, the editor of, Der Stuermer. Streicher, you’ll recall, went to the gallows at Nuremberg – but Spencer holds forth regularly on FOX News.

The labour leader August Bebel famously dubbed anti-Semitism the ‘socialism of fools’, since some supposed radicals subscribed to crackpot theories about Jewish finance. In a similar fashion, Islamophobia today often gets served up as an addlepated secularism by vulgar atheists, indifferent to how often their conversationsabout Muslim theology slide neatly intoanguish about Muslim birthrates (an obvious giveaway of the racialised imagination and its biological concerns).

Should Muslims be worried about rising Islamophobia? Of course they should! As the recent report by the Institute of Race Relations, Pedlars of Hate, makes clear, anti-Islam bigotry is becoming a key element of the revival of the far Right – a Right that doesn’t merely slander Muslims but also takes action against them.

The Innocence of Muslims was, quite obviously, intended as a provocation, and many Muslims have argued that the minority of shrilljihadis who raised their sectarian and violent slogans at protests around the wold fell entirely into the intended trap.

Then, again, this too is familiar. Twentieth century race-baiters knew all about goadingtheir victims into a certain response, and then using that response to justify a fresh pogrom. Not unexpectedly, German far-right extremists (who have some historical experience with this strategy) are now planning fresh screenings of the film.

Those who call themselves progressive might note that a certain Karl Marx followed the Great Indian Rebellion closely. While he acknowledged and decried the excesses of the rebels, he declared these were ‘only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India.’

In other words, Marx, one of history’s more famous atheists, stood firmly with the ‘ignorant’ sepoys against their ‘enlightened’ opponents.

‘John Bull,’ he wrote, ‘is to be steeped in cries for revenge up to his very ears, to make him forget that his Government is responsible for the mischief hatched and the colossal dimensions it has been allowed toassume.’

Add ‘Uncle Sam’ to that sentence, and you have a remarkably apt assessment of what’s taking place today.

Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland magazine and the author of “Money Shot: A Journey into Porn and Censorship.“

31 Notes on the Alcohol Wars at Pine Ridge

31 Notes on the Alcohol Wars at Pine Ridge

Crazy Horse was a Sober Warrior

by RUSS McSPADDEN

Photos by Joey Feaster

1. Autumn Two Bulls is the mother of Wakiyan, or Loud Brave Thunder, a young Oglala Lakota protester who was maced by police on August 26 during a march against alcohol sales along the border of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. “My son believes in sobriety. One thing he told me was that Crazy Horse, his hero, was a sober warrior. Crazy horse didn’t believe in alcohol and he knew what was coming because he was a spiritual man and he stood up and fought against what was coming.” Wakiyan is ten years old. Days after the protest his vision was still blurry from the mace.

2. Wakiyan takes part in traditional ceremonies, traveling as far away as Wyoming to offer respect to the sacred, to hang prayer flags in the presence of Mato Tipila, or bear lodge, an enormous intrusion of igneous rock that towers over the land like a blunted 1,200 foot buffalo horn. The sacred mountain in the Black Hills is also known as Devil’s Tower in the language of the ones who made wretched war on the Lakota and colonized the region.

Lakota protesters occupy Highway 87 in White Clay.

3. There are four liquor stores and only fourteen residents in the unincorporated town of White Clay. It exists purely to unload alcohol, and lots of it. On average, the retailers sell 12,500 cans of beer every day, mostly to the reservations 40,000 residents. White Clay is 250 feet from Pine Ridge where alcohol is forbidden.

4. I’ve always only respected and prayed for the “zombies” of White Clay, because some of them are my uncles, my grammas, or my cousins, a new pain hard to see…When I used to live at home, I live in Omaha now, I would drive through White Clay everyday, early in the morning, with a cigarette and a dream, on my way to school, I drove through everyday, with a fleeting moment’s honor, I would honk at them; a small moment of honor, a small song with one drum beat and one sound, a death song perhaps, I would honor them. – Elisha Yellow Thunder

5. There is a green State Highway sign near the hamlet of Wounded Knee, 18 miles northeast of White Clay that lists four possible burial sites of Crazy Horse, the great Lakota warrior. It is believed that his family buried his bones and his heart in the earth beside the creek.

6. Wounded Knee Creek is cut by wind, its behavior a condition of the topography of wind. The surface is evaporated skywards by the sweeping aridity in the summer or frozen by the crystallized gusts of winter. Its waters eventually meander northwest to feed the White River into the isolated grassland mesas and buttes of the Badlands. From there, the blood of Wounded Knee Creek eventually feeds the Missouri, empties into the Mississippi, mixes with silt, agricultural runoff, thousands of other tributaries, and dumps, some 1,400 miles south, into the Gulf of Mexico. The migration of the watersheds of the Lakota nations, which carry the debris of attempted genocide, of struggle and spirit, pass into the warm open ocean, feeding the intensity of hurricanes.

Members of Deep Green resistance blockade highway, shutting down liquor sales.

7. Crazy Horse malt liquor first appeared in 1992 in New York City. Attorney’s representing the descendants of Crazy Horse successfully sued the brewing company responsible, which went out of business in 1999. Collectors still sell cases, from time to time, online.

Facing down the police.

8. For over 100 years the women of the Oglala Lakota nation have been dealing with an attack on the mind body and spirit of their relatives. We have been silenced through chemical warfare waged by the corporations who are out to exploit and make a profit off of the suffering and misery of our people. The time has come to end this suffering by any means necessary. – Olowan Martinez, organizer of the Women’s Peace March.

Young Lakota wearing fox head prepares for march.

9. Numerous documented complaints have been lodged against the four liquor stores: beer sales to Lakota minors; racist slurs from the store keepers; the trading of alcohol for sexual favors; the violation of open container laws at the store fronts; the continued harassment of the Lakota by poisonous profiteers.

Helen Red Feather, veteran of Wounded Knee 1973, protesting alcohol sales in White Clay.

10. In 1973 several hundred Oglala Sioux and hundreds of others occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee with rifles and roadblocks. Under the banner of the American Indian Movement (AIM) protesters reclaimed sovereignty of the land–reclaimed the spirit of a warrior’s revolt. They demanded the end of corrupt tribal government collusion with outside and moneyed interests, the return of the Black Hills, and the end of strip mining, which toxified Lakota waters, on their land. For 71days AIM and the Lakota held the town. U.S. Armed Forces, Marshals, the National Guard and the FBI surrounded the uprising, cutting electricity and food supplies to Wounded Knee. Buddy Lamont and Frank Clearwater, both members of AIM, were killed by machine gun fire. Two FBI agents fell in open gunfights. Twelve other members of the uprising simply disappeared. In the end law enforcement raided the camp and made over 1,200 arrests. AIM organizer, Leonard Peltier, received two life sentences. Over the next few years the reservation would see more than 60 unsolved murders of tribal members.

11. Every year, the Lakota and other First Nation peoples commemorate the ‘73 uprising. It’s not uncommon to see U.S. flags displayed upside down.

12. I was also taught that the American flag upside down is our right. That when our ancestors rode off with this flag at the Battle of the Greasy Grass [aka Custer’s Last Stand] it became ours. – Olowan Martinez.

13. Along with 10 year old Wakiyan, veterans of the ‘73 uprising, protesters from AIM grassroots, Deep Green Resistance (DGR), Un-Occupy Albuquerque, Occupy Lincoln and Native Youth Movement (NYM) joined women from the Oglala Lakota nation for the Women’s Peace March on White Clay. Members of DGR closed down Nebraska Highway 87 for six hours by linking arms in fortified pvc tubes, laying in the road. Elders and youth provided them with support–water, shade, drums. Some stood with ceremonial staffs between the protesters and the police. The action cut off sales at the liquor stores to the tune of five grand. This is the second such highway blockade this summer. Autumn Two Bulls publicly thanked the activists for showing solidarity with the Lakota people noting that active unity across cultural lines would bring results. One of the members of DGR noted that the group is honored to follow the leadership of the Lakota. According to a published DGR code of conduct, “Non-indigenous members of DGR remember that we are living on stolen land in the midst of an ongoing genocide. The task of the non-indigenous is to build solidarity with indigenous people in defending the land, preserving traditional cultures, and protecting sacred ceremonies from exploitation.”

14. Police sprayed mace from their cars, disabling marchers, elders, children, anyone–a chemical drive by.

The police maced protesters from the windows of their cruisers.

15. A few days later–ushered by gusty winds–wildfires moving north from Nebraska raced through the Pine Ridge Reservation, burning 25,000 acres. The tribal government issued evacuation orders for several districts.

16. It’s common for winds to topple buildings throughout the area.

17. In 1890, hundreds of famished Minneconjou Sioux were murdered by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry in the dead of winter at Wounded Knee, 18 miles from White Clay. Old photos capture the scene of the genocide in the frozen snow. With the thaw, the blood made its way to the creek.

18. There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce, and the women and children of course were strewn all along the circular village until they were dispatched. Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing, and that especially was a very sad sight. The women as they were fleeing with their babes were killed together, shot right through, and the women who were very heavy with child were also killed. All the Indians fled in these three directions, and after most all of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed or wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys who were not wounded came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there. – Testimony of American Horse to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1891.

19. Nearly twenty years before the massacre at Wounded Knee, Crazy Horse led a successful coalition war party against the 7th Cavalry of the U.S. Army, which included 700 soldiers and one General George Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn in Montana.

20. Every year tribal members reenact their ancestors’ victory against Custer in a grand celebration on horseback.

21. One year after the victory, as the story goes, Crazy Horse was fatally wounded in Nebraska, resisting imprisonment.

22. Crazy Horse malt liquor has a Facebook page in disturbing memoriam.

23. Though the Lakota struggle to rid their community of outside poisons has existed since the first European traders arrived in their land with small pox and liquor, the recent skirmishes were reignited in 1999. Two tribal members, Ron Hard Heart and Wally Black Elk Jr., were killed near White Clay, their deaths unsolved. Marches, protests, blockades and legislative hearings in Nebraska called into question the legality and morality of liquor sales in the region.

Vivian Loud Hawk, who has lost loved ones from alcohol-related deaths, condemns the business practices of bars in White Clay.

24. According to Re-Member, a non-profit working on the reservation, Pine Ridge boasts some rather painful statistics: alcoholism in up to 80 percent of the community; 1 in 4 infants suffer the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome; the lowest life expectancy rate in the U.S., second lowest in the Western Hemisphere; high rates of cancer, diabetes, suicide.

25. Wakiyan: Alcoholism ain’t right. It kills a lot of our relatives.

26. The Oglala Sioux tribe filed a lawsuit in February, 2012 seeking $500 million in damages from the four establishments and the nation’s biggest breweries.

27. The area around White Clay has a history rooted in illegal liquor sales. In 1882, at the behest of Oglala elders and the U.S. Indian agent in the territory, U.S. President Chester Arthur ordered that a buffer zone be put in place in Nebraska, south of the reservation, between illegal whisky peddlers and the Lakota. Known as the White Clay Extension, the fifty square mile area was later incorporated into the reservation then offered up into public domain, precipitating a land grab by whites. Liquor licenses followed shortly after–its original purpose turned upside-down.

28. The growing alliance in defense of Lakota sovereignty, uniting DGR, the occupy movement and indigenous resistance, both broadly, under the banner of AIM, and locally, with the descendants and veterans of the ‘73 uprising, is promising to the resistance–terrifying to authority.

29. DGR is a movement built upon Derrick Jensen’s critique of industrial civilization and his premises for a return to a healthy humanity and planet, spelled out his book End Game. In essence, Jensen has called for the deliberate toppling of industrialism and militarism, power-grids, dams, monoculture, patriarchy, and the dominant culture of contemporary city-states–for a return to the land and the land-based community. In his books Jensen calls for a new warrior ethos amongst environmentalists, for a serious resistance prepared to meet a serious and terrifying enemy, a resistance akin to the French underground during WWII, the Spanish anarchists in the time of Franco, or the Lakota Sioux in the time of Crazy Horse.

30. It was Custer’s Last Stand, sure, but not the last stand of Manifest Destiny, which eventually had its way and still does.

31. Until it kills itself, or something else does.

Russ McSpadden is a part of the editorial collective of the Earth First! Journal and Newswire. He has worked on grassroots biodiversity, human and indigenous rights campaigns across the United States and has taken part in tree-sits, power plant blockades and late night political rants about the beauty of the stars and the detritus of civilization. He can be reached at russ@earthfirstjournal.org