Defending the Embassy, Defending Liberty

A new low was reached this week when, at the direction of the US Secret Service, Potomac Electric Power Company cut off the electricity to the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington DC, in an effort to force out members of Code Pink and other organizations there – at the invitation of the staff – defending the Embassy against a siege by thuggish supporters of the attempted putsch by US-backed fascist failson Juan "Guido" Guaidò.

This is in addition to ongoing attempts to prevent the delivery of food to the Embassy, ironically mirroring the economic warfare being waged against the people of Venezuela by the US Empire.

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Free Gifts With Every Fill-Up

If you managed to tear yourself away from the US media's 24/7 election shitshow for ten or fifteen minutes in the past month, you may have noticed that one of the biggest stories of the past month or two has been the reports of the Erdogan regime buying smuggled black-market oil from ISIS.

That's Turkey, ostensibly our ally, buying oil from ISIS, ostensibly our enemy. Just so we're straight on that.

And by the way, you know the current oil price slump is really hitting hard when even ISIS has to start offering free giveaway goodies with every fill-up.

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Reject And Protect!

This past Saturday, April 26, was the culmination of a week's worth of actions and educational events at the Cowboy & Indian Alliance (CIA) camp on the Mall protesting against the KeystoneXL Pipeline.

 
"Reject & Protect" Keystone Pipeline Protest, Wash DC 04.26.14 from Mike Flugennock on Vimeo.

Pipeline Peace Walk Begins

From the Pipeline Peace Walk donations page:

This summer, Love Bomb Seed Bomb, the People’s Garden, the Harvest Collective, Permatecture Design, the Compassionate Earth Walk, Occupy the Keystone XL Pipeline and Pipeline Peace Walk will walk the length of the Keystone XL Pipeline, from the Canadian border in Montana, down to the Gulf of Mexico, in a pilgrimage to defend nature from the Oil Machine. We walk for our children, for nature, the plants and animals, and for the next seven generations of humanity…

…We will walk thousands of miles to shift our reality, and to build a better future, by demanding we depart from the old paradigm, and enter into the new. As we walk we will be visiting communities along the pipeline, lending support to their current struggles, and telling their stories.

Along the way we will be in service to communities who are resisting the Keystone XL Pipeline. We will meet up with Moccasins on the Ground in South Dakota, Farmers Unions in Kansas, Bold Nebraska in Nebraska, Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance in Oklahoma, and Tar Sands Blockade in Texas. Throughout the summer we will be traveling to be in service to these causes, and to help create links between the communities along the Keystone XL Pipeline path. At current, we are also coordinating with #Fearless Summer to create collective movement.

This is the art I created for the cover of the Pipeline Peace Walk Guide, published as an aid to the activists walking the length of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Find out more about the Pipeline Peace Walk on Farcebook here.

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How to make a “seed bomb”, part 1

How to make a “seed bomb”, part 2:

Celebration

A victory for the Libyan people? D’ah ha ha ha ha ha hah, nahh, I’m just givin’ y’all some shit. Of course not. Gadhafi is claiming that the US, NATO, and their proxy “rebel” armies in Libya are still in for a “long war” and I, for one, hope he’s right — not because I don’t think that Gadhafi is a rat bastard, but because it would mean that Obama and the Cruise Missile Liberals would finally get their very own “Mission Accomplished” albatross hung on them.

Maximilian C. Forte writes in CounterPunch:

Since Colonel Gaddafi has lost his military hold in the war against NATO and the insurgents/rebels/new regime, numerous talking heads have taken to celebrating this war as a “success”. They believe this is a “victory of the Libyan people” and that we should all be celebrating. Others proclaim victory for the “responsibility to protect,” for “humanitarian interventionism,” and condemn the “anti-imperialist left”. Some of those who claim to be “revolutionaries,” or believe they support the “Arab revolution,” somehow find it possible to sideline NATO’s role in the war, instead extolling the democratic virtues of the insurgents, glorifying their martyrdom, and magnifying their role until everything else is pushed from view. I wish to dissent from this circle of acclamation, and remind readers of the role of ideologically-motivated fabrications of “truth” that were used to justify, enable, enhance, and motivate the war against Libya—and to emphasize how damaging the practical effects of those myths have been to Libyans, and to all those who favoured peaceful, non-militarist solutions… >more here.

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Band Of Rebels

Here’s a fun game you can play while reading or watching the “news”: every time you see a report from Libya and hear the phrase “Libyan rebels”, insert the phrase “supported by US and NATO airstrikes” after it, to get a more accurate picture of what’s going on.

Then, when you get bored with that, ask yourself this question: why is the US so gung-ho to intervene in Libya while totally ignoring an equally vicious and horrific regime in Syria? Here’s a hint: it’s got three letters, it’s black and goopy, and there’s a whole goddamn’ lot of it under the ground in Libya… and it sure as hell isn’t freedom.

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Climate Change?

Ultimately, we need to move beyond the tired debates between right and left, between business leaders and environmentalists, between those who would claim drilling is a cure all and those who would claim it has no place. Because this issue is just too important to allow our progress to languish while we fight the same old battles over and over again.
– President Barack Obamessiah, “Drill, Baby, Drill” Speech, 03.31.10

Well, it certainly looks like the last cartoon has started a sizzling but happy shitstorm across the Leftie blogozone, especially at my favorite, Stop Me Before I Vote Again. So, I thought, perhaps I need to take responsibility and do something to quiet things down a bit – so, here we go: something about a topic we can all agree on, and it has Barack Obama being made to look like a big-assed Ichabod in it, and everything.

You’ll recall a couple of weeks ago, I had something to say about the Obamessiah throwing his environmentalist constituencies under the proverbial Bus with his announcement that he was joining in the zesty chorus of “Drill, Baby, Drill” in an effort to appease the Right. (Hell, it’s always about keeping the Right off their backs to the goddamn’ Democrats, isn’t it?) Well, it wasn’t a week later that suddenly the Obamessiah was reconsidering his position – or, as most of us like to say, “backpedaling”. Hah, Mr. O, I guess those debates aren’t so damn’ tired now, are they?

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Spill, Baby, Spill!

When our Exalted Boy Emperor and Nobel Peace Laureate, George W. Obama, caved in to the “Drill, Baby, Drill” crowd and proposed the opening of large areas of the Atlantic and Alaksan coasts and the Gulf Of Mexico for oil drilling, you could’ve knocked over your average Liberal or Pwogwessive with a feather. They were shocked — shocked — to hear that The One was proposing to allow offshore oil drilling with a plan very nearly identical to that Evil Rethuglican, George W. Bush. Mind you, I, myself, wasn’t the least bit surprised, as only with the slightest bit of search-engine rummaging, I was able to determine way back in ‘04 that Obama was a craven military-industrial stooge of the most typical kind. The really sad part is, of course, that your average Liberal or Pwogwessive will still — like your classic abused spouse — feel as if they’ve got noplace else to go and, as per usual, trudge off to the polls to pull a lever for the Democrats later this year, and in ‘12 and, also as per usual, once again feign shock and surprise when they come in for more abuse and betrayal from George W. Obama and the Democrats.

“Drill, baby, drill”…? “Spill, baby, spill”, more like.

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Let's Roll!

A friend of mine noted that it'd been quite some years since I did one of my good old-fashioned blood-spattered antiwar cartoons, so I came roaring back with "Super Service", and the even more brutal piece here. As I recall, it was about this time that Lisa Beamer, wife of a 9/11 victim, went on a whirlwind promotional victimhood-pimping tour including a stop on the NBC Today Show plugging her book, and -- what really sent me over the top, inspiring this cartoon -- her attempt to register a trade/service mark on the phrase "Let's Roll". Sweet friggin' Jayzus, I thought, does this goddamn' woman have any shame at all?



While pretty much everyone I knew in the antiwar activist community was totally down with the message, many found the imagery disturbing (much to my delight). Washington DC media activist Zoe Mitchell wrote:

...the argument he chose to present his argument with disturbs me. It's violent. It's bloody. It makes me sick. Unfortunately, it's dead-on accurate. US soldiers driving SUVs have shot and killed Iraqi civilians. Contrary to the US Media's imagery, Persian Gulf War 2.0 is violent and bloody. It should make us ALL sick.

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Super Service!

Revisiting the meme that never fails: Blood For Oil. By this time, more and more people in actual positions of influence were "outing" the real reason for the wars in Iraq: to brutalize and intimidate the population while making off with their oil. US Congressman Dennis Kucinich, in a rare ballsy moment, actually came right out and publicly blurted out the truth that sent the pro-war factions into conniptions: this was a war for oil and resources, and had nothing to do with the (non-existent) WMDs or with restoring democracy (the claimed purpose after the WMD claims were debunked). By this time, I'd developed a pretty much foolproof system for determining whether something was true or not: if it was in the Washington Post or on TV, it was a sure bet that it was false, and if somebody said something that sent the mainstream punditocracy and pro-war howlers into a shrieking tizzy, you could be sure that it was true.


My research for this piece consisted of hitting Google for some scans of old gasoline advertising from back in the days when gas-station attendants wore actual uniforms with hats and bowties, and -- now I can confess to it -- nabbing the title from a favorite old Three Stooges comedy in which the Stooges were running a gas station ("Super Service! Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk...").

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