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:

oPhone

The recent outbreak of revelations regarding the mass surveillance and data mining operations against American citizens by the NSA made it rather serendipitous that I’d finally get around to finishing this poster — a parody of this Apple iPhone ad — this week.

Actually, this idea’s been rattling around for nearly a month, inspired by the revelations concerning the Justice Department’s data slurping of Associated Press phone records, the surveillance of Tea Party groups’ tax records by the IRS, the fiasco at the US “consulate” in Benghazi, Obama’s tap-dancing over the Keystone XL pipeline, the US State’s shielding Monsanto against consequences for its bullying of farmers over the accidental spread of GMO plants onto their lands — and the notorious “Obama Phone Lady” video from the last Presidential freak circus.

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Obama's Morehouse College Speech, Condensed

By now, it’s pretty common knowledge that whenever El Presidente and Lady Obama speak to Black audiences, they’re really speaking to white audiences, and that their remarks to Black audiences are guaranteed to be packed to the gills with disrespect, condescension, offensive stereotypes, and shopworn bromides about “personal responsibility”. A classic example of this backhandedness can be found in El Presidente’s recent — and already infamous — commencement speech at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Not since his notorious Father’s Day speech on the campaign trail in 2008 did El Presidente emit such a great, steaming load of bite-me, rolling out the trendy Black “street” slang like “brother” and “on point” in what was basically a slicked-up Bill Cosby rant, where the only thing missing was El Presidente telling the Morehouse Men to pull up their pants.

Could you imagine El Presidente speaking to an audience of white college grads this way? Could you imagine him at, say, the University Of Virginia, admonishing fresh graduates to get a haircut and stop piercing their noses and wearing those sloppy ripped jeans and playing those Green Day albums and smoking weed and partying ’til all hours? Not a chance.

What’s really sad about all this, though, is that for the most part, Black Americans totally eat this stuff up. It doesn’t seem to matter that The First Black President hasn’t done squat about the Black unemployment rate, the Black foreclosure rate, mass incarceration and racist police violence. Barack Obama tells Black America to eat shit, and Black America reaches for a fork.

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…and, here’s what some other folks are saying about El Presidente and Lady Obama jerking Black America’s chain in their recent college commencement speeches:

“How The Obama Administration Talks To Black America”, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, 05.20.13
“As Commencement Speakers At Black Schools, The Obamas Pile On The Homework”, Courtland Milloy, The Washington Post, 05.21.13
“The Obama ‘Dog Whistle’”, Margaret Kimberly, Black Agenda Report, 05.22.13