…Can White Americans See White Privilege? 
Evolution of Black Lives Matter

We ended the Localize This Action Camp with a protest in Seattle.
The protest, more of an art installation, was held in the same downtown park where Bernie Sanders was interrupted the week before. The protest, Racism: the Elephant in the Living Room, was put on by primarily white activists from across the country to urge white Americans to recognize white privilege.  The reaction to the Sanders
protest brought out what some called a veneer of white liberalism in
Seattle and denial of white privilege and racism from some on the left.
The protest sought to engage people in a conversation about privilege 
and what can be done to end racism.

BLM has now protested Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and Jeb Bush
and attempted to protest Hillary Clinton….

The attempted protest with Clinton resulted
in a videotaped 15 minute conversation.



 Glen Ford, the executive editor of Black Agenda Report, took the BLM
activists to task for not making clear demands of Clinton. 
BLM is developing clear demands …

…Political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal notes how the word “Ferguson”
has “become a watchword for resistance, like Watts, like Newark, Harlem
and Los Angeles. He describes what Ferguson means:

“For the youth – excluded from the American economy by inferior,
substandard education; targeted by the malevolence of the fake drug
war and mass incarceration; stopped and frisked for Walking While
Black – were given front-row seats to the national security state at
Ferguson after a friend was murdered by police in their streets.

“Ferguson is a wake-up call. A call to build social, radical, revolutionary movements for change.”

The Obvious Shows Itself on the Environment and Climate

Chris Hedges describes the wrath of nature, the dramatic planetary
environmental impacts that too many do not see:

“Greenhouse gas concentrations, including carbon dioxide, methane
and nitrous oxide, continue to rise. Last year was the hottest since we
began scientifically tracking weather, and 2015 is expected to top 2014.
Glaciers and ice sheets are melting at an accelerated rate, causing the
oceans to rise. Even if we stop all carbon emissions today, some scientists
say, sea levels will rise by 10 feet by 2065 and as much as 70 feet over
the next couple of centuries. Major coastal cities such as Miami and
New York will be underwater. Droughts plague huge swaths of the
planet. Wildfires, fueled by parched forests, have been burning out
of control in Southern California, Canada and Alaska. Monster cyclones
and hurricanes, fed by warming air currents, are… ripping apart whole
cities. Massive species extinction is underway.”

This week the Global Footprint Network reported that humans have
exhausted a year’s supply of natural resources in less than eight months. 
That means for the remaining months of the year we are borrowing
from future generations.

… Despite all of this people struggle to convince others of the
environmental catastrophe and climate change. How do
we convince people of the obvious?

While governments continue to go in the same direction that created
this mess, many have awakened and are doing what they can to turn
away from the mistaken path humans are on.  …

Among the many protests in the last two weeks were more than
 a thousand people shutting down the biggest coal mine in Germany.
After a massive EPA spill of toxics into a river the
 Navajo Nation declared a state of emergency as the
 spill moved toward the Grand Canyon. 

The Utah Tar Sands Resistance and Peaceful Uprising used tripods to
protest tar sands excavation in Utah.  At the same time it was revealed
that in the battle to stop tar sands in Canada from coming through
the US KXL pipeline the judges who ruled in favor of TransCanada had investments in the corporation.

Protests are escalating, becoming more constant as we know are
having an impact. One upcoming escalation will be a hunger
strike at FERC, the federal so-called regulatory agency that is
responsible for oil and gas infrastructure. The hunger strike will
coincide with the visit of Pope Francis to the United States.

The Corporate Trade Agreements Get More Secret, Why Do They Hide?

It seems pretty obvious that when massive transnational corporations ally with government to secretly negotiate trade agreements that these agreements are not going to be good for the people, small businesses or the planet.  In fact, these falsely labeled “free” trade agreements have destroyed the US economy resulting in a massive transfer of wealth demonstrated by 30 years of trade deficits, resulting in lost jobs, indeed lost industries.Benjamin Clement explains why the US keeps pushing corporate trade:

…

These trade agreements are a form of neocolonialism where western corporations dominate poor, developing countries. They allow corporations to take their natural resources at low cost and produce slave labor jobs while driving wealth to the oligarchs and transnational corporations.  Not only do corporate rigged trade agreements enslave developing nations to western corporations, but they also add to racial unrest in the United States. Isaiah Poole describes how the hundreds of thousands of lost jobs leave city governments with budget deficits. In places like Ferguson the city used the court system and fines on the poor who get arrested to fill their budget needs.

The trade agreements are also being used as a tool to foment military conflict with China.Finian Cunningham describes how trade is a carrot being used to get Vietnam to do its bidding against China. The US Asian Pivot depends on countries in Asia working with the US military in conducting joint war exercises, buying US military equipment and standing up to China in regional conflicts. The TPP is the economic arm encircling China and a tool to entice Asian countries to join the US – China conflict.

People in almost all the countries where the US is pushing corporate rigged trade are standing up. This week in New Zealand the US consulate warned Americans to stay away from TPP protests because they could “become confrontational.”  The protests were large by New Zealand standards – 21 cities saw tens of thousands of protesters urging the government to “walk away from the TPPA.”  These protests in Europe and Asia have made it hard to reach final agreement because politicians fear voters will throw them out of office and therefore it limits their ability to give in to corporate and US demands.  …