Endurance

In light of the revelations in Cobell v Kempthorne regarding theft of tribal royalties and leasing revenues by corporations in collusion with the Department of Interior, it's clear that tribal sovereignty has little hope of surviving the economic turmoil brought on by the Wall Street heist of 2007-8. As the crisis intensifies, predation and scapegoating can be expected to escalate as well. Without an adequately funded independent communications infrastructure, tribal governments are at the mercy of the corporate media, which in turn represents those interests committed to further plundering tribal resources. As the only power remaining to tribes is that of moral sanction, making their case through mass communication is essential.

Iran-Contra icons Richard Armitage and Wayne Downing don't figure in the public imagination, but their careers exemplify the lethal undergirding of US foreign policy institutionalized in 1948 by President Truman. All the coups, assassinations and other nefarious acts targeted at preventing democracy worldwide, enabled by National Security secret agents and budgets, continue unabated. While they normally fly under the radar of most journalists, during the Bush Administration some of them became very outspoken; the hubris of this milieu was momentarily exposed by Armitage in a couple of interviews he did, in which he seemed gleefully intoxicated with his new found notoriety. I'm sure Wilkerson and Powell were horrified.

Adrienne Pine reports on the Pentagon's Strategic Culture Initiative, a project to develop propaganda favorable to US interests in Latin America. Targeted at recent anti-imperial agreements between a majority of states in South America -- particularly at the democratic independence of Bolivia -- the new psychological warfare partnership with Florida International University enables the U.S. military to go on the offensive against self-determination south of the border. Lauding such enterprises as Peru's plan to assimilate its indigenous peoples by annihilating their cultural land base, the renewed Pentagon partnership with academia is anticipated to revitalize the hostility toward indigenous peoples promoted by the Reagan Administration.