The USA is on land stolen from Native Americans. Despite the best efforts of the government for the past 242 years to kill Native Americans, they are still alive, and fighting the system. Activists are calling on politicians to raise taxes on billionaires and give the money to Native Americans. In recent weeks, several people from the Valley were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience for Native American rights, and other issues, as part of the Poor People's Campaign.

On June 6, the Valley Post published the names of five people from the Valley who were arrested in recent weeks. Two more people who were arrested in recent weeks are Kathy Oliver of Marlborough, New Hampshire and Deborah Opramolla of Rindge, New Hampshire. Marlborough borders Keene. Rindge is two miles from Marlborough.

In Vermont in recent years, Native Americans fought for and won state recognition, which gives them money for college and other benefits. Native Americans in Vermont are asking the federal government for recognition, which would mean they could get money to buy some of their land back.

In the USA, Native Americans are twice as likely to be killed by police (compared to the rate for white people). Police in the USA kill about 1,000 people a year.

In 1958, the government ended its policy of forcibly sterilizing Native Americans in Vermont so they couldn't have children. The last person was sterilized under the program in 1957. Details are in the book “Breeding Better Vermonters” by Nancy Gallagher. It was published by the Dartmouth College-based University Press of New England.

In November 1814, Andrew Jackson, who later became president of the USA -- with U.S. Army soldiers under his command -- killed 186 Native Americans. “We shot them like dogs,” said Davy Crockett, who was then elected to Congress. This is just one example of hundreds of similar incidents.

In 2016, Native Americans succeeded in bringing global media attention to crimes by oil companies like Exxon Mobil with their protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Buying ads equivalent to that media coverage would cost millions of dollars.

On June 11, 2018, people from the Valley who are members of a union in Springfield attended a rally in Boston as part of the Poor Peoples Campaign. The union has a web site at www.ufcw1459.com. The Campaign has a web site at www.PoorPeoplesCampaign.org.

In other news from the Valley, on June 16 in Belchertown, Massachusetts there will be a rally in support of gun control at 1:30 p.m. at the town common. Belchertown borders Amherst. Details are at:

www.facebook.com/events/171285426882071

In other news from the Valley, in Brattleboro on June 14 at 5 p.m. at Pliny Park, there will be a rally to protest president Trump's policy of keeping kids in secret prisons. Details are at:

www.facebook.com/events/239347823495006

In other news from the Valley, in Greenfield on June 11 some 200 nurses at the hospital voted unanimously to approve a new union contract. They have a web site at www.MassNurses.org.

In other news from the Valley, the June 13 editions of the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper and the Brattleboro Commons newspaper had full page ads that were paid for by Entergy Corporation, which is based in Louisiana. Entergy owns a nuclear waste dump in Vermont. The dump is three miles from Massachusetts and a stone's throw from New Hampshire. Details are at:

www.valleypost.org/2018/03/20/workers-unite

Newspapers get more of their money from advertisers than from readers. That's according to:

www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/newspapers

MIT professor Noam Chomsky said, "Like any other corporation, news corporations have a product, which they sell to a market. Their market is advertisers. What keeps the market functioning is not news audiences—news corporations make their money from advertisers. Now, without any further assumptions, what comes out of this is a picture of the world, a perception of the world that satisfies the needs and the interests and the perceptions of the buyers of the product."

NPR and PBS get a large share of their budget from advertising; so does commercial radio and TV news.