home / subscribe / about us / books /events / archives / search / links /

October 3, 2005 Gary Leupp An Earlier Empire's War on Iraq: a Lesson from Roman History October 3, 2005 Vijay Prashad Desperation at Holyoke Paul Craig Roberts Condi Rice: Gunslinger Joshua Frank An Interview with Cindy Sheehan Seth Sandronsky The Hiring Crisis for Black Teens Jeffrey St. Clair The Great Green Scare October 1 / 2, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair Democrats Sink Deeper into the Ooze Dave Marsh A Direction Home: a Message from Bob Dylan Ralph Nader Gutless, Spineless and Clueless Flavia Alaya Showdown at Sheriff's Plaza Uri Avnery The Gladiators: Sharon's Victory Chris Kutalik The Battle at Northwest Airlines Greg Moses Bill Bennett's Book of Cracker Virtues Brian J. Foley I Gave My Copy of the Constitution to a Pro-War Vet Nicole Colson Hunger Strike at Gitmo Ray McGovern Abu Ghraib is a Command Responsibility Fred Gardner Ricky Williams Takes a Late Hit Justin Felux Save America from Crime: Abort Every White Baby! Will Youmans "Free the P": Hip-Hop for Palestine Mike Ferner What Else Shall We Do? David Krieger The War in Iraq: a Broken Covenant Agustin Velloso Samson Returns to Gaza Saul Landau The Constant Gardener: Serious Cinema Ben Tripp Right Down the Middle Poets Basement Peddibone, Crowell, Engel and Albert Website of the Weekend Holler If Ya Hear Me   September 30, 2005 Mary Geddry Why I Marched: They Made My Son Kill Paul Craig Roberts Bush is Cooking Up Two New Wars Dave Lindorff Judith Miller's Strange Voluntary Jail Time Gregory Wilpert "The Osama Bin Laden of Latin America" Benjamin Dangl "Gringo, Go Home:" an Interview with Orlando Castillo James McMurtry We Can't Make It Here Anymore T.R. Johnson Return to the Ninth Ward   September 29, 2005 Sen. Russ Feingold Bush's Iraq War is Weakening America Carl G. Estabrook Obama the Enabler Ramzy Baroud Rhetoric and Reality of War Dave Lindorff What Opposition Party? Mike Whitney Brownie's Comic Opera Jozef Hand-Boniakowski What Noble Cause? Gary Handschumacher Getting Arrested with Cindy Sheehan Winslow T. Wheeler No Leaders in Congress Against This War: Lame Democrat and Tame Republicans   September 28, 2005 Dr. Eyad Serraj Letter from Gaza: What Disengagement Sounds Like William A. Cook Bush's Security Barrier Liaquat Ali Khan The Invention of Porno Torture Mike Whitney Apartheid Justice in America Joshua Frank Sheehan and the Democrats: Anybody Home? CounterPunch Wire New Orleans Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters Chris Genovali Cutting the Bears Out of the Great Bear Rainforest Linn Washington, Jr. White Affirmative Action: How John Roberts Got to the Top   September 27, 2005 Forrest Hylton Political Murder in Puerto Rico: a Matter for Our Movement Jason Leopold The Decline and Fall of Bill Frist Jennifer K. Harbury Torture is US Policy, Not an Aberration Ray McGovern Torture and Cowardice: Why are American Religious Leaders Silent? Mike Ferner Bringing the War Home: Arrested at the Pentagon Antony Loewenstein When the Truth Comes to Town: What You Can't Say About Israel in Australia Harry Browne Live from Hollywood: the IRA Disarms   September 26, 2005 Rafael Rodriguez Cruz Assassination in Puerto Rico: the FBI Murders a Legend Joshua Frank Democrats Flee Peace Protests Lamis Andoni The Railroading of Taysir Alony Mike Marqusee Those Pesky "Urban Intellectuals": Blair, Spiro Agnew and the Antiwar Movement Rep. Cynthia McKinney They Can't Fool Us Anymore Ron Jacobs A Small March for Me, a Giant March for the Antiwar Movement Norman Solomon The Media and the Antiwar Movement John Chuckman Bush in a Bottle Paul Craig Roberts America is Running Out of Time   September 24 / 25, 2005 Kathy and Bill Christison Polluting Palestine: Settlements & Sewage Ralph Nader Stealing the Moment: How Corporations Cashed in on Katrina Saul Landau The Terrorist Resumé of Luis Posada Greg Moses A Movement Gathers Power on the Sorrow Plateau Roger Burbach Hugo Chavez's Mission Vijay Prashad America's Shame Laura Carlsen After NAFTA Robert Fisk When Man and Nature Conspire to Expose the Lies of the Powerful Dave Lindorff A Gusher Called Katrina: They Fix Oil Prices, Don't They? Kirkpatrick Sale / Thomas Naylor Secession from the Empire: the Middlebury Declaration Maj. Anthony Milavic The US Military and Torture: the View of a Former Interrogator Brian Concannon, Jr. Haiti: the Time for Action is Now   September 23, 2005 CounterPunch News Service In Which, Phil Donahue Demolishes Bill O'Reilly Diane Farsetta Katrina and Right-Wing Think Tanks Robert Sandels Militarizing the Market Christopher Brauchli Bush: the Good Samaritan for Corporations Alan Farago Bird Flu Takes Flight Dave Zirin When Sports & Politics Collided: Redeeming the Olympic Martyrs of 1968 Maxine Conant A Simple Test for Bush David Price Workers Get Hit Twice: Katrina and Davis-Bacon Profiteering   September 22, 2005 Smith, Wood, Leas, and Greenfield Which Way Forward for the Green Party? a Report from Tulsa Patrick Cockburn Iraqis: This Government has No Authority Manuel Garcia, Jr. Thinking is Religious Freedom Lucia Dailey Trial of the St. Patrick's Four: Day One Mokhiber / Weissman Are You a Speed Freak? Russell D. Hoffman The Nukes in Rita's Path Kona Lowell God's Hurricane? Jason Leopold GOP Fiscal Policy and Katrina Website of the Day Robert Pollin on the Global Economy   September 21, 2005 Jorge Mariscal Military Recruiters: Counselers or Salesmen? Linda S. Heard Double Standards in Iraq: Basra Brit Jailbreak Joshua Frank NYPD Unplugs Cindy Sheehan Eric Ruder "The Problem in Iraq is the US": an Interview with Camilo Mejia Pierre Tristam The Struts and Bull Presidency Dave Lindorff The Real Story of the German Elections Mike Ferner Sit Down in DC Missy Comley Beattie Bush's Katrina Bling Bling Jeffrey St. Clair W Marks the Spot Website of the Day New Orleans: Survivor Stories   September 20, 2005 Steve Breyman Toxic Gumbo: Katrina and Environmental Justice George Galloway Et Tu, Greg Palast? Patrick Cockburn What Happened to Iraq's Missing $1 Billion? M. Shahid Alam Gen. Musharraf and Israel: Is Pakistan Selling Out? Mike Whitney The Gitmo Hunger Strikers Winslow T. Wheeler It's Not Rocket Science Niranjan Ramakrishnan Back to the Future: North Korea's Gambit Paul Craig Roberts Will Neocon Fanaticism Destroy America?   >

October 4, 2005 Storm Warning for Jeb Bush Developers and Hurricanes: a Lethal Combo for the Florida Keys By ALAN FARAGO Live long enough, and reality surpasses whatever imagination one can bring to bear on the future. Here is a fictional account of Hurricane X, which ought to generate 200,000 letters from the Florida Keys to the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush. The letters should ask for the intervention of the state in current and proposed zoning changes and permitting of new development in Miami-Dade County that could make hurricane evacuation from the Florida Keys impossible. Here we go ... Hurricane X has already devastated Haiti. Now, this killer storm is tracking toward western Cuba, a Category 3 storm curving like a bowling ball toward Florida. At National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration headquarters, modelers predict the path of the storm will cross the Florida Straits and attack the Keys from below, from Key West straight to Key Largo and Miami-Dade county. The latest data shows abnormally high water temperatures, something fishermen from the Florida Keys have been complaining about for weeks. Hot water fuels intense hurricanes. Whether it is global warming is beside the point now. Forecasters predict Hurricane X will be a Category 5 storm with a devastating storm surge by landfall, less than two days from now. Moreover, modelers cannot be certain about the forward speed of the storm. Throughout the Keys, families pile into cars, cradling photo albums, a suitcase or two and not much else. There is not much talk. People have seen enough of intense hurricanes the past years to know what is coming. For more than two decades, the state of Florida has tried to moderate development in the Keys, based on the time it takes to evacuate for a hurricane. Developers contested the state's data and provided model after model, showing that phased and orderly evacuation could allow more growth. Now, hundreds of thousands of people are taking their cue from satellite images showing the storm's gathering intensity. At Marathon, on the north side of the Seven Mile Bridge, the progress of traffic stalls and grinds to a halt. Emergency planners and the governor have prepositioned disaster relief at the South Dade emergency center, but now discomforting word filters back to Tallahassee: all roads leading out of South Dade are backed up. U.S. 1, from Marathon, is solid traffic — all lanes northbound and SUVs piling on the soft shoulders have created an impassible logjam. But even if traffic were moving out of the Keys, the Florida Turnpike, U.S. 1, and Krome Avenue, vehicles are stuck on the roadways like beads of sap on a pine tree. Although growth in the Keys had been limited, in Miami-Dade county the state has allowed West Kendall and South Dade to be jammed with new cities without providing any new capacity for evacuation. More than 100,000 new residents, in just the past five years. Production housing developers, land speculators, and farmers had all pressed county commissioners to allow the rapid conversion of open space into housing, with no planning for the effect of a mass evacuation from the Keys piling into an evacuation from South Dade: a rear-end collision. It was all so predictable. Emergency management officials in the Keys are now apoplectic. The storm is accelerating. With less than 24 hours before landfall, hundreds of thousands of cars are stranded and running out of gas, a scene eerily similar to what happened in Texas with Hurricane Rita only a few years earlier. But not 50 miles from the Gulf. Fifty feet. The Gulf is already rising. People are abandoning their vehicles on the Seven Mile Bridge and walking back toward Bahia Honda. The governor of Florida realizes that quick decisions need to be made. He has the sinking feeling that he will have to take ownership for all the bad decisions made years ago. Those decisions allowed zoning changes, water use and building permits for massive new developments in South Dade without any planning for the worst case evacuation scenario. In Tallahassee, emergency managers face the governor around a conference table. "What do you want to do?" they ask the governor. The governor says decisively, "Wherever they are, turn them around. Send them home." There is silence in the room. The governor knows he is sending people home to face a Category 5 hurricane and storm surge higher than many rooftops. "Have you forgotten," one manager says, "all lanes of traffic are northbound." And that is how Hurricane X unfolds. One of the greatest disasters in U.S. history. You will never want to roll up the windows of your car against a killer hurricane to ride out the storm, so it is time to roll up your shirtsleeves and write to Gov. Jeb Bush. Ask the governor to stop any decisions that could lead to moving the Urban Development Boundary in Miami-Dade County, and to require new analysis of the carrying capacity of South Florida in the light of hurricane evacuation needs in a worst case scenario. This is one message that leaves no one behind. Alan Farago lives in South Florida. He can reached at: afarago@bellsouth.net

Coming in the Fall from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Click Here to Advance Order Philosopher Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Coming This Fall Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair