Today's Stories

June 13 / 15, 2008

Douglas Valentine:
McCain: War Hero or Go-To Collaborator?

June 12, 2008

Judith Levine
As Cranes Fall and People Die

Patrick Cockburn
Amid Iraqi Fury, U.S. Offers Concessions on Military Bases

Saul Landau
The Iraq War Becomes Suicidal

Christopher Brauchli
Bush Bling-Bling: Government by Crony

Norman Solomon
Deadly Diplomacy

Helen Redmond
Why Can't We All Get KennedyCare?

Laura Carlsen
No Rest for the Working Poor

Jeremy R. Hammond
Threats Against Iran Escalate

Anne Landman
Pinkwashing: Can Shopping Cure Breast Cancer?

Website of the Day
Fire in Watts

June 11, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Oil Prices Are So High

Ralph Nader
Wall Street Gamblers

Joshua Frank
Why I Can't Support Barack Obama

Clifton Ross
Conversation in Miami: the Neoliberal Left and Socialism

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Whatever Happened to "Democracy Now?"

Stephen Lendman
Exposing Pentagon and CIA Corruption

Diane Farsetta
Talking Back to Bill O'Reilly

Ron Jacobs
The Sixties Painted Black

Deborah Rich
Hay Belly Nation: the FDA and the O-Word

Hop Wechsler
A Friend of Women? My Bill Clinton ... and Ours

Website of the Day
A New Path to the Waterfall

June 10, 2008

Alan Farago
John McCain and the Company He Keeps

James G. Abourezk
Deadly Fallout From Obama's Groveling Before Israel Lobby

Saree Makdisi
Banned in the U.S.A. (Almost)

Malini Johar Schueller
A Picture From Beirut

John Ross
Killing Foods, Killing People

Wajahat Ali
Rumi and Sufism

Peter Morici
Bernanke Aggravates Recession Risks

Jordan Flaherty
Inside Angola Prison, Louisiana's Last Slave Plantation

Gary Macfarlane
Collaboration on the Clearwater: Is It Legitimate?

Joanne Mariner
The Gitmo Trials: an Inglorious Start

Website of the Day
The End of the Clinton Machine?

June 9, 2008

Uri Avnery
No, I Can't: Obama, Israel and AIPAC

Nikolas Kozloff
McCain & the Republican Insitute: Promoting Iraqi Occupation for "a Million Years"

Allan Nairn
Drawing Your Last Breath Hungry

Dennis Loo
Threats on Iran and the "Batterer's Defense"

Harry Browne
Irish Euro Vote Comes Down to the Wire

C. Hand
U. S. Bid to Hike Iran's Gas Prices Seems Doomed

Peter Morici
An Unsustainable Trade Deficit

Kenneth Couesbouc
A Ripe Time for Inflation

Martha Rosenberg
The Inconvenient Senator Grassley

James L. Secor
Chinese Superstition or Unconscious Oracle?

Website of the Day
Pay Bo Diddley!

June 7 / 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama Goes Over the Top

Ishmael Reed
How Miles Davis Changed My Life

Jeffrey St. Clair
What a Miner's Life is Worth

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet the King the Beers: John McCain and Latin America

Dave Lindorff
The High Cost of a Single War-Like Remark: Oil Prices, Israel, Iran and the U.S.

Robert Fantina
When Truth is the Casualty

Conn Hallinan
Iran and Rumors of War

Neve Gordon
The Occupation and the Politics of Death

Tom Barry
The Deterrence Strategy of Homeland Security

Patrick Irelan
Raiding the Packing House

Tim Wise
Your Whiteness is Showing

David Ker Thomson
The Hard Question

Joshua Frank
"Socialist" Wins Republican Nomination in Montana

David Yearsley
Disaster Music

James T. Phillips
1968: Year of the Rat

Joe Allen
The Real Bobby Kennedy

P. Sainath
Making Life Brighter in Kondapur

David Macaray
Should Unions be More Democratic?

B.R. Gowani
Experience and the Two-for-One

Fred Gardner
What Happened (at the DA's Office)

Peter Harley
Technology to the Rescue? Kurzweil and the Human Machines

Michael Dickinson
Surrender the Bones of Geronimo!

Jen Roesch
Where are the Real Women in Sex and the City?

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Landau, and Buknatski

Website of the Day
Partying with the Waltons

June 6, 2008

Frank Barat
An Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky on the Future of Israel / Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
U.S. Extorts Iraq to Approve Military Deal

Gary Leupp
Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

James Abourezk
Name That Terrorist

Peter Morici
Recession Grips the Jobs Market

Faheem Hussain
What is NATO Doing in Afghanistan?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Britons Go on Hunger Strike

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
How Will Musharraf Go? Impeachment or Safe Exit?

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs to Defend Itself

Website of the Day
Backstage with Bo Diddley

June 5, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Wreckage

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Electoral Dilemma: Latinos or Reagan Democrats?

Linn Washington, Jr.
Police Brutality and Cover-Up in Philly

Omar Barghouti
60 Years of Nakba, 41 Years of Occupation ...

Scott Pellegrino
Jim Crow Radio: Bob Grant's Lifetime Achievement Award

John Walsh
Obama Woos AIPAC

Dan Bacher
The Parching of California

DC Larson
Nazi Rockers ... F-Off

Robert Jensen
Masculine, Feminine or Human?

Website of the Day
Ohio Cops Attack Long Walkers

June 4, 2008

Eric Walberg
Princess Patricia and the Taliban

Gary Leupp
Iran and EFPs: Chronology of a Lie

Ralph Nader
Disenfranchised Youth

Dave Lindorff
Of Whiners and Poor Losers

George Wuerthner
Farm Economics

Victor M. Rodriguez
The Puzzle of Race and Politics

Remi Kanazi
Why a Cultural Boycott of Israel is Needed

Stephane Luçon
Renault's Romanian Fairyland Suspended

Farzana Versey
The Tablighi Jamaat Movement

Laray Polk
The Militarization of Space

Website of the Day
Red State Rebels

June 3, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts /
Lawrence M. Stratton
Legislating Tyranny

Mike Whitney
The Withering Economy

Steve Early
San Juan Showdown

Manuel Otero
Why Hillary Won Puerto Rico: the View from the Colony

George Bisharat
The Hope of a Victimized People

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's VP Quandry

Dan Bacher
Death on the Salmon Highway

Website of the Day
Censoring Bill Knott?

June 2, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Olmert Scandal

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Latino Problem Getting Worse

Allan J. Lichtman
Revisionist History: Bush, Borah and Hitler

Malini Johar Schueller
The Color of Randomness: Returning to the US From Beirut Via Syria

Robert Weissman
What's Driving Skyrocketing Oil Prices?

Peter Morici
Bailing Out Wall Street

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Don't Get Burned: How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon's Pain Gun

John Ross
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico

Ahmad Al-Akhras
Encounters with the Watch List

Website of the Day
Man on Earth

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

Jeffrey St. Clair
Arkansas Bloodsuckers

Gary Leupp
How McClellan Prettifies Bush

Stan Cox
Broken Agriculture

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon: the Domino That Wouldn't Fall

P. Sainath
A Guaranteed Day's Work--in the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day

Binoy Kampmark
Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

Robert Fantina
Bush, Rice and McClellan

Seth Sandronsky
Will There be Water Riots, as Sacramento Goes Dry?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Death Penalty for Bush?

Anthony DiMaggio
Gaming the Ghetto: Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle

Karl Grossman
A Half-Trillion for Nukes

Matt Reichel
From Vegas to the Heartland and Back Again

Paul Myron Hillier
Of Gas and God

Andy Worthington
Suicide at Guantánamo

David Yearsley
And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

Daniel Cassidy
Free Lunch

Charles Thomson
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy ...

Gary Corseri
A Dream Deferred: Activism and the Arts

Wajahat Ali
Sex and the City Through a Man's Eyes

Ron Jacobs
Robins Weep

Poets' Basement
McNeill and Davies

Website of the Day
Last Charge of the Light Horse

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

Subscribe Online

Eliminate Tolls!

How to Stretch Gasoline

By MANUEL GARCIA, Jr.

John McCain, the Republican party's presidential candidate, has been promoting the idea of a "gas tax holiday," supposedly for the summer months before the November 2008 election, to win popular support. Barack Obama, the Democratic party's candidate for president, has called McCain's proposal "a trick." The idea appeals to motorists and truckers who are focused on their immediate concerns to reduce their substantial rises in motoring costs, driven by the price of fuel over the last eighteen months. The idea certainly is a trick -- one more distraction tossed into the nationally televised Colosseum to prevent substantive thought. Critics of McCain's proposal point out that fuel taxes are a significant source of revenue, generally used to maintain and improve the nation's roads, bridges, dams and other forms of public infrastructure.

The spectacular and deadly collapse of the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis (Minnesota) during rush hour on August 1, 2007, and the June 9, 2008 bursting of the Lake Denton Dam in Wisconsin (northwest of Madison) are recent failures of deteriorated infrastructure that alarm public works agencies, who fear such events might signal a trend brought on by decades of limited attention to and investment in infrastructure improvements. The integrity of our structures and public spaces is an expense that is rarely welcomed (except by grafters of the construction and maintenance operations) until after a major disaster. We appreciate buildings that do not collapse on us during earthquakes, bridges that do not snap, and dams that do not burst. So, once we are sensitized to this concern, we are willing to pay for the imposition of higher standards on our construction industry, and inspections by public agencies. The high mortality (nearing 70,000) in the Sichuan earthquake of May 12, 2008 may be partially due to some laxity in Chinese building standards. Wherever it occurs, such laxity is always a "cost saving."

However, domestically, immediate attention is focused on the realities of escalating fuel costs, and the constriction of USAmerican vacations and livelihoods; the people are restive and the problem has become political. In addition, we must still contend with the damaging effects to public health and the environment by the air pollution emitted by our hundreds of millions of motors. Because the sources of this pollution are concentrated in urban areas, where our major ground transportation routes intersect, and because many holiday and business travelers will find themselves at these points, a natural solution to the problem suggests itself: cut highway and bridge tolls to eliminate traffic congestion and to simultaneously increase fuel efficiency (no idling in toll booth traffic jams). Federal "highway funds" would compensate state and local governments for losses of gasoline tax revenue [toll revenue]. The elimination of congestion at the many "choke points" in our highway system would significantly reduce the production of carbon dioxide gas by the nation's motor and truck fleet, so state and local governments could recover funds as "carbon credits" gained within their jurisdictions, once new legislation instituting carbon taxes and credits is enacted. Any motorist would welcome the reduced travel time and the reduced cost to be had by the elimination of tolls, and the more thoughtful among them would also welcome the opportunity to go about their business with greater fuel efficiency and with less emission of pollutants.

McCain's proposal is a trick, but the concerns being exploited are real. Real solutions are available, and with a little thought they can be worked out. If you worry that the elimination of tolls would increase motor traffic and starve infrastructure maintenance of funds, fear not. "Tolls" must be thought of as including bus and train fare on the many publicly subsidized bus and rail systems. If you think about it, putting tolls on roads, busses, trains and trollies is like putting up toll booths on elevators, escalators and sidewalks -- a stupid impediment that damages the public good more than can be compensated for by the fiscal return to public agencies. By eliminating congestion, we eliminate its wasteful by-products, both temporal and gaseous. This is real tax reduction.

If you still fear that with tolls eliminated, insufficient funds will be generated to maintain our high-standards toll-free infrastructure, then we do have another remedy of near limitless capacity: end the Iraq and Middle East Wars, and cut the military and its budget to that actually required for national defense without imperialistic excesses. We can do this. Why sacrifice our vacations for the war?

Manuel Garcia, Jr. is a post-employment physicist (I still do physics, just no paycheck), e-mail = mango@idiom.com. This article is about reducing the production of entropy.

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