Today's Stories

October 3 - 5, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Paulson's Plan is a Fraud

October 2, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Can a Bailout Succeed?

Joe Bageant
Speaking in the Tongues of Brokers: the Bailout in Plain English

Ralph Nader
Soulmates in Deregulation

Mike Whitney
Why the Bailout Stinks

Madis Senner
When Push Comes to Pull: How a Foreign Banker Invasion Sent the Markets Reeling

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congress as Usual:the Crisis Will Pass, But This Bunch Will Remain the Same

William Blum
A Boy's Game: the Origins of the Financial Crisis

P. Sainath
Wall Street Transforms Presidential Race

Website of the Day
McCain's Meltdown in Des Moines

October 1 , 2008

Glen Ford
The Last Hold Up

Steven Conn
Trashing Sarah Palin: the Boomerang Effect

Alan Maass / Lee Sustar
Why Not a Bailout for the Rest of Us?

Kenneth Couesbouc
The Blame Game: When Wall Street Pigs Sprout Wings

Stan Goff
How the Republicans Can Win (And Deserve It)

Adolfo Gilly
Racism, Domination and Bolivia

Rannie Amiri
Bombs in the Levant

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil

Adam W. Parsons
Food and Markets

Dave Lindorff
Bums' Rush to the Bailout: Where are the Hearings?

Douglas Valentine
The Bush Continuity Plan?

Adrien Rain Burke
The Party's Over: an Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Beauty Pageant

September 30, 2008

Pam Martens
What Wall Street Hoped to Win

Chris Floyd
The Shadow of the Pitchfork: Elite Panic on Wall Street

Stephen Martin
A Biological Walk Down Wall Street

Deepak Tripathi
A Bitter Harvest in Afghanistan

Mark Engler
Bad Money

Jonathan Cook
The Attack on Zeev Sternhell: Has Israel Become a Breeding Ground for Jewish Settler Terrorism?

Dave Lindorff
The Power of No

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Time for a General Strike?

Ahmad Faruqui
In Cold Blood: Buried Alive in Pakistan

John Chuckman
Will the Bride Wear White? As Rome Burns, Bristol Palin Prepares to Tie the Knot with Mr. "Sex on Skates"

David Macaray
Blaming the Labor Unions

Fatemeh Keshavarz
What Obama Could Have Said

Website of the Day
538: a Cognitive Map of American Politics

September 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
Black Monday

Jeff Gibbs
"Just Say No!" to Reverse Robin Hood

Paul Craig Roberts
Why America Should Listen to Ahmadinejad

Peter Morici
The Bailout and the Economy

Tim Wise
Racism as Reflex

John Walsh
Sarah Palin is a Rotten Mom

Uri Avnery
Israeli Fascism: Yes, It Can Happen Here

Alan Farago
Hell to Pay: the Financial Collapse and the Housing Market

Andy Worthington
Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials?

David Michael Green
Where's the Repudiation?

Carl Finamore
Capitalism on Steroids; Labor on Tranquilizers

Iris Keltz
Postcards from the DNC

Bill Hatch
Take This Shrimp Slayer!

Website of the Day
Tina Fey as Palin, Round Two

September 27 / 28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
How McCain Blew It

Linn Washington, Jr.
Alaska's Blacks and Palin: a Strained Relationship

Christopher Ketcham
An Israeli Trojan Horse

Mike Whitney
The People vs. the Banksters

Kevin Alexander Gray Race in the Race: Is Obama Shining Us On?

Anthony DiMaggio
The Unspoken War: Pakistan, the Media and Nuclear Weapons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Their Assets; Our Debts: How Economic Crises Are Overcome

Marc Levy /
Susan Erony
War Jokes Wanted: No Laughing Matter

Stan Cox
Livestock of Mass Destruction: Germ Labs in the Heartland

Saul Landau
Election Drizzle

Ali Khan
Meltdown in American Markets: an Islamic Perspective

David Rosen
The Great Fear: the Sexual Politics of Sarah Palin

Todd Alan Price
Bailing Out the Foes of Public Eduction

Matts Svensson
The Red and White Bird in Gaza

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan Through the Eyes of a Native Son

Robert Fantina
McCain and the Economy

Richard Rhames
Hank-ering for a Bailout

David Krieger
The U.S.-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Rethinking Charter Schools

Charles R. Larson
Dear Mrs. Abacha: a Nigerian Email Romance

Kim Nicolini
Sadism in the Desert

Poets' Basement
La Morticella, Holt, Moser and Buknatski

Website of the Day
The Great Schlep

September 26, 2008

Moshe Adler
Bailing Out Wall Street Won't Save Main Street

Bill Quigley
The U.S. War on Unarmed Working Mothers

Jonathan Cook
When Archaeology Becomes a Curse

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Visions of Pinpoint Control: the Romance of Laser Weapons

Madis Senner
Why the Bailout will Fail

Brian Cloughley
US Raids in Pakistan: Violations of Sovereignty

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Oh, Henry!

Joanne Mariner
Passport Fraud and Torture

Dan La Botz
The Financial Crisis: a View from the Left

David Macaray
Ralph's Management Indicted by Federal Grand Jury

Website of the Day
Nader and Obama Girl at the Office

September 25, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway

Sharon Smith
Democrats and Corporate Bailouts

Ralph Nader
Who Will Show Some Backbone Against the Bailout?

Christopher Ketcham
The Economy of Dead Sperm (or What I Learned From My Race-Car Grandpa Who Had No Bankers)

Eric Toussaint
Is Another Third World Debt Crisis in the Offing?

Robert Weissman
Getting Wall Street Pay Reform Right

David Estabrook
A Better Bailout Plan

Nikolas Kozloff
The Voyage of the SS Peter the Great

Steve Early
The High Price of Purple Dissent

Judith Scherr
Blue Helmets in Haiti

Laray Polk
South Ossetia and Abkhazia: Notes from the Inside

Website of the Day
Letterman Spanks McCain

September 24, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin at the UN: a Tutorial from Uribe

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis: How and Why Congress Should Play for Time

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Trials: Govt. Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Steve Conn
Will Nader's Warning be Acknowledged in the Presidential Debates?

Karyn Strickler
The $700,000,000,000 Power Punch

Diane Farsetta
Stealth Marketers Gone Wild

Dennis Loo
Poisoned Legacy

John Halle
Wealth Tax Now!

Khalil Nakhleh
Palestinians Under the Occupation

Website of the Day
Nader: Debate Crasher

September 23, 2008

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Bail Out on This Bailout

Michael Hudson
Henry Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal

Tariq Ali
Why was the Marriott Targeted?

Patrick Dyer
A Death Row Visit with Troy A. Davis

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah and the Palestinians

Joshua Frank
Oppose Barack Obama? How Dare Thee!

Alan Farago
Pushing the Referees: How the Financial Crisis Occurred

Dave Lindorff
The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

Tanya M. Kerssen /
Roger Burbach
Bolivia's Popular Upheaval

Harvey Wasserman
Nuclear Power Liabilities Dwarf Bush's Wall Street Bailout

Website of the Day
Hammered by the Irish: the Video

September 22, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout Plan: Will the Cure be Worse Than the Crisis?

Mike Whitney
Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street

Christopher Ketcham
Let It Collapse!

Ron Jacobs
The Predators' Bailout

Anne-Marie McManus
Lost in the Rhetoric of Crisis

Robert Weitzel
The Twin Terrors of the Holy Land: a Sexy Fundamentalist and a White-Haired Zionist

Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Howard Dean

John Ross
A New Cold War Comes to Latin America

Steve Breyman
Does the U.S. Really Need Cluster Bombs?

Patrick Bond
On the Bellies of the Filth

Uri Avnery
Fly, Tzipora, Fly

Carl J. Mayer
An Open Letter to Michael Moore (AKA God's Pen Pal): Whatever Happened to Voting Your Conscience?

Website of the Day
Stop the Execution of Troy Anthony Davis

September 20 / 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart?

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Mike Whitney
Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The NY Yankees and the U.S. Economy

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Susan Block
Palin as Venus in Furs: the Dominatrix Politics of Drilling and Killing

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

David Yearsley
Germany's Lost Organs: When Bigger Was Better

Raymond J. Lawrence
The Politics of Tribulation: Sarah Palin and the Rapture

David Rosen
One Billion Pills Later: Viagra at 10

David Michael Green
Living in Sarah Palin's America

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Freddie, Fannie, Daddy, Nanny

Howard Lisnoff
When We Notice the Homeless

John Goekler
Leaving Every Child Behind

Missy Beattie
Impalement

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

Charles R. Larson
Holden Caulfield, Rest in Peace

Tim Matson
Too Big for His Birches: Woodlot Economics

Susie Day
Attack of the Angry Fetus

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Gibbons, Jenkins and Ford

Website of the Weekend
Dylan & Baez: Deportees

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

Weekend Edition
October 3 - 5, 2008

Environmental Security and the Evolution of Military Green Think

Waging a Sustainable Peace?

By CINDY ELLEN HILL

Thousands of conservation leaders will convene in Barcelona Spain next week for the 2008 World Conservation Congress, an event which International Union for Conservation and Nature (IUCN) sponsors every four years. On October 6, a select few will meet with key military leaders at an invitation-only roundtable to spearhead a paradigm shift in thinking about the intersection of environmental issues and local, regional, and national security.

The IUCN Roundtable on Environment and Security will match representatives from the military (USA, Netherlands, Spain, Thailand, Nepal, Mauretania), NATO, and other members of the world’s security community with key environmental leaders to explore strategies for waging an environmentally sustainable peace. 

Among those security leaders is Sherri Goodman, General Counsel for the Arlington, Virginia think thank CNA, and former U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Environmental Security. “Climate change is a national security threat. It is a threat multiplier for instability in fragile regions,” says Goodman.“We need to protect natural resources, food, water, forests, agriculture, as a matter of security.”

From Suspicion to Alliances

In the past, discussion of the intersection of environmental and military concerns have focused on direct pollution and damage caused by armed conflict. For example, the U.S. media has recently turned its attention to the USEPA’s failure to regulate perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel, which is found in groundwater near military bases and has potentially serious human health effects.

“War is the worst destructor of nature and the environment. Depleted uranium and other pollutants leave large tracts devastated,” says Wouter Veening, director of the Institute for Environmental Security, one of the sponsors of the Environment and Security Workshop. “It uses tremendous amounts of fossil fuels, tremendous CO2 emissions from military operations. Seventy percent of what you bring to the battlefield is fuel.”

While contention over the environmental impacts of military operations continues, the relationship between environment and security is evolving into a new perspective – that of seeing security forces as an ally.  Effecting this shift presents significant challenges in overcoming communications breaches and biases.

Frits Hesselink, CEO of HECT Consultancy and a member of the IUCN’s Commission on Education and Communication, was one of those who saw opportunity to foster interaction between environmental and security personnel at the World Conservation Congress. His goals for the workshop are to look beyond direct ‘battlefield impacts’ on the environment and explore both environmental implications of the military – and military implications of environmental crises.

“We are thinking of, for instance, is in mandate of peace missions, that the military also be instructed to guard the forests and look after water supplies, food supplies. But at the same time, we have to open ears of environmental people, who may see the military as a threat instead of an ally, and yet military is the only organization that has the logistical capacity to help.”

Climate Change Brings Sea Change in Environmental Security Thinking

Climate change is one transnational factor driving urgency into the need for environmental-security community cooperation. Last year, CNA issued a ground breaking report National Security and the Threat of Climate Change authored by a team of 3 and 4 star generals and admirals. Military organizations increasingly realize that environmental problems challenge their assets, which threatens national and international security. Naval bases, for example, are by their inherent nature located in positions extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels. This realization has helped focus military organizational attention on environmental issues.

As floods, droughts, and shifting storm patterns grow in the wake of climate change, environmental organizations increasingly see the need for security force allies. One scenario on the table for discussion is the glaciers of the Himalayas, which are disappearing at an exponential rate, leaving billions of people who rely on the Indus, Ganges, and Yangtze river systems in danger of short term flooding and long term drought.

“If these rivers run dry, imagine the security risk,” says Veening. “People will be moving into other areas where there is water or food, creating conflict due to competition for resources. Water would have to be brought in, perhaps in tanks or trucks, people moved out, how do you organize that? The Red Cross and other aid organizations are great, but they do not have the ships, the helicopters, the transport trucks. This is beyond their capabilities. My imagination is not enough, we need the imaginations of others with experience in large-scale operations, such as the military.”

As climate change progresses, analysts anticipate that security communities will increasingly be called upon to perform disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. “As the NGO community is already heavily involved in these activities, it will be critical for the military and NGOs to cooperate and develop a working relationship of each other,” Catarious says. “If the organizations look at each other with suspicion, the mission and people in need will not get the help they require.”

Security Intervention in Conservation Crises

Environmental organizations are increasingly confronting their own needs for that security help, not only with crises triggered by climate change but also in ongoing conservation work. At Virunga National Park, which spans the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, armed security forces are all that stand between a raging civil conflict and the continued existence of mountain gorillas. Over 17,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops are working “to keep rebels apart and protect world heritage sites including the mountain gorillas,” Veening explains.

But their intervention needn’t stop at keeping the belligerent parties apart, Veening says, envisioning potential for positive post-conflict transformation: “One thing I would hope could happen is you demobilize the rebels, then try to retrain the young men, typically young men, to restore agricultural lands, engage in reforestation and terracing to prevent erosion. Then you also train them to be park guards and serve ecotourism. We need some of the old-fashioned military drilling types to make environmental guards out of them.”

Conservation NGOs also increasingly ponder their own operational security needs. IES specializes in mapping and remote sensing to protect environmentally sensitive areas from intrusions like illegal resources extraction. In Columbia, IES provides assistance to a federation of indigenous persons, helping to protect the Orinoco River basin.

“How can we help without putting our personnel or the indigenous persons into a dangerous situation? They are facing threats of encroaching coca plantations and violence. We are very good at remote sensing, we do mapping and locate the coca fields, but we still have to figure out how to share those data with the communities without compromising their safety,” Veening says.

Mutual Benefits from Military Green-Think

But the benefits of military green-think do not run only to the conservation community:

Environmental security actions also create opportunity for positive military consequences, Catarious continues. “While environmental security is usually seen through the lens of "threats" and "vulnerabilities," the environment also presents some of our most valuable levers of soft power. In regions where we may have strained diplomatic relations, cooperating over environmental issues like food and water scarcity can be a very effective way of rebuilding strong ties that can help in other areas.”

As Undersecretary of Defense in the Clinton administration, Sherri Goodman took steps to build those ties at home as well as abroad. 

“When I was at the U.S. Department of Defense, I did a lot of outreach to the environmental community, so that the environmental community could get to know us, and also so that the military could learn from environmental organizations,” she says. “Many conservation organizations, for example the Nature Conservancy, work hand-in-glove with the DoD. DoD is the third largest federal (U.S.) landowner, and its lands have the highest number of endangered species. Communities with military installations want to keep those lands open, they are a natural oasis and anchor for environmental stability in the area.”

But even ongoing armed conflicts present opportunity for the new environmental-security alliance model.  Piet Witte, director of global conservation NGO Syzygy, recently returned from Afghanistan, where, serving as a major in the Dutch army’s peacekeeping forces, he worked on  provincial reconstruction in fields of sustainable agriculture and food development, providing leadership and advice to small farmers who have had irrigation systems destroyed in the ongoing armed conflict there.

In peacetime, this kind of assistance might have been provided by private organizations, but “because it’s an insecure situation, it must be a militarized intervention,” Witte says. “I’ve been in a convoy that ran over a bomb. It’s very dangerous. But I hope that people realize that even during conflict, it is very much possible to join forces to work on environmental conservation issues and humanitarian issues. Most military personnel I have worked with have notion now that we not only win hearts and minds but bring economic stability. Security is also food security, and food security depends on ecosystem stability. It’s exciting and satisfying work.”

Military and environmental community leaders will explore a wide range of opportunities to engage in that work at the upcoming Roundtable on Environment and Security.  The Institute for Environmental Security and other participating commissions are already planning a follow-up meeting next year, to bring the potential for positive progress to the attention of parliamentarians and key world opinion leaders.

Cindy Hill is an environmental attorney and freelance writer living in Vermont. She can be reached at: wordwomanvt@yahoo.com

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