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Today's Stories

December 30,2005

T.W. Croft
The Wind Has Changed: Gulf Storms, Fables of Reconstruction and Hard Times for the Big Easy

Website of the Day
Images of Mass Consumption

December 29, 2005

Norman Solomon
Journalists Should Expose Secrets, Not Keep Them

Missy Comley Beattie
Christmas Without Chase

Dave Zirin
Over the Edge: the Year in Sports

Kevin Zeese
Top 10 Antiwar Stories of 2005

Derrick O'Keefe
Bolivia and Venezuela Offer an Alternative to Neo-Liberalism

Sam Bahour
Turning the Page in Palestine, Again

Macdonald Stainsby
What's Behind Paul Martin's Broadside Against Bush?

Bill & Kathleen Christison
Let's Stop a US/Israel War on Iran

Website of the Day
Deconstructing the Democrats

December 28, 2005

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Worst Day of Ted Stevens' Life?

Lila Rajiva
Operation Romeo: Lessons on Terror Laws from India

Amira Hass
The Humanitarian Lie

Joshua Frank
Let the Drilling Begin: Iraq's IMF Loan

David Swanson
Leaking Top Secret Lies

Richard Thieme
High Time for Torture

Paul Craig Roberts
Three Books to Wake You Up

Website of the Day
Conyers Report: "Constitution in Crisis"

 

December 27, 2005

Evan Jones
Whither the National Guard?

Uri Avnery
The Peretz Shuffle

Mike Whitney
Pop Goes the Bubble!

Gideon Levy
Dusty Trail to Death

David Swanson
Kurt Vonnegut: a Man Without a Country

Norman Solomon
NSA Spied on UN Diplomats During Push for Invasion of Iraq

 

December 26, 2005

Lawrence R. Velvel
The Usurpers of Our Freedoms

Lance Olsen
The Toughest Challenge for Intelligent Design

Ben Terrall
No Holiday Compassion for Haiti's Political Prisoners

Scott Boehm
Santa Drove a Bulldozer

Charlie Ehlen
A Vietnam Vet's Appraisal of Bush

Tom Kerr
The Atheist Dad at Christmas

 

December 24/25, 2005

Aleander Cockburn
The Year of Vanished Credibility

James Petras
Iran in the Crosshairs: Israel's Deadline

Ralph Nader
Talkin' About the "I"-Word

Lila Rajiva
Horowitz's New Project: Begging for Brownshirts

Fred Gardner
Dialogue with the DEA

Ron Jacobs
When Impeachment was Taken Seriously

Dave Lindorff
Xmas Games for a Gitmo World

Gary Leupp
Happy Birthday Mithras!: the True Meaning of December 25th

Saul Landau
Bush's Year in Review: a Report Card from Santa

John Chuckman
A Christmas Tale for Bushtime

Dr. Susan Block
Merry XXX-mas!

St. Clair / Vest / Pollack / Donnelly
Playlist: What We're Listening to This Week

Poets' Basement
Holt, Jones, Landau, Ross and Albert

Website of the Weekend
Merry Xmas, From the Beatles

 

December 23, 2005

John Ross
The Corrido of Death Row: Mexico Ends the Death Penalty

Chris Floyd
Gospel Truth: Bush Hypocrisy, Radical Holiness and Woody Guthrie

Lawrence Mishel / Ross Eisenbrey
The Economy in a Nutshell

Joanne Mariner
Bringing Torture into Court: the Loopholes in McCain's Bill

Eric Johnson-Debaufre
The Trew Law of Free Democracies?

Ray McGovern
Cheney the Bully; Rockefeller the Coward

J. L. Chestnut, Jr.
What White America Doesn't Hear

Website of the Day
BB King: What I've Learned This Year

 

December 22, 2005

Ingmar Lee
The Citizen's Metamorphosis: I Awoke an Object of Suspicion

Elisa Salasin
Classrooms in Cages

Christopher Brauchli
Absolut Bush: "I Swear to Upturn and Rear End the Constitution of the United States"

Robin Blackburn
Rudolf Meidner, a Visionary Pragmatist

Evelyn Pringle
Dan Olmstead, Autism & the Dangers of Thimerosal

Amira Hass
A 14-Year Old's Prison Journey: "I Refused and He Hit Me"

Francis A. Boyle
Iraq and the Laws of War: US as "Belligerent Occupant"

Stew Albert
The Spies Who Thought We Were Messy

Website of the Day
How to Reach a Human Voice

 

December 21, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
One Nation, Under Prosecutors: Presumed Guilty

Lila Rajiva
A Short History of Radio Free Iraq

Joshua Frank
Nancy Pelosi's Truth

Dave Zirin
The Bray of Pigs: Bush Nixes Beisbol Cubano

Ramzy Baroud
US Image Problem Rooted in History, Not Media

Sonia Nettnin
Connect the Dots: Decoding Bush's Mumbo Jumbo

Ben Saul
Torture as Calculated Policy

Jonathan Cronin
Anniversary of a Handshake: Cherry-picking History in Iraq

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Election Spells Total Defeat for US

Website of the Day
Nixon on Presidential Power

 

December 20, 2005

Jackie Corr
Natural Gas: a Montana Tragedy

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Nothing New About NSA Spying on Americans

Michael Donnelly
"Eco Terrorism": Cui Bono?

Gian Paulo Accardo
Empire of Shame: a Conversation with Jean Ziegler

Pierre Tristam
Trifler, Fibber, Sophist, Spy: How Bush Flouted the Constitution

Norman Solomon
The Foulest Media Performances of the Year

Sen. Robert Byrd
No President is Above the Law

Dave Lindorff
Missing Black Boxes in WTC Attacks Found by Firefighters, Analyzed by NTSB, Concealed by FBI

Website of the Day
FBI's Spy Files: Got Yours Yet?

 

December 19, 2005

Mike Marqusee
The Global War on Civil Liberties

Gary Leupp
Feds Ask Student: "Why are You Reading that Little Red Book?"

Ron Jacobs
The Antiwar Movement, the Democrats and the Delusions of Bushworld

John Blair
Stealing the Golden Shovel: Lessons on Civil Disobedience

Gideon Levy
Sadism at the Qalandiyah Checkpoint

Kevin Zeese
The Global War on Civil Liberties

Missy Comley Beattie
Warnings from a Military Man and Dad

Don Santina
Ride 'Em Brush Cutter: Cowboy Imagery and the American Presidency

Website of the Day
A Call for Justice in Palestine

 

December 17 / 18, 2005

Cockburn / St. Clair
Time-Delayed Journalism: the NYT and the NSA's Illegal Spying Operation

Gabriel Kolko
The Decline of the American Empire

Susan Alcorn
Texas: Three Days and Two Nights

Werther
The Democrats are an Impotent and Tolerated Opposition Party

Ralph Nader
The Senator Without Guile: Proxmire of Wisconsin

Patrick Cockburn
Counting Ballots and Bodies in Baghdad

Fred Gardner
When Prosecutors Deceive: Did the Feds Frame Bryan Epis?

Dave Lindorff
Spy Scandal Far Larger Than Just NSA

Ned Sublette
Essence is Gasoline

Lee Sustar
The Class War Economy

Jason Leopold
Did Karl Rove Destroy Evidence in Plame Case?

Laura Carlsen
Report from Hong Kong: Deciphering the Language of Globalization

Jeff White
Teacher Fired for Talking About Peace?

Ray McGovern
Torture Between the Lines

Chris Floyd
Pale Fire: the White Death of Fallujah

William Loren Katz
Remembering the First Quagmire at Xmastime: Zachary Taylor vs. the Seminoles

Rose Miriam Elizalde
Mashenka and the Bear: a Tale for Our Time

Greg Moses
Pinter's Provocation: Self Love in America

Heather Gray
Privatizing the Social Contract

Alison Weir
My Bethlehem Experience: the Sequel

St Clair / Walker / Pollack
Playlists: What We're Listening to This Week

Poets' Basement
Landau, Engel and Albert

Website of the Day
At Least Homeland Security Believes that Mao Still Matters

 

December 16, 2005

Tom Kerr
CNN's Goddess of Vengeance: What's Not to Love About Nancy Grace?

Mark Engler
The WTO in Hong Kong: Is Market Access the Answer to Poverty?

John Bomar
When Ollie North Came to Hot Springs

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Votes; Now What?

Pierre Tristam
Iraq, Ourselves

William S. Lind
The Fine Art of Withdrawal

Cyril Neville
Why I'm Not Going Back to New Orleans

Robert Jensen
Monkey See, Monkey Do: Reason, Evolution and Intelligent Design

Saul Landau
Bolivian Democracy and the US: a History Lesson

Website
CounterPunch & Dr. Price Vanquish Anthropologist Spies

 

December 15, 2005

Oren Ben-Dor
The Ethical and Legal Challenges Facing Palestine

Stan Cox
"Agroterrorists" Needn't Bother

Joshua Frank
Organic Inconsistencies: Federal Food Politics

Ben Terrall
Waivers for State Terror: Bush and the Indonesian Generals

Patrick Cockburn
Silence Descends on Baghdad

Monica Benderman
What Peace Needs

Walter A. Davis
Fear and Loathing in San Quentin

Vijay Prashad
Our Torture Problem

Website of the Day
Hourly Wages After Four Years of "Recovery"


December 14, 2005

Patrick Cockburn
Iran Poised to Win Iraqi Elections

Paul Craig Roberts
Lethal Developments

Lawrence R. Velvel
A Bore Called Bob: On Trying to Read Woodward

Wayne Garcia
The Summer of Sami

John Sugg
Preach Peace, Sami; Get Truthful Prosecutors

Gary Leupp
Bush and the Constitution: "Just a Goddamned Piece of Paper"

Ray McGovern
Torture: a Defining Moment

Alan Maass
They Murdered a Peacemaker

April Hurley, MD
NPR Swallows Bush's Guestimate on Iraqi Dead

Kevin Alexander Gray
Richard Pryor's Mirror on America

 

December 13, 2005

Stephen T. Banko, III
Heroes

Patrick Cockburn
America's War So Far: 1000 Days of Getting It Wrong

Laura Carlsen
What's at Play at the WTO

Karl Grossman
Nuclear Routlette in the Troposhere: Another NASA Plutonium Launch

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Original Sin

Kevin Zeese
Report from the International Peace Conference in London

Norman Solomon
At the Gates of San Quentin

Michael G. Smith
Ending the Death Penalty

Stew Albert
California Killers

Bob Dylan
Song for Tookie: George Jackson

Phil Gasper
California Murders Tookie Williams: a Report from San Quentin

Website of the Day
Boot Hill

 

December 12, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
The Defenders of Torture

Lawrence R. Velvel
George the Disconnected

Jessica Stewart
My Husband is at the Gates of Gitmo

George Bisharat
Busharon: a Fusion of Like Minds

Nate Mezmer
Killing Tookie Williams: If a Black Man Dies in America, Does It Make a Sound?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Richard Pryor Wasn't Crazy

Alison Weir
My Bethlehem Experience

Seth Sandronsky
Thank You, Richard Pryor

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq: the Beginning of the End

Website of the Day
Wrestling for Peace


December 10 / 11, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
All the News That's Fit to Buy

Landau / Hassen
The Condemned of Nablus

Ralph Nader
The Widening Wasteland of American Media

Linn Washington, Jr
The Philly Media and Mumia: When They Don't Bash, They Ignore

Bill Christison
Apathy, US Culpability and Human Rights Day

Mike Ferner
The Courage of Jim Loney

Elizabeth Schulte
Abortion and the Bush Court

Neve Gordon / Yigal Bronner
Murder in Jerusalem

Linda S. Heard
Saddam's Trial: Grandstanding in the Theater of the Absurd

Ingmar Lee
A Kayak Journey to Vancouver Island's Wildest Forest

Ray McGovern
Lies, Torture and the Six Blind Mice

John Chuckman
Torture and White Phosphorous: the Moral Hell of Condi Rice

John Ryan
An Honorary Degree in Child Sacrifice?: Madeleine Albright and US Foreign Policy

Dick J. Reavis
From Waco to Baghdad

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Hired Pens

Behzad Yaghmaian
Trapped at the Gates of the European Union

Aseem Shrivastava
The Winter in Delhi, 1984

John Ross
Bushlandia in Black and White

Ben Tripp
War, What is It Good For?

St. Clair / Pollack / Vest / Despair
Playlist: What We're Listening to This Week

Poets' Basement
Hassen, Bear Dog, Ford, Mickey Z, Albert & Engel

Website of the Week
Burn a Brick for Bush

 

December 9, 2005

Linn Washington, Jr.
Roots of Gitmo Torture Lie Close to Home

Dave Zirin / Mike Stark
On Seeing Wesley Baker Die

Patrick Cockburn
Blair Tries to Cover Up $1.3 Billion Iraqi Theft

Alexander Cockburn
Murtha Returns to Attack; Flays Bush

Lila Rajiva
Shooting the Mentally Ill

Gary Leupp
White House Liars on the Defensive

Jason Leopold
Rove Running Out of Answers, Time

Bruce K. Gagnon
So These Are the Democrats?

Andrew Cockburn
Meet Rahm Emmanuel, the Democrats' New Gatekeeper

Website of the Day
"X-mas Time for Visa"

 

December 8, 2005

Kathy Kelly
Blessed are the Merciful in Baghdad

James Petras
The Venezuelan Election: Chavez Wins, Bush Loses (Again)

William S. Lind
Questionable Assumptions: Dissecting the Stategy for Victory

Laura Carlsen
The Strange Mission of Vicente Fox: Free Trade and Mexico

Justin Akers
Bush's Border War

Thomas Graham, Jr
A Nuclear Pearl Harbor in Outer Space?

Norman Solomon
Rumsfeld's Handshake Deal with Saddam

Tariq Ali / Robin Blackburn
The Lost John Lennon Interview

Website of the Day
Pigs at the Trough of War

 

December 7, 2005

John Ryan
Dershowitz vs. Chomsky: a Review of the Harvard Debate

Gary Leupp
Suicide Before Dishonor in Occupied Iraq

Fran Quigley
How the ACLU Didn't Steal Christmas

Jeremy Brecher / Brendan Smith
Bush War Crimes: the Posse Gathers

Joshua Frank
Bird Dogging Hillary

William W. Morgan
Rendition, Torture and Democracy

Dave Lindorff
A Stunning Win for Mumia Abu Jamal

Patrick Cockburn
Saddam: "Come Visit My Cage"

Harold Pinter
Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture

Website of the Day
Witnesses to Torture

 

December 6, 2005

Ron Jacobs
No One is Illegal; No One is an Infidel

Patrick Cockburn
Inside Saddam's Trial: Tales of the Human Meat Grinder

Yifat Susskind
Death, Politics and the Condom: African Women Confront Bush's AIDS Policy

Mike Whitney
How Greenspan Skewered America

Pat Williams
Public Land Should Stay Public

Paul Craig Roberts
Condi to Europe: Trust Us

Website of the Day
Debunking Woodward

 

December 5, 2005

John Walsh
The Lies of John Edwards: What Did the Democrats Know and When Did They Know It?

Brian Cloughley
The Poor Dead: the Relative Value of Human Lives

Mokhiber / Weissman
The Corporate Crime Quiz

Robert Jensen
How Big Money Eviscerates the First Amendment

Norman Solomon
Hidden in Plane Sight: US Media Ignores Iraq Air War Plan

Peter Rost, MD
An Open Letter to the Justice Department: Pfizer May Have Violated Federal Laws When They Fired Me

Lila Rajiva
The Torture-Go-Round: CIA's Rendition Flights to Secret Prisons

Website of the Day
National Day of Counter-Recruitment


December 3 / 4, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
The Revolt of the Generals

Lawrence R. Velvel
Iraq, Brains and Lies

Rev. William Alberts
The Forgotten Christmas Story: Saying No to King Herod

Saul Landau
Latino Troops Have Parents

Ralph Nader
Consumerama

Paul Craig Roberts
Don't Confuse the Jobs Hype with the Facts

Mike Whitney
Blood Feast: Celebrating Executions in America

Allan Lichtman
The DeLay Scheme: Blatantly Buying Our Government

Dave Lindorff
A Sudden Rush for the Exits?

Brian Concannon, Jr.
Haiti's Elections

Fred Gardner
Oregon NORML Honors Growers

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
On Freeing the CPT

Carol Wolman
Remembering the 60s

St. Clair / Vest / Walker / Pollack
Playlist: What We're Listening to This Week

Poets' Basement
Albert, Engel and Orloski

Website of the Weekend
Free the CPT

 

December 2, 2005

Stan Goff
An Open Letter to Congress from a Veteran and Military Dad

Mike Ferner
Beware Iraqization: Melvin Laird, Vietnam and Christmas Bombings Over Baghdad?

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Constitutional Kamikazes: Padilla's No-Win Dilemma

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Questions for the President

Manuel Talens
The Chávez Theorem

Peter Phillips
Death By Torture: Media Ignores the Hard Evidence

J.L. Chestnut, Jr.
Alabama's Taliban: Judge Roy Moore, Preachers and Dixie Hypocrisy

Website of the Day
Support the Hampton University Peace Activists!

 

December 1, 2005

John Walsh, MD
The God Gaps

Ron Jacobs
Hard Rain: Toward a Greater Air War in Iraq?

Jenna Orkin
EPA's Latest Betrayal at Ground Zero

Joshua Frank
Howard Dean's Blunt Message: Forget Palestine

Tiffany Ten Eyck
Rank and File Resistance to Delphi

Missy Comley Beattie
Home on the Range: Where the Fear and the Animus Play

Eli Stephens
The Reed and Kerry Show

Elaine Cassel
A Government Game of "Gotcha" with Jose Padilla

Website of the Day
Rare Erotica

 

 

 

Subscribe Online

December 30, 2005

Environmental Racism

The Toxic Air in Black America

By EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

Environmentalists hit the roof in 2002 when President Bush announced his Clean Sky Initiative. The initiative would not clean the skies but dirty them further. It would allow corporations to dump tons more toxic pollutants in the air, delay or exempt enforcement of smog and soot pollution standards, and gut EPA pollution enforcement powers. Though the initiative is stalled in Congress, Bush did an end around and used an administrative order to weaken enforcement.

That virtually assures that blacks, especially poor blacks, will breather dirtier air. This has had dire health consequences. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has repeatedly warned that blacks are more likely to live in neighborhoods with higher air pollution levels and suffer higher rates of respiratory and blood ailments than whites, and suffer more deaths. The Bush administration defends its contempt for the lungs of the poor by saying that race should not be as issue in the battle against toxic pollution, and that it will protect all groups against environmental damage. The Bush record shows that it has done just the opposite.

A recent Associated Press survey of government data found that in 19 states blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to live in neighborhoods where pollution posed a severe health hazard. Despite the severe health risks that toxic damage poses in these neighborhoods, the residents have gotten very little attention or support from environmental groups. But the fight against environmental racism is a civil rights battle, and a fight to save black lives. That battle should fully engage civil rights and environmental groups. Black residents in some cities have screamed just as loudly as white, middle class homeowners and urban conservationists about hacked up parkland, toxic dump sites, waste incinerators, garbage dumps, recycling centers, contaminated sewage sites, and power plants in their backyard. They label this racially-warped policy, "PIBBY" or, put it in blacks backyard.

In 1979, Houston city officials tried to dump yet another toxic waste site in a black neighborhood. This time the homeowners and residents fought back. They filed and won the first major lawsuit against the dumping of a waste facility in an urban neighborhood. Their action transformed the fight for environmental justice into a health and a civil rights issue. Since then blacks have marched, demonstrated, filed lawsuits, been jailed, and held local and national conferences, to denounce environmental degradation of their neighborhoods. In a milestone report on race and toxic wastes in 1987, the Commission for Racial Justice, a church-based civil rights advocacy group, revealed that blacks are far more likely than whites to live near abandoned toxic waste sites, waste landfills, and sewer treatment plants. They prodded former President Clinton in 1994 to issue an executive order directing federal agencies to intensify efforts to determine the harm toxic waste plants and sites wreak on urban communities.

A decade later, the Government Accounting Office found that all of the offsite hazardous waste landfills in nine Southern states were situated in or in close proximity to black neighborhoods. This environmental racism outraged black environmental activists.

Meanwhile, Bush has done everything he could to scrap the Clinton rules, and corporations and public officials have dutifully taken their cue and tossed more pollutants into the air and water. The courts haven't helped. Residents in poor, highly toxic neighborhoods can sue polluters under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but they must prove intentional discrimination. This is virtually impossible to prove. The Supreme Court has ruled that private citizens can't sue to enforce federal environmental regulations that ban discrimination. The EPA has moved with glacial speed to investigate complaints of environmental pollution, and has been even more reluctant to take strong action against polluters. In one two-year stretch from 2001 to 2003, the EPA settled only two cases against corporate polluters. There's little evidence that the agency's settlement scorecard has gotten much better since then.

The damage from official neglect of the problem has been profound. Toxic eyesores disfigure black neighborhoods, degrade property values, and discourage public and private investment in those neighborhoods, and that in addition to the grave health risks that toxic pollution poses to the residents.

Corporate and industrial polluters get away with their toxic assault on low-income, black neighborhoods by skillfully twisting the jobs versus environment issue. They claim that the choice is between creating more jobs and business growth and economic stagnation. Their economic black mail works since few politicians will risk being tagged as anti-business. They gamble that poor, blacks and Latinos, many of whom do not own their homes, and vote in far smaller numbers, are less likely than politically connected white, middle-class homeowners to squawk at putting a hazardous plant or toxic waste site in their neighborhood.

Many officials will eagerly waive requirements for environmental reports, provide special tax breaks, and even alter zoning and land use requirements to allow them to set up shop in these underserved neighborhoods. They'll get it with the full blessing of the Bush administration, but let's hope not with Congress.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a columnist for BlackNews.com, an author and political analyst.

 

 

 


 


 

 

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By Michael Neumann

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Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror

by Jeffrey St. Clair


The Book on 9/11 the White House Denounced as "ABSOLUTE GARBAGE"

 

 

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