Today's Stories

May 24, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

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

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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Pulse of the Planet

Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

By BARBARA ROSE JOHNSTON

This world is clearly in a state of crisis. Unchecked violence and war has forced tens of millions from their homes and into crowded refugee camps. Earthquakes, cyclones and other natural disasters are crippling government ability to meet basic humanitarian needs. Global warming and resulting changes in local weather patterns has placed added stress on an already faltering global food supply. Our air, water, soil, and seas are contaminated with toxins that inhibit and strangle sustainable life. Societies are hit with wave after wave of preventable public health crises and epidemics.

The global numbers of those struggling in misery are truly staggering. One in five humans lack access to water. One half of humanity lives without basic sanitation, and half of these folks lack electricity.  More than one quarter of the world’s children are malnourished.  Half of the world’s population lives in cities, and one third of those urban dwellers live in slums.  Half of the world struggles to live on less than two dollars a day.

With all of these urgent issues and more emerging each day, why should we care about the human environmental impacts of large dam development?

Why should we care? Because, contrary to the popular notion that hydroelectricity fuels societal progress, in fact, large dam development destroys communities and their environs and generates the fuel that feeds our ever-rising global poverty rates.

Since World War II some 54, 000 large dams have been built, generating an estimated 20 percent of the world's electricity and providing irrigation to fields that produce some 10 percent of the world's food. These dams have also flooded some of the most productive agricultural lands in the world. They have caused the endangerment or extinction for half of the world's fresh water fish. Changes in downstream water quality have decimated the fisheries, waterfowl and mammals of the world's deltas. And, for the tens of millions of people whose lives and livelihood were rooted in the banks and valleys of wild rivers, upstream and down, and for the hundreds of millions who struggle with the degenerative impacts of dead or dying fisheries, dam development has literally destroyed the health, economy, and culture of communities and entire nations.

What has happened to these millions of people? Lacking fertile lands and the means to reproduce a way life, many suffer in horrific poverty in “resettlement” compounds and camps or migrate as “development refugees” from rural to urban settings within their nation and abroad.  Recent estimates suggest that in India, alone, by the year 2000 some 60 million people had been forcefully evicted from their rural homes to make way for water development projects, and the majority of these people did not receive adequate compensation or assistance in rebuilding their lives. Similar numbers have been reportedly displaced in China. Another 40 million people have been forcibly evicted to make way for large dam development in other nations of the world. Each year of this century has seen another 15 million people forcibly displaced by large dam development. Recent reassessments by resettlement experts of the status of dam development refugees worldwide has produced dismal findings: there is not a single case where dam development refugees now experience an equivalent, let alone, improved quality of life.

Who are these displaced people? They are fishers, farmers, pastoralists: people who live off the land and have done so for generations in largely self-sustaining communities. Many are members of ethnic minority or indigenous groups whose society, culture, and way of life differs from the national norm. For example, in India, while 2% of the entire population has been forcibly displaced by dams, at least 40% of the people displaced since 1947 are categorized as “tribals” and other ethnic minorities. This disproportionate burden is not unique. In the nations of our world it is the indigenous, ethnic minorities and other relatively powerless groups who are “in the way of development” because they live in the wild lands where rivers run free, where the undeveloped water resources of a nation are found. And because they lack the political power to significant challenge how development occurs, and for whom the benefits accrue. 

We are just beginning to understand the many and profound intergenerational consequences of this massive uprooting of place-based peoples and ways of life.  For those displaced by dams, development has meant loss of fertile lands with inadequate or nonexistent compensation, and loss of access to the varied resources the previously supported families, communities, and the cultural traditions that sustained them.  In case after case, the end result is best described as an ulcerating mess.

The 57,000 Tongans, for example, forced from their homelands in 1952 by Great Britain and the World Bank to build the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River in Rhodesia, now number some 250,000 people who, lacking any adequate compensation, live in abject poverty.  The post-colonial creation of two states, Zambia and Zimbabwe, split the Tongan nation into two separate refugee communities and their isolation and extreme poverty has had a devastating impact on language, kinship ties, and cultural solidarity. In 2000, following the World Commission on Dams review of their case, Tongan refugees in Zambia began to document their conditions and consequential damages of dam displacement with hopes of negotiating meaningful remedy. While governments and financiers have drafted remedial social and economic development plans, implementation has been timid, haphazard, and ineffective. Today, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the highest levels of unemployment and poverty in Zimbabwe can be found in the Tongan nation. And in Zambia, where most of the population survives as subsistence farmers, the Tongan refugees are among the poorest of the poor.

A similar tale of development-induced poverty can be told by Mayan peoples displaced by Guatemala's Chixoy Dam. Built during a time of civil war, construction was begun in 1976 without notifying residents or establishing a resettlement plan. When the dam was completed in 1982, villages were emptied at gunpoint, homes and fields burned, and massacres ensued. Survivors were rounded up and placed in a “model village” built with a single access road, and guarded by a military outpost. Years later, a UN-sponsored truth commission determined that the massacres were an example of state-sponsored violence against a civilian population and evidence of genocide. The military continued to openly control the lives of the dam-displaced community until December 2003, when the base was finally decommissioned, many years after other “model villages” had been decommissioned and several months after residents of this and other dam-affected communities began working with national and international advocates to document their experiences. In 2004, after 29 hours of peaceful protest at the hydroelectric facility involving some 1,000 Mayan people displaced by the Chixoy Dam, an agreement that a reparations negotiation process would be established was achieved. Today, with the facilitating involvement of the Organization of American States, the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the World Bank, the Government of Guatemala is working with communities displaced by the Chixoy Dam to shape and implement socioeconomic remedy. After three years of negotiating, conditions on the ground have yet to change, and dam-affected communities continue to struggle with no electricity, no potable water, crumbling homes, inadequate farmland, and extreme food shortages.   

While displaced communities around the world work to document and publicize their plight with the hopes of negotiating some form of remedy, governments and international financiers react in minimalist ways. In the rare case where remedial actions are proposed, the negotiated deal comes with a heavy price. For example, in Guatemala, while the Government works with affected communities to fashion a plan to repair the socioeconomic damages from the first Chixoy Dam, it is at the same time soliciting financing in support of a new hydroelectric development upstream on the Chixoy that will forcibly displace thousands more Mayan families. Energy from the first Chixoy Dam sustains the capitol city and is exported to foreign markets. Many displaced communities still lack electricity. Similarly, the new dam is expected to generate energy to feed a grid that flows up to the United States, and to power the extractive industry in rural Guatemala (gold, silver, uranium, nickel mines and natural gas development). Where communities have been consulted, they voted to reject expansion of extractive industry. Community preferences, however, have been ignored and public protests have been met with violence.

The enduring lesson of dam development is that when it involves forced evictions and resettlement with inadequate compensation, the end result is life-threatening conditions and conflicts that threaten cultural diversity, livelihood, and life itself. This legacy of dam development has been thoroughly documented by affected communities, advocates, independent scientists, financiers, and the World Commission on Dams. To what effect? Not only have we failed to learn from our mistakes, we are now setting out to repeat these mistakes. And this time, the stakes are even higher.

In the past few years, thousands of new large hydroelectric dam projects around the world have been announced or are in the planning and early construction phases. Hydroelectric energy has been adopted by the world’s nations as an appropriate strategy to combat global climate change and offset predicted water shortages. Over a thousand large dam projects have been announced in China. Every river on both sides of the Himalaya will be modified in some way. Turkey has recently proposed its intent to privatize its rivers and lakes, selling the right to develop and control water resources for 49-years to private corporations. And, projects that were formerly proposed and dismissed because of their adverse social and environmental impact, are back again – like the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon. The World Bank financing for this dam was canceled in 1989 following Amazonian Indian protests. Today, financing is available, and some 15,000 Kayapo and other Amazonian groups are again threatened and they are protesting over the possibility of forced eviction and the inevitable loss of a way of life.

This new boom in dam development is being sold to the public and project financiers as measures that will improve local and national economies, strengthen national security, and combat global warming. Regardless of the validity of these selling points, it is important to note that there are other agendas at work here.

Consider, for example, the Southeast Anatolia project in Turkey, where 22 dams are being built in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins to fuel 19 hydroelectric plants and allow irrigation for intensive export crop production. This development is in the heart of ancient Kurdistan, and the rising waters will do more than drown the ancient cities, they will create a watery barrier between Kurdish populations in Iraq and Syria and forcibly displace many of the remaining Kurdish communities within Turkey. The construction of the Ataturk Dam alone displaced some 11,000 Kurds. The Ilisu Dam project promises the dispossession of another 36,000 or so people. With a countryside already decimated by war, almost half the rural Kurdish villages and hamlets were destroyed by Turkish security forces during the 15-year war with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and some 3 million surviving Kurds fled to the cities, the depopulation accompanying dam development appears to be Turkey’s final solution for removing the threat of a Kurdish state.

Here is a scary thought: consider these changes on a global scale.  Map out where dams are planned or being built. Add an overlay of biodiversity hot spots. Add another overlay of cultural diversity, where the worlds remaining indigenous groups and ethnic minorities reside.  And, then, add a final overlay of known and as yet undeveloped mineral and energy reserves. You will see a dismaying convergence. The proposed and planned dams will generate a lot of hydroelectricity allowing the extraction and processing of gold, nickel, copper, silver, uranium, oil shale, and other critical resources, and providing the power to transform the water molecule, thus creating hydrogen fuels for the cars of the future. And it will most assuredly threaten, if not wipe out, a huge portion of the world’s remaining cultural and biodiversity. How will people respond to these threats? In the event that their protests are futile, where will these people go? How will they survive? And what consequences will we see in global rates of poverty, health, misery, and violence, from their collective experiences with dam development and displacement?

We live in a time of immense crisis.  The lessons we learn from examining the legacies of past dam development and addressing ulcerating conditions in meaningful ways – with political processes and actions that repair, make amends, and make peace – these are lessons in the meaning of the term security. Dealing with dam legacy issues and rebuilding a sustainable way of life requires governance and action that prioritizes human and environmental security over profit and power. It’s a legacy we can’t afford to ignore.

Barbara Rose Johnston is an anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Center for Political Ecology, and a member of the expert advisory group for UNESCO’s Water and Cultural Diversity Project.  She is the co-author of The Consequential Dangers of Nuclear War: the Rongelap Report. Her documentation of dam legacy issues in Guatemala is available in Spanish and English at http://www.centerforpoliticalecology.org/chixoy.html. She can be reached at: bjohnston@igc.org

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