Today's Stories

July 18, 2008

Corey D. B. Walker
A Kinder, Gentler Imperialism?

July 17, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Airport Gestapo

James G. Abourezk
Big Oil's Raid on the Great Plains

Ralph Nader
D.C. Socialists Save Crashing Capitalists

Allan J. Lichtman
Conservative Denial

Andy Worthington "Screwed Up" and "Abused": Omar Khadr's Interrogations at Gitmo

Ronnie Cummins
Move Over MoveOn

July 16, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Star Whores: How John McCain Doomed Mt. Graham

Paul Craig Roberts
War Crimes Paradox

Conn Hallinan
To the Edge in the Middle East

Dave Lindorff
Torture for Torturers?

William S. Lind
Running the Narrows in Iraq

Christopher Brauchli
Sweepstakes Politics

Website of the Day
History of Iraqi Art

July 15, 2008

Michael Hudson
Why the Bail Out of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is Bad Economic Policy

Brian Cloughley
Iran's Missile Tests

Patrick Cockburn
Sadr's Militia May Live to Fight Another Day

John Ross
Crunchtime for Mexico's Oil

Howard Lisnoff
When Torture Was Practiced on U.S. Soil

Website of the Day
Rachel Corrie Soccer Tournament

July 14, 2008

Uri Avnery
Will Israel and / or the US Attack Iran?

Paul Craig Roberts
Enabling Tyranny

Trish Schuh
Talking to Iran's Only Jewish Member of Parliament: an Interview with Morris Motamed

Patrick Cockburn
Immunity in Iraq

Mike Whitney
Betancourt Unbound

Alan Farago
Will Miami's Cubans Vote Blue?

Seth Sandronsky
Taxing U.S. Stocks and Bonds

Phyllis Pollack
Stones Paint It Black

Website of the Day
Our Pal in Butte, Jackie Corr, RIP

July 12 / 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Lock and Load--It's the Law!

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Origins of the Western Greens

James Abourezk
Talking World War III Blues: From Dylan to Iran

Nicole Colson
The Ethanol Scam

Stan Cox
Fixing a Broken Agriculture

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Is There an Oil Shortage?

Wajahat Ali /
Omid Safi
The Future of Iran: an Interview with Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi

John Stauber
There May be a Left, But is it Moving? An Interview with David Sirota

Alan Farago
The Crash of the King of Liquidity

Missy Beattie
Dark Neighborhoods

Robert Fantina
Bush's Last Yes Man: Canada, Guantanamo and Yankee Poodles

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak Hires the Mosque

Gregory Kafoury
After the Obama Betrayal

Fran Shor
The Audacity of Hype

Martha Rosenberg
Why Heifer International is Rolling in Dung

David Macaray
Will There be an Actors Strike?

Andrew Wimmer
No Lies! No War!

Ron Jacobs
They Call Me the Seeker

Farzana Versey
The Kashmir Chiaroscuro

Kim Nicolini
Angelina Jolie's Wanted: Taking the M-Fers Down with Guns and Exploding Rats

Poets' Basement
Wright, Fleming, Solomon and Birnbaum

Website of the Weekend
Parsing Jesse Ventura

July 11, 2008

Kevin Alexander Gray
Why Does Barack Obama Hate My Family?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Historical Amnesia and the Shoot Down of Iran Air Flight 655

Peter Morici
Breaking Down the Trade Deficit

Mike Whitney
Worse Than McCain?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Oiling the War Machine

Robert Weissman
Crime, Punishment and ExxonMobil

Ramzy Baroud
The Not-So-Historic Barak-Talabani Handshake

Kelly Overton
If There is a Chimp Heaven

Adrian Burgos
In Praise of Jules Tygiel

Website of the Day
Wendell Berry on Mountaintop Removal

July 10, 2008

Brian McKenna
McCain's Melanoma Cover-Up

Paul Craig Roberts
Watching Greed Murder the Economy

Saul Landau
Mississippi River Blues

Ron Jacobs
Who Will Leave Iraq First?

Joshua Frank
Cutting Deals with Big Timber's Darth Vader

Peter Morici
What's Driving the Wall Street Rout

Alan Maass
Jesse Helms Finally Does the Right Thing

Robert Weissman
Humanitarian Failure at the G8

William Blum
Dr. Strangelove

Alan Farago
Coral Reef Meltdown

Website of the Day
Lieberman Must Go!

July 9, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Are They Really Oil Wars?

Luis Rodriguez
The Deadly Fallout from Gang Injunctions

Sheldon Richman
What's Wrong with Selling Your Vote?

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Lessons from Sa'di of Shiraz on "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"

Chad Hanson
Blowing Smoke: Logging Industry Lies on Forest Fires and Climate Change

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Problems with the FISA Bill

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Defining Deviancy Down with FISA

Dave Lindorff
Paul Krugman's Blind Spot

Stanley Heller
A Damned Good Assembly

Philip Rizk
Sick at the Gaza Crossing

Website of the Day
Mumia on Nader

July 8, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Riding the Colombia Gravy Train

Laura Carlsen
North America Doesn't Exist: the New Geography of Trade

Mike Whitney
Bush's Rampage in Somalia

Andy Worthington
Scandal at Diego Garcia

Patrick Irelan
The Empire Goes to the Movies

Chellis Glendinning
The Un-tied States of America

David Macaray
A Union Story

Dave Lindorff
Mumia's Long-Shot Appeal

John Chuckman
The Myths of Independence Day

Phillip Doe
FISA and the Decline of America

Website of the Day
Daniel Ellsberg on Warrantless Wiretap Bill

July 7, 2008

Patrick Bond
Can Reparations for Apartheid Profits be Won in US Courts?

Kathy Kelly
Cold Shoulders

Andy Worthington
Repatriation as Russian Roulette

Clifton Ross
A Rescue Staged for the Screen

Elizabeth Schulte
Obama's War Room

Ralph Nader
The Patriotism of Deeds

Dave Lindorff
Keeping Count

Binoy Kampmark
The World According to Jesse Helms

Stephen Fleischman
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Change

Website of the Day
Time for a Change

July 5 / 6, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Could Anyone be "Worse" Than Bush?

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Preliminary Notes from No Man's Land

Patrick Cockburn
Blowback from a Strike on Iran

Mike Whitney
Hunkering Down in Afghanistan with Field Marshall Obama

Robert Fantina
Obama, Iraq and Change

Binoy Kampmark
The Anwar Case: Snitching and Sodomizing

Rannie Amiri
Can Nasrallah Unite Lebanon?

Eric Ruder
Hidden Casualties

Brian Cloughley
Israel Flexes Its Muscles

William Blum
Some Thoughts on Patriotism

Frank Barat
The One-Word Solution

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Phony Pollution Accounting

David Yearsley
Rubbert Shines, as US Envoy Puts Foot in His Mouth

Ron Jacobs
U.S. Blues

Karim Makdisi
On Soccer and Politics in Lebanon

Wendy Thompson /
Chris Kutalik
What Can We Learn from the American Axle Strike?

N.D. Jayaprakash
The NPT as a Roadblock to Disarmament

Ramzy Baroud
Journalistic Imperatives

Kelly Overton
Animal Rights and Obama

Richard Neville
Bitch Fights and Tomorrow's Top Model

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Gibbons, Matson and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Ginsberg and Cassady on "Extremists"

July 4, 2008

Kathy Kelly
Istiklal

Dave Lindorff
My War Story

Paul Krassner
Confessions of a Barista

Jackie Corr
In the Footsteps of Evel Knievel: Obama Heads Back to Butte

Laray Polk
Military-Industrial Convergence

Dan Bacher
Dead Runs: Salmon Fishing Banned in Central Valley Rivers

Walter Brasch
The Rocket's Red Glare--May be Chinese

Charles Modiano
Hall of Fame Hypocrisy

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Independence Day

July 3, 2008

Sharon Smith
Exxon's Legal Guardians

Andy Worthington
Another Torture Victim Gets Charged

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA and the Elephant in the Room

Peter Morici
Crisis Grips the Jobs Market

Ramzi Kysia
Breaking Into a Prison

Martha Rosenberg
Mandatory School Milk and the Early Death of Football Players

Anne Landman
Who Really Benefits From Voluntary Codes of Corporate Conduct?

Dave Zirin
Grand Theft Hoops

Kristin Bricker
US Contractor Leads Torture Training in Mexico

Website of the Day
Bush Tours America to Survey Damage from His Presidency

July 2, 2008

Patrick Irelan
Holy Obama

Vijay Prashad
Lunch with Karzai

Brian Cloughley
Sense of Honor, French and US Style

Ralph Nader
Economic Domino Theory

Robert Fantina
General Stupidity: McCain, Obama and Clark

Dave Lindorff
What's So Special About Veterans?

Parvez Ahmed
Obama and Those Pesky Muslim Rumors

Robert Bryce
The Democrats and Off-Shore Drilling

Website of the Day
King Corn: Q&A

July 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Two Months Later, Seymour Hersh Strains to Catch Up With CounterPunch

Mike Whitney
Getting to the Heart of America's Economic Crisis: an Interview with Michael Hudson

Douglas Macgregor
Obama's General?

Steven Higgs
Fighting the NAFTA Super-Highway

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland

Binoy Kampmark
The Global Seed Police

Dave Lindorff
Blood Money Democrats

Roger Burbach
Fighting Food Fascism

Richard W. Behan
The Story Behind George Bush's Lies

Gary Leupp
The McCain Edge Among Voters on Iraq

Website of the Day
Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice

July 18, 2008

Fighting King Coal in Appalachia

Ed's Chicken

By MIKE ROSELLE

I was in Charlie’s Bar when my cell phone rang. It was Floyd, and he wanted me to come down to Alabama so we could drive up and see Ed and Debby over the forth of July in West Virginia. Since summer is no time to be in the Rocky Mountains, and as July in central Alabama is known to be glorious, and just starting to get hot and sticky, I just couldn’t resist Floyds invitation to drive down to Birmingham in my brand new 1992 Honda station wagon.

When we got to Ed’s there wasn’t much going on. Debby was gone and Bobby and Joe were there from up the road and they were busy putting a full beer inside a chicken, can and all. This they wrapped with foil and perched on the smoker ass down. I had never seen anything like this done before, but after two hours the meat fell right off the bone. The beer, on the other hand, was not only flat and greasy, it burnt my lips.

On the fifth we went up to Larry Gibson’s place. Larry lives on what’s left of Kayford Mountain, right smack dab in the middle of coalfields of West Virginia. All around him mountains are being blown up and dumped in the creeks in order to extract a thin seam of coal that underlay’s the entire region. Every year Larry throws one of the best party’s of the summer on the mountain, so people can come up and celebrate both the beauty of the Mountain get as peed off about Mountain Top Removal as he is.

It works pretty well. If you stand and look in one direction, you see the mountain. If you look in another, you see a drag line literally flattening the mountain and dumping it in the creek. It makes you so mad that you want to walk right over there and start shouting at the people running those dam machines. It’s no wonder he doesn’t let anyone drink liquor up there.

I sat down at the table and talked to Larry for a bit. He has been trying to get his neighbors off the coal habit for most of his sixty some odd years. Larry has been fighting to save his mountain for a quarter of a century, and thousands of people have made the trip up here and listened to him just the way I am.

Larry has had many threats to his life, but is unafraid. Both his hat and tee shirt are bright florescent green, with anti strip mining slogans printed in bold face type. “Larry” I said, “Doesn’t that shirt make you a better target?” “Well yes”, he responds, “It does…” he paused, “But if I won’t do it, how can I ask anyone else to?”

Everyone up here today feels this way. By coming up to Kayford Mountian you are not just making a statement. If you live in the Coal River Valley you are taking a risk. In the city, its easy to be a protestor. Here you can feel the danger in the air. Yet everyone is calm, a band is playing Appalachian Music, a pig was bar-b-qued and somewhere Floyd had found something called “Apple Pie”. It was in a glass jar and contained no pie. It gave you courage, which is what you need up here.

Larry was getting edgy. He wanted everyone to leave and be off the mountain before dark. Previous years had seen violence, and it was safer to travel together. We drove back to Ed’s house on the Creek. Ed was going up to New York City in a rented van with eight other West Virginians to attend New York Loves Mountains, a multi media festival about mountain top removal and a fundraiser for the grassroots effort. There were two seats left in the van so Floyd and I decided to join them. By the time we left, we had two vans full.

It is four lane asphalt super highway from Beckley West Virginia all the way to Brooklyn. If you drove through Beckley you might even think that coal mining doesn’t look so bad. You can’t see anything like what you would see from Kayford Mountain. You don’t see the poverty, or what are fast becoming ghost towns as people are forced to flee because the mountains are literally being torn from beneath them. You can get sushi up in Charlotte, but in towns like Whitesville and other towns in the region restaurants and groceries stores are closing up, houses are abandoned, the paint flaking, the porches rotting, and the only thing for sale at the corner store is beer, gas and chips. Hanging on, fighting, means also watching these towns, these communities, many which were established at the dawn of the industrial revolution, die.

But the four-lane also reveals another truth about Appalachia; it is no longer isolated from the rest of the world as it once was. The children know how to use a computer, they watch cooking shows on TV and listen to many of the same bands that children do everywhere. Most of them I suspect have higher aspirations than going to work in a coal mine as their relatives have done for generations. The lack of real opportunities for these children, and their constant exposure to toxic dust, water and air is the real tragedy of mountain top removal. While they four-lane brings in tourists and produce, and all of the amenities of modern life, for many of these children, it will be a one way road leading beyond the hollers and ridges of West Virginia, because not only is West Virginia exporting coal, it is exporting it’s people, a vast Hillbilly Diaspora, and one can not travel far in this country without meeting them and hearing their stories. No one is ever as homesick as a Hillbilly.

Arriving in New York I am surprised. Maria and Ed have been here before and have made many friends. Ed knows the subway, where to get the good pizza and the cheapest breakfast. Maria children are adventurous and curious and can navigate both the streets and the menus with ease. We settle in Brooklyn as easily as if we had just arrived in Ashville or Chattanooga. Its Thursday night after a ten hour drive and everything begins on Friday. Antrim, our guide and host, takes us to her favorite sushi joint, where the food is cheap and served in large quantities. “I thought you said this was sea food” grumbles Ed; “I don’t SEE anything I can eat”, and he set out to find a restaurant with a stove in it.

Friday everybody scatters, each with a list of appointments, meetings and social visits. We rendezvous later at Jalopy, which is a performance space that sells beer, but is not a bar. With all the Hillbilly music coming from the stage, and the crowd getting pumped up and slightly liquored, you could have fooled me. I have been to many “performances spaces” in San Francisco and I had never seen anything like this.

The best performance of the evening, as it turned out, would belong to Ed Wiley. He took to the stage to a big round of applause, from the New Yorkers, the Hillbillies, from the whole audience. Those who had not met him on his previous visits to the city had certainly met him by the time began to speak. Ed knows how to work a crowd. Most of them were already holding pamphlets in their hand that he had given them when he introduced himself shortly after they walked in the door.

I could not do justice to Ed’s story. It is a story of a journey he made from being a coal miner, not just a coal miner, but a mountain top remover, and a toxic waste dumper who even pumped a bunch of sludge into vacant mine shafts behind Maria’s house. “Now she’s my best friend.” he says. What got him thinking was his granddaughter, Kayla. It was not what was happening to her; she had been sick a lot. It was that he realized that he was doing it to her. It was as if he were struck down by lightning.

Since then both Ed and Maria have been on the road, often together, often separately, always taking advantage of every opportunity to talk about the harm that comes from burning coal. It is not some abstract harm. It is harm that they can see every day, in their communities, in their mountains, in their children. Leaving New York City with ten weary Hillbillies after the long weekend, I felt proud to have had the two of them take me around town and show me how shit gets done.

Note: Ed and Debbie Wiley working hard and I want them to go on the Salmon River with us in August. I have arranged a free six day trip down this wonderful river, but they will need some financial help in order to travel.

I think Ed and Debbie deserve a vacation. If you can help, please let me know. Preferably they'd want to take AMTRAK to Whitefish Montana where I would pick them up. You can also use the PAYPAL on the Lowbagger.org website, go to LBF (lowbagger foundation). We are tax deductible. Our goal is two thousand dollars so every little bit helps.

This is not a fundraising request. I want them on my boat.--MR

Mike Roselle can be reached at: mikeroselle@hotmail.com

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