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June 19, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti-Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
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TO
COUNTERPUNCH
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Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
June 19,
2002
Nature and Politics
Terry Lynn Barton's
Fire?
by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn
If you believe what the Forest Service interrogators
say, Terry Lynn Barton started the big fire in Colorado's Pike
National Forest by burning a letter from her estranged husband.
Maybe so, and possibly the jury will be forgiving when they hear
more details of Ms Barton's married life. But a jury might well
be equally forgiving if it turns out Terry Lynn started the fire
by setting fire to her pay stub.
After 18 years of dedicated service Terry
Lynn Barton's monthly pay was $1,485, which tots up to $17,820
a year. Try raising two kids on that in the greater metropolitan
area of Denver. She's being described in the press as "a
Forest Service technician" which is FS-speak for all-purpose
manual laborers cleaning up campgrounds, trail maintenance and
kindred grunt work.
Forget the Edward Abbeys, Jack Kerouacs
and Gary Snyders of the forest fire watchtowers, turning out
literature while communing with nature and scanning the ridge
lines for tell-tale plumes. The Forest Service, part of the USDA,
has long been notorious for exploiting its bottom-rung workers
more than any other agency. The laborers are often forced to
live in squalid housing under fairly harsh conditions with scant
benefits.
These grunts are the ones who have to
deal with visitors angered at having to pay as much as $40 in
annual passes for visits to forests in a particular area. Having
ponied up the money these visitors often find nature's temple
criss-crossed with logging roads, scarred by clear cuts or the
new, RV friendly rec sites blessed by recent administrations.
From the anguish and outrage of Barton's
superiors you'd think that you'd think that that the Forest Service
has always regarded fire as the devil's work.
A little perspective: this particular
Colorado fire has so far burned through something over 100,000
acres. The implication is that all these acres are blackened
zones of ash and carbonized stumps. Not so. Many of those acres
will have suffered minor scorching. And of course healthy forests
need fires as a natural and frequent catalyst to regeneration,
particularly in the conifer forests in Colorado.
But the Forest Service's policy has been
to suppress fires. In the middle and long term this policy leads
to huge fuel loads which, when the inevitable conflagration does
come, then burst out into the kinds of large scale burns that
we are now seeing across the West.
Responsibility for fires stretches far
higher up the bureaucratic chain than poor Ms Barton. Since the
days of Gifford Pinchot the Forest Service has seen fire-suppression
as a sure way to get a blank check from Congress. Fire-suppression
gets the Service the big ticket items, planes, helicopters and
so forth. Fire suppression is used to justify the Service's road
building budget and even logging programs.
The Forest Service says all fires are
bad and need to be suppressed with the help of huge disbursements
from Congress plus public vigilance. All children have the ursine,
self-righteous smirk of Smokey the Bear dinned into their psyches,
said bear being conjured into icon status 60 years ago after
the incredible popularity of that noted fire-fugitive, Bambi.
So the Forest Service needs fires, and
diligently sets them each year, under the rubric, Controlled
Burn, or Prescribed Fire. These regularly surge out of control,
as in the Los Alamos forests a couple of years ago, started by
the Park Service in Bandolier National Monument. The Forest Service
bigwigs okay fires and then summon ill-paid fighters to do the
dangerous work. Far more prudent would be to let the fires run,
but that of course would leave idle all the costly fire-fighting
machinery and expose the Forest Service to the wrath of the real
estate industry, which has raised million dollar homes in areas
certain to see a blaze some day.
Terry Lynn Barton faces twenty years
in prison while the timber industry licks its lips at the prospect
of "salvage logging" the Colorado forests. "Light
it and log it," as the old phrase goes. Once a forest burns,
existing restrictions go out the window, the Forest Service offers
up 100,000 acres for salvaging, and in go the timber companies,
hauling out the timber, immune to environmental restrictions.
You don't think timber companies have setting fires for years,
often with Forest Service complicity?
We sure hope Terry Lynn Barton gets a
good lawyer. He might start by asking a few pointed questions
about her treatment. Is the Forest Service trying to paint as
the John Walker Lindh of Colorado?
Today's
Features
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
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