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August 1, 2002
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
July 30, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Branding September 11
PS Burton
Financial
Journalism:
A Very Small Cog
Tom Stephens
Hypocrites in the House:
Fast Track After Midnight
Dave Marsh
Censorship
Goes Global
July 29, 2002
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
July 28, 2002
Bob Geary
Our Dinner
with Fidel Castro
July 27, 2002
Ian Daoust
The New
Mahler, Seattle Style
Gavin Keeney
Zizek
and Lenin
Ralph Nader
Citigroup
Heal Thyself
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
July 26, 2002
Jerre Skog
American
Dictatorship:
It Couldn't Happen...Could It?
Philip Farruggio
Lie,
Rob and Steal
Rep. Ron Paul
Monitor
Thy Neighbor
Ron Jacobs
Thinking
About the
Weather (Underground)
Walt Brasch
Ashcroft's War on Bookstores
July 25, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Paul
Krugman's Howl:
Populism, War and
the Melting Economy
Gavin Keeney
Van Morrison: In September
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
War
on Terrorism or
Police State?
July 24, 2002
Gary Leupp
An Islam Primer
July 23, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Battle
for Zuni Salt Lake
Ansar Ahmed
Am I with You, George?
Bill Christison
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US: Oppression Abroad Means
Repression at Home
July 22, 2002
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil
and the Taliban
July 21. 2002
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
Racist Eyes:
Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
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Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
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August
1, 2002
Dark Deeds
in the Black Hills
Daschle's Deal
Dooms the Sacred Land of the Sioux
by Jeffrey St. Clair
If there was even the smallest doubt before, it's
been eradicated now. The Black Hills National Forest in South
Dakota, where Crazy Horse and Black Elk went on vision quests,
must be returned to the Lakota Sioux for its own survival.
In 1868, the federal government signed
a treaty with the Lakota Sioux granting the tribe ownership of
most of western South Dakota, including the majestic Black Hills.
Six years later, the US tried to coerce the tribe, under threat
of starvation, to cede the Black Hills back to government so
that they could be ravaged for gold. The tribe wouldn't yield,
thus prompting Custer's rampages against the Sioux and eventual
demise at Little Big Horn. Eventually, the government seized
the land anyway, assassinated Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, and
confined the Sioux to the enforced poverty of the Pine Ridge
and Rosebud reservations, which functioned for years as little
more than concentration camps to house some of the most destitute
communities in the United States.
Much of the Sioux land ended up in the
hands of the federal government as part of the 1.5 million acre
Black Hills National Forest. The Black Hills, the tallest mountains
east of the Rockies, are an isolated range that rise up like
shadows off the sun-baked flatlands of South Dakota. The flanks
of the mountains are a kind of botanical crazy quilt, blending
Rocky Mountain species with those found in Great Plains, Midwestern
prairies and eastern deciduous forests. The Black Hills are the
eastern limit of the Ponderosa pine forests and about the only
place you can find unadulterated patches of montane grasslands.
For decades, the Sioux have pressed for
the return of these lands. Environmentalists, largely, have refused
to support the transfer, saying that the mountains would be better
off in the hands of the Forest Service. It's the old paternalism
that has stained mainstream environmentalism since John Muir
helped to evict the last remnants of the southern Miwok tribes
out of Yosemite so that the Park Service could run the show (Yosemite
is Miwok for "some among them (ie., the whites) are killers").
These days it's okay to quote Native American spirituality in
your fundraising letters, another thing entirely to trust the
tribes to take care of their own lands.
But this condescending line should no
longer wash with even the most gullible green. Now the sacred
mountains, which the Sioux call Paha Sapa, are being laid to
waste in a final frenzy to log off the little wild forests that
remains and environmentalists and top rank Democrats must share
the blame. In early July, two big time environmental groups,
the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, connived with the
top Democrat in the Senate, Tom Daschle, to doom some of the
last wild forest in the Black Hills to logging. Worse than that,
the deal exempted the clearcutting from compliance any environmental
laws.
Under the Daschle/Sierra Club/Wilderness
Society deal, which was quitely attached as a rider to the Defense
Appropriations Bill, the Forest Service will allow timber companies
to begin logging in the Beaver Park roadless area and in the
Norbeck Wildlife Preserve. These two areas harbor some of the
last remaining stands of old-growth forest in the Black Hills.
All of these timber sales will be shielded from environmental
lawsuits, even from organizations that objected to the deal.
The logging plan was consecrated in the
name of fire prevention. The goal of the bill, Daschle said,
"is to reduce the risk of forest fire by getting [logging]
crews on the ground as quickly as possible to start thinning."
It's long been the self-serving contention of the timber lobby
that the only way to prevent forest fires is to log them first.
The environmental movement has rightly countered that the real
problem is a century of unbridled logging of old growth forests
and fire suppression, which have created conditions ripe for
the catastrophic blazes that are scorching the West this summer.
In a single blow, the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society legitimized
the timber industry's cockeyed claim. And now there will be hell
to pay.
Surprised that such a deed could originate
in the office of Tom Daschle? Don't be. Despite what the League
of Conservation Voters might allege, Tom Daschle's never been
much of an environmentalist, especially in his home state. Indeed,
the leader of the Democrats in the senate has always carried
water for the big timber and mining companies that have done
so much damage to landscape of South Dakota. Occasionally, he
pipes up on high profile national issues, such as ANWR. But he
rarely has his heart in it. Witness his woefully inept attempt
to defeat the mad scheme to ship nuclear waste across the nation
to Yucca Mountain.
The Sioux certainly have no love for
Daschle. Daschle is a close friend and political ally of South
Dakota governor William Janklow, known for his rabidly anti-Indian
views. How anti-Indian is Janklow? In 1974 he told reporters:
"The only way to deal with the Indian problem in America,
is to put a gun to the AIM [American Indian Movement] leaders'
heads and pull the trigger." In 1983, Janklow sued writer
Peter Matthiessen for $23 million in an attempt to stop publication
of In
the Spirit of Crazy Horse--Matthiessen's great book on
the FBI's assault on the Pine Ridge reservation and the trial
of Leonard Peltier. Janklow's suit was eventually thrown out
of court.
Daschle also helped to organize the Open
Hills Association, a group of ranchers, mining companies and
timber groups that came together to oppose the return of the
Black Hills to the Sioux. A recent Sioux newsletter described
the Open Hills Association as espousing "overtly racist
views."
In 1999, Daschle engineered the passage
of the deceptively titled Wildlife Mitigation Act. The bill authorized
the transfer of 90,000 acres of land along the Missouri River
then controlled by the US Army Corps of Engineers to the state
of South Dakota. The land is inside both the 1851 and 1868 Ft.
Laramie Treaty boundaries and rightfully belongs to the Sioux
tribe. A contingent of Sioux elders and members of the Lakota
Student Alliance occupied LaFramboise Island, a sandbar in the
Missouri River near the state capitol, for over a year as a protest
against the transfer. Daschle didn't budge.
Daschle's also proven to be the kind
of senator who is always willing to screw over the downtrodden
to help a big time political contributor. An example. Around
Christmastime of last year, Daschle quietly attached a rider
to the Defense Appropriations Bill granting total legal immunity
to the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Mining Company, which operates
the Homestake Gold mine in the Black Hills. This mine, which
was once owned by William Randolph Hearst and has been in nearly
continual operation since the Sioux were driven out of the mountains,
has generated more than a billion dollars in revenue. George
Bush Sr. sits on their board of advisors.
The Sioux haven't seen a dime. But they
have seen the mine devour and despoil a huge chunk of their mountains.
When the gold runs out, the Homestake mine will leave behind
an environmental ruin of poisoned rivers, cyanide-laden leach
ponds, toxic tailings piles and a hole in the earth a mile wide
and 1,000-feet deep. Daschle's rider means that the US government
assumes the costs of cleaning all this up, amounting to a $50
million bail out for a foreign corporation. "This re-affirms
an unsurprising truth," says legal scholar Edward Lazarus.
"This country deals far more generously with foreign corporations
that buy our land than with the native peoples from whom we took
it."
The latest Black Hills deal, it appears,
was primarily geared to help Daschle's South Dakota colleague
Tim Johnson, himself only slightly to the left of Attila the
Hun when it comes to environmental issues, fend off a stiff Republican
challenge for his senate seat from the green-bashing Rep. Jim
Thune, who is currently the state's sole congressional representative.
Of course, this scenario only works if green Democrats vote for
Johnson in spite of his capitulations to the timber and mining
industries.
It's an old story, one we've recounted
time and again, that's taken an even darker, though entirely
predictable, turn. The Black Hills are one of the most butchered
national forests in the West. Less than 5 percent of the forest
remains in an old-growth condition, the rest is fragmented by
clearcuts and logging roads. Most of the remaining old-growth
forest is located in the Norbeck Wildlife Preserve and the Beaver
Park Roadless Area. In the 1990s, the Forest Service planned
massive timber sales for both places.
The battle to save the Norbeck Wildlife
Preserve goes back almost ten years, a back and forth war of
appeals and lawsuits that culminated in 2001 with a landmark
ruling by the 10th circuit court of appeals that the Norbeck
timber sales were illegal. The environmentalists also won a court
case stopping the Beaver Park sales.
In his defense of the deal, Daschle claims
that it was reached through a consensus process of the "local
stakeholders." This is untrue. In fact, two of the original
plaintiffs in the lawsuits, Jeff Kessler and Brian Brademeyer,
objected to the proposed settlement. In recent testimony before
congress, Mark Rey, the former timber lobbyist who now serves
assistant secretary of Agriculture in charge of the Forest Service,
said plainly, "Our counsel have advised that there is no
effective legal process to implement the modified agreement through
the District Court, in the absence of the two non-settling plaintiffs."
Rey advised that the only way to get the logging started was
to steamroll the local enviros with a rider exempting the sales
from judicial review. That's where Daschle, the Sierra Club and
the Wilderness Society came in to save the day for big timber,
Daschle and Johnson.
"We fought a decade to save those
forests and finally won an appeals court victory," says
Denise Boggs, director of the Utah
Environmental Congress. "Daschle and the big greens
sold us out in ten minutes. we are tired of doing good work to
protect
biologically significant areas only to have the Sierra Club and
Wilderness Society enter and undermine our work and then cut
us entirely out of the process by not allowing those who differ
with them to appeal or litigate."
Some environmental big wigs have called
Jeff Kessler, head of the Biodiversity
Conservation Alliance, an obstructionist for not going
along. He doesn't shy away from the charge. "You bet we're
obstructionists," says Kessler. "We're obstructing
the fruitless and environmentally damaging logging that won't
significantly reduce risk to lives and property but that does
mislead the public about fire safety, we're obstructing illegal
activities by the Forest Service, we're obstructing stealth law
making that erodes our important environmental laws and the checks
and balances designed by our founding fathers, and we're obstructing
the loss of important old-growth forest and wildlife habitat."
But here's where the story takes off
to another level. It's not just the Black Hills that have been
put at risk. What's good for Daschle's backyard, the chainsaw
delegation in Congress argues, must be good for the rest of the
nation. Thus a little backroom deal in South Dakota can quickly
metastasize into a cancer that ravages forests from Vermont to
Alaska.
"After hearing all the hand-wringing
from environmentalists downplaying the impact of appeals and
litigation, it's nice to see that the highest-ranking Democrat
in the nation agrees that these frivolous challenges have totally
crippled forest managers," said Rep. Scott McInnis, Colorado
Republican and chairman of the House Resources subcommittee on
forests and forest health. "It will be interesting indeed
to find out if what's good for Mr. Daschle's goose is also good
for the West's gander. We intend to find out."
And it's not just right-wingers like
McInnis who are itching to use the Daschle rider as a template
for a broader assault on the national forests and environmental
laws. Senate Dianne Feinstein, a darling of the Sierra Club,
announced last week that she intends to seek a similar exemption
from environmental lawsuits for logging in California's national
forests and may support an amendment that applies the provision
to all national forests.
Daschle seems open to the idea. "I
think the Black Hills could be a model for the rest of the country,"
Daschle told the Rapid City Journal in late July.
This is an entirely predictable turn
of events. But the Sierra Club remains blindly behind Daschle
and refuses to denounce his bill as a mistake. "We appreciate
the work of Senators Daschle and Johnson to bring all the parties
to the table to hammer out a deal that would ensure the safety
of South Dakotans and continued protections for America's National
Forests," writes Sierra Club CEO Carl Pope in a defense
of the deal. "This is how these matters should be addressed."
There's a lot of caviling with words
here. Pope is getting expert at this kind of Clintonian parsing
in his press releases. In the first place, the agreement wasn't
supported by local environmentalists. In fact, the Sierra Club's
own local representative, Brian Brademeyer, walked out of the
talks once he saw where they were headed. He also quit his Sierra
Club post. Pope's organization, it must be noted, is on record
as opposing all commercial timber sales on federal lands, but
that didn't prohibit him from signing off on logging in two of
the most sacrosanct types of land in the national forest system:
a roadless area and a wildlife preserve.
When Bush came into office, the mainstream
enviros howled that he was putting timber industry flacks, such
as Mark Rey, in charge of the national forests. A case of the
fox guarding the henhouse, they charged. It's clear now that
an equal threat comes from the leadership of the Democratic Party,
in the form of Tom Daschle and Dianne Feinstein, and enviro bureaucrats
who trade away forests, even in the sacred Black Hills, to keep
them in power. There's a difference. No one can accuse Mark Rey
of hypocrisy. He's never claimed to be a defender of nature.
That the Wilderness Society played a
key role here is hardly shocking. After all, this was the group
that was headed in the 1990s by a man who clearcut his own ranch
in Montana and when he was exposed tried to blame the scandal
on his wife.
One of the principal deal cutters was
Bart Koehler, now a flack for the Wilderness Society, whose main
claim to fame rests on the fact that he was one of the founding
members of Earth First! During Earth First! roadshows in the
early 1980s, Koehler dressed up as a singing cowboy called Johnny
Sagebrush. The act wasn't funny then; it's even less so now.
Koehler is only the latest of the founders
of Earth First! to opt for a plush office and a plump salary.
In 1989, Dave Foreman was arrested by the FBI on charges that
he conspired to knock down powerlines in Arizona. He saved his
hide by cutting a deal with prosecutors while his colleagues
Mark Davis and Peg Millet were sentenced to six and three years
in prison respectively. Then he renounced Earth First! and joined
the Sierra Club board. Today he claims that Earth First! was
really little more than a joke. Two other founders, Mike Roselle
and Howie Wolke, both recently defended a deal that consigned
thousands of acres in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana to
the chainsaw.
Edward Abbey must be grinding his teeth
in his grave at how smoothly these green radicals have turned
into political pimps for the Democratic Party, flashing their
enviro credentials as they put their green stamp of approval
on one clearcut after another. All in the name of pragmatism.
Koehler and Foreman used to fume at the Wilderness Society and
Sierra Club for just such sell-outs. To differentiate themselves
they coined the phrase "No compromise in the Defense of
Mother Earth" as a motto for Earth First! Nice slogan. Now
it has come back to haunt their every step.
As aging green heroes, these former rads
have coddled up to the very groups they used to revile as spineless
sell-outs and have taken money from the same foundations they
used to denounce as agents of big oil. It's all about getting
big. And the budgets of the big environmental groups have bloomed
since Bush got into the White House. The national Sierra Club
now has more than 500 professional staffers. That's more than
the timber industry and mining trade groups combined. Carl Pope,
the Sierra Club's CEO, makes about $100,000 a year-or $96,000
more than the per capita income on the Sioux's Pine Ridge reservation,
where 8 out of 10 adults are unemployed.
Yet, bigger isn't necessarily better.
Go ask Enron and Worldcom.
Grassroots greens are getting angry as
they've experienced the big groups undercut them time after time.
"The actions of the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society in
the Black Hills reinforces the accusations by the wise-use community
that the environmental movement lacks integrity and accountability,"
says Denise Boggs of the Utah Environmental Congress. "This
is yet one more shameful example of the Sierra Club and Wilderness
Society looking out for their political connections instead of
for the land and wildlife that must actually live with the repercussions
of their deal cutting."
In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that
the Sioux had been cheated out of the Black Hills. They awarded
the tribe $106 million in compensation. The tribe told the court
to keep its money. They wanted the land. Can you imagine the
Sierra Club or the Wilderness Society doing the same?
The Black Hills haven't seen such an
act of betrayal since the Crow offered to scout against the Sioux
for Custer. It's time to return the sacred mountains of Crazy
Horse now before Daschle and his cronies in Big Green can do
even more damage.
Today's Features
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
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