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Calling All CounterPunchers!
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Today's Stories November 7 / 9, 2008 Jean Bricmont November 6, 2008 Frank J. Menetrez John Chuckman P. Sainath Joshua Frank Edna Canetti John Ross Norman Solomon Fawzia Afzal-Khan Robert Weissman Harvey Wasserman Website of the Day
November 5, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair Chuck Spinney Ishmael Reed Chris Floyd Binoy Kampmark Michael Donnelly David Macaray Peter Morici Manuel Garcia, Jr. William Willers Website of the Day November 4, 2008 Kathleen Christison James Ridgeway Winslow T. Wheeler Mike Whitney Conn Hallinan Holly M. Barker Ashley Smith Andy Worthington Martha Rosenberg Stephen Martin Doug Lummis Carlos Fierro Website of the Day November 3, 2008 Patrick Cockburn John Kennedy O'Hara Peter Montague Steve Conn Andrew Gebhardt Ron Jacobs Ralph Nader Niranjan Ramakrishnan Uri Avnery Dave Lindorff Fred Gardner DC Larson David Michael Green Val Strange Tuli Kupferberg / Website of the Day
October 31 , 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Douglas Valentine Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Dr. Ignacy Nowopolski Alan Maass William P. O’Connor Patrick Irelan Brian Cloughley Mats Svensson Binoy Kampmark Steve Conn Alan Farago Morton Skorodin Robert Bryce Wajahat Ali David Yearsley Dennis Loo Pam Martens Stephen Martin Richard Rhames Ramzy Baroud Missy Beattie Howard Lisnoff Richard Neville Saul Landau / Kim Nicolini Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 30, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair Vijay Prashad Paul Craig Roberts Glen Ford Stanley Heller William Loren Katz Joshua Frank James McEnteer Felice Pace Jonathan Cook Reza Fiyouzat Website of the Day
October 29, 2008 Arno J. Mayer Eric Toussaint Matt Gonzalez Steven Conn Jonathan Cook Patrick Bond Ramzi Kysia Douglas Valentine Stephen Martin Margaret Dooley-Sammuli Amee Chew Website of the Day
October 28, 2008 James G. Abourezk Andy Worthington Gary Leupp Paul Craig Roberts Mike Whitney Gregory V. Button Ralph Nader P. Sainath Martha Rosenberg Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 27, 2008 Michael Hudson Barbara Rose Johnston John Dinges Mike Whitney Mary Lynn Cramer Greenspan's Higher Power Alan Farago David Michael Green Andy Worthington George Wuerthner Niranjan Ramakrishnan Website of the Day October 24 / 26, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Ishmael Reed Mike Whitney Don Santina Scott Boehm Saul Landau Ron Jacobs Binoy Kampmark Linn Washington Jr. Nicole Colson Bernard Chazelle Brian Jones Christopher Brauchli Benjamin Dangl Val Strange Steve Early David Macaray Allison Kilkenny Richard Rhames Jim Bell Kris De Welde Barry Clemson Adam Engel Mark Scaramella Tuli Kupferberg Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 23, 2008 Allan J. Lichtman Todd Chretien John Ross Peter Morici Mats Svensson Marlene Martin Robert Jensen / Margaret Kimberley Deepak Tripathi David Morris Website of the Day October 22, 2008 Brian Cloughley Heather Gray Jeff Birkenstein Ralph Nader DC Larson David Swanson Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor Race and the Election: When the "Real" America Enters the Voting Booth Larry Everest Robert Fantina Martha Rosenberg Stephen Martin Website of the Day October 21, 2008 Vijay Prashad Paul Craig Roberts Corey D. B. Walker Steve Breyman Eric Toussaint Wajahat Ali Robert Weitzel Brendan Cooney Dave Lindorff Marqueece Harris-Dawson / Bob Wing Patrick B. Barr Omar Barghouti Website of the Day October 20, 2008 Michael Hudson Anthony DiMaggio Tariq Ali Uri Avnery Bill Quigley Ben Rosenfeld David Michael Green William S. Lind Chris Genovali Stephen Martin Howard Lisnoff David Yearsley Website of the Day October 17 / 19, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Pam Martens Paul Craig Roberts Mike Whtney Michael D. Yates Suzanne Smith Carl Boggs Ralph Nader Fidel Castro Dave Marsh Saul Landau Jo Guldi Kevin Zeese Larry Everest Steve Early David Macaray Ben Terrall Missy Beattie Don Monkerud Helen Redmond Dan Bacher Wajahat Ali Farzana Versey Vladimir Frolov Kim Nicolini Poets Basement Website of the Day
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Weekend Edition Just a Match AwayThe Politics of FireBy JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Riverside, California. Sooner or later all big fires become political events. Even before becalmed Santa Ana winds and mountain sleet quenched the blazes in southern California, politicians from both parties raced to exploit the charred landscape for their own advantage—a kind of political looting while the embers still glowed. Republicans, naturally, pointed an incendiary finger at environmentalists, rehashing their tired mantra that restrictions on logging had provided the kindling for the inferno that consumed 3,600 homes (largely in Republican districts) and took twenty human lives (the non-human body count will never be tallied). Not to be outdone, Democrats parroted a similar line, but in more bombastic tones. They tried to affix the blame on George W. Bush, alleging that our chainsaw president had rebuffed desperate pleas from Gray Davis for money to finance the logging off of beetle-nibbled forests in the parched San Bernadino Mountains. So here the two parties converge once again, harmonized in their fatuous contention that more logging will prevent forest conflagrations. It didn’t take long for this unity, soldered by the flames of southern California, to find a way to express itself in Congress. On Halloween Eve of 2003, the Senate passed the so-called Healthy Forest Initiative with just a paltry fourteen votes of dissent. This bill is the no-holds-barred logging plan crafted by Bush’s forest czar, Mark Rey, a former ace timber-industry lobbyist who now oversees the Forest Service from his perch as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture. Using fire prevention as a pretext, the legislation authorizes a kind of pre-emptive strike of logging across more than 20 million acres of federal lands. It also exempts the blitzkrieg of cutting from adherence to most environmental laws, and shields it from legal challenges by pesky green groups. Although environmentalists roundly derided the plan as a gift to big timber, it was embraced and championed in the senate by a cohort of top rank Democrats, including California’s Dianne Feinstein, Oregon’s Ron Wyden, and Montana’s Max Baucus, the political playmate of celeb enviro Robert Redford. The version of the bill that passed the senate was spun as a compromise brokered by these three luminaries. In fact, the logging legislation was essentially the same bill that Rey dreamed up for Bush and his backers in big timber and the building industry. Except the Democrats were more generous, increasing the funding for the $2.9 billion plan by $289 million more than even the White House requested. Feinstein, long a favorite of the Sierra Club, was the lead perpetrator of soothing myths about the bill. “This legislation is not a logging bill,” Feinstein said. “This legislation would merely allow the brush to be cleared out.” She makes it sound like a weekend clean up operation, when the reality is more akin to the silvicultural equivalent of Shock and Awe. There’s no money in clearing brush or thinning small trees. And let’s be clear, the Healthy Forests Initiative, which should land in the PR Hall of Fame in the category of “most deceptively titled bills,” is all about making money for timber companies. Feinstein’s legislation underwrites the logging of big trees, many of them in roadless areas far removed from even the most advanced tentacles of suburban sprawl. In exchange, she doles out to complacent environmentalists—the Pavlovian dogs of the political establishment—a few tiny old-growth reserves as morsels, knowing that they can always be logged later. Hush puppies, indeed. So the timber industry didn’t have to break a sweat to achieve their fondest objective. Politicians from both parties, along with the media, did their work for them. The public fears fire more than other natural events, such as earthquakes or tornadoes. Fires seem preventable. People want to believe there’s a political fix, and congress is anxious to feed that illusion. But the forests and chaparral of southern California are meant to burn. This is an ecosystem born, reared, and shaped by fire. Once or twice every twenty years for the past 10 millennia these forests and scrublands have been scorched with fires at least as intense as those which blazed this autumn. Logging off big (or little) trees won’t alter that ecological reality in the least, except, perhaps, to exacerbate it. Wildland fires are linked most firmly to periods of prolonged drought. The longer the drought, the bigger the fires. Indeed, logging will simply remove from the forest the hardiest trees, the very ones that have survived previous fires. In their place will come new logging roads which will open up tempting new avenues for forests arsonists. The fires may also come more frequently because of economic factors. During recessions, arson-sparked forest fires become more common. At least three of the big California fires were deliberately set. Firefighting, which is almost useless in combating forest fires, is big business. And increasingly it’s a corporate business. Under Clinton and Bush, firefighting has been privatized. That business needs fires—the bigger the better—in order to prosper. A government subsidy is just a match away. Firefighting and military expenditures are the last remnants of Keynsian economics thriving in the American system these days. Congress blindly writes blank checks for both enterprises regardless of their utility. Of course, global warming also plays a role. The West is becoming drier and hotter. In the future, scrubland and forest fires will become more frequent, more intense, and burn longer than in the past. But don’t expect action from the current crop of politicians on that front either. The congress is more likely to hand out tax breaks for designer SUVs than to give a dime to solar energy or raise fuel-efficiency standards. In the post-9/11 landscape, Bush has made the conspicuous burning of fossil fuels a patriotic emblem of American manliness. Simply put: fire can’t be excluded from these ecosystems, but the endless march of subdivisions and mountain resorts can be halted. (Indeed, wildfires might be thought of as a naturopathic remedy of sorts, a kind of ecological radiation treatment for the cancer of urban sprawl.) Of course, none of the politicians on the scene today will entertain notions of even the least restriction on further development of the shrinking forests, deserts, and chaparral of the arid and fire-prone West. Instead, they try to pacify the developers and homeowners with the comforting illusion that smart-bomb logging and beefed up firefighting can keep the inevitable infernos in check. It’s a dangerous delusion that cost twenty lives in the fires and left thousands displaced. The rich will survive to build again, bigger and sturdier structures, with irrigated lawns, swimming pools and tile roofs. The insurance companies are pressed by politicians to pay up in full so that the building trades can prosper. But what will become of the poor and uninsured, the true human victims of these autumn fires? One calculation by the Los Angeles Times estimated that 32 percent of the residents evacuated from the southern California fires were welfare recipients, which means they were impoverished women and children. How many more were poor men? Elderly? Migrant workers? The desperate people who tend the homes of the Riverside and Big Bear elites. Where will they end up? The final victim in all of this is environmental movement itself. It is clearly defunct at the operational level. The green establishment vowed that stopping the Healthy Forest Initiative was their top legislative priority. But their campaign, which tried to lay all the blame on Bush and his gang of Republican ultras, was reduced to cinders with those California fires and the carrion feeders of the Democratic Party. They got creamed eighty to fourteen, betrayed by legislators, including Feinstein, Wyden, Boxer, Murray, and Baucus, who they had previously certified as champions of the green cause. The big greens can’t even go down fighting. With the blood still fresh on the floor from the slaughter in the senate, a representative from The Wilderness Society told the Idaho Statesman that the legislation “offers workable solutions to forest problems, as long as the government follows through with its promises.” There you have it. With one move, the Wilderness Society yanked the rug from beneath the grassroots greens and at the same time stamped its imprimatur on logging as a tool to fight forest fires. Given a chance, the forests of the San Bernadinos will recover. The same can’t be said for the credibility of the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This article is adapted from Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes From the Dark Side of the Earth. Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.
New in the Print Edition of CounterPunch For his 20-year stretch as Fed chairman, they all fawned on him – presidents, Congress, the press. Only a handful of left economists said he was pushing the economy over the cliff. Now Greenspan admits it in a humiliating confession. As the world’s financial structure tumbles in ruins, guess what? “I found a flaw in the model… To the extent that I figure out where it happened and why, I will change my views.” Read Frederick Claremont’s savage assessment of the fool who has plunged millions into misery. Also in our new issue: Bill Hatch on the story of one foreclosure; Kristian Williams on police torture in Chicago. Only in CounterPunch newsletter! Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and gear make great presents. Order CounterPunch By Email For Only $35 a Year !
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New in the CP Print Edition! For his 20-year stretch as Fed chairman, they all fawned on him – presidents, Congress, the press. Only a handful of left economists said he was pushing the economy over the cliff. Now Greenspan admits it in a humiliating confession. As the world’s financial structure tumbles in ruins, guess what? “I found a flaw in the model… To the extent that I figure out where it happened and why, I will change my views.” Read Frederick Claremont’s savage assessment of the fool who has plunged millions into misery. Also in our new issue: Bill Hatch on the story of one foreclosure; and Kristian Williams on police torture in Chicago. Only in CounterPunch newsletter! Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Waiting for Lightning
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