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America's First Terror War
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Today's Stories May 30, 2007 James Ridgeway May 29, 2007 Stephen Soldz Eliza Ernshire Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Evelyn Pringle Mike Whitney David Swanson John Holt Cynthia McKinney Martha Rosenberg Website of the Day
Bill Quigley Col. Dan Smith Cindy Sheehan Dr. Susan Block Jeeni Criscenzo Douglas Valentine Website of the Day
May 26 / 27, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Michael Donnelly Patrick Cockburn Franklin Lamb Jean Bricmont Gary Leupp James Petras William Peace Judith and John Sharpe Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Democracy in Iraq, Tyranny at Home? Jonathan M.
Feldman Dave Lindorff Missy Beattie Mike Whitney Badruddin Khan Ron Jacobs Zoe Blunt Arjun Chowdhury, Heather Gray N. D. Jayaprakash Joe Allen Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
Robert Jensen David Vest John Stauber Evelyn Pringle Corporate Crime Reporter Susan Rosenthal,
MD Roberto Rodriguez Steve Fournier Patrick McElwee Robert Weissman Website of the Day
Franklin Lamb Corporate Crime
Reporter Robert Fantina Norman Solomon Dave Lindorff Sen. Russell
Feingold Fred Gardner Mike Whitney Kevin Parsneau, Arjun Chowdhury
and Mark Hoffman Caroline Paul Eva Liddell Website of
the Day
Patrick Cockburn Rev. William
Alberts Joe DeRaymond Sudhanva Deshpande
Paul Craig Roberts Glen Ford Rannie Amiri China Hand Zoe Blunt Nivien Saleh Website of the Day
Robert Fisk Joshua Frank Harvey Wasserman David Mos Masumoto Sonja Karkar Conn Hallinan Dave Lindorff Jeffrey Kolakowski Evelyn Pringle Jim Baumer Website of the Day
Patrick Cockburn Nicole Colson John Ross Stephen Fleischman M. Shahid Alam Ron Jacobs Peter Rost, MD Alan Farago Paul Buchheit Website of
the Day
May 19 / 20, 2007 Andrew Cockburn Uri Avnery Peter Gelderloos Saul Landau Robert Fantina Fred Gardner Ralph Nader Jean Daniels Reza Fiyouzat Missy Beattie Robert Alvarez Sonja Karkar Dave Lindorff Jeff Sher Julian C. Holmes Clancy Sigal Prairie Miller James Murren Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
May 18, 2007 Adam Jones Sharon Smith Christopher Brauchli Peter Rost,
MD Denise Maloney Pictou David Swanson Ali Khan Susan Rosenthal,
M.D. Samer Assad CP News Service Website of the Day
May 17, 2007 Tariq Ali Yifat Susskind Dave Zirin Brian J. Foley W. John Green Eric Johnson-DeBaufre Badruddin Khan Martha Rosenberg China Hand Dan Vojir Website of the Day
Patrick Cockburn Ashley Dawson Joshua Frank Corporate Crime
Reporter Ray McGovern Glen Ford Joe Bageant Sonja Karkar Mickey S. Huff John Chuckman Kaz Dziamka Website of
the Day
May 15, 2007 Michael Neumann Patrick Cockburn Ashley Smith Marc Gardner Dave Lindorff Ben Terrall Ron Jacobs Harvey Wasserman Marcus Mabry Dr. Susan Block Website of the Day
May 14, 2007 Jennifer Roesch Jeffrey St.
Clair George Bisharat Diane Wachtell Ramzy Baroud Rosemary and
Walter Brasch Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Roberto Rodriguez Jonathan Culp Website of
the Day
May 12 / 13, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Patrick Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Diane Farsetta Ralph Nader Jean Bricmont Marcus Breen Joe Bageant Conn Hallinan Fred Gardner Juan Santos
Eve Bachrach Missy Comley
Beattie Ron Jacobs Niranjan Ramakrishnan Susie Day Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend May 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Kathleen Christison Mike Ferner John Holt Laurie Hasbrook Christopher
Brauchli Margaret Kimberley Dave Lindorff Nicole Colson John V. Walsh Website of the Day
May 10, 2007 Tariq Ali Patrick Cockburn Neve Gordon Marjorie Cohn David Rosen Alan Farago John Hellman Kathy Rentenbach BANCO Richard Rhames Website of the Day
Jeff Leys Patrick Cockburn Glen Ford Paula Rothenberg Kathryn Weber John Chuckman Jordan Flaherty Dave Lindorff Stephen Lendman Website of
the Day
May 8, 2007 Dave Lindorff Patrick Cockburn Corporate Crime Reporter Ralph Nader Malini Johar Schueller Juan Santos Dave Zirin Joshua Frank Evelyn Pringle Eamonn McCann Website of the Day
May 7, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Monica Benderman Greg Moses Rannie Amiri Fitrakis / Wasserman Fred Wilhelms Ramzy Baroud Bruce K. Gagnon T. W. Croft Sonja Karkar Website of the Day
Alexander Cockburn William Blum Uri Avnery Franklin Lamb Fred Gardner Lawrence R.
Velvel Missy Beattie Robert Fantina Carla Blank Linn Washington,
Jr. Stephen F. Jackson P. Sainath Anthony Papa James T. Phillips John Ross Stephen Lendman Ben Terrall CounterPunch
Newswire Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
May 4, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Col. Dan Smith Norman Solomon Azmi Bishara Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Kevin Zeese Bob Fitrakis Janet Kauffman Website of
the Day
May 3, 2007 Jeff Halper Christopher
Brauchli Dave Zirin Corporate Crime
Reporter Robert Fisk Mike Ferner Mike Whitney Pham Binh Dave Lindorff Michael A.
Johnson Website of the Day
May 2, 2007 Saul Landau Dr. Susan Block Carla Blank Margaret Kimberly Kevin Zeese Carlos Villareal Michael Dickinson Tim Shorrock Alevtina Rea William S.
Lind Website of the Day
Andrew Cockburn Fred Gardner Chase Madar Ralph Nader John V. Walsh Joshua Frank Leslie Radford Shaun Harkin Dave Lindorff Peter Rost,
MD Peter Linebaugh Website of
the Day
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May 30, 2007 Corporate America's Latest CounterAttackThe Green MasqueradeBy ALAN MAASS and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Jeffrey St. Clair: NONE. That's the short answer. Must we really elaborate? I remember being up in Alaska with the Inupiat, looking at Prudhoe Bay. BP wants to expand in every direction up there, into ANWR [the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge] on one side of Prudhoe Bay, and then into the Alaska Petroleum Reserve on the other side. And one of the Inupiat tribesman said to me, "They want it all." If they can't get into ANWR now, they'll go into the Alaskan Petroleum Reserve and drain that. Then they'll come back and get ANWR, and they'll drain that. And meanwhile, they're investing in solar and biofuels, too. They want it all. To pretend that this green enlightenment on behalf of BP or ARCO or any of the others has to do with anything other than maximizing their profits is a serious delusion. Oil and coal are almost free assets for corporations. They're not going to stop coal mining and burning coal until they're out of it--unless you regulate them out of that business. The free market is going to encourage them to dig up every last coal vein in Appalachia, using the most cost-efficient method, which is mountaintop removal. This is the most noxious, environmentally destructive form of mining imaginable, but they're even using a kind of global warming defense for engaging in this kind of activity--because the coal that they're going after is low-sulfur coal or synthetic fuels or liquified coal. On and on. Alan Maass: WHEN A company like BP talks about developing alternative fuels, is this real, or is it a PR sham? Jeffrey St. Clair: THERE'S MOVEMENT toward alternative fuels that they can profit from. This is nothing new. I remember talking to Enron executives back in the early 1990s, as they were making their first forays into Oregon and California, and they were saying that they were the good guys--that they were going to combat global warming and reduce toxic emissions, because they were promoting natural gas instead of nukes or coal-fired power plants. What they saw were tremendous opportunities for profit. That's what motivates them. In BP's case, it's not a matter of developing biofuels at the expense of extracting oil from the north slope of Alaska. It's developing biofuels and extracting oil. For the other integrated companies, it's strip mines, oil, gas, biofuels and nukes--the whole gamut. There's another aspect of this, which is that biofuels are providing a new excuse for genetically engineered crops. So you have Third World countries where there's indigenous resistance to Monsanto's saturation bombing of Frankenfoods--whether it's cotton, corn, soybeans. There's been resistance--in some cases, relatively successful. But now, the new excuse for genetically engineered crops is to save the world from global warming. So we've seen deals struck with Lula's government in Brazil and elsewhere. This isn't just a back-door way to force GM crops down the Third World's throat. If you look in the U.S. at ethanol and other biofuels, which are promoted as the salvation of Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas, they're essentially running on topsoil. These are not sustainable solutions to these problems. Alan Maass: AMONG A number of politicians, including Democrats, the concerns about global warming seem to have become an excuse for talk about resurrecting nuclear power. Jeffrey St. Clair: THAT COMES out of the Gore shop. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with Gore's political biography will know that he's his father's son, and his father was one of the prime movers behind the Tennessee Valley Authority, behind nuclear power in Appalachia, and the Oak Ridge nuclear lab. Gore Junior was their congressional protector as a congressman and as a senator. If you go back to Gore's book, Earth in the Balance, behind the scenes of that book is a cooling tower. That's Gore's solution to the global warming crisis--a world that is clotted with nuclear power plants. If you look at his advisers on global warming while he was vice president, that was their message, too. Those had been lean times for the nuclear power industry. I think that the Clinton administration could have sealed the nuclear power industry's fate in the U.S. if it had wanted to. But of course, it didn't. They sort of kept them on life support, with a lot of research funding and renewing all the protections. So is there a renewed faith in nuclear power from the Democrats? Yes. And they now have a justification for it. If you scare yourself into believing that we're going to be having a runaway greenhouse effect, and the only way to stop it is to take immediate action in reducing the burning of fossil fuels, then you're going to be confronted with the argument that a proliferation of nuclear power plants is the fastest way to do that. Alan Maass: WITH GORE, it's also a question of who gets the blame for global warming. Jeffrey St. Clair: IT'S ALL about personal responsibilit with Gores, whether its rap music or toxic waste. It's like listening to Jerry Falwell or Dr. Laura. There's no critique of capitalism, there's no political critique, there's no critique of large corporations. Call it guilt trip politics. There never has been. Earth in the Balance wasn't a critique. Back then, in the late 1980s, Gore was already talking about this as the dividing moral issue of our time. But there was never a critique of the transgressors--except the individual responsibility of the American consumer of electrical power and gasoline. Alan Maass: CAN YOU talk about the attitude of the environmental movement toward this corporate greenwashing? Jeffrey St. Clair: THE ENVIRONMENTAL movement made its deal with the devil at least a decade ago, when they essentially became neoliberal lobby shops. The idea was that if we can't defeat capitalism, if we can't change capitalism, then let's just give in and see if we can use some of the mechanics of the free market in order to tweak the damage done to the environment. These kinds of seeds were sown in green groups in the early 1980s, but really reached an apogee in Clinton Times. I don't even think the term greenwashing even applies any more. That was the industry response to the great environmental tragedies of the 1970s, and '80s--Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez. But they don't have to do that any more, because essentially, corporations like BP and environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund share the same basic mindset. You can't distinguish between, for example, Ikea, one of the world's great predators of rain forests, and the World Wildlife Fund, which is in a joint venture with Ikea--so Ikea gets a little panda stamp on the lumber cut from primary forests in Indonesia. So greenwashing seems to me to be very passé. Environmental politics are largely controlled by the foundations--they control what's discussed and what the major issues are. The foundations are shackled at the hip to the Democratic Party, and the dominant ones are all children of big oil companies. Pew, the Rockefeller Family Fund, W. Alton Jones--their endowments were the fortunes of big oil. I was talking to an environmentalist who said that if you want a grant from any of those foundations, you have to have global warming in your agenda. Now, let's say you're working on fighting chemical companies in Cancer Alley. How do you work global warming into your agenda? Or if you're fighting factory trawlers, which are creating dead zones off the Pacific coast, how do you work global warming into that? But if you can't, then the money dries up. What it creates is a kind of inchoate state of environmental politics, because I don't think you can build a mass political movement around global warming. This is one of the ways where Alex Cockburn and I differ. Alex doesn't believe that humans can affect the environment. I know we can screw things up royally--I just don't think we can fix it. In some ways, to me, global warming ought to be a kind of liberating experience. Yes, this is bad, but you really can't build a movement to fight it or correct it, so let's go fight things that we can defeat--whether it's strip mines, or the mismanagement of the Colorado River, or the Bush administration removing the grizzly bear in Yellowstone from listing under the Endangered Species Act. Those are battles that you can fight and win. But if you're cowering under the shadow of global warming, then you're not going to be able to wage those battles successfully. I think that's one of the many reasons why the environmental movement is as impotent as the antiwar movement. It's shackled to a political party that has no vision, no spine and no guts. And it's economically dependent on a tiny network of foundations that it allows to control its political agenda. These foundations frown on any kind of militancy even when the moment demands militancy. If you take their money, and they expect you to dance to their tune. See Jeffrey St. Clair, speaking on "Hot Climate, Cold Cash: Making a Killing from Global Warming," at Socialism 2007, June 14-17 in Chicago. See the Socialism 2007 Web site for more information. Alan Maass is the editor of the Socialist Worker and author of The Case for Socialism. He can be reached at: alanmaass@sbcglobal.net 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 is End
Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, co-written with Alexander
Cockburn. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net
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The Gang's All Here: Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Jeffrey Goldberg, Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly...End Times Leaves No Reputation Unstained!  Buy End Times Now! CounterPunch Books! Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal  Click Here to Order!  Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair           The Occupation by Patrick Cockburn   Humanitarian Imperialism By Jean Bricmont           CITY BEAUTIFUL By Tennessee Reed        Bruce Springsteen On Tour By Dave Marsh                   |
