Today's Stories

October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Facing Down the Machine: Mike Roselle Draws a Line

October 29, 2009

Michael Neumann
Criticism of Israel: a Wonderful Hiding Place

Mike Whitney
Housing Rebound? Not So Fast

Gary Leupp
Matthew Hoh Speaks Truth to Power

Conn Hallinan
Roman Roads and Modern Emperors

Marshall Auerback
Obama's Bogus Populism: Pay Curbs and Bank Loans

Laura Flanders
Palin's Pet Doug Hoffman Has Taliban Ties

Eamonn McCann
The War Criminal Vote: Blair or Karadzic for EU President?

David Macaray
Strange Invaders: Can Ignorance and Arrogance Win Hearts and Minds?

Mark Weisbrot
When Small Countries Lead the Way

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Complicity in Torture Challenged

Christopher Brauchli
Will the Pope Bring the Taliban Into His Flock?

Website of the Day
The USS Liberty Affair and the Problem of Truth in History

October 28, 2009

Moshe Adler
How to Reduce Unemployment, Rebuild the Middle Class and Free Ourselves From Wall Street

Dave Lindorff
America's Drug Crisis: Brought to You by the CIA

Frank Joseph Smecker
Agaisnt Prometheus: an Interview with Derrick Jensen on Science and Technology

Alexandra Early
What a "Jobless" Recovery Means for Young Workers

M. Shahid Alam
Israeli Exceptionalism

Vijay Prashad
Sahelian Blowback: What's Happening in Mali?

John Ross
Three Years Later, Brad Will is Still Dead

Franklin Lamb
A Rare Victory for Lebanon's Palestinians

Gregory Travis
The Dismal Science: Elinor Ostrom's Nobel

Susan Galleymore
Peace Cycle to Palestine

Website of the Day
Newspaper Decline, a Graphic Display

October 27, 2009

Mike Whitney
Black Tuesday and How We Got Out of It

Patrick Cockburn
Bombs Will Go Off in Baghdad, Whether the US is There or Not

Stewart J. Lawrence
Honduran Coup Myths Dispelled

Alan Farago
Power Plays in Florida: Rate Increases, Nukes and Deception

Ralph Nader
Obama: Form Letters and Business as Usual

Dave Lindorff
Pentagon Dirty Bombers: DU in America

Bouthaina Shaaban
The Danger of Towing the Line Behind Israel

Brian M. Downing Elections in Afghanistan, the Second Time Around

Iain Boal
How You Can Save Pacifica

Carl Finamore
Hotel Workers and the Law of Momentum

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Here Comes That Third Party: Palin and the Constitutionalists

Website of the Day
How Bank of America Charges for Perfect Credit

October 26, 2009

Bill Quigley /
Deborah Popowski
When Gitmo and Abu Ghraib Come Home

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?

Uri Avnery
A Tsunami Called Goldstone

Mike Whitney
Will the Dollar Remain the World's Reserve Currency in Five Years?

Michael Snedeker
The Execution of Cameron Willingham

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Dirty War on Immigrants

David Michael Green
Paranoia for Breakfast

Martha Rosenberg
Gagging Michael Pollan

Patrick Bond
Gridlock on the Way to Copenhagen

Binoy Kampmark
Heading for the Tiber

Website of the Day
Goldman Sachs Abandons Kittens

October 23-25, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
All the Populism Money Can Buy

Christopher Ketcham
Unlearning the CIA: the Education of Bob Baer

Jeff Gore
Palestine in Pieces: an Interview with Bill and Kathleen Christison

Gareth Porter
What Really Prompted Iran to Build the Qom Enrichment Facility?

Jayne Lyn Stahl
The Power Behind the Drone

Saul Landau
Fidel on Obama and Consumerism

Mike Whitney
The Great Dollar Collapse Debate

Nikolas Kozloff
Challenging the Dollar Dictatorship: an Interview with Economist Ethan Kaplan

Ron Jacobs
The Vatican's Takeover Bid

Russell Mokhiber
The Weiner Charade

Missy Beattie
Gainful Employment

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Posada and the Cuban 5: Without Any Exception Whatsoever?

Stephen Lendman
Cashing In, Selling Out: AARP's Tradition of Betrayal

David Ker Thomson
Natural History: Make Some Today

Rannie Amiri
Saada Under Siege

Ronnie Cummins
The Organic Revolution

Norm Kent
Bring It On: Fox News vs. Team Obama

Charles R. Larson
Zimbabwe's Unravelling

David Yearsley
Damn Near Dead at Yale

Lorenzo Wolff
A Fistful of Your Own Teeth

Ben Sonnenberg
Costa-Gavras's "Z": an Excellent Thriller

Kim Nicolini
Where the Wild Things Are: Max's Hollow Utopia

Poets' Basement
Three Poems by Leonard J. Cirino

Website of the Weekend
Truth Squading Timberland: Join the Fray!

October 22, 2009

Dan Pearson /
Kathy Kelly
The Rotten Fruits of War

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Police Don Arab Disguises

Paul Craig Roberts The US as Failed State

Mark Engler
Pranksters Fixing the World: and Interview with the Yes Men

Johann Hari
Three Myths Driving the Afghan War

Brian M. Downing
Losing the War

Eric Toussaint
Small Oversights and Big Lies About Latin America

Tom Mountain
Busting the Darfur Myth

Israel Shamir
Russia's Daring Vote

Charles Thomson
What is Damien Hirst Playing At?

Website of the Day
Hitler Upset At Balloon Boy Hoax

October 21, 2009

Pam Martens
The Next Financial Crisis Hits Wall Street: Judges Start Nixing Foreclosures

Linn Washington, Jr.
A Kafkaesque Deportation

Liaquat Ali Khan
Now Pakistan: Sequential Destruction of Muslim Nations

D. K. Wilson
Rush Limbaugh and the NFL

Franklin Lamb
Syria's Golan Heights

Norman Solomon
Uncle Sam in Afghanistan

Stephen Fleischman
Hypocrisy Unbridled

Patrice Higonnet
On Harvard's Financial Crisis

Binoy Kampmark
Herta Müller's Nobel

Kevin Coval /
Josh Healey
Searching for a Minyan

Website of the Day
How Wall Street is Making Its Bilions

October 20, 2009

Sharon Smith
Et Tu, Codepink?

Tariq Ali
Farce in Kabul, Tragedy in Pakistan

Mark Brenner
Pensions: the Next Casualty of Wall Street

Bouthaina Shaaban
The Adoption of the Goldstone Report: What Does It Mean?

Michael D. Yates
Down in the Valley With Cesar: Power, Paranoia and Purges in the UFW

Dean Baker
Does Citibank Need China?

Dave Lindorff
Depleted Uranium Weapons: Dead Babies in Iraq and Afghanistan are No Joke

John Ross
Chronicle of a Tormenta Electrica, II

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: a Very Important Liar

Kevin Zeese
Can the Democrats Avoid a Populist Health Care Rebellion?

Gilad Atzmon
Autumn in Shanghai

Website of the Day
A Message From the Gyre

October 19, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Dollar Will Not Crash

Greg Moses
The Cash Cops of Tenaha

John Ross
Chronicle of a Tormenta Electrica

Michael Donnelly
Outside Agitator

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Dick's Fringe Army: Tea Baggers and Birchers?

Eric Walberg
The Battle in Canada

Russell Mokhiber
Pennsylvania, First in the Nation for Single Payer?

Barbara Rose Johnston
War, Peace and the Obamajority

John V. Whitbeck
Zionism: an Anti-Semite's Dream?

Christopher Ketcham
Swine Fools

Website of the Day
Greenspan: Break Up the Big Banks?

October 16-18, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
White House v. Fox News: a War Obama Can Win

Saul Landau
Autumn of the Patriarch

Paul Craig Roberts
The Rich Have Stolen the Economy

Carl Ginsburg
Where $18 an Hour is Too Much

Ralph Nader
Barney Frank the Bankers' Consort

Nikolas Kozloff
Rainforest Beef, Factory Farms and Anthony Bourdain's War on Vegetarians

Carlo Galli
Berlusconi: Still Doing Nothing, Still There

Dave Lindorff
Agent Orange in Vietnam: Ignoring the Crimes Before Our Eyes

Catherine Rottenberg / Neve Gordon
Educating Children in War Zones

Marshall Auerback
Dollar Spasms

Nicola Nasser
The Realistic Way Out of Iraq

Windy Cooler
The Ghost of John Brown

James L. Secor
Why I Miss China

Ron Jacobs
Escalation Unopposed

Wes Jackson
A Way of Knowing

Jesse Lerner-Kinglake
Global Food Fight

David Ker Thomson Against Leaders

Missy Beattie
Dinner With the President

Emily Ratner
Taping Our Mouths Shut to Scream Out Our Dissent

Stephen Martin
The Scorched Earth Mindset of the International Banker

Michael Snedeker
"A Place of Greater Safety"

Charles R. Larson
Cheeta: the Last of the Hollywood High-Rollers

David Yearsley
Judith Leyster's Sensuous Passions

Peter Stone Brown
It's a Bob Christmas for Halloween

Poets' Basement
Keeler, Beatty and Anderson

Website of the Weekend
Elements of Nature

October 15, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
Our Cheap Politicians

Brian M. Downing
Rethinking the Afghan Insurgency

Ramzy Baroud
Abbas and the Goldstone Report: Our Shame is Complete

Danny Weil
A Neo-Liberal Arts Education: Diploma Mills and Debt Peonage

M. Idrees Ahmad
Return to Peshawar: a Journey Home

Margaret Kimberley
Michelle's Family Tree

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: Which Side Are You On?

Harvey Wasserman
Nuking the Climate Bill

Nirmal Ghosh
A Tale of Two Protocols: How Montreal Could Save Us From the Mire of Kyoto

Charles R. Larson
Sarah Palin Bears It All

Website of the Day
Tortured Law

October 14, 2009

Michael Neumann
Fearsome Words? a Suppressed Talk on the Israel/Palestine Conflict

M. Reza Pirbhai
Fighting the Taliban: What, Exactly, is Being Fought in Afghanistan?

Gareth Porter
Hawks Play Up the Taliban's Ties to Al Qaeda

Paul Craig Roberts
War Criminals Are Becoming Arbiters of the Law

John Strausbaugh Fortress Moon

Ralph Nader
The CBO's Flawed Report on Medical Malpractice

Dean Baker
Won't You Please Come to Chicago to Greet the Bankers?

Charles Modiano
White Silence: Where Does Brett Favre Stand on Rush Limbaugh?

Nadia Hijab
Abandoning "Women and Children"

Walter Brasch
An Extension of Her Motherhood: Sherry Carpenter, Journalist and Animal Care Provider

Website of the Day
Nader: Obama Has a "Concessionary Personality"

October 13, 2009

Peter Linebaugh
Putting the Spine Back in the Commonwealth

Shamus Cooke
What Obama Isn't Telling American Workers

John Ross
War on Mexican Women

Brendan Cooney
Ask Awal Khan About Obama's Prize

Frida Berrigan
Operation Enduring Detentions: Losing the Moral High Ground

Yves Engler
Is Canada More Pro-Israel Than the US?

David Macaray
Why the Government Fears Unions

Dave Lindorff
Democrats: Selling Out, But Still Getting Screwed

Mark Weisbrot
Occupying Afghanistan is Making Things Worse

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
History Repeats Itself

Binoy Kampmark
That Dirty Colonial War

Website of the Day
The Health Insurance Industry's Latest Doublecross

October 12, 2009

Pam Martens
Secret Deal Between Wall Street and Washington Shines a Harsh Light on Federal Housing Agency

Mike Whitney
A Dollar Rout or More Bernanke Trickery?

Martha Rosenberg
Yale Lab Tech Causes Two Problems for Animal Researchers

Jessica Arents
The Price of Peace: Our Arrest at the White House

Eamonn McCann
Massacre in Ireland, Massacre in Iraq

Bill Hatch
Dairy Industry Goes Down the Tubes

Sen. Russell Feingold
Time for a Timetable in Afghanistan

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Siren Song of World Praise

Gideon Levy
Obama's Betrayed Mission in the Middle East

Iyad Burnat
Why Does Obama Get a Prize and Bush Got Shoes?

Alan Cabal
Why Obama Deserves the Nobel

Dan Bacher
The Astroturf Method

Website of the Day
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help

October 9-11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
War and Peace

James Bovard
Eight Years of Big Lies on Afghanistan

Kathleen and Bill Christison
New Crisis Developing in Palestine

Andy Worthington
Congressional Depravity on Gitmo

Marc Levy
Talking Dirty to the Kids

Tariq Ali
Ahmed Rashid's War

Mike Whitney
The Securitization Boondoggle

Paul Craig Roberts
Warmonger Wins Peace Prize

Alan Nasser
Cockeyed Economics

Jack Z. Bratich
The Twitterest Pill: Policing Dissent in the Information Age

Steve Breyman
Time for a War Tax

David Michael Green
A Hapless Presidency

Dave Lindorff
The WTF Prize

Paul Buchheit
Fear of the Rich

Jim Goodman
Feedlots and E. Coli

Missy Beattie
Theater of the Absurd

Michael Leonardi
Ships of Poison

Nadia Hijab
The Plight of the Right of Return

Mel Packer
The Crackdown on Pittsburgh

David Macaray
The Raiding Game

James T. Phillips
Getting Burned

Charles R. Larson
One Man's Walk Through Hell

Michael Donnelly
Behind the Capitalist Curtain

David Yearsley
The Biggest Blot on Mel Gibson's Rap Sheet

Lorenzo Wolff
Rap That Threatens ... and Endures

Poets' Basement
Heyen, Ames and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Jobs Conference

October 8, 2009

Saul Landau
A Late September Morning With Fidel

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Dark Omens for the US in Afghanistan

Linn Washington, Jr.
Pot and Perversion: Judicial Antics Expose Drug War Insanity

Marshall Auerback
Neo-Classical Economics Misses What Matters

Dave Lindorff
A Nation of Snoops

David Rosen
Bankrupt Morality: the Staying Power of Republican Sinners

Chris Darimont / Misty MacDuffee
The Bear Essentials: New Thinking Needed to Save BC's Salmon and Grizzlies

John V. Walsh
Remembering Hinton's Fanshen

Stewart Lawrence
The Edwards / Hunter Affair Reconsidered

Charles R. Larson
Conservatives in the Sandbox

Website of the Day
Et Tu, Code Pink?

October 7, 2009

Brendan Cooney
Are Republicans Breaking US Law in Honduras?

Paul Craig Roberts
Dead Labor: Marx and Lenin Reconsidered

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Recovery: Unemployment Up, Wages Down (But the Banks Have Been Saved ... Sort Of)

Jonathan Cook
A Third Intifada?

John Stanton
HTS: Congress Rewards Failure, Puts Personnel in Harms Way

Joanne Mariner
Tortured Language

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cherry Blossoms

Stephen Lendman
The Gaza War's Effect on Women

Sen. Russell Feingold
Time to Draw Down in Afghanistan

Mary Lynn Cramer
Doublespeak on Health Care

Website of the Day
How to Bag a Wolf by Aerial Assault

October 6, 2009

Mike Whitney
Dollar Hysteria: Is the Sky Really Falling?

Gareth Porter
The Iranian Rift in the IAEA: Leaked Paper Based on Disputed Intel

Jonathan Cook
How Israel Buried the UN's War Crime Probe

Boris Kagarlitsky
My Hour as Talking Head in Moscow

Iain Boal
The New Crisis at Pacifica

Ron Jacobs
Why Are We in Afghanistan?

John Ross
Wave of Anarchist Bombings Strikes Mexico

Michael Dickinson
Panic in Istanbul: Smoke, Mayhem and the World Bank

Stephen Fleischman
Beware the Predator

Ira Glunts
The Audacity of Nope

Missy Beattie
Outside Looking In

Website of the Day
Round Up the Usual Suspects

October 5, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Titans Use Aliases to Foreclose on Families While Partnering with a Federal Agency

Mike Whitney
Dead Man Walking: Welcome to the US Economy

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Feds Imprison the Innocent

Harry Browne
Ireland Says, "Yes, Please"

Sara Mann
My Little Town: Nothin' But the Dead and Dyin'

Omar Barghouti
Dissolve the Palestinian Authority

Shamus Cooke
A Jobless Recovery?

Brenda Norrell
A Dirty New Low for Peabody Coal

Fred Gardner
Situation NORML: Reconciling Medical Pot Use and Legalization

Binoy Kampmark Copenhagen Blues: McChrystal and the Afghan Trap

Website of the Day
In Goldman Sachs We Trust?

October 2-4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Geezer Renditions

Saul Landau
News From Raul Castro

Diana Johnstone
After the German Elections: Is Socialism Really Dead in Europe?

Greg Moses
Cramming for the Downside

William Blum
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Another Cold War Myth

Brian Cloughley
Iran's Nuclear Program: Where's the Proof?

Russell Mokhiber
Welcome Back, Michael Moore

John Ross
Chomsky in Mexico

Ellen Brown
IMF Catapults From Shunned Agency to Global Central Bank

David Ker Thomson
Cop Shocks

David Macaray
The Audacity of Toyota

Gary Engler
Unions in a Rut

Robert Fantina
Meet the New Boss (Same as the Old Boss)

Lisa Stolarski / Naomi Archer
Pittsburgh: Still a (Coal) Company Town

Anthony Papa
Here is Your Chance to Help End the Failed War on Drugs

Joe Allen
The Good Wife: Bad View of a Corrupt System

Harry Browne
Tarantino Scalps His Audience

Ron Jacobs
Collective Fiction

Charles R. Larson
Cultural Warriors: Austrialian Aboriginal Art Triennial

David Yearsley
Hanns Eisler's Great National Anthem for East Germany is Available: Make It America's

Poets' Basement
Taylor, Gardner and Landau

Website of the Weekend
Wrongful Convictions of Youth

Weekend Edition
October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009

Mike Roselle Draws a Line

Facing Down the Machine

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
and JOSHUA FRANK

The beard is graying. The hair is clipped military-short. He is a large man, oddly shaped, like a cross between a grizzly and a javelina. It’s Roselle, of course, Mike Roselle—the outside agitator. He and a fellow activist have just spread an anti-coal banner in front of a growling bulldozer in West Virginia on a cold February morning in 2009. He’s in this icy and unforgiving land to oppose a brutal mining operation and will soon be arrested for trespassing. Massey Energy, the target of Roselle’s protest, is the fourth largest coal extractor in the United States, mining nearly 40 million tons of coal in Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee each year.

The arrest was nothing new for Roselle, who cut his teeth in direct action environmental campaigns decades earlier as a co-founder of Earth First!, top campaigner for Greenpeace U.S. and later as the wit behind the tenacious Ruckus Society. Unlike most mainstream environmentalists you are not likely to see Roselle sporting a suit and lobbying Washington insiders on the intricacies of mining laws -- you are more apt to see this self-proclaimed lowbagger (one who lives light on the land, works to protect it and has few possessions to show for their hard work) engaged in direct, but non-violent, confrontations with the forces of industrialization, using tactics honed during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. And his dissent in West Virginia is more than justified.

The mountaintops of the Appalachia region, from Tennessee up to the heart of West Virginia, are being ravaged by the coal industry -- an industry that cares little about the welfare of communities or the land that it is chewing up and spitting out with its grotesque mining operations.

The debris from the mining pits, often 500 feet deep, produce toxic waste that is then dumped in nearby valleys, polluting rivers and poisoning local communities downstream. Currently no state or federal agencies are tracking the cumulative effect of the aptly named “mountaintop removal,” where entire peaks are being blown apart with explosives, only to expose tiny seams of the precious black rock.

On December 22, 2008, a coal slurry impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston coal fired power plant in Harriman, Tennessee spilled more than 500 million gallons of toxic coal ash into the Tennessee River. The epic spill was over 40 times larger than the Exxon Valdez in Alaska. Approximately 525 million gallons of black coal ash flowed into tributaries of the murky Tennessee River - the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in the states of Alabama and neighboring Kentucky. The true costs—environmental and social--of the spill are still not known.

As a result of the ongoing destruction of this forgotten region of Appalachia, Roselle and others affiliated with his latest group, Climate Ground Zero, have set up shop and vow not to end their actions until this mining practice has been outlawed. But the West Virginia media, long in the pockets of Big Coal, has not depicted Roselle as a non-violent activist who has been pushed to act because his conscience has forced him to. On the contrary, Roselle has been portrayed as a potential eco-terrorist and a threat, not only jobs in the region, but human life as well.

“A quick search of Roselle’s name on the internet produces pages of accusations that he will go to any length for his cause, vandalism that could put lives in danger,” reported WSAZ-TV on February 11, 2009.

Fox affiliate WCHS-TV8 went even further in a story they aired on the same date stating, “Roselle has been called an ‘eco-terrorist’ by some because of his tactics. He's someone we think you should know about. Tomorrow night don't miss the ‘Roselle Report’ when we'll take a closer look at how this man's radical methods of protest may put lives at stake in West Virginia.”

Being labeled a terrorist isn’t a new accusation for Roselle, who has been at the forefront of dozens of non-violent direct action environmental campaigns throughout the past several decades. “I have been arrested over forty times in twenty states,” Roselle remembers with a smirk. “My longest time in jail is four months in South Dakota for an action on Mt. Rushmore against acid rain.”

Even anti-environmentalist Ron Arnold, who coined the term “eco-terrorist” in Reason magazine in the early 1980s, came out with a statement in opposition to Roselle’s terrorist label.

“I don’t agree with him, but he’s no terrorist. I’ve covered Roselle since 1995 and even devoted dozens of pages to his protest activities in my 1997 book EcoTerror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature,” says Arnold. “I covered his actions to distinguish between radicals and terrorists. I say he’s a radical environmentalist, not an eco-terrorist. It’s not a crime to be a radical and Roselle has never been charged with any violent crime.”

Despite Arnold’s clear distinction between terrorism and environmentalism western states like Idaho and Oregon seem to disagree.

***

Saving Idaho’s wilderness had come to this: Two militant greens standing in the middle of an isolated, snow-crusted road in a place where machines should never be; bracing their bodies against a train of logging trucks, snowmobiles, and Forest Service jeeps groaning at the gate, demanding entry; willingly subjecting themselves to arrest by Idaho troopers armed with automatic weapons, Billy clubs, and a draconian and sub-constitutional new law. All in a last-gasp attempt to halt a vastly destructive timber sale in the heart of the nation's largest roadless area called Cove/Mallard, a timber sale two federal judges already found to be a brazen assault on our national environmental laws.

Charged with felony conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor, Roselle and Tom Fullum, of the Native Forest Network, faced a possible five-year prison terms and $50,000 fines under Idaho's so-called Earth First! Statute - a law geared to smother popular dissent against the transgressions of multinational timber companies by slamming the jailhouse door on anyone bold enough to bodily protest logging on federal lands in the Potato State. The bill was signed into law in 1993 by then-Governor Cecil Andrus, a noted liberal who called the Cove/ Mallard protesters "just a bunch of kooks."

The 90,000-acre Cove/Mallard Roadless Area is a biological cradle in the mountains, a rolling landscape of ponderosa pine forests, meandering streams, and wet meadows that serves as a critical biological and migration corridor between the Salmon River and the high country of the Gospel Hump and Selway Mountains. One of the most wild places in the lower-48, its brisk streams are home to steelhead, chinook salmon, bull trout, rainbow trout, and cutthroat, while the broad meadows harbor some of the best elk country in the Northern Rockies. Bighorn sheep and mountain goats inhabit the tall mountains and the entire area is a key part of the Central Idaho grizzly bear and gray wolf recovery areas. In fact, over the past 10 years the Fish and Wildlife Service has documented numerous confirmed wolf sightings in the Cove/Mallard Roadless Area.

Federal and state governments have long targeted the civil rights of environmentalists. In the mid-1980s swaths of new laws were passed that targeted the acts of direct action oriented environmental protests. The laws followed a tree spike incident in Sonoma County, California during the height of the battles to save the ancient Redwood forests. As a worker thrust his blade into the trunk of a mighty tree, the blade hit a spike, snapped, and flung back only to strike the logger. The media and logging industry called it eco-terrorism. But it wasn’t an environmentalist that hammered that spike into the tree; it was a furious local right-wing landowner who had no part in the protests to end logging of the Redwoods in the state. He was just pissed it was happening in his own backyard. Nonetheless, the tree spiking opened up attacks by the media, treating the incident as legitimate terrorism. The timber behemoths lobbied hard and the result of was series of laws that were meant to deter activists from targeting the logging industry in any way in any form.

The problem with most of these laws is that they do not decipher between acts of civil disobedience and vandalism. There is no line drawn, for example, between property damage like arson and chaining oneself to a logging truck. States across the West followed California and Oregon’s lead, making it a crime to hinder or delay any timber sale on public or private land. Activists that shut down logging operations directly, even by nonviolent means, were soon being deemed eco-terrorists, and not only by the media, but by the state laws themselves.

“Some of these laws, like the Earth First! Statute made it a felony to conspire to or advocate any of those actions,” recalls Roselle. “During debates on the House floor, outraged legislators said the law was intended to apply to professional radical environmentalists who recruited innocent kids from college campuses, and sent them off to block legal-logging operations, and take food out of the mouths of working families. Imagine!”

The Noble timber sale was one of nine big timber sales slated for the Cove/ Mallard. These sales called for 200 different clearcuts, the logging of 81 million board feet of timber, and the construction of 145 miles of new logging roads. The Cove/ Mallard timber sale planned to leave behind only an empty infrastructure: its web of roads a lethal impediment to the migration of wolves and elk; its eroding swaths of bare land quietly smothering salmon and trout.

The evidence of an imminent ecological collapse of Idaho's river systems in the area is overwhelming. In one of America's wildest state, more than 70 percent of the streams are out of compliance with the standards of the Clean Water Act, dozens of stocks of salmon gasp along with the bull trout at the brink of extinction. This means that every additional clearcut or mine gouged into these watersheds creates a necrotic wound in the fragile ecosystem. This was the emergency situation to which Federal Judge Ezra responded with an injunction to halt the logging.

Of course, the predictable backlash swiftly erupted in rural Idaho when news of the injunction was leaked to local timber contractors, ranchers, and mining companies by the Forest Service. Local papers played up the inevitable chest-beating by a mongrel assortment of tree-cutters, ranch-hands and placer miners from towns with names like Challis, Dixie and Kamiah. Then came the apocalyptic assessments of the ruling by mega-corporations such as Boise/Cascade, Pot-latch, and Hecla Mining: Mills and mines will be closed, they warned, thousands will be thrown out of work, bars will run dry and already impoverished communities will be driven deeper into destitution. Environmentalists and not greed were to blame.

The injunction also became a pretext for yet another round of vituperative cant from Idaho's reactionary congressional delegation against provoking folks like hippie Roselle. On the floor of the Senate, Dirk Kempthorne (who would later become Idaho’s governor and then Interior Secretary under Bush the Younger) bellowed that he would seek congressional action to shred the injunction and "the ill-conceived laws it was based on." Meanwhile, Helen 'Call-Me-Congressman' Chenoweth denounced the injunction as the work of "animal worshipping nature cults." And the stentorious Larry Craig, the ex-senator with the wide stance, amplified the volume of his "forest health" crusade -- a cruel hoax on the public in which the last roadless forests in the West will be stripped of the meager protection provided them by current environmental laws and opened to indiscriminate chainsaw surgery in the name of medicating the ecosystem.

The response to Idaho’s Earth First! law was predictable says Roselle, “We went to a bunch of college campuses ... we intended to recruit a bunch of new students to block, impede, halt, obstruct, and otherwise obliterate logging in the Cove/Mallard Timber Sale. We continued to block the road until the U.S. Forest Service was halted, impeded, blocked and obliterated in Federal court. It turned out that the logging in Cove/Mallard never was legal after all.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Idaho’s anti-environmentalist statues aren’t the worst you’ll find our here in the Northwest. In fact the neighboring state of Oregon has pushed the envelope so far that home invasions, felony charges and police brutality have become the norm, not the exception to how law enforcement reacts to environmental campaigners. And like Idaho’s egregious Earth First! law, Roselle is also at the center of Oregon’s attempt to paint environmental civil disobedience as eco-terrorism.

***

It was during the State legislative session of 1999 when the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association and the Oregon timber industry joined forces to lobby their allies at the capital in Salem to pass special criminal legislation, worthy of a felony charge, for any individual or group that interfered with business operations. Entitled “Interference with Agricultural Operations,” (Ag-Ops law) the new statues prohibited any activist, sans union or labor disputers, that knowingly or intentionally “obstructs, impairs or hinders or attempts to obstruct, impair or hinder agricultural operations.”

Call it Oregon’s version of Idaho’s Earth First! law, or at least its latest incarnation, and like Idaho’s statute, Mike Roselle found himself in the middle of the liberal state’s crackdown on pesky enviros.

In March of 2005 activists traveled to Josephine County, Oregon, near the quiet town of Ashland, to protest what they believed to be illegal logging operations. Like good direct action environmentalists of old they blocked public roads that led to the cut in the Siskiyou National Forest where the Biscuit timber sale was taking place. The logging operations were being contracted by the United States Forest Service (USFS) to private timber outfits that were looking to cash in on a rather dismal occupation.

Like the untouched forests of Idaho, the Siskiyou National Forest is one of the most biologically diverse landscapes in the continental United States. It houses five nationally designated wild and scenic rivers, as well as one of the healthiest stocks of native salmon in the country. The plan introduced by the US Forest Service included extensive logging in 12 roadless areas, which covered well over 12,000 acres of taxpayer-managed land.

In all, the USFS placed 1900 acres of public land on the auction block and of those, 1160 were mapped out for demolition. The venture, titled the "Biscuit Fire Recovery Project", was the largest forest service sale in US history. In all, almost 30 square miles of federal land was handed over to chainsaw happy timber barons.

Not surprisingly, the Forest Service wanted onlookers to believe these types of logging operations are for "restoration" purposes only, not profit, as this patch of old trees in the Siskiyous fell victim to massive natural wild fires in the summer of 2002. During a meeting between timber, conservation, and USFS officials on July 26, 2006 over lawsuits the groups had filed regarding the Biscuit sales, eco-activists were simultaneously erecting a 75 foot tall tree platform and a large road blockade in hopes of halting access to "Indi", the first salvage sale site set for cutting by the beginning of August.

"Logging is not restoration," said activist Kay Pittwald as she hung from her suspended platform high above the soggy forest floor. "The future of this remote area is healthy salmon, clean water and a thriving tourist economy. It is not a place for an out-of-country timber grab to ship wood products to Asia."

U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan, who handled the lawsuits, was of little comfort to the conservationists that attempted to stop the logging in the courts. Indeed Hogan, one of the most conservative federal judges in the Ninth Circuit, has a long history of siding with extractive industries (and later being over-ruled on appeal). In 2001 he called for the de-listing of threatened Coho salmon and in 2002 he allowed logging in Montana's Bitterroot National Forest to proceed after talks between Big Greens and industry officials.

Forest fires, like the one in the Siskiyou National Forest, became stigmatized only when forests began to be viewed as a commercial resource rather than an obstacle to settlement. Fire suppression became an obsession only after the big timber giants laid claim to the vast forests of the Pacific Northwest. Companies like Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific were loath to see their holdings go up in flames, so they arm-twisted Congress into pouring millions of dollars into fire-fighting programs. The Forest Service was only too happy to oblige because fire suppression was a sure way to pad their budget.

In effect, the Forest Service's fire suppression programs (and similar operations by state and local governments) have acted as little more than federally funded fire insurance policies for the big timber companies, an ongoing corporate bailout that has totaled tens of billions of dollars and shows no sign of slowing down, even under President Obama. There's an old saying that the Forest Service fights fires by throwing money at them. And the more money it spends, the more money it gets from Congress. Sadly, the Biscuit Fire Recovery Project was no different.

"Their world-view dictates that ‘healthy forests’ equal tree farms," said George Sexton who worked as the Conservation Director for the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center at the time. "Industry wanted a train wreck at Biscuit."

In the eyes of the activists who blocked the logging road that March afternoon in 2005, they had been successful. Logging was halted for the moment. But when logging operations stop, law enforcement officers are dispatched to get the chainsaws running again and in order to do so activists are arrested and charged, often with trespassing (on private lands) or disorderly conduct. But in this case, with a new law in their arsenal, the Biscuit protestors, Roselle included, were charged with disrupting logging operations. A potential felony. For those arrested the court imposed sentences of two to four days in custody, additional fines, and probation for 18 months.

“[One] problem with [the Ag-Ops law] is that it does not forbid ‘hindering’ an agricultural operation to the point of cessation, property damage, or any other tangible point,” writes Lauren C. Regan and Misha J. Dunlap of the Civil Liberties Defense Center in their appeal brief, which claimed the law used to sentence the defendants was unconstitutional. “Instead, it leaves the person conducting the ‘agricultural operation’ free to decide when a group of people shall be dispersed and/or arrested. The point at which there is harm (or ‘hindrance’) under [the law] is not readily identifiable and, in fact, reaches to protected conduct of peaceable assembly at sites of agricultural operations. This clearly violates Article I, section 26 of the Oregon Constitution. The constitutional right to publicly assemble in a public forum cannot be proscribed by a statute that is intended to protect commercial interests. Commercial interests do not trump fundamental constitutional rights.”

The lawyers also argued in their brief that the law is aimed at the content of ones’ speech and targets that speech based on the content. In the context of the statute used, it does not prohibit all speech aimed at disrupting agricultural operations, but only certain types of speech -- that which does not relate to labor protests.

On October 28, 2009, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biscuit protesters, striking down the Ag-Ops Law as unconstitutional. The court ruled that unfairly singled out environmental demonstrators as a separate class, in violation of the equal protection clause. Labor protests, for example, were specifically excluded from the law.

“The overwhelming majority people prosecuted under the law were environmentalists,” said Dan Kruse, an attorney for the protesters.

***

Back in West Virginia Mike Roselle sits back and conducts one of his many radio interviews by telephone. Empty beer cans are piled up in the kitchen. Roselle’s rental home has become the headquarters for Climate Ground Zero. In this particular interview Roselle it is spelling out his defense of the treesitters who are attempting to halt Massey Energy’s mining operations by setting up camp in their blast zone. It was an unusually busy summer for Roselle, as hundreds of boisterous activists descended on West Virginia to voice their objections to mountaintop removal. The fight has heated up, so much so that even Roselle is surprised at the grassroots outpouring. There have been dozens of arrests and several major protest actions. Yet Roselle is still sympathetic to the workers’ concerns and shrugs off the negative media coverage as par for the course.

“Those who are not involved in the mining industry are almost unanimously opposed to it. And even a lot of the folks who work for Massey Energy are not really happy with what they’re doing, but they’re kind of—because this is one of the poorest states in the country, they don’t have many choices. There are no other jobs,” Mike Roselle told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! in April, 2009. “I don’t think there’s really that much support throughout West Virginia for destroying the mountains. There is support, I think, for supporting the coal industry ... the best way to maintain coal jobs in West Virginia is to end mountaintop removal immediately, because it employs a lot less people than underground mining. Underground mining is a lot less destructive to the environment, and it could be even less so if more regulations were enforced and new ones put in place.”

So his fight to save the mountains of Appalacia continues. Laws may attempt to deter Mike Roselle as accusations of terrorism attempt to tarnish his reputation. Yet he soldiers onward, and will do so until he sees an end to mountaintop removal. In the meantime, however, you can expect Massey Energy, in conjunction with Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia who receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from the coal industry in his state, to do its best to outlaw the actions taken by Roselle’s Climate Ground Zero campaigners. Even if it means trampling over their civil rights in the process.

Have a beer with Mike Roselle and Josh Mahan in Portland tonight (October 30) as they talk about their new book, Tree Spiker, at 7 PM, Julia's Cafe, 2130 NE Broadway Portland, OR 97232.

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. 

Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the brand new book Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published by AK Press in July 2008.

This is an excerpt from GreenScare: the New War on Environmentalism, forthcoming from Haymarket Books.

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