Today's Stories

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

April 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Thin Ice From Here to the Horizon

Saul Landau
Infiltrating Alpha 66: a Conversation with Gerardo Hernandez, Leader of the Cuba Five

Franklin Lamb
Persia Rising

Ralph Nader
The Greedsters Are Back!

Fred Gardner
Obama's Chimerical Marijuana Policy: a Guide for the Perplexed

Dean Baker
A Win-Win Solution: Tax the Rich!

Rannie Amiri
The Curious Case of Benjamin Netanyahu

George Wuerthner
The War on Predators

Dave Lindorff
No Amnesty for Torturers

David Swanson
Personal Torture Laws

Jim Goodman
The Control of Food

Kathy Sanborn
Economic Fallout Hits Families Hard

Don Monkerud
Economic Recovery for Whom?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The People's Money

David Michael Green
Home of the Barricaded, Land of the 'Fraid

Nelson P Valdés
The OAS Charter, Cuba and the United States

Manuel Gomez
From the Bay of Pigs to Trinadad and Tobago

Dr. Susan Block
On Sex Addiction: the Deadliest Sin?

Ramzy Baroud
Non-Violence in Palestine?

Christopher Brauchli
Banning Barbie

Stephen Martin
Statelessness: the Final Frontier

Ron Jacobs
Tearing the Whole Building Down: the Dead in Greensboro

David Yearsley
Monkey Music

Lorenzo Wolff
A Song for the End of the World

Poets' Basement
Moser, McTeer and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
New England Journal of Medicine Report on Civilian Deaths in Iraq

April 16, 2009

Mike Whitney
A Bulletin From the Captain of the Titantic

Russell Mokhiber
The Top 10 Enemies of Single-Payer

Ronald Teska
From Iraq to Appalachia

Gareth Porter
Predator Blowback

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Thinking Like an Afghan

Benjamin Dangl
Latin America Changes

Kevin Pina
Haiti: Obama's First Foreign Policy Disaster?

Robert Bryce
Another Ethanol Producer Goes Bust

George Wuerthner
See the Forest: the Value of Dead Trees

Paul Garon, David Roediger and Kate Khatib The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont

Website of the Day
Socialism and the Facebook Generation

April 15, 2009

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Solving Palestine While Israel Destroys It

Ray McGovern
W, the Torture Decider

Robert Sandels
Is There a Latin American Policy?

Heather Williams /
Paul Baker
Carbon Cap and Trade: How Wall Street will Game the Regs and Trash the Planet

Jack Willoughby
The Lessons of the S & L Crisis

David Swanson
Habeas at Bagram?

Paul Craig Roberts
94 Years of Serfdom

Sara Mann
Norman Rockwell and the Perils of Nostalgia

Kenneth Couesbouc
John Maynard's Martingale: How Keynes Got Rich

Binoy Kampmark
Tax Haven Hypocrisies

Kekuni Blaisdell, Lynette Hi'llani Cruz, George Kahumoku Flores, et al.: An Urgent Letter to Obama on the Rights of Native Hawaiians

Website of the Day
Taxa: the Paintings of Isabella Kirkland

April 14, 2009

Conn Hallinan
The Afghan Rubik's Cube

Mike Whitney
Why is Goldman Sachs So Scared of Mike Morgan?

Peter Morici
Taxing Grandma to Subsidize Goldman Sachs

Greg Moses
Economic Curveballs: the Laffer Posse

Fidel Castro
Obama's Cuba Policy: Not a Word About the Blockade

Robert Weissman
No Blank Check for the IMF

Rebecca Macaux /
Philip Primeau
Somali Piracy and American Foreign Policy

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
The Dubious Revoution: Biofuels, the Next Generation

Dave Lindorff
Snatch-and-Jail Justice: the Ugly War on Immigrants

Walter Brasch
The Resurrection of Intolerance

Benjamin Day
Why Has the Press Failed Us in Reporting on Health Care Reform?

Website of the Day
The Appraisal Bubble

April 13, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Militia Fear Reprisals After US Exit

Uri Avnery
Our Dissonance

Jeremy Scahill
A Test Case for Habeas Corpus: Will Obama Prosecute the Somali Pirate in a US Court?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide Syndrome: Are VA Protocols Behind Iraq Vet Suicides?

Karl Grossman
A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

Nadia Hijab
Still Waiting: Obama and American Muslims

Sam Smith
America's Cultural Bear Market

James McEnteer
Peru's Shining Example

Sean McMahon
Globalizing Politicide: Israel's Strikes on Sudan

Namihei Odaira
Makota's "Campaign Against Poverty"

John V. Walsh
Bossnapping

Website of the Day
Declining IRS Audits for Big Financial Houses

April 10 / 12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Resurrection and Revenge

Chris Floyd
Hope Abandoned: Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

Mike Whitney
"Liquidate the Banks; Fire the Executives!" Warren's Devastating Report to Congress

Saul Landau
How the Media Bought the Surge

M. Reza Pirbhai
Obama's Afghanistan Plan and India-Pakistan Relations

Franklin Spinney
The Art of the Scam: Wall Street and the Pentagon

Rannie Amiri
Iran's Elections: Why Arab Leaders Want Ahmadinejad to Win

William Blum
The Ideology of Barack Obama

Matt Vidal
Why Card Check Would Help the Economy

Jeff Howison
Death of the Square Deal

Jeff Leys
Resisting the Af-Pak War: the Creech Air Base Arrests

Dave Lindorff
America's Imperial Wars: Why We Need to See the Horrors

Ramzy Baroud
Israel Investigated: But Will It Repent?

Missy Beattie
The Grateful Dead, Wounded and Displaced

Fred Gardner
Fakes Left, Goes Right: Obama's Crossover Dribble on Marijuana Policy

Harvey Wasserman Another $50 Billion for Rust Bucket Nukes?

Suzan Mazur
A Revolution in Biology: an Interview with Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse

Bernard Umbrecht
German Capitalists Take Fire

David Macaray
A Word Clooney, Hanks and Baldwin Should Learn: Solidarity

Janet Kauffman
How to Starve (or Feed) a River

Ron Jacobs
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win

Norman Solomon
Getting a Death Grip on Memory

Michael Winship
Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Richard Rhames
Empire, Ennui and Extra Cheese

Wanda Fucha
Brother, Can You Spare a Million Bucks?

David Yearsley
My Journey to the Heart of Rahman

Lorenzo Wolff
Getting Beyond the Black-and-White: Jason Isbell's Challenging New Album

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini's Louis XIV: "Neither the Sun Nor Death Can be Gazed Upon Fixedly"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Corzett

Website of the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help!

April 9, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Decade of Darkness

Patrick Cockburn
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

Stephen Soldz
Caught on Tape: Diagnostic Abuse of Veterans

P. Sainath
The Rise of the Shoe-cide Bomber

Ellen Cantarow
Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

Gareth Porter /
Jim Lobe
Obama and Israel's Threat to Strike Iran

Jeremy Scahill
How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget?

Jerry Kroth
Saving GM From Bankruptcy--With the Stroke of a Pen

Binoy Kampmark
Fujimori Convicted: A Measure of Justice in Latin America

Fidel Castro
My Meeting with the Black Caucus

Website of the Day
Bird Song Radio

April 8, 2009

John Prados
The Af-Pak Paradox

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Tooth Fairy and the Defense Budget

Russell Mokhiber
PBS Lashes Back

Kathy Sanborn
Depression Fury

Rev. William E. Alberts
If the Shoe Fits: Bush and Al-Zaidi

James McEnteer Rashomon and the Binghamton Shooter: the Rush to Interpret Jiverly Wong's "Statement"

Nadia Hijab
Olmert's Nightmare

Adam Turl
Card Check on the Ropes

Kevin Zeese
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire

Website of the Day
Walk Score Your Neighborhood

April 7, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency's Free Ride

Uri Avnery
Who's the Boss?

Chris Floyd
Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan

Winslow T. Wheeler Defense Cuts: Gates and the System

Marjorie Cohn
Prosecuting the Bush Torture Team: Spain Leads the Way

Dean Baker
Hands Off Social Security

Diana Johnstone
NATO, Strasbourg and the Black Block

Dave Lindorff
Politicizing Accounting

Martha Rosenberg
Life on HBO's Factory Hog Farm

Evelyn Pringle
Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex

Website of the Day
Gaza: Closed Zone

April 6, 2009

Michael Hudson
The IMF Rules the World

Andy Worthington Bagram: Guantánamo's Dark Mirror

Ray McGovern
Profiles in Cowardice: Eric Holder and Colin Powell

Deepak Tripathi
The Pakistan Enigma

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: a Glide-Path to Destitution

Norman Solomon
Meet the New Escalators: the Democrats and the Afghan War

Jonathan Cook
Israel Railways Accused of Racism in Firing of Arab Workers

Judith Bello
Justice for the Developmentally Disabled

Deena Metzger Blackwater in Liberia

Dr. M. Kamiar
"There's No 'Eye' in Iran:" Obama's Pronunciation Problem

Website of the Day
Prison Talk

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Batting 50-50

Charles R. Larson
Too Much Stuff

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Stephen Martin
Gordon Brown's Chicken Run at the G20

Kim Nicolini
"Last House on the Left:" Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

David Yearsley
Homage to Moog and Mallards

Phyllis Pollack
An Interview with Legendary Rock Producer Chris Kimsey on Working with the Stones, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Saint Jude

Poets' Basement
Foley, Valentine and Kozak

Website of the Day
The Corner Store

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

May 5, 2009

Dancing on the Promises of Paved Roads

Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

By BELÉN FERNÁNDEZ

Puerto Francisco de Orellana, Ecuador

In the run-up to the Ecuadorian elections of April 26, 2009, Guadalupe Llori — the Pachakutik movement candidate for prefect of Orellana province in the eastern Amazonian region — promised the Quechua community of Pako Rumi a paved road. The road would connect Pako Rumi with the highway to the provincial capital of Puerto Francisco de Orellana, colloquially known as Coca; the promise was made after the Pachakutik candidates had traveled the road themselves several times while preparing for a community dance.

Llori’s name had become intimately linked with the practice of road paving in 2007 during a prior term as prefect, when 40 kilometers of asphalt destined for the road from Coca to the oil-producing town of Dayuma were reduced to 23 kilometers of asphalt due to the state´s failure to pay the road construction company. Following a November strike by the residents of Dayuma, whose complaints also included the lack of adequate compensation for oil contamination and the lack of motivation on the part of the oil companies to hire local labor, Llori was deemed to be a strike instigator, removed from the prefecture, and imprisoned for 10.5 months in Quito on counts of terrorism and sabotage. As the strike impeded oil production more than did the missing 17 kilometers of asphalt, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa expanded the terrorism charge to apply to all those who were opposed to the country´s development.

Hugo Chávez offered a slightly more refined response to popular objection to road conditions, decreeing on a March 2009 episode of his television program Aló Presidente that asphalt did not benefit poor people, anyway. At the dance hosted by Pachakutik in Pako Rumi in April, the Chávez model was contested by Guadalupe Llori, who declared that a paved road leading to the community was only the first step in a process of modernization according to which the Quechua would one day be able to watch television and drink cold glasses of water. The latter luxury was currently prohibited by the absence of refrigerators, and by Pachakutik´s decision to cater its party with 5-liter water jugs that had been emptied and filled with aguardiente, which was administered to all party attendees from the same plastic cup.

Llori assured the Quechua of Pako Rumi that modernization would not detract from cultural tradition, proof of which she located in the fact that she herself watched TV and drank cold beverages but still knew a few phrases in Quechua. A Pachakutik candidate for the Ecuadorian national assembly added tourism as another potential catalyst for Pako Rumi´s transformation, and drew Quechua attention to the presence in the dirt-floor dance hall of my friend Amelia and me, who had inserted ourselves into the Pachakutik election campaign in Coca as a means of traveling to indigenous communities without having to pay for transport; were thus not exemplary models for the economic advantages of tourism; were contributing to cultural tradition in Pako Rumi by being paired with local dance partners who refused to make eye contact. The pairing was coordinated by Pachakutik campaigners, as was the music, which blared out of two large speakers in between generator malfunctions.

The speakers had been bounced in from Coca in the back of a pickup truck along with a team of men to keep them from bouncing out. The superior efficiency of paved roads was highlighted once again a few days later in the Quechua community of Alto San Miguel, which Amelia, the musical equipment, and I reached by motorized canoe and where we then waited approximately 10 hours while the pickup truck transporting Pachakutik mayoral candidate Anita Rivas got stuck in the mud. Running for reelection, Rivas was also known for her commitment to asphalt, and reminded her constituents that pedestrians in Coca no longer had to wear mud boots.

Rivas arrived to Alto San Miguel’s dance hall at midnight without the truck and with further promises of pavement. Amelia’s and my dance partners endorsed the scheme as the logical follow-up to the solar energy panels that had already been installed outside their shacks, and continued not to make eye contact. When we asked whether indigenous aspirations also included television sets and cold glasses of water, the dancers informed us that the Huaorani tribe had DVD players—a consequence of preferential treatment by oil companies—in addition to its own officially recognized territory.

Preferential treatment of the Huaorani had begun in the 1950s, when evangelical Christian missionaries in eastern Ecuador adopted a Huaorani woman named Dayuma who had fled her tribe and who aided in evangelical acquisition of the Huaorani language for purposes of Bible translation. Other missionary pastimes included dropping cooking pots on Huaorani areas from helicopter and encouraging the inhabitants to relocate to protectorates in less oil-rich areas, where they were provided with all of their material needs in addition to a variety of diseases. The state of Israel might yet learn from such subtle paradigms of displacement, and add kitchenware to its cache of items regularly dropped from helicopters.

Huaorani territory in its contemporary form consisted of approximately 600,000 hectares and overlapped with the Parque Nacional Yasuní, a biosphere reserve which, aside from being filled with tens of millions of animal and plant species, hosts a number of oil blocks, including the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) block, subject of the Yasuní-ITT initiative. The aim of the initiative, supported by Pachakutik, was to refrain from exploiting ITT oil reserves in exchange for international compensation and freedom to exploit all other blocks; the initiative´s attractiveness generally fluctuated in accordance with drops in the market price of crude oil.

The reserve also contains the Tagaeri and Taromenane, pueblos no contactados who had rejected civilization by religion and oil and existed in voluntary isolation. The Tagaeri were direct relatives of the Huaorani and the Taromenane were presumed to be related, as well. According to our Quechua dance partners in Alto San Miguel, the fundamental difference between civilized and uncivilized Huaorani was that some wore jeans and some wore much less, but that this didn’t stop them from killing each other with spears.

The morning after the dance, Amelia and I reported to the Pachakutik office in Coca with a list of suggestions for Enrique, the man in charge of the weekly campaign agenda. The agenda consisted of a stack of pages that was stapled together and continuously consulted but never adhered to; our suggestions included avoiding 10 hour delays in the future and organizing an excursion to Huaorani territory, whose inhabitants were implicated in Ecuador’s mandatory voting law, violations of which incurred a 12 dollar fine. Enrique consulted the agenda, announced that the Huaorani had already been politically courted, and put a video on for us of his attendance at a ceremony conducted by Huaorani wearing less than jeans; he explained that the featured Huaorani were in fact civilized and that they were merely dressed up as uncivilized Huaorani for the benefit of a visiting delegation from the embassy of Spain.

Amelia and I persisted in our electoral advisories, which Enrique eventually put a stop to by placing us in the back of a Pachakutik pickup truck he claimed was headed in the direction of the Huaorani community of Tigüino in the neighboring province of Pastaza, approximately 2.5 hours from Coca by car—or 13 if you were depending on the Ecuadorian military for a ride on election day. The Pachakutik pickup deposited us one kilometer outside Coca on the road to Tigüino and returned to headquarters, a situation we rectified by flagging down a passing truck.

The truck driver took us as far as Dayuma, site of the 2007 strike and named for the evangelical adoptee that had paved the way for the extraction of regional resources — now expedited by the fact that all 40 kilometers of the way to Dayuma had been paved as well. In Dayuma Amelia and I were picked up by an oil industry employee named Fabián who claimed that the paved road illustrated Correa’s charitable nature but who was nonetheless not voting in the elections on account of the fact that his company would pay the 12 dollar fine.

Fabián was en route to an oil facility in Tigüino run by Canadian Petrobell. The rest of our ride with him was thus interspersed with English pronunciation practice of such words as “Halliburton” and “sustainable development”—Fabián´s definition of which was for foreign firms to exploit Ecuadorian gold mines in addition to oil reserves. Fabián claimed to have a degree in environmental science; Amelia and I detected further themes of betrayal in the behavior of Rafael Correa, who had followed up his 2007 presentation of the Yasuní-ITT initiative to the United Nations by referring to environmentalists as románticos and the failure to exploit resources as immoral.

Fabián pointed out that members of the Huaorani community were also employed by the oil industry and that at least he did not have ties to illegal logging, as well. Amelia and I meanwhile joined the list of betrayers by attending a dance hosted in Tigüino that evening by the Movimiento Popular Democrático (MPD), rival of Pachakutik, the members of which noted further discrepancies on the part of the employed Huaorani, whom they claimed had no need for employment as they subsisted on handouts from oil companies, the government, and other concerned organizations.

The effects of a history of handouts were illustrated when the MPD pickup truck was tasked with escorting various Huaorani to their respective houses with large food sacks they claimed to have just received from Chinese seismic contractor BGP. The escort process consisted of the Huaorani banging extensively on the back of the truck whenever they wanted the driver to stop or go; a dentist in Coca later confirmed the clan’s authoritarian nature, based on a Huaorani patient of his who had insisted in having his molar removed despite the fact that there was nothing wrong with it.

At the dance that evening in Tigüino’s cement-floor pavilion, the MPD revealed that they did not cater their functions with 5-liter jugs of aguardiente. Amelia and I responded by handing out rainbow Pachakutik bracelets to a group of Huaorani bystanders and proposing that they bang extensively on the MPD pickup truck in order to procure transport to the licorería. At the licorería we sponsored a few 2 dollar bottles of aguardiente and suggested the group petition BGP for supplements.

Back at the dance, the aguardiente was once again dispensed from a single plastic cup while we and the other partakers accommodated ourselves in school desks that had been dragged into the pavilion (and that later provided the dentist in Coca with more evidence that the Huaorani behaved like children). Amelia and I conversed with Jonathan, the Huaorani whose school desk was closest to ours and who was thus the only person we could hear over the music.

Jonathan appeared to be about 30 and had worked with a local tourism agency as an assistant on canoe rides prior to obtaining employment with Petrobell. He was largely unresponsive to our question of whether cup-sharing traditions in indigenous communities had been encouraged by missionaries as a means of spreading disease, and proved more concerned with a certain female canoe passenger who had wanted to have his babies. Amelia and I were given a ride back to Coca that night with the members of the MPD, who had witnessed the Pachakutik bracelet distribution and who attempted to win us over by purchasing Listerine-flavored wine.

We hitchhiked back to Tigüino the following day to find that a barrier of spears had been set up on the bridge over Río Shiripuno, 20 kilometers outside the village, by indigenous BGP employees and their sympathizers who were disgruntled with a reported 3 month lapse in salary payments. After being deposited at the bridge by two Colombian BGP workers who did not report a lapse in payments, Amelia and I confirmed with the people manning the spear arrangements that it would be possible for us to step over them and proceed toward Tigüino in a non BGP-affiliated vehicle. We were stopped in the midst of stepping by an employee of the Ecuadorian Ministerio del Ambiente, whose duties included preventing illegal logging in the area, asserting the rights of the pueblos no contactados to continue not being contacted, and registering crossers of the bridge in the event they did not return.

Amelia and I were invited into the office that had been erected to one side of the bridge, where additional duties of the environment ministry appeared to include allowing Huaorani takeovers of the office internet and the radio equipment, which they used to very loudly contact other communities down the river. As for instances of Huaorani contact with pueblos no contactados, these were summarized for us as follows:

1993: Group of Huaorani from Tigüino kidnap Tagaeri girl. After a disputed number of days, girl is escorted back to her community but Carlos Omene — one of the Huaorani escorts—is speared while returning to Tigüino and later dies in the hospital in Coca.

2003: Death of Carlos Omene is supposedly avenged during an expedition originating in Tigüino in which a disputed number of women and children plus at least one injured Tagaeri are massacred, despite apparent claims by the victims prior to death that they are not Tagaeri but rather Taromenane. (Other disputed issues included whether the massacre of the no contactados was merely a means of clearing the area in order to respond to a Colombian demand for specific types of timber; after speaking with various inhabitants of Tigüino — some of whom claimed that the Taromenane could fly — Amelia and I determined that most details of Huaorani history were subject to dispute, aside from the universally agreed upon fact that the kidnapped Tagaeri girl did not eat salt.)

Babe Ima, the Huaorani leader in Tigüino, had described contact with the Tagaeri and Taromenane as a means of “civilizing” them, terminology which the environment ministry employee pointed out had not been spontaneously invented by the Huaorani. Additional information garnered during our office visit was that Jonathan—our companion from the previous night’s dance — was the son of Carlos Omene and a participant in the 2003 massacre.

Amelia and I hitchhiked back and forth between Coca and Tigüino for the next several days, intercepted on one occasion by members of the MPD, rivals of Pachakutik, who remained convinced that we were engaging in a civilizing mission of our own. We were intercepted on another occasion by a middle aged Huaorani woman in mud boots who spoke a slight amount of Spanish and who insisted we view a film on her DVD player while she performed yard work with a machete. The film was an American release from 2006 concerning the demise of 5 Christian missionaries who made contact with the Huaorani in the 1950s. The son of one of the missionaries eventually befriends one of the Huaorani responsible for the demise, who has since become Christian and who thus serves as a symbol of hope for future reconciliation between the Huaorani and the relatives of dead Tagaeri/Taromenane.

On April 26, election day in Ecuador, Amelia and I located Jonathan at his home in Tigüino. Exempted from Petrobell duties for the afternoon on account of the rain, Jonathan welcomed us with a book detailing Huaorani medicinal practices and knowledge of plants, and claimed to have the decapitated head of one of the massacre victims lying around somewhere, as well. He still had not made up his mind about whom to vote for.

Jonathan reminded us that the no contactados could not vote as they did not have government-issued IDs, and defended Babe Ima´s mission civilisatrice on the basis that his father Carlos had lived for 3 days with a Tagaeri spear through his side. The clan leader’s interpretation of civilization seemed to have been sanctioned by the Ecuadorian government as well, which had failed to prosecute those involved in the 2003 massacre despite the fact that they spoke openly of the expedition and in many cases confessed to killing far more people than they actually had; Rafael Correa meanwhile contributed to the nebulousness of the crime by making statements that called into question the existence of pueblos no contactados.

Amelia and I accompanied Jonathan to the polling station, where he decided on Lucio Gutiérrez for president. Gutiérrez had recently claimed that Correa and Hugo Chávez had chosen the wrong path for their people; Jonathan stressed the importance of good paths, and wagered that his father may not have perished had the road to Coca been paved in 1993.

Belén Fernández is traveling with  Amelia Opaliska  in Latin America. She can be reached at belengarciabernal@gmail.com

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