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Democrats on the Brink: Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair; Innocent Lads, Depraved Killers and Predatory Priests by JoAnn Wypijewski; Torture Air, Inc.: the Road to Rendition: by Jeffrey St. Clair. Remember these stories are available exclusively in the print edition of CounterPunch. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories March 19, 2005 Alexander Cockburn March 18, 2005 Dave Zirin Richard Thieme John Walsh David Swanson Ben Terrall David Boyle Dorreen Yellow Bird Mokhiber /
Weissman Greg Moses Website of
the Day
March 17, 2005 Christopher
Brauchli Bill Quigley Brian Cloughley Gary Bass / Adam Hughes Dave Lindorff Jude Wanniski Alexander Billet John Ross Website of the Day
March 16, 2005 Ralph Nader William Cook Kevin Zeese Jackie Corr Alan Maass David R. Kolker Cindy Ellen
Hill Paul Craig
Roberts
March 15, 2005 Gary Leupp Dave Lindorff Greg Moses Hadas Their
/ Katrina Yeaw Alison Weir Matt Koehler Evelyn Pringle Harry Browne
March 14, 2005 Ralph Nader David Miller Stan Cox Mike Roselle David Swanson Simona Sharoni Dave Lindorff Dorreen Yellow Bird Tom Barry Website of the Day
March 12 / 13, 2005 David H. Price Noam Chomsky Laura Carlsen Stan Goff Valentina Nicoli Michael Leonardi Saul Landau
/ Sarah Anderson Joe Bageant Manuel García,
Jr. Greg Moses James J. Brittain Ben Tripp Joshua Frank Fred Gardner Walter Brasch Ramzy Baroud Christopher
Brauchli Michael Donnelly Ron Jacobs Richard Oxman Poets' Basement
March 11, 2005 Jerry Fresia Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff William James
Martin Muqtedar Khan Kathryn Ledebur Mike Whitney Dave Zirin Website of the Day
March 10, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts John Marc Leas, Colleen McLaughlin
and Ashley Smith Larry Birns Michael Donnelly Luis Gomez Jackie Corr Uri Avnery Website of the Day
March 9, 2005 Jeffrey St.
Clair Ward Churchill Robert Fisk Bernice Powell Jackson Mickey Z. Dave Zirin Michael Donnelly James Reiss Vijay Prashad
March 8, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts Robert Fisk Kurt Nimmo Suzan Mazur Evelyn Pringle Giuliana Sgrena Elaine Cassel
March 7, 2005 Dave Zirin Brian Cloughley John Chuckman Mike Whitney Mark Weisbrot Fred Gardner Richard Neville Uri Avnery
March 5 / 6, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Gary Leupp Ron Jacobs Tom Reeves Jenna Orkin Tom Barry Joshua Frank Moshe Adler Jane Stillwater Omar Barghouti / Jacqueline
Sfeir Christopher
Brauchli John Pilger Raúl
Zibechi David Krieger Three Takes on Nepal Surendra R. Devkota Bhishma Karki Joseph Pietri Ben Tripp Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
March 4, 2005 Frederick Hudson
March 3, 2005 Pat Williams Brian Cloughley Dave Lindorff Amira Hass Greg Moses Lynne Landes Nelson P. Valdés John Ross
March 2, 2005 Saul Landau
/ Farrah Hassen Mike Roselle M. Junaid Alam Suzan Mazur Jackson Thoreau Michael Donnelly Jeffrey St.
Clair Website of the Day
March 1, 2005 Scott Richard
Lyons David Lindorff Patrick Cockburn
/ David Enders Ron Jacobs Tanya Garcia Joseph Pietri Kona Lowell Paul Craig
Roberts Website of
the Day
February 28, 2005 Gary Leupp Bill Quigley Paul de Rooij David Swanson Mario Lamo
Jimenez Emma Perez Diana Johnstone Website of the Day
February 26 / 27, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Noam Chomsky Rev. William E. Alberts Fred Gardner Gary Leupp Saul Landau Robin Philpot Yitkhak Laor Ben Tripp Justin Taylor Jack Random Rafael Renteria Jim B. Seth DeLong John Chuckman Alison Weir Richard Oxman Dr. Susan Block Poets' Basement
February 25, 2005 Roger Burbach Behzad Yaghmaian Kurt Nimmo Joshua Frank John Farley Lawrence Reichard Pratyush Chandra David Smith-Ferri Website of
the Day
February 24, 2005 Omar Waraich Brian Cloughley Tom Wright Sharon Smith Dave Lindorff Fred Feldman James Reiss
Diane Christian Website of
the Day
February 23, 2005 Werther W. John Green James Petras Conn Hallinan Joe Pietri Louis Proyect Alexander Cockburn Website of
the Day
February 22, 2005 Naseer Aruri Richard Manning William A.
Cook Paul Craig Roberts Ken Krayeske Dave Zirin Kirkpatrick
Sale
February 21, 2005 Hunter S. Thompson John Ross Ward Churchill Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst David Swanson Dave Lindorff Stew Albert Michael Neumann
February 19 / 20, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Kathleen Christison Ted Honderich Gary Leupp Don Santina Jennifer Roesch Scott Richard
Lyons Chris Clarke George Beres Harry Browne Manuel Garc'a,
Jr. Mark Scaramella Michael Donnelly John Pilger Norman Madarasz Surendra Devkota Deborah Rich Fred Gardner CounterPunch
News Service Richard Oxman Poets' Basement
February 18, 2005 Ben Moxham Dave Lindorff Larry Birns Gregory Elich Samuel Logan / John Meyers Nicole Colson Suzan Mazur Mickey Z.
February 17, 2005 Joshua Frank Paul Craig
Roberts Robert Fisk Christopher
Brauchli Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst Alison Weir Ahrar Ahmad Saul Landau Website of the Day
February 16, 2005 Robert Fisk Kevin Zeese Gary Leupp Ron Jacobs Jessica Leight Greg Moses Mark Engler Jack McCarthy Bill Christison Website of the Day
February 15, 2005 CounterPunch
News Service Robert Fisk Uri Avnery Stan Cox Mickey Z. Dave Zirin Nadia Martinez Lila Rajiva Paul Craig
Roberts
February 14, 2005 Robert Jensen Brian Cloughley Patrick Cockburn Gary Leupp Michael Donnelly Dave Lindorff Elaine Cassel
February 12 / 13, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Paul Craig
Roberts Patrick Cockburn John Feffer Mickey Z. Kurt Nimmo Fred Gardner Dave Zirin John Chuckman Ben Tripp Carol Norris Robert Fisk Frank / Chowkwanyun Mike Whitney Deborah Frisch Niranjan Ramakrishnan Christine TenBarge Ron Jacobs Dr. Susan Block Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
February 11, 20055 Manuel Garcia,
Jr Kurt Nimmo Dave Lindorff Larry Birns Bill Quigley Tom Barry Jennifer Van
Bergen
February 10, 2005 Dave Lindorff Christopher Brauchli Patrick Cockburn Nicole Colson Suzan Mazur Michael Donnelly Mike Stark Greg Moses Website of
the Day
February 9, 2005 Jeffrey St.
Clair Mickey Z. John Ross Tom Barry Conn Hallinan Patrick Cockburn Steen Sohn Tim Wise Website of
the Day
February 8, 2005 Patrick Cockburn Brian Cloughley Steve Breyman Harry Browne Doug Giebel Nate Collins Dave Lindorff David Smith-Ferri
February 7, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts Carolyn Baker Joshua Frank Mickey Z. Patrick Cockburn Mike Whitney Stacie Jonas Dave Zirin Tariq Ali
February 5 / 6, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Kurt Nimmo Joshua Frank P. Sainath Patrick Cockburn Laura Carlsen Dave Lindorff Pamela Olson Behzad Yaghmaian Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen Roger Burbach Robert Fisk David Swanson Justin E.H. Smith Cacie Hart Ron Jacobs Mickey Z. Ben Tripp Ben Sonnenberg Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
February 4, 2005 Brian Cloughley Bill Christison Elaine Cassel Jacob Levich Kanak Mani Dixit Ron Jacobs
February 3, 2005 Ward Churchill Sharon Smith Mickey Z. Mike Whitney Jenna Orkin Saul Landau Yitzhak Laor Dave Lindorff
February 2, 2005 David Domke
/ Kevin Coe Noam Chomsky M. Shahid Alam Richard Oxman Joshua Frank Dave Lindorff Nina Hartley Website of the Day
February 1, 2005 Joshua L. Dratel Patrick Cockburn Robert Fisk Uri Avnery Col. Dan Smith Alison Weir Alan Farago Ray Hanania Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
December 22, 2004 James Petras Omar Barghouti Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond Harry Browne Richard Oxman Kathleen Christison Website of the Day
December 21, 2004 Greg Moses Dave Lindorff Chad Nagle Dragon Pierces
Truth* Patrick Cockburn Seth DeLong Ahmad Faruqui Paul Craig
Roberts
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Weekend Edition From Louisville to the Big WildA History of White People in the Conservation MovementBy MIKE ROSELLE A lot of people think that the environmental movement is mostly white. This is because whenever they go to a meeting, or a protest, or a conference, the only people of color they see have speaker's badges. Sometimes they are flown in from great distances. You can usually tell that these people are not white, and there usually aren't very many of them. I have wondered about this for some time, and decided to look into it. Other more qualified people than I have done this before, and many books have been written about this subject by some of our greatest minds. I decided to take a different approach. What I discovered is that people who say the environmental movement in the USA is mostly white are right. I wanted to know why. Before we get started, let me say that I was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1954, the year of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Louisville would later have a lot of what we called race riots. I was from the West End, in the old Louisville neighborhood of Germantown. There things were different. We were integrated before the riots. This had nothing to do with race, but another ugly word. Rent. It wasn't like we didn't fight or hang out in gangs. We were just 8th graders. Of course my buddies and I fought and hung out in gangs. We just weren't dangerous to anyone, or each other. We usually hung out at the Cabbage Patch on Sixth and Magnolia Street. If we fought anywhere near there, we couldn't use the gym or pool tables. But, my black friends and I couldn't use the pool table at the same time, because back then, even the Cabbage Patch was segregated. Like it was when my mother hung out there. And like it was when her father hung out there. Still the Cabbage Patch was, and continues to be, one of the most progressive institutions in Louisville. The outdoor program didn't allow blacks in. The only integrated program the Cabbage Patch had was basketball. The Cabbage Patch is where I learned both that I loved the out doors, thanks to Mr. Chin, and that I was bad at basketball, thanks to Mr. Cooksie. I was allowed to play on the team only if I stood under the net with my six-foot, two-inch frame and got rebounds. The name of our team was the Enchanters. Much has been written about how well African Americans do at Basketball. I can tell you that this is true. If I got a rebound I was not allowed to do anything, mind you, except to hand it to one of our guys. We usually had the same colored jerseys, so I was pretty good at getting the ball to my teammates almost half the time. My street name was the Goofy Guard. This is how my teammates encouraged me to be better. They also talked a lot about my Mama. Most of it wasn't true, but that didn't seem to matter to them. Right after that we moved to California in that great hillbilly migration of 1966. We were also in the great hillbilly migration back to the South in 1968. A year-and-a-half later we were in the great hillbilly migration back to Los Angeles. As I remember, there weren't many hillbilly migrations in and out of Kentucky that we were not part of. This is because of another ugly word. Jobs. During the great Hillbilly Migration of 1970 we moved to Shively, Kentucky, where both Hunter S. Thompson and NRBQ first lost their minds. The Adams brothers went to Butler High School. On my first day of school at Butler High there was a walkout by the students and faculty to protest the new policy of bussing in blacks. These were people who had moved to Butler County after school segregation was dismantled in Louisville. You could not buy a house there if you were not white. I had just moved to Shiveley from La Puente, California. They arrested me during lunch at Bassett High School in La Puente, and said I couldn't come back. This helped fuel the Great Hillbilly Migration of 1970. Another factor behind the migration was that the same thing happened to my brother. There were no two people from the country in La Puente, California back them. If there were, they were usually living in the same house. Butler County was Klan Country, as the large billboard with the hooded men on it at the Jefferson County Line informed. We're talking White People. I wasn't quite sure what was going on. But, I was not going to walk out of school with the brand of rednecks they had in Butler to protest blacks being bussed in, even if the rednecks were serving free beer and pizza. Three other kids stayed inside this hastily constructed "white flight" concrete high school designed for two thousand students. The black students wisely decided this was a good day to stay home. The year before there was a riot and one of the mighty Butler Bears was photographed punching a young girl. I don't think any of these students were scared, because you don't try to segregate Butler High School if you're a wuss. Being one day late was actually a good idea. This gave me a great opportunity to meet two white people who were not from Shively. One of the guys was Brian. He was Mr. Chin's nephew's cousin. You remember Mr. Chin, he ran the outdoor program at the Cabbage Patch and was a member of a well established Louisville Chinese-American family. They let Chinese guys into the outdoor program. The others students I met that day at Butler were from Ohio and Florida. No one had bothered to tell us this was the day to pick sides. I won't tell you how they usually phrase this, but its ends in "lover" and was not the kind of love we were used to. Brian dealt with this in the normal way. He had a Black Belt in Karate and was six-feet tall. He knew about this boycott, but since this was our first meeting, he never told us. Still, we were not intimidated and did what any kids in our situation would do. We started a Rock n Roll band and hung out with the black students. And because of our bravery Butler High would be peacefully integrated the next day. That is, our bravery and a few dozen busloads of cops. Because of our unplanned participation in such an important civil rights campaign, we would continue to be unpopular until I quit high school, almost forever, a few months later in the great Hillbilly Migration to Texas. The coach of the mighty redneck Butler Bears tried to recruit me for tryouts because of my height, but I told him to go fuck himself. That's how I landed in Special Ed, and part of the reason for the Great Hillbilly Migration to Texas. In Houston we had no race problems. I went Abraham Lincoln High School in the Westhiemer District. My father never told me this, but you didn't have to go to Abraham Lincoln if you had a note from your parents saying you didn't like black people. Because of this, we actually had an acute shortage of white guys. And there was only one white girl. For the African-American students white people were not much of a problem. The entire faculty was black, except the Basketball coach. This may seem strange to you. It certainly was to me. Anyway, I knew it was useless to try out for the team. Even if I got on, people would think it was because I was white, and they would be right. They would just have to talk to any member of the Enchanters to verify this. But back to my question: How did there get to be so many white people in the environmental movement? Where did they come from, who are they, and what do they really want? Why can't they dance? This is, of course, a stupid question. A bunch of white people in America advanced the concept of public land conservation and worked with others around the world to make shit happen. John Muir, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson and Marty Murie may be just a bunch of white folks to you, but, to me, they are heroes. White people invented conservation, just as we did rock-and-roll. Everyone knows this. However, like a lot of facts, this is wrong. As Adam Hothschild makes clear in his excellent history of the colonization of the Congo, King Leopold's Ghost, many of the early anti-slavery campaigners were black Christian Missionaries, and cared more about Africa and its people then anyone has proven to so far. I suspect there are many more stories out there about black conservationists, but I'm not talking about black people I'm talking about white people I always thought if those outdoor programs at the Cabbage Patch hadn't had been illegally unavailable to my teammates of the Mighty Enchanters, and other children of my generation who were African American, and they had gotten as much time outdoors with Mr. Chin as they did in the Gym with Mr. Cooksie, I might be working with some of my former teammates today on important conservation issues. I'm pretty sure they are done playing basketball with me, as this was the last thing we talked about before I moved to La Puente. After hearing the same remarks from African Americans and Mexican Americans and even a Samoan in La Puente, I pretty much gave up Basketball altogether. Today outdoor programs are available to everyone but the poor. Unless you live near Sixth and Magnolia and go talk to Mr. Chin. He's still there, and the outdoor program is integrated. The real reason that there are not more African Americans in our movement, I'm afraid to say, is because we are boring. As a bona fide White Trash American, I can say that I am bored by most of this progressive environmental stuff. First it was no Chicken. Then it was no Beer. Than it's the bad Hippie Music. You know what I'm talking about. I know the movement is trying hip-hop nowadays, but trust me, hip-hop is a fad and has been for the last twenty years. All I'm saying is, if a Hillbilly (and we're easily amused) can't any have fun in the environmental movement, what chance does an African American have? Last week, Floyd and I were the only white people at Joe's in Northeast Portland. Nobody told us how to act. They were not serving tofu or spinach artichoke dip. They served chitlins. Chitlins to me are like Basketball. I don't do it any more. But imagine serving chitlins at ELAW. People would riot. We need to meet anyone who we wish to work with half way. If conservationists would ease up on this pagan, vegan, eco-politically correct definition of fun, we might get some of these people with speaker's badges to come back and brings their friends, instead of scaring them off with Bad Hippie Music. Don't think that black people don't go back home and tell all their friends that we are nice people, but act a little silly. I'm not saying we have to serve free beer and chicken to work together. Even if we did, we would screw up the chicken somehow. Aside from building a diverse movement, we definitely could see some better basketball at ELAW, and that is what is really important. Even if nobody will let me play. I was kicked off the Enchanters before they were good. However, like many facts, this is wrong. Mike Roselle writes from the road for Lowbagger.org.
He can be reached a t: roselle@lowbagger.org.
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